Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Change-point Detection and Kernel Methods

In this thesis, we focus on a method for detecting abrupt changes in a sequence of independent observations belonging to an arbitrary set on which a positive semidefinite kernel is defined. That method, kernel changepoint detection, is a kernelized version of a penalized least-squares procedure. Our main contribution is to show that, for any kernel satisfying some reasonably mild hypotheses, this procedure outputs a segmentation close to the true segmentation with high probability. This result is obtained under a bounded assumption on the kernel for a linear penalty and for another penalty function, coming from model selection.The proofs rely on a concentration result for bounded random variables in Hilbert spaces and we prove a less powerful result under relaxed hypotheses—a finite variance assumption. In the asymptotic setting, we show that we recover the minimax rate for the change-point locations without additional hypothesis on the segment sizes. We provide empirical evidence supporting these claims. Another contribution of this thesis is the detailed presentation of the different notions of distances between segmentations. Additionally, we prove a result showing these different notions coincide for sufficiently close segmentations.From a practical point of view, we demonstrate how the so-called dimension jump heuristic can be a reasonable choice of penalty constant when using kernel changepoint detection with a linear penalty. We also show how a key quantity depending on the kernelthat appears in our theoretical results influences the performance of kernel change-point detection in the case of a single change-point. When the kernel is translationinvariant and parametric assumptions are made, it is possible to compute this quantity in closed-form. Thanks to these computations, some of them novel, we are able to study precisely the behavior of the maximal penalty constant. Finally, we study the median heuristic, a popular tool to set the bandwidth of radial basis function kernels. Fora large sample size, we show that it behaves approximately as the median of a distribution that we describe completely in the setting of kernel two-sample test and kernel change-point detection. More precisely, we show that the median heuristic is asymptotically normal around this value.
Modified end-fire bow-tie antenna fed by microstrip line for wideband communication systems

Abstract A broadband microstrip-fed modified printed bow-tie antenna is proposed. Using a rounded ground plane, adding a pair of circular patches to the bow-tie arms, and optimizing the design parameters, an operation frequency band of 3.3–15.2 GHz is achieved. The development stages of the modified bow-tie radiator is exhibited and it is shown that by designing different antenna structures, the impedance bandwidth (defined by –10-dB reflection coefficient) can be improved from 37% to more than 128%. The modified antenna possesses advantages of not only a broad bandwidth of 128%, but also a small size of 34 × 34 × 1.2 mm3. The designed antenna was fabricated and tested. The impedance matching, group delay, and the antenna radiation characteristics, including co-polarized far-field patterns, cross-polarized patterns, radiation efficiency, and gain were analyzed with numerical simulation and experimental measurement. Measured data are in good agreement with the simulated results. Based on the obtained frequency- and time-domain characteristics, the designed antenna is an attractive candidate for broadband communication applications.
Exponential convergence of the stochastic micropolar and magneto-micropolar fluid systems

We study the micropolar and magneto-micropolar fluid systems with random forces in two-dimensional case. The additional terms on the equations that govern the time evolution of the velocity and micro-rotational velocity vector fields are more singular than many other equations that have been previously studied, for example Bénard or magnetic Bénard problem. Following the approach of [2] via a coupling method, we prove the existence and uniqueness of their solutions and the invariant measures as well as the exponential convergence of its trajectories to the unique invariant measure.
On the of neural modeling of some dynamic parameters of earthquakes and fire safety in high-rise construction

The recent change in the correlation of the number of man-made and natural catastrophes is presented in the paper. Some recommendations are proposed to increase the firefighting efficiency in the high-rise buildings. The article analyzes the methodology of modeling seismic effects. The prospectivity of applying the neural modeling and artificial neural networks to analyze a such dynamic parameters of the earthquake foci as the value of dislocation (or the average rupture slip) is shown. The following two input signals were used: the power class and the number of earthquakes. The regression analysis has been carried out for the predicted results and the target outputs. The equations of the regression for the outputs and target are presented in the work as well as the correlation coefficients in training, validation, testing, and the total (All) for the network structure 2-5-5-1for the average rupture slip. The application of the results obtained in the article for the seismic design for the newly constructed buildings and structures and the given recommendations will provide the additional protection from fire and earthquake risks, reduction of their negative economic and environmental consequences.
Computationally Efficient Predictive Direct Torque Control Strategy for PMSGs Without Weighting Factors

This paper proposes a computationally efficient Predictive Torque Control (PTC) technique for permanent-magnet synchronous generators (PMSGs) without weighting factors. The proposed control strategy is based on computing the q-axis reference current from the demanded torque. Furthermore, the d-axis reference current is set to zero to achieve the maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) operation of the PMSG. Then, the reference voltage vector (VV) is directly computed from the reference current vector using the deadbeat principle. Finally, according to the location of this reference VV, only three evaluations of the cost function are required. The cost function includes only the error between the reference VV and the candidates ones, which eliminates the need of weighting factors. Therefore, the proposed control scheme overcomes the following drawbacks of the classical PTC: 1) High calculation burden, and 2) tuning of the weighting factors. Experimental results using a dSPACE DS1007 realtime platform and a 14.5 kW PMSG are presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed control method.
Erratum: “Brightening X-Ray Emission from GW170817/GRB 170817A: Further Evidence for an Outflow” (2018, ApJL, 853, L4)

Further Evidence for an Outflow” (2018, ApJL, 853, L4) John J. Ruan , Melania Nynka, Daryl Haggard , Vicky Kalogera , and Phil Evans 1 McGill Space Institute and Department of Physics, McGill University, 3600 rue University, Montreal, Quebec H3A 2T8, Canada; john.ruan@mcgill.ca 2 CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar, Gravity & the Extreme Universe Program, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, 661 University Avenue, Suite 505, Toronto, ON M5G 1M1, Canada 3 Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Northwestern University, 2145 Sheridan Road, Evanston, Illinois 60208-3112, USA 4 Leicester Institute for Space and Earth Observation and Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK Received 2018 May 2; published 2018 May 23
Methadone Maintenance and QT-Interval: Prevalence and Risk Factors—Is It Effective to Switch Therapy to Levomethadone?

Methadone is a chiral synthetic opioid primarily used to treat heroin and prescription-opioid addiction: the (R)-enantiomer (Levomethadone) activates the µ-opioid receptor more potently than the (S)-enantiomer, which is a more potent blocker of the hERG potassium channels, resulting in QTc prolongation. The purpose of this retrospective study was to assess the effect of methadone on the QTc interval and to investigate the benefits of Levomethadone. The electrocardiograms of 165 patients taking methadone at various dosages and for different periods of time were examined: the QTc value was manually measured and then adjusted using Bazett’s formula. Data analysis revealed a linear association between the dosage of methadone and QTc length; no correlation was found between the QTc value and gender, age, or duration of therapy. In total, 14% of the sample (23 patients) showed a prolongation of the QTc interval (>470 ms in males and >480 ms in females); 10 of the 23 patients with QTc elongation underwent a change of therapy from Methadone to Levomethadone—in 90% of these patients, a normalization in the QTc length was established. This study confirmed the role of methadone, specifically its dosage, in QTc prolongation and the efficiency of Levomethadone as an adequate therapeutic substitute in these circumstances. This study validates the importance of careful electrocardiographic monitoring in methadone-treated patients.
Mathematics, Mental Imagery, and Ontology: A New Interpretation of the Divided Line

This paper presents a new interpretation of the objects of dianoia in Plato’s divided line, contending that they are mental images of the Forms hypothesized by the dianoetic reasoner. The paper is divided into two parts. A survey of the contemporary debate over the identity of the objects of dianoia yields three criteria a successful interpretation should meet. Then, it is argued that the mental images interpretation, in addition to proving consistent with key passages in the middle books of the Republic, better meets those criteria than do any of the three main positions.
New Storage Codes Between the MSR and MBR Points Through Block Designs

In distributed storage systems, data are stored across multiple storage nodes which are unreliable and prone to failure. While erasure coding is more efficient than simple replication in terms of storage overhead and reliability, classic erasure codes like Reed-Solomon codes require a large repair bandwidth when repairing a failed node. Therefore, reducing both the storage overhead and repair bandwidth under a given fault tolerance is desired, however, it is not possible to minimize both. In 2007, Dimarkis et al. characterized the storage-bandwidth trade-off under functional repair. While exact repair is preferred in practical systems, it was shown that only two extremal points and a line segment are achievable under exact repair. Up to now, the storage-bandwidth trade-off under exact repair remains unresolved for general parameters. Nevertheless, constructing codes with exact repair between the two extremal points is still of great interest, however, very few such constructions have been reported in the literature. In this paper, we present explicit code constructions based on block designs, which can be viewed as a generalization of a previous work by Tian et al. Such a generalization leads to two new codes, i.e., an <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(n, k=n-1, d=n-1)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> storage code based on regular mandatory representation designs (MRDs) and an <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(n, k=n-2, d\ge n-2)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> storage code based on 3-designs. It is shown that the new storage codes have a better performance than the ones by Tian et al. in terms of the sub-packetization level and storage-bandwidth trade-off. In addition, the new <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$(n, k=n-2, d)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> storage code supports two repair degrees, i.e., <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d\in \{n-2,n-1\}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>.
Obesity in Adolescents: Prevalence and Association with Sociodemographic and Lifestyle Factors

Introduction: Overweight and obesity has become a worldwide epidemic and is a growing public health concern. The increase in prevalence and severity of obesity among children and adolescents has been attributed largely to behavioral factors such as changing eating habits and sedentary lifestyles. Objective: To determine prevalence of obesity and abdominal obesity among adolescents and its association with sociodemographic factors and lifestyle. Methods: Present cross-sectional study was conducted in the urban field practice area under the Community Medicine Department of LLRM Medical College, Meerut, among 872 adolescents. All localities in the field area were covered and house to house survey was done. Questions were asked about eating patterns, physical activity and sedentary lifestyle. Data was collected and analyzed using appropriate statistical tests. Results: The prevalence of overweight and obesity was 17.43, 6.88%, respectively. Obesity was significantly higher among females, those who indulged in unhealthy eating habits were physically inactive, watched television for a longer duration and ate junk while watching television. Conclusion: In the present study, we found that high junk food consumption and a sedentary lifestyle were found to be significantly associated with childhood overweight/obesity. As a result, timely interventions should be taken to improve awareness about healthy lifestyle behavior to prevent obesity and its complications among adolescents.
Genetic characterization of MDR genomic elements carrying two aac(6′)-aph(2″) genes in feline-derived clinical Enterococcus faecalis isolate

Multidrug-resistant Enterococcus faecalis (E. faecalis) often cause intestinal infections in cats. The aim of this study was to investigate a multidrug-resistant E. faecalis isolate for plasmidic and chromosomal antimicrobial resistance and their genetic environment. E. faecalis strain ESC1 was obtained from the feces of a cat. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was carried out using the broth microdilution method. Conjugation experiments were performed using Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus as receptors. Complete sequences of chromosomal DNA and plasmids were generated by whole genome sequencing (WGS) and bioinformatics analysis for the presence of drug resistance genes and mobile elements. Multidrug-resistant E. faecalis ESC1 contained a chromosome and three plasmids. The amino acid at position 80 of the parC gene on the chromosome was mutated from serine to isoleucine, and hence the amino acid mutation at this site led to the resistance of ESC1 strain to fluoroquinolones. Eleven antibiotic resistance genes were located on two plasmids. We identified a novel composite transposon carrying two aminoglycoside resistance genes aac(6′)-aph(2″). This study reported the coexistence of a novel 5.4 kb composite transposon and a resistance plasmid with multiple homologous recombination in an isolate of E. faecalis ESC1. This data provides a basis for understanding the genomic signature and antimicrobial resistance mechanisms of this pathogen.
Research on User Behavior Based on Higher-Order Dependency Network

In the era of the popularization of the Internet of Things (IOT), analyzing people’s daily life behavior through the data collected by devices is an important method to mine potential daily requirements. The network method is an important means to analyze the relationship between people’s daily behaviors, while the mainstream first-order network (FON) method ignores the high-order dependencies between daily behaviors. A higher-order dependency network (HON) can more accurately mine the requirements by considering higher-order dependencies. Firstly, our work adopts indoor daily behavior sequences obtained by video behavior detection, extracts higher-order dependency rules from behavior sequences, and rewires an HON. Secondly, an HON is used for the RandomWalk algorithm. On this basis, research on vital node identification and community detection is carried out. Finally, results on behavioral datasets show that, compared with FONs, HONs can significantly improve the accuracy of random walk, improve the identification of vital nodes, and we find that a node can belong to multiple communities. Our work improves the performance of user behavior analysis and thus benefits the mining of user requirements, which can be used to personalized recommendations and product improvements, and eventually achieve higher commercial profits.
A bi-criteria multiple-choice secretary problem

Abstract This article studies a Bi-criteria Multiple-choice Secretary Problem (BMSP) with full information. A sequence of candidates arrive one at a time, with a two-dimensional attribute vector revealed upon arrival. A decision maker needs to select a total number of η candidates to fill η job openings, based on the attribute vectors of candidates. The objective of the decision maker is to maximize the expected sum of attribute values of selected candidates for both dimensions of the attribute vector. An approach for generating Pareto-optimal policies for BMSP is proposed using the weighted sum method. Moreover, closed-form expressions for values of both objective functions under Pareto-optimal policies for BMSP are provided to help a decision maker in the policy planning stage. These analysis techniques can be applied directly to solve the more general class of multi-criteria multiple-choice Secretary Problems, provided the objective functions are in the form of accumulating a product-form reward for each selected candidate.
Safety Evaluation of Restricted Crossing U-Turn Intersection

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) established the Development of Crash Modification Factors (DCMF) program to address highway safety research needs for evaluating new and innovative safety strategies (improvements) by developing reliable quantitative estimates of their effectiveness in reducing crashes. The ultimate goal of the DCMF program is to save lives by identifying new safety strategies that effectively reduce crashes and to promote those strategies for nationwide implementation by providing measures of their safety effectiveness and benefit–cost (B/C) ratios through research. State transportation departments and other transportation agencies need objective measures for safety effectiveness and B/C ratios before investing in new strategies for statewide safety improvements. Forty State transportation departments provided technical feedback on safety improvements to the DCMF program and implemented new safety improvements to facilitate evaluations. These States are members of the Evaluation of Low-Cost Safety Improvements Pooled Fund Study, which functions under the DCMF program.
Customer Experience (Cx) Design in the View of Managers: An Analysis of the Impact of Pandemic in the Local Hospitality and Tourism Industry

Hospitality and tourism are among the worst-affected industries during this pandemic, with a global drop in demand. These industries are operating under strict restrictions, and a “new normal” needs to be defined. Because of its disruptive effects, hospitality and tourism providers must redesign the customer experience (CX), which is considered the core of the tourism and hospitality sector. Thus, this study sought to measure the views of the managers on customer experience (CX) design as an analysis of the impact of the pandemic in the local hospitality and tourism industry. This study emploa yed a descriptive method to identify the different variables of the study and presents quantitative research that utilized online survey method to gather data information from the respondents. Top-level managers from different hotels, resorts, restaurants and tourism sites in the prime hospitality and tourism towns in the province of Oriental Mindoro were the respondents (n=26) of this study. Results showed that the view of the managers on the measures designed to create safe customer experiences in terms of hygiene and protection, internal work reorganization, services cape reorganization, technology and digital innovations, customer wait time reduction, staff training and communication were all positively affirmative. As a result, these measures positively affected the intended experience in terms of reassurance, quickness and intimacy. It is recommended that the managers adopt and implement the proposed CX framework to enhance the customers’ experience in various hospitality and tourism service providers despite the threats of the pandemic and to guide the managers to transition to post-pandemic situations.
The Fix‐Point Method for Estimating Interdependent Systems with the Underlying Model Specification

The fix-point method, given by Wold (1965), is an iterative least squares method, which builds upon a respecification of an interdependent system. In this paper a partial respecification of an interdependent system with identities and its fix-point estimator is considered. Convergence questions and asymptotic properties are discussed, as well as the experience of the applications to empirical models.
Close-canopy lighting, an effective energy-saving strategy for overhead sole-source LED lighting in indoor farming

Significant advancement has been achieved improving electrical efficiency and photon efficacy of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as the sole source of crop lighting for indoor farming. However, a significant portion of highly efficient photon emissions from improved LEDs is wasted by natural beam spread beyond cropping areas. Additional attention is needed to enhance crop-canopy photon capture efficiency (CCPCE), the fraction of photons emitted from LEDs actually incident upon foliar canopies. We postulate that by taking advantage of unique physical properties of LEDs, such as low radiant heat at photon-emitting surfaces and dimmable photon emissions, reduced vertical separation distance between light-emitting surfaces and light-receiving surfaces will enhance CCPCE by capturing more obliquely emitted photons that otherwise are lost. This “close-canopy-lighting” (CCL) strategy was tested in two ways: For an energy-efficiency strategy, LEDs were dimmed to the same photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) of 160 µmol m-2 s-1 at 45-, 35-, 25-, and 15-cm separation distances between lamps and cropping surfaces. For a yield-enhancement strategy, dimming was not applied, so higher PPFDs occurred at each separation distance closer than 45 cm for the same input energy. In the first strategy, the same biomass of lettuce (Lactuca sativa L. cv. Rouxai) was produced at each separation distance, while significantly lower energy was expended for lighting at each closer separation. Significantly higher biomass was produced at reduced separation distances with the same energy expenditure by LEDs using the yield-enhancement strategy. For both strategies, energy-utilization efficiency (g/kWh) doubled at the closest separation distance of 15 cm compared to the standard 45-cm separation distance. Even higher energy-utilization efficiency was achieved at a 25-cm separation distance when growth compartments were enclosed with a reflective curtain in the yield-enhancement strategy. Our findings suggest that CCL is a highly effective energy-saving strategy for overhead LED lighting, suggesting the need for innovative next-generation re-design of height-adjustable LED mounts and controlled air movement between tiers of indoor farms utilizing CCL.