Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Rapid Transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 in Detention Facility, Louisiana, USA, May–June, 2020

To assess transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in a detention facility experiencing a coronavirus disease outbreak and evaluate testing strategies, we conducted a prospective cohort investigation in a facility in Louisiana, USA. We conducted SARS-CoV-2 testing for detained persons in 6 quarantined dormitories at various time points. Of 143 persons, 53 were positive at the initial test, and an additional 58 persons were positive at later time points (cumulative incidence 78%). In 1 dormitory, all 45 detained persons initially were negative; 18 days later, 40 (89%) were positive. Among persons who were SARS-CoV-2 positive, 47% (52/111) were asymptomatic at the time of specimen collection; 14 had replication-competent virus isolated. Serial SARS-CoV-2 testing might help interrupt transmission through medical isolation and quarantine. Testing in correctional and detention facilities will be most effective when initiated early in an outbreak, inclusive of all exposed persons, and paired with infection prevention and control.
Factoring image sequences into shape and motion

Recovery scene geometry and camera motion from a sequence of images is an important problem in computer vision. If the scene geometry is specified by depth measurements, that is, by specifying distances between the camera and feature points in the scene, noise sensitivity worsens rapidly with increasing depth. The authors show hat this difficulty can be overcome by computing scene geometry directly in terms of shape, that is, by computing the coordinates of feature points in the scene with respect to a world-centered system, without recovering camera-centered depth as an intermediate quantity. More specifically, the authors show that a matrix of image measurements can be factored by singular value decomposition into the product of two matrices that represent shape and motion, respectively. The results in this paper extend to three dimensions the solution the authors described in a previous paper for planar camera motion (ICCV, Osaka, Japan, 1990). <<ETX>>
Parallel visual motion analysis using multiscale Markov random fields

The use of Markov Random Field (MRF) models within the framework of global bayesian decision has brought new powerful solutions to visual motion analysis. The efficiency of MRF models for image sequence analysis has been proved on various classes of real-world sequences: outdoor and indoor scenes including several moving objects and camera motion. The authors extend this work by investigating new multiscale motion analysis algorithms based on MRF models. These algorithms are related to a new class of consistent multiscale MRF statistical models. The multiscale paradigm exhibits fast convergence properties towards quasi optimal estimates. Its performances are compared to standard relaxation in the case of optical flow measurement. <<ETX>>
Recognizing and Handling Negations in Machine Learning

In several machine learning problems, a relatively small subproblem is present in which combinations of (negating) objects or structures result in a negation or otherwise other classification compared to when these (negating) objects are not present. To be more specific, a variant of the XOR problem is present in a small amount of objects in these classification problems. Examples of this could be negating words in textual sentiment classification or the presence of sarcasm when one wants to determine seriousness in speech. As negations are usually present in a small part of much larger datasets, it is important to recognize these relatively rare negation structures within objects' data. Correctly recognizion and handling negations could improve overall classification performance in machine learning problems that inhibit negations in some of their dataset objects. To lay the groundwork for solving these problems, the subproblem of recognizing negation words in sentiment classification is solved by employing a word embedding neural network to recognize text structure and to correctly classify these negations while at the same time this neural network is used to classify complete sentences in the problem of sentiment classification.
Evaluation of Tissue Damage and Grasp Stability Using Finite Element Analysis

Minimizing tissue damage and maintaining grasp stability are essential considerations in the procedure of surgical grasper design. Most past and current research analyzing graspers used for tissue manipulation in minimally invasive surgery is based on invitro experiments. In their previous work, tissue injury and grasp security are assessed by visual inspection, but not quantified yet. The goal of the present work is to develop a methodology with which to compute tissue damage magnitude and grasp quality that is appropriate for a wide range of grasper-tissue interaction. Using finite element analysis (FEA), four graspers with varying radius of curvature and four graspers with different tooth sizes were analyzed while squeezing and pulling tissue. All graspers were treated as surgical steel with linear elastic material property. Nonlinear material properties of tissue used in the FEA as well as damage evaluation were derived from previously reported in-vivo experiments. Computed peak stress, integrated stress, and tissue damage, were compared. Applied displacement is vertical and then horizontal to the tissue surface. A close examination of the contact status of each node within the grasper-tissue interaction surface was carried out to investigate grasp stability. The results indicate less tissue damage with increasing radius of curvature. A smooth wave pattern reduced tissue damage at the cost of inducing higher percentage of slipping area. By comparing the results with experimental counter parts, it can be concluded the methodology may be useful for researchers to develop and test various design of graspers. Also it could improve the surgical simulator performance by reflecting more realistic tissue material property and predicting tissue damage for the
An overview of airborne measurement in Nepal – Part 1: Vertical profile of aerosol size, number, spectral absorption, and meteorology

Abstract. The paper provides an overview of an airborne measurement campaign with a microlight aircraft over the Pokhara Valley region, Nepal, a metropolitan region in the central Himalayan foothills. This is the first aerial measurement in the central Himalayan foothill region, one of the polluted but relatively poorly sampled regions of the world. Conducted in two phases (in May 2016 and December 2016–January 2017), the goal of the overall campaign was to quantify the vertical distribution of aerosols over a polluted mountain valley in the Himalayan foothills, as well as to investigate the extent of regional transport of emissions into the Himalayas. This paper summarizes results from the first phase where test flights were conducted in May 2016 (pre-monsoon), with the objective of demonstrating the potential of airborne measurements in the region using a portable instrument package (size with housing case: 0.45 m × 0.25 m × 0.25 m, 15 kg) onboard an ultralight aircraft (IKARUS-C42). A total of five sampling test flights were conducted (each lasting for 1–1.5 h) in the Pokhara Valley to characterize vertical profiles of aerosol properties such as aerosol number and size distribution (0.3–2 µm), total particle concentration (>14 nm), aerosol absorption (370–950 nm), black carbon (BC), and meteorological variables. Although some interesting observations were made during the test flight, the study is limited to a few days (and only a few hours of flight in total) and thus the analysis presented may not represent the entire pollution–meteorology interaction found in the Pokhara Valley. The vertical profiles of aerosol species showed decreasing concentrations with altitude (815 to 4500 m a.s.l.); a steep concentration gradient below 2000 m a.s. l. in the morning; and mixed profiles (up to ca. 4000 m a.s.l.) in the afternoon. The near-surface (<1000 m a.s.l.) BC concentrations observed in the Pokhara Valley were much lower than pre-monsoon BC concentrations in the Kathmandu Valley, and similar in range to Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) sites such as Kanpur in India. The sampling test flight also detected an elevated polluted aerosol layer (around 3000 m a.s.l.) over the Pokhara Valley, which could be associated with the regional transport. The total aerosol and black carbon concentration in the polluted layer was comparable with the near-surface values. The elevated polluted layer was also characterized by a high aerosol extinction coefficient (at 550 nm) and was identified as smoke and a polluted dust layer. The observed shift in the westerlies (at 20–30∘ N) entering Nepal during the test flight period could be an important factor for the presence of elevated polluted layers in the Pokhara Valley.
Imaging Imaging of coronary atherosclerosis : intravascular ultrasound

Atherosclerosis is the main cause of coronary heart disease, which is today the leading cause of death worldwide and will continue to be the first in the world in 2030. In the formation of atherosclerotic coronary lesions, a critical primary step is the accumulation and oxidation of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) particles. Oxidized-LDL favours leucocyte recruitment and their activation, as well as cell death. This leads to generation of complex atherosclerotic plaques. These plaques have a high content of necrotic core, a thin inflamed fibrous cap (intense accumulation of macrophages) and scarce presence of smooth muscle cells (i.e. thin-capped fibroatheroma). At early stages of the formation of the atheroma, the remodelling of the vessel wall usually prevents plaque from encroaching on the lumen, thereby masking the presence of atheroma on angiography. In contrast, greyscale intravascular ultrasound can fully assess the extension of the disease axially and longitudinally. This intravascular imaging technique has played a vital role in advancing our understanding of the pathophysiology of coronary artery disease, and in the development of novel cardiovascular drugs and device therapies. This intravascular imaging technology and its clinical and research applications are discussed in more detail below.
Reduction of Nitrates in Waste Water through the Valorization of Rice Straw: LIFE LIBERNITRATE Project

An improved and more sustainable waste management system is required for successful development of technologies based on renewable sources. Rice straw is submitted to controlled combustion reactions and the produced ashes are chemically treated to produce silica. After a chemical activation step, the activated silica shows potential as an adsorbent agent and will be used to remove the excess of nitrates in groundwater and wells in the area of Alginet (Valencia, Spain), selected as a vulnerable zone within the Nitrates Directive. The demonstration activity aims to have a local impact on municipalities of 200 inhabitants or fewer, decreasing from current nitrate concentrations close to 50 mg/L, to a target of 25 mg/L. In a successive step, the methodology will be transferred to other municipalities with similar nitrate problems (Piemonte, Italy) and replicated to remove different pollutants such as manure (the Netherlands) and waste waters from the textile industry (Italy).
New Developments in the Field of Radiochemical Ageing of Aromatic Polymers

Polymers having an aromatic backbone polymers have a high mechanical strength and a high modulus. Their aromaticity increases their resistance for use in relatively severe conditions especially in aerospace and nuclear industry for which lifetime prediction is a key issue. For example, a challenge for nuclear plants is to extend lifetime from the initially planned 40 years duration to 50 or 60 years, which makes necessary to determine lifetime by a non-empirical method. Since polymers mechanical failure originates from chain scission or crosslinking of the backbone, the ideal method of lifetime prediction would first involve the elaboration of a kinetic model for chain scission and crosslinking. Then, the changes of molecular mass would be related to the changes of mechanical properties using the available laws of polymers physics. Lifetime would be then determined using a pertinent lifetime criterion. A noticeable difficulty comes here from the fact that oxidation, which plays a key major role in chain scission, is diffusion controlled and thus heterogeneously distributed in sample thickness. It is crucial, indeed, to determine experimentally and to predict this depth distribution of chain scission and crosslinking because it will play a key role on fracture properties. This chapter will be henceforward devoted to the effect of aromaticity on radiostability, the effect on temperature on the chain scission/crosslinking competition, the diffusion limited oxidation (which will be illustrated by the effect of dose rate, atmosphere and sample thickness), then some concluding remarks on oxidative stability of aromatic polymers and the possible link with the absence of macromolecular mobility below Tg. We will start by some basics of radiochemistry which are necessary for the good understanding of this paper, and especially the quantitative treatment for crosslinking and chain scission.
WSDAF : A Dynamically Adaptive Framework for Scalable Web Services

The growing popularity of XML and Web Services is transforming the World Wide Web from its information centric roots into a programmable network offering a wide variety of computation and data services to its users. A growing number of applications are being constructed by assembling preexisting services, and typically accessed over a large scale, heterogeneous wide area network by users who are geographically distributed, using a variety of devices that present different quality of service requirements. To support such applications, there arise two important issues: ensuring good performance across wide area environments and the ability to do so while adapting to changes of usage patterns as well as network conditions. This proposal describes a novel approach to address the above two issues. Our approach is to make use of a collection of predetermined locations which are distributed across the wide area network. The key functionality of these locations is to detect locality among the service requests over space† and time. This information is used to efficiently find an optimal and dynamically adjustable strategy for service replication. We present an implementation of our approach, WSDAF, a dynamically adaptive framework for scalable Web Services, which we use as a prototype. WSDAF leverages SOAP Routers to relay user requests, with embedded monitoring functionality to detect network changes and study usage patterns using a statistical model and a dynamically adaptive data structure. Our preliminary results are promising: WSDAF can efficiently detect the locality in workload, track the change of network conditions, and adapt to these changes with a significant improvement in performance. †We use the term, “space”, to refer to the portions of network where users reside as well as the data or computational space represented by the services.
A Simplified Cost Function for Distillation Systems Evaluation

The chemical engineer needs a quick and rough economical evaluation to decide between alternative designs and optimize the operating parameters from early stages of design. The ability to find a reasonable optimum operating conditions of a complex distillation system within a short period is difficult due to a huge mathematical computing effort required and mathematical convergence difficulties. This contribution proposes a simplified cost function taking into account the main parameters to which are proportional the capital and operational costs. The goal is not to provide an exact cost estimate in some currency units, the aim of the paper is to provide an optimal operational window defined by a percentage over the minimum cost value. The optimized illustrative example is a pressure-swing distillation system with a reactive column for the transesterification of residual methyl acetate with ethanol to produce ethyl acetate and methanol.
Channel-Quality Aware RFID Tag Identification Algorithm to Accommodate the Varying Channel Quality of IoT Environment

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technique is broadly adopted as the automated identification system for the Internet of Things (IoT). Many RFID anti-collision algorithms were proposed to accelerate the tag identification process. However, they misjudged some unreadable slots which were due to collision instead of the bad channel condition, causing low bandwidth usage. This study proposes the Channel-quality Aware Query Tree algorithm (CAQT) to improve the identification performance in an error-prone channel environment. CAQT has three novel features: (1) it estimates the channel quality continuously and statistically in the rapidly changing channel quality environment; (2) it asks the tag for retransmission or to split the collide tags based on the channel quality; (3) the number of the groups which it splits tags is based on the estimated number of tags collide in current slot. The simulation results show that CAQT uses less than 31% slots compared with the conventional algorithms. The simulation results also demonstrate that CAQT provides enhanced performance when the channel quality is varying especially in outdoor environment, for example, ticket checking for railway or subway system.
SPEEDING UP ALGORITHM FOR BUILDING THE STL MODEL USING 3D PRINTING

Recently, developing 3D printing (3DP) technologies have been substantially increased, because its advantages toward the direct fabricating of 3D physical model from the CAD system. Although several advantages over the subtractive method, there are still many difficulties and problems for building a precise and efficient part. Building time and Accuracy are two important concerns in 3DP. To speed up the building process and improve the accuracy at the same time, an algorithm based on mathematical models will be presented. The algorithm presents variable slicing strategy by adjusting the layer thickness to consider the curvature and flatness of the 3D CAD surfaces, in order to reduce the number of building layers, staircase effect, and consequently decrease the building time and cost. Through this proposed analytical study and the results, the number of layers were saved by 54% that will decrease the building time by the same percentage.
Changes in Extreme Low Temperature Events over Northern China under 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C Warmer Future Scenarios

Recently, NCAR (the National Center for Atmospheric Research) released the Community Earth System Model’s low-warming simulations, which provided long-term climate data for stabilization pathways at 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C above pre-industrial levels. Based on these data, six extreme low temperature indices—TXn (coldest day), TNn (coldest night), TX10p (cool days), TN10p (cool nights), CSDI (cold spell duration indicator), and DTR (diurnal temperature range)—were calculated to assess the changes in extreme low temperature over Northern China under 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C warmer future. The results indicate that compared to the preindustrial level, the whole of China will experience 0.32–0.46 °C higher minimum surface air temperature (SAT) warming than the global average, and the winter temperature increase in Northern China will be the most pronounced over the country. In almost all the regions of Northern China, especially Northeast and Northwest China, extreme low temperature events will occur with lower intensity, frequency, and duration. Compared with the present day, the intensity of low temperature events will decrease most in Northeast China, with TXn increasing by 1.9 °C/2.0 °C and TNn increasing by 2.0 °C/2.5 °C under 1.5 °C/2.0 °C global warming, respectively. The frequency of low temperature events will decrease relatively more in North China, with TX10p decreasing by 8 days/11 days and TN10p decreasing by 7 days/9 days under 1.5 °C/2.0 °C warming. CSDI will decrease most in Northwest China, with decreases of 7 days/10 days with 1.5 °C/2.0 °C warming. DTR will decrease in the Northwest and Northeast but increase in North China, with −0.9 °C/−2.0 °C in the Northwest, −0.4 °C/−1.5 °C in the Northeast, and 1.7 °C/2.0 °C in North China in the 1.5 °C/2.0 °C warming scenarios. For temperatures lower than the 5th percentile, the PRs (probability ratios) will be 0.68 and 0.55 of that of the present day under 1.5 °C and 2.0 °C warmer futures, respectively. Global warming of 2.0 °C instead of 1.5 °C will lead to extreme low temperature events decreasing by 6–56% in regard to intensity, frequency, and duration over Northern China, and the maximal values of decrease (24–56%) will be seen in Northeast China.
Satellite radar interferometry 1993–1999 suggests deep accumulation of magma near the crust‐mantle boundary at the Krafla volcanic system, Iceland

Deep magma accumulation near the crust‐mantle boundary (21 km depth) at the Krafla volcanic system is suggested from InSAR observations. A best fit model, derived from four interferograms covering 1993–1999, comprises an opening dike, representing plate spreading and post‐rifting deformation, and two Mogi sources. A Mogi source deflating at a rate of ∼0.3 × 106 m3/yr coincides with the shallow Krafla magma chamber while a deeper inflating Mogi source, further north, at 21 km depth, inflates at a rate of ∼26 × 106 m3/yr. The inflating source is at or near the crust‐mantle boundary as identified by seismic studies and is interpreted as accumulating magma.
Thermal radiation effects on the onset of unsteadiness of fluid flow in vertical microchannel filled with highly absorbing medium

This study presents the effect of thermal radiation on the steady flow in a vertical micro channel filled with highly absorbing medium. The governing equations (mass, momentum and energy equation with Rosseland approximation and slip boundary condition) are solved analytically. The effects of thermal radiation parameter, the temperature parameter, Reynolds number, Grashof number, velocity slip length, and temperature jump on the velocity and temperature profiles, Nusselt number, and skin friction coefficient are investigated. Results show that the skin friction and the Nusselt number are increased with increase in Grashof number, velocity slip, and pressure gradient while temperature jump and Reynolds number have an adverse effect on them. Furthermore, a criterion for the flow unsteadiness based on the temperature parameter, thermal radiation parameter, and the temperature jump is presented.