Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Multi-target Parameter Estimation in Bistatic MIMO Radar

In this paper, novel subspace-based algorithms are proposed for estimating parameters of multiple moving or static targets in bistatic MIMO radar. The target's parameters of interest include delay/range, Direction of Arrival (DOA), Direction of Departure (DOD), Doppler frequency and complex path coefficient, which is a function of the target's bistatic Radar Cross-Section (RCS). Based on parametric bistatic pulse MIMO radar signal models in conjunction with the concept of extended array manifolds, subspace-based algorithms are proposed for estimating these parameters without suffering from estimates association problem. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated using computer simulation studies.
The Use of Grouped Measurements

IN RECORDING and summarizing sample data by class intervals, it is sometimes desirable to obtain the total of the measurements as well as the number of observations for each interval. In recording grouped temperature readings, for example, if 15, 15, 16, and 19 are the observed readings for the class interval 15 to 19, inclusive, it may be desirable to record 65, the total of the readings for that interval, as well as 4, the number of observations. If it be assumed that the distribution of the data in the universe sampled is continuous and linear for some class interval, the parameters of the line describing the distribution for that interval can readily be estimated by putting
Threshold-Free Phase Segmentation and Zero Velocity Detection for Gait Analysis Using Foot-Mounted Inertial Sensors

Gait analysis is a prosperous tool for the clinical evaluation and diagnosis. In this article, a portable gait analysis system based on foot-mounted inertial sensors is established. A threshold-free method using a long short-term memory recurrent neural network is constructed to segment four typical gait phases in a gait sequence for the temporal parameters analysis. Segmentation accuracy reaches over 95% across recruited subjects with distinct gait patterns, which is significantly superior when compared with traditional machine learning methods. The zero-velocity indicator is generated successively according to the segmented sequence to accomplish zero velocity update for the spatial parameter calculation. The accuracy of the proposed system is also validated through the OptiTrack in the lab. The comparison result of the stride length shows that the error between the two systems is less than 2%, which demonstrates that our system can satisfy the demand in the clinical.
Image watermarking scheme using visual model and BN distribution

A watermarking scheme for digital images that is based on the charecteristics of the human visual system is presented. The watermarking scheme inserts a perceptually invisible watermark in the discrete cosine transform domain. It is shown that the proposed scheme provides better results than two other popular schemes in terms of both transparency and robustness.
Sustainable scale-up of negative emissions technologies and practices: where to focus

Most climate change mitigation scenarios restricting global warming to 1.5 °C rely heavily on negative emissions technologies and practices (NETPs). Here we updated previous literature reviews and conducted an analysis to identify the most appealing NETPs. We evaluated 36 NETPs configurations considering their technical maturity, economic feasibility, greenhouse gas removal potential, resource use, and environmental impacts. We found multiple trade-offs among these indicators, which suggests that a regionalised portfolio of NETPs exploiting their complementary strengths is the way forward. Although no single NETP is superior to the others in terms of all the indicators simultaneously, we identified 16 Pareto-efficient NETPs. Among them, six are deemed particularly promising: forestation, soil carbon sequestration (SCS), enhanced weathering with olivine and three modalities of direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS). While the co-benefits, lower costs and higher maturity levels of forestation and SCS can propel their rapid deployment, these NETPs require continuous monitoring to reduce unintended side-effects—most notably the release of the stored carbon. Enhanced weathering also shows an overall good performance and substantial co-benefits, but its risks—especially those concerning human health—should be further investigated prior to deployment. DACCS presents significantly fewer side-effects, mainly its substantial energy demand; early investments in this NETP could reduce costs and accelerate its scale-up. Our insights can help guide future research and plan for the sustainable scale-up of NETPs, which we must set into motion within this decade.
Voluntary International Mobility Lived in Laughter, Tears, and Resignification: Experiences of Brazilians Shared on YouTube Channels

Abstract Voluntary international mobility requires greater responsibility, given that there is no structure and organizational support for the challenge of living in another country. The aim of this study is to analyze the intercultural adaptation process of Brazilian immigrants and self-initiated expatriates in “off-axis” countries (less sought after/without a structured community of Brazilians) based on their reports and interactions on YouTube channels. The study employs a qualitative approach, with narrative research of four individuals. The data were collected between March and May of 2021 according to the following categories: intercultural adaptation; types of adaptation; structure and functioning of the channel. We confirmed the applicability of the theories of intercultural adaptation to analyze voluntary mobility, but with the need to consider specific aspects, such as advance adjustment actions, the influence of the channels on the focus and effort to adapt to the general environment and interact with the locals, and the emergence of individual aspects and behaviors (such as flexibility to change and self-knowledge), which were shown to be relevant for the intercultural adaptation process in voluntary mobility. As a theoretical contribution, it is understood that to use the theories about intercultural adaptation with the aim of analyzing voluntary mobility it is necessary to consider some specific aspects of this type of mobility while still in the country of origin, the weight and importance of each adaptation environment for the voluntary expatriate’s objective, and how much that experience is shared and exposed on different media with their respective impact on choices and (re)creation of meanings.
Quantitative analysis of the roles of IRM cell adhesion molecules in column formation in the fly brain

The Drosophila visual center shows columnar structures, basic structural and functional units of the brain, that are shared with the mammalian cerebral cortex. Visual information received in the ommatidia in the compound eye is transmitted to the columns in the brain. However, the developmental mechanisms of column formation are largely unknown. The Irre Cell Recognition Module (IRM) proteins are a family of immunoglobulin cell adhesion molecules. The four Drosophila IRM proteins are localized to the developing columns, the structure of which is affected in IRM mutants, suggesting that IRM proteins are essential for column formation. Since IRM proteins are cell adhesion molecules, they may regulate cell adhesion between columnar neurons. To test this possibility, we specifically knocked down IRM genes in columnar neurons and examined the defects in column formation. We developed a system that automatically extracts the individual column images and quantifies the column shape. Using this system, we demonstrated that IRM genes play critical roles in regulating column shape in a core columnar neuron, Mi1. We also show that their expression in the other columnar neurons, Mi4 and T4/5, is essential, suggesting that the interactions between IRM proteins and multiple neurons shape the columns in the fly brain.
Closed-Form Solution for Lost-In-Space Visual Navigation Problem

The paper describes a new closed-form solution for the lost-in-space visual navigation problem. Focal plane images of several known beacons are used to determine both position and attitude of a sensor equipped with position-sensing diodes. A preliminary set of possible solutions is obtained without any initial guesses using any three beacons. These solutions employ a closed-form method for finding sensor-to-beacon distances based on their lines of sight. Instead of providing these solutions in terms of polynomial roots, the paper for the first time derives these solutions explicitly and includes a complete error analysis. Using additional beacons, the possible three-beacon solutions are refined, extraneous solutions are discarded, and the best solution is identified via the Gauss–Newton method. The paper also includes numerical examples and a statistical validation of the proposed method.
Raising from NP in Malagasy

We begin this paper with a detailed study of Possessor Raising in Malagasy. Possessor Raising is shown to be exceptionally productive; moreover it largely conforms to the generalizations offered by Relational Grammar for Possessor Raising in general. But the incorporation it triggers is not of the same sort as studied in Baker (1996). Then we argue that Possessive Raising is a special case of a more general syntactic/semantic relation we call Raising from NP. This more general operation violates some tenets of Relational Grammar and appears to be a new type of derivational relation within generative grammar.
SuperCDC: A Hybrid Design of High-Performance Content-Defined Chunking for Fast Deduplication

Content-Defined Chunking (CDC) has been widely applied in data deduplication systems in the past since it can detect much more redundant data than Fixed-Size Chunking (FSC). CDC approach becomes faster and faster to match the improvement of high performance storage systems, and there are two main kinds of acceleration mechanisms: calculation-efficient acceleration and stream-informed acceleration. We observe the opportunity to combine the benefits of these two mechanisms to chase a faster speed, and the challenges of memory overhead and deduplication ratio loss, which are caused by stream histories and the configuration of minimum/maximum chunk size, respectively. Motivated by these observations, we proposed SuperCDC with several corresponding techniques, including hybridizing calculation-efficient processing with a stream-informed design, memory-efficient structure for tracking stream history, and Min-Max chunking for improving deduplication ratio. Evaluations suggest that SuperCDC achieves an up to 4.94× faster chunking speed and 6.23% higher deduplication ratio while saving 99.58% memory space on stream histories compared with the state-of-the-art Gear-based RapidCDC.
Allosteric Inhibition of c-Abl to Induce Unfolded Protein Response and Cell Death in Multiple Myeloma

Endoplasmic reticulum stress activates inositol-requiring enzyme 1α (IRE1α) and protein kinase, R-like endoplasmic reticulum kinase (PERK), the two principal regulators of the unfolded protein response (UPR). In multiple myeloma, adaptive IRE1α signaling is predominantly activated and regulates cell fate along with PERK. Recently, we demonstrated that GNF-2, an allosteric c-Abl inhibitor, rheostatically enhanced IRE1α activity and induced apoptosis through c-Abl conformational changes in pancreatic β cells. Herein, we analyzed whether the pharmacological modulation of c-Abl conformation resulted in anti-myeloma effects. First, we investigated the effects of GNF-2 on IRE1α activity and cell fate, followed by an investigation of the anti-myeloma effects of asciminib, a new allosteric c-Abl inhibitor. Finally, we performed RNA sequencing to characterize the signaling profiles of asciminib. We observed that both GNF-2 and asciminib decreased cell viability and induced XBP1 mRNA splicing in primary human myeloma cells and myeloma cell lines. RNA sequencing identified the induction of UPR- and apoptosis-related genes by asciminib. Asciminib re-localized c-Abl to the endoplasmic reticulum, and its combination with a specific IRE1α inhibitor, KIRA8, enhanced cell death with the reciprocal induction of CHOP mRNA expression. Together, the allosteric inhibition of c-Abl-activated UPR with anti-myeloma effects; this could be a novel therapeutic target for multiple myeloma.
Evolutionary Characteristics and Immunologic Divergence of Lung and Brain Metastasis Lesions in NSCLC

Abstract Brain metastases (BM) is one of the main reasons for lung cancer-related deaths but lack prediction methods. Many patients with BMs do not benefit from immunotherapy. A comprehensive genomic analysis of matched primary tumors (PT) and their BM lesions may provide new insight into the evolutionary and immune characteristics. To describe evolutionary features and immune characteristic differences, we analyzed whole-exome sequencing data for 28 paired PT and BM samples from 14 patients with non-small cell lung cancer. In addition, we used another 26 matched PT and BM samples as a validation cohort. We found that total mutational signatures were relatively consistent between paired primary and brain metastatic tumors. Nevertheless, the shared mutations of the two lesions were fewer than the mutations present in each of the lesions alone. In the process of BM, driver genes undergo evolutionary branches. Typical driver genes, including EGFR and TP53, appear relatively conserved throughout evolution; however, specific signals are enriched in BM lesions. We found several main characteristics of lung cancer BMs that were different from primary lung cancer, such as genomic instability, novel driver genes, tumor mutation burden, and BM lesion private neoantigens. In addition, the estimated timing of dissemination showed that BMs might occur early in lung cancer. Implications: Mechanistic insight from this study provides new insight into the biology of the metastatic brain process and a new beneficial approach for preventing and treating lung cancer BMs.
A Synchronous-Sampling Impedance-Readout IC with Baseline-Cancellation-Based Two-Step Conversion for Fast Neural Electrical Impedance Tomography

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is widely used for functional imaging of the bio-impedance of body parts for various applications, such as lung ventilation monitoring [1]. It was recently shown that ‘fast neural EIT’ with far enhanced temporal resolution (frame rate) can provide the neural activity monitoring and functional localization of the active peripheral nerve at the same time [2]. In an EIT system, to reconstruct an impedance tomography image (Fig. 1(a)), an AC current is injected from a current generator $(\text{I}_{\text{CG}})$ into the target bio-impedance network $\text{Z}_{\text{BIO}}$ through an electrode pair (channel) in a rotational manner, while demodulating the voltages appeared at all the other channels. The I/Q demodulation is the most popular way to extract the resistance and reactance information of $\text{Z}_{\text{BIO}}$ [1]. For the neural EIT, however, this method cannot support a high enough frame rate, failing to acquire neural activities, mainly due to the down-conversion to DC and low-pass filtering. As shown in Fig. 1(a), many cycles of the AC input signal are needed for the I and Q outputs to be well settled to their final values. A higher excitation frequency $(\text{f}_{\text{CG}})$ can be used for faster settling in conventional applications, but in the neural EIT, $\text{f}_{\text{CG}}$ should be $\lt 20$ kHz for high SNR image acquisition [2]. Alternatively, peak detection can be used [3], but it needs a much faster sampling clock than $\text{f}_{\text{CG}}$, consuming a large dynamic power in all the demodulation channels.
Evaluating Integration of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles into Port Protection

As underwater vehicle technology, manufacturing processes, and artificial intelligence continue to advance, autonomous underwater systems are now faster, smarter, more connected, and capable of completing a great variety of mission types. Although the ocean science community uses these systems for oceanography and exploration, potential adversaries could re-task these systems to threaten port facilities and infrastructure. It is imperative that our nation and our industry partners evaluate and develop port protection systems that utilize, and defend against, autonomous underwater vehicle threats of the future. This paper reviews the problem of port protection, its importance, technical challenges, and existing and novel technology that may support the required protection functions. A literature review outlines the history of port security capabilities, both supporting and adversarial systems, including underwater vehicles and marine mammals. Assumptions, variable definitions, and methodology for evaluating port protection scenarios are presented. A port protection solution is introduced with corresponding evaluation strategies and potential technologies for implementation. We conclude by recommending that autonomous underwater vehicle technology and associated protection solutions be further developed, and research gaps be resolved, to develop a comprehensive port protection solution for the future.
Oral Health Barriers for African American Caregivers of Autistic Children

The most persistent oral health disparities in the United States impact children from racial and ethnic minoritized groups and children diagnosed as autistic. This paper aims to describe barriers to oral care as depicted by Black/African American (B/AA) parents of autistic children to further explore how and why oral health disparities persist in this population. A purposeful sample of eleven caregivers of autistic children, ages 4 to 14 years, who identified as B/AA were interviewed twice for approximately 60–90 min each. Thematic analysis utilizing a narrative approach was employed. Three themes emerged from the data concerning the barriers that affect oral health experiences: (a) difficulty in maintaining good oral health practices, (b) challenges with access to care and resources, and (c) poor patient-provider relationships. Due to the limited research that examines the intersection of autism, B/AA culture, and oral health practices, this study provides a rich picture of the barriers families face when obtaining oral care. Many families raised issues that other parents of autistic children also identified. B/AA caregivers have demonstrated that despite their own negative dental experiences, they understand the value of good oral care practices and are willing to pursue oral care for their children.
EMT and Tumor Turning Point Analysis in 3D Spheroid Culture of HNSCC and Mesenchymal Stem Cells

The prognosis, metastasis, and behavior of head and neck squamous cancer cells are influenced by numerous factors concerning the tumor microenvironment, intercellular communication, and epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT). The aim of this study was to examine the codependent interaction of the mesenchymal stroma with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) in a 3D spheroid structure. To simulate stroma-rich and -poor 3D tumor microenvironments, cells of the established cell SCC-040 were cultured with human mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs), forming 3D stroma-tumor spheroids (STSs). STSs were compared to uniform spheroids of SCC-040 and MSC, respectively. The expressions of CD24, β-catenin, SNAI2, and ZEB2 were analyzed via RT-qPCR. The immunohistochemical expressions of E-cadherin, connexin 43, vimentin, and emmprin were analyzed, and protein expression pathways as well as Akt signaling were assessed via protein analysis. A promotive effect on the expressions of EMT markers ZEB2 (p = 0.0099), SNAI2 (p = 0.0352), and β-catenin (p = 0.0031) was demonstrated in STSs, as was the expression of Akt pathway proteins mTOR (p = 0.007), Erk1/2 (p = 0.0045), and p70 S6 Kinase (p = 0.0016). Our study demonstrated a change in genetic expression patterns early on in tumor development, indicating a tumor turning point.
A New Integrated Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Model for Sustainable Supplier Selection Based on a Novel Grey WISP and Grey BWM Methods

Supplier selection is an important task in supply chain management, as suppliers have a vital role in the success of organisations in a supply chain. Sustainability has emerged as a solution to decreasing resources and increasing environmental and social problems in the past few decades. It has been applied to various industrial operations, one of them is supplier selection, to mitigate unwanted effects in the future. Sustainable supplier selection is a complicated multi-criteria decision making problem, including several criteria from economic, environmental, and social perspectives. To deal with subjective judgements of decision makers, fuzzy and grey methods are widely used in multi-criteria decision making, In the case of small, limited, and incomplete data, the grey theory provides satisfactory results, compared to fuzzy methods. Therefore, this study is an integrated method including grey Best-Worst Method (BWM) and grey Weighted Sum-Product (WISP) for choosing the most sustainable supplier for a textile manufacturer, which includes three main criteria and twelve sub-criteria. According to the result of the proposed model, the supplier with the best performance was determined to be the supplier with the SP2 coded. The results of the developed model were shown to the experts, and the accuracy of the results was confirmed. According to the experts, a higher amount of product can be purchased from the supplier with the SP2 code, and a tighter relationship can be worked with this supplier. The contributions of this study are: (1) Develop a new grey MCDM model called Grey WISP. (2) Create a new integrated MCDM model with grey theory, BWM, and WISP methods that can be applied to assess supplier sustainability using this hybrid model. The proposed model can be used not just for selecting sustainable suppliers, but also for any other decision problems that have multiple criteria and alternatives. The findings suggest that the Grey WISP method achieved accurate results.
Quasi-Elliptical Stub-Based Multi-Resonance Waveguide Filters With Low Manufacturing Complexity for mm-Wave Applications

In this paper, the design and realization of quasi-elliptical waveguide filters with reduced manufacturing complexity are discussed. The filters are based on TE mode cavities, which are loaded with TM mode stubs. It is shown that dual-, triple- and quadruple-resonance segments are obtained by using up to three stubs loaded on the broad side of a TE mode cavity. The structures obtained can either be used as a stand-alone filter or even as a building block suitable for the realization of higher order filters. The multi-resonance blocks reveal several advantages in the mm-wave area: The manufacturing complexity is easy to handle and comparable to simple all-pole filters, which is especially important at high frequencies. Therefore, three prototypes are manufactured as proof of concept in the D-band (110 GHz–170 GHz). Moreover, the building blocks are able to produce $n-1$ transmission zeros (TZs) with $n$ being the number of resonances. Therefore, the blocks generate between one (dual-resonance) and up to three (quadruple-resonance) TZs. Advantageously, the filters can be cut in the E-plane in order to reduce the insertion loss and hence consist of only two components. Three examples are manufactured by high precision CNC milling and reveal good agreement to the simulation by obtaining unloaded Q-factors of up to 1000.