Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
SPECTACKLE: toward a specification-based DSAL composition process

DSAL composition frameworks are tools used in the process of composing multiple DSAL mechanisms into a single multi-DSAL weaver. The DSAL composition process starts with specifying the desired interactions between the DSAL mechanisms being composed, and concludes with producing a multi-DSAL weaver which satisfies the composition specification. However, the lack of tool support for defining the composition specification, and the coding effort required in composition frameworks to implement the specification, make this process complex and error prone. This work presents a specification-based approach to DSAL composition. The approach is based on having a specifiction manifest file for the composition and for each of the individual mechanisms involved. A novel tool, named SpecTackle, analyzes the manifests and helps the composition designer define the desired specification. Based on the composition specification produced, the composition framework can generate a significant part of the implementation code for the mechanisms and for the multi-DSAL weaver. The specification-based DSAL composition process is illustrated in the context of the Awesome composition framework.
Reproductive behavior and health in consanguineous marriages

In many regions of Asia and Africa, consanguineous marriages currently account for approximately 20 to 50% of all unions, and preliminary observations indicate that migrants from these areas continue to contract marriages with close relatives when resident in North America and Western Europe. Consanguinity is associated with increased gross fertility, due at least in part to younger maternal age at first livebirth. Morbidity and mortality also may be elevated, resulting in comparable numbers of surviving offspring in consanguineous and nonconsanguineous families. With advances in medicine and public health, genetic disorders will account for an increased proportion of disease worldwide. Predictably, this burden will fall more heavily on countries and communities in which consanguinity is strongly favored, as the result of the expression of deleterious recessive genes. However, studies conducted in such populations indicate that the adverse effects associated with inbreeding are experienced by a minority of families.
Hierarchical Models of Chemical Infiltrated Carbon/Carbon Composites

In the last years there has been an increasing interest in the multi-scale mechanics of the materials, i.e. in predicting the macroscopic constitutive response on the basis of the underlying microstructure. At each level of structural hierarchy, one may model the material as a continuum, and the representative volume element problem can be formulated in terms of standard equilibrium and boundary conditions. The overall physical behaviour of these micro-heterogeneous materials depends strongly on the shape, size, orientation, properties and spatial distribution of their microconstituents. For prediction of the macroscopic behaviour of such materials the multi-scale homogenization techniques were developed. As an example of such investigation we develop the hierarchical material model of the chemical vapour infiltrated carbon fiber composites (CFCs) with a unidirectional or random distribution of fibers. The approach based on hierarchical structural modeling can be used to theoretically predict the mechanical parameters of CFCs with different microstructure and to develop virtual materials with prescribed mechanical properties.
An Overview of Mesoscale Modeling Software For Energetic Materials Research

Abstract : Engineering of novel energetic materials requires a thorough understanding of the phenomena that control chemistry, processing, structure, and performance over multiple length and time scales. While atomistic methods are typically limited in time and length scale, and continuum approaches tend to break down at microstructural scales, mesoscale modeling approaches are critical in bridging the gap between the modeling scales. This document serves as an overview of the current state-of-the-art mesoscale modeling software for energetic materials research that is available through commercial or general public licensing.
The edge buffer: a data structure for easy silhouette rendering

Cartoon rendering of 3d models relies heavily on accent lines to portray the important features of a model. In addition to this it has been shown that highlighting silhouette edges can significantly enhance the comprehension of technical images. In this paper we introduce the edge buffer. This data structure allows us to highlight silhouette edges, boundary, edges, and artist defined edges. This edge buffer is used a-priori to define which edges are to be rendered when visible. The edge buffer is also updated each time the object is rendered so that silhouette edges can be drawn. We discuss the difference between silhouette edges and boundary edges and show how the edge buffer allows both types of edges can be drawn. The use of the edge buffer only requires that a front/back computation be available and that the object being rendered be represented in a vertex/polygon representation
Low-threshold electrically pumped ultraviolet laser diode

Electrically pumped ultraviolet lasing has been realized in a Au/MgO/MgZnO/n-ZnO structure. The lasing is located at around 330 nm. Notably the threshold of the lasing is about 30.0 mA, over one order of magnitude smaller than the corresponding values reported before.
BIONICS BASED APPROACH FOR TREATMENT OF EPILEPSY

Bionics plays an important role in the treatment of Epilepsy using memristors. Bionics is the branch of science in which we study nature and find solutions tohuman problems. Echo state networks (ESN) or reservoirs, are random, recurrent neural network topologies that integrate temporal data over short time windows by operating on the edge of chaos. Recently, there is a significant effort on the mathematical modeling and software topologies of the reservoirs. However, hardware reservoir fabrics are essential to deploy in energy constrained environments. In this paper, we investigate a hardware reservoir with bi-stable memristive synapses. In particular, we demonstrate a scalable hardware model for detecting real-time epileptic seizures in human models . The performance of the proposed reservoir hardware is evaluated for absent seizure signals with 85% accuracy.
Magic labellings of graphs over finite abelian groups

A total labelling of a graph with v vertices and e edges is a one-to-one map taking the vertices and edges onto the set {1, 2, 3, . , v + e}. A labelling can be used to define a weight for each vertex and edge. For a vertex the weight is the sum of the label of the vertex and the labels of the incident edges. For an edge {x, y} the weight is the sum of the label of the edge and the labels of the end vertices x and y. A labelling is vertex-magic if all the vertices have the same weight. A labelling is edgemagic if all the edges have the same weight. A labelling is totally-magic if it is both vertex-magic and edge-magic. In this paper we generalize these concepts to A-labellings of a graph, that is labellings with the elements of an abelian group A of order v + e. We consider in detail A-labellings of star graphs.
Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) and Bluetooth coexistence: issues and solutions

The IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks also known as Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth wireless personal area networks have independently become the leading wireless network technologies. Both technologies are finding their way into a growing number of mobile devices such as cellphones, smartphones, PDAs, and laptops. Both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth utilize the unlicensed 2.4 GHz ISM band, resulting in a potential for interference between the two. In mobile devices, where the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios are collocated in the same device, interference issues become more severe, and need to be dealt with using special mechanisms. Texas Instruments has introduced a BT/WLAN coexistence solution that is being used in a variety of industry products. We address the issue of Bluetooth and 802.11 WLAN coexistence. We discuss the interference problem and the coexistence solution for the case where both radios are collocated in the same device. We further analyze the performance of both technologies when utilizing the coexistence solution, and compare it to the performance without coexistence.
Overview of Cyber Science and Technology Programs at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory

This paper provides an overview of research programs in cyber security performed by the U.S Army Research Laboratory. Although ARL is the U.S. Army's corporate laboratory that focuses on fundamental and early applied research, the fundamental science endeavors are closely integrated with extensive operationally-oriented programs. One example is the Cyber Collaborative Research Alliance (CRA) that brings together ARL scientists with academic researchers from dozens of U.S. universities. ARL cyber scientists are largely driven by challenges unique to the ground operations of the Army; this paper outlines a few of these challenges and the ways in which they are addressed by ARL research efforts. The long-term campaign of cyber research is guided by the vision of the future Army battlefield. In the year 2040, it will be a highly converged virtual-physical space, where cyber operations will be an integral part of the battle.
Affective structure modeling of speech using probabilistic context free grammar for emotion recognition

A complete emotional expression typically contains a complex temporal course in a natural conversation. Related research on utterance-level and segment-level processing lacks understanding of the underlying structure of emotional speech. In this study, a hierarchical affective structure of an emotional utterance characterized by the probabilistic context free grammars (PCFGs) is proposed for emotion modeling. SVM-based emotion profiles are obtained and employed to segment the utterance into emotionally consistent segments. Vector quantization is applied to convert the emotion profile of each segment into codewords. A binary tree in which each node represents a codeword is constructed to characterize the affective structure of the utterance modeled by PCFG. Given an input utterance, the output emotion is determined according to the PCFG-based emotion model with the highest likelihood of the speech segments along with the score of the affective structure. For evaluation, the EMO-DB database and its expansion in utterance length were conducted. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieved emotion recognition accuracy of 87.22% for long utterances and outperformed the SVM-based method.
M-Health: The Development of Cuff-less and Wearable Blood Pressure Meters for Use in Body Sensor Networks

To meet the needs of the increasingly aging population, development of wearable medical devices and body sensor networks technologies for applications in telemedicine and mobile health are imperative. In this direction, we have developed a cuff-less and noninvasive pulse transit time (PTT)-based approach to overcome the shortcomings of conventional invasive or cuff-based blood pressure (BP) measurement techniques for long-term and continuous measurement of BP and its variability. The technique is useful for designing wearable BP meters, which, if connected with various types of wearable devices by a body sensor network, could form a front-end infrastructure for long-term personal health monitoring. In this paper, we evaluated the PTT-based approach with data collected from two groups of 85 subjects. The results suggested that the PTT-based approach is a promising technique for the noninvasive and cuff-less measurement of BP
Laser induced heating of PMMA microspheres for remote drug release: a FEM simulation model

We present a model in which polymeric spherical microstructures embedded with a light absorbing dye are shown to attain the phase transition temperature necessary for the release of a drug contained in its polymeric matrix into the surrounding medium. By numerically solving the heat diffusion equation and considering a Gaussian near-infrared source it is shown that heating is mostly confined to the particle although limited heat transfer occurs out into the surrounding medium. The influence of different operational parameters is analyzed. Based on the results, we elaborate on the experimental implementation of this kind of remotely operated drug delivery systems.
The XMU phrase-based statistical machine translation system for IWSLT 2006

In this paper, an overview of the XMU phrase-based statistical machine translation system for the 2006 IWSLT Speech Translation Evaluation was given. In this year’s evaluation, we participated in the open data track for ASR lattice and Cleaned Transcripts for the Chinese-English translation direction. The system ranked 7th among the 12 participating systems in the Chinese-English spontaneous speech ASR output task, 11th among the 15 participating systems in the Chinese-English read speech ASR output task and 8th among the 15 participating systems in the Cleaned Transcripts task.
Hierarchical Roadmap Approach to Rough Terrain Motion Planning

A reconfigurable chassis provides a mobile robot with a high degree of mobility and enables it to overcome rough terrain in unstructured outdoor environments, like boulders or rubble, and challenging structures in urban environments, like stairs or steps. Yet, many planning algorithms rarely exploit those enhanced capabilities to the full extent, limiting these systems to mainly flat environments also traversable by less capable fixed-chassis robots. In this paper we introduce a two-stage roadmap approach to motion planning for reconfigurable robots which utilizes the system’s actuators to traverse rough terrain and obstacles. First, by considering the platform’s operating limits rather than the complete state, we quickly generate an initial path. Second, we refine the initial path in rough areas within a constrained search space. So we are able to plan appropriate actuator configurations to traverse rough areas and ensure the system’s safety. Our algorithm does not categorize the terrain and does not use any predefined motion sequences. Hence, our planner can be applied to urban structures, like stairs, as well as rough unstructured environments. We present simulation experiments to provide more insight into our method and real-world experiments to prove the feasibility of our motion planning approach
Maximal Utility Rate Allocation for Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks

There is currently tremendous interest in deploying energyharvesting wireless sensor networks. Engineering such systems requires striking a careful balance between sensing performance and energy management. Our work addresses this problem through the design and analysis of a harvestingaware utility-based sensing rate allocation algorithm. Based on a network utility formulation, we show that our algorithm is optimal in terms of assigning rates to individual nodes to maximize overall utility, while ensuring energy-neutral operation. To our knowledge, our work is the first optimal solution that maximizes network utility through rate assignments for tree-structured energy harvesting sensor networks. Our algorithm is fast and efficient with running time O(N), where N is the number of nodes. We evaluate the performance, scalability, and overhead of our algorithm for various utility functions and network sizes, underlining its significant
Genetic algorithm for clustering accelerated by the CUDA platform

Unsupervised clustering of large data sets is a complicated NP-hard task. Due to its complexity, various metaheuristic machine learning algorithms have been used to automate or aid the clustering process. Genetic and evolutionary algorithms have been deployed to find clusters in data sets with success. However, also evolutionary clustering suffers from the high computational demands when it comes to fitness function evaluation. The GPU computing is a recent programming and development paradigm introducing high performance parallel computing to general audience. This work presents an initial design and implementation of a genetic algorithm for density based clustering on the GPU using the nVidia CUDA platform.
Techniques for characterizing the structure and properties of polymer nanocomposites

This chapter summarizes the techniques that are generally used to investigate the structure and morphology of polymer nanocomposites. Over the last few years, it has become clear that the characterization of materials is a challenge facing the synthesis of polymer nanocomposites. A number of techniques have recently been proposed; however, there is still not a single technique that can fully characterize the structure of polymer nanocomposites.
3D finite element simulation of human proximal femoral fracture under quasi-static load

In this paper, a simple and accurate finite element model coupled to quasi-brittle damage law able to describe the multiple cracks initiation and their progressive propagation is developed in order to predict the complete force-displacement curve and the fracture pattern of human proximal femur under quasi-static load. The motivation of this work was to propose a simple and practical FE model with a good compromise between complexity and accuracy of the simulation considering a limited number of model parameters that can predict proximal femur fracture more accurately and physically than the fracture criteria based models. Different damage laws for cortical and trabecular bone are proposed based on experimental results to describe the inelastic damage accumulation under the excessive load. When the damage parameter reaches its critical value inside an element of the mesh, its stiffness matrix is set to zero leading to the redistribution of the stress state in the vicinity of the fractured zone (crack initiation). Once a crack is initiated, the propagation direction is simulated by the propagation of the broken elements of the mesh. To illustrate the potential of the proposed approach, the left femur of a male (age 61) previously investigated by Keyak and Falkinstein, 2003 (Model B: male, age 61) was simulated till complete fracture under one-legged stance quasi-static load. The proposed finite element model leads to more realistic and precise results concerning the shape of the force-displacement curve (yielding and fracturing) and the profile of the fractured edge.
A Design of Web-based GDSS that Supports Anonymous Communication and the Convergent Process

Most of the successful supporting frameworks of anonymous communication in group decision support systems (GDSS) are designed for the divergence phase in a decision process. Not many GDSS designs address the later convergence phase where participants through discussion seek a conclusion or an answer. This paper presents a new design for a Web-based GDSS that supports anonymous communication for the convergent process. We also illustrate an implementation of a prototype system and offer an evaluation using a decision making experiment of document selection.
Increasing speech intelligibility via spectral shaping with frequency warping and dynamic range compression plus transient enhancement

In order to make speech (natural or synthetic) more in-telligible for listeners in real-world noisy environments, various modiﬁcations have been proposed that exploit spectral and temporal signal features. Previously, an evaluation cam-paign involving several approaches illustrated that a Spectral Shaping (SS) and Dynamic Range Compression (DRC) method proved highly successful at increasing speech intelligibility. For the public follow-up campaign (i.e., the Hurricane Challenge), this work introduces additional modiﬁcations into SSDRC in an attempt to further enhance intelligibility. First aiming to slow down the articulation rate, the speech is uniformly time stretched to effectively increase signal redundancy. Second, a frequency warping mechanism to expand vowel space is incorporated into the SS. Third, scaling to enhance the transient regions of speech is applied in the time-domain along with DRC. Objective and extensive subjective (i.e., the Hurricane Challenge) evaluations show that the new approach successfully achieves intelligibility gains over natural speech for all of the noise conditions evaluated, though compared to SSDRC, there is less advantage observed at higher SNR.
Discriminative training using the trusted expectation maximization

We present the Trusted Expectation-Maximization (TEM), a new discriminative training scheme, for speech recognition applications. In particular, the TEM algorithm may be used for Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) based discriminative training. The TEM algorithm has a form similar to the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, which is an efﬁcient iterative procedure to perform maximum likelihood in the presence of hidden variables [1]. The TEM algorithm has been empirically shown to increase a rational objective function. In the concave regions of a rational function, it can be shown that the maximization steps of the TEM algorithm and the hypothesized EM algorithm are identical. In the TIMIT phone recognition task, preliminary experimental results show competitive optimization performance over the conventional discriminative training approaches (in terms of speech and accuracy).
Diminishing friction of joint surfaces as initiating factor for destabilising permafrost rocks

Degrading alpine permafrost due to changing climate conditions causes instabilities in steep rock slopes. Due to a lack in process understanding, the hazard is still difficult to asses in terms of its timing, location, magnitude and frequency. Current research is focused on ice within joints which is considered to be the key-factor. Monitoring of permafrost-induced rock failure comprises monitoring of temperature and moisture in rock-joints. The effect of low temperatures on the strength of intact rock and its mechanical relevance for shear strength has not been considered yet. But this effect is signifcant since compressive and tensile strength is reduced by up to 50% and more when rock thaws (Mellor, 1973).
Matching Queries to Frequently Asked Questions: Search Functionality for the MRSA Web-Portal

As part of the long-term EUREGIO MRSA-net project a system was developed which enables health care workers and the general public to quickly find answers to their questions regarding the MRSA pathogen. This paper focuses on how these questions can be answered using Information Retrieval (IR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques on a Frequently-Asked-Questions-style (FAQ) database.
Policing the Boundaries of Sex: A Critical Examination of Gender Verification and the Caster Semenya Controversy

On August 19, 2009, Caster Semenya, South African track star, won a gold medal in the women's 800-meter event. According to media reports, on the same day, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) ordered Semenya to undergo gender verification testing. This article critically assesses the main concepts and claims that undergird international sport organizations' policies regarding “gender verification” or “sex testing. ” We examine the ways in which these policies operate through several highly contested assumptions, including that (a) sex exists as a binary; (b) sport is a level playing field for competitors; and (c) some intersex athletes have an unfair advantage over women who are not intersex and, as such, they should be banned from competition to ensure that sport is a level playing field. To conclude, we make three recommendations that are consistent with the attainment of sex and gender justice in sport, which include acknowledging that myriad physical advantages are accepted in sport, recognizing that sport as a level playing field is a myth, and eliminating sex testing in sport.