Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Closed loop temperature and repetition rate control for accelerated pulse stress testing of smart power switches

Cyclic stress tests for smart power switches require a significant effort in test resources, particularly in test time, to provide statistically valid life time data. To address this issue we present a novel accelerated pulse stress test method to speed up the qualification process of smart power switches. A closed loop repetition rate controller employing individual temperature sensors stabilizes device operating points while preserving standardized test conditions. Temperature acquisition module and controller are implemented on a PXI-based system hosting a PC and an FPGA device. Finally the method is experimentally verified and lifetime data are compared to standard open loop test results.
Improved health-related quality of life for rheumatoid arthritis patients treated with abatacept who have inadequate response to anti-TNF therapy in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicentre randomized clinical trial.

OBJECTIVE Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients who have inadequate response to anti-tumour necrosis factor (TNF) therapy currently have treatment options that are limited and less than optimal in their risk-to-benefit ratio. Abatacept provides a new generation of RA medications that has previously been demonstrated to have positive clinical outcomes with this population. The current study sought to demonstrate the efficacy of abatacept on quality of life (QoL) for RA patients with inadequate response to anti-TNF therapy. METHODS Patients were entered into a double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicentre randomized clinical trial, with 258 patients randomized to abatacept + disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) and 133 patients randomized to placebo + DMARDS. The QoL was measured with the Short Form Health Survey (SF-36), Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) and fatigue visual analogue scale, and was analysed with basic (ANOVA, chi-square) and multigroup growth curve techniques to assess differential change over time. RESULTS Treatment group QoL improved significantly more than placebo on the HAQ and fatigue indices, as well as seven of the eight SF-36 scales and SF-36 physical and mental summary scores. Improvement rate was faster for abatacept than for placebo on the QoL measures, and the improvements from abatacept related to normal levels of QoL on many domains. CONCLUSION Clinically relevant benefits of abatacept over placebo are discussed regarding improving QoL. Importantly, the larger rate of change for abatacept over placebo provides clinicians with a medication that can lead to meaningful changes in a patient's life within a few weeks, even when the patient previously failed anti-TNF therapy.
COMPLEMENTARY MECHANISMS FOR SECURE MOBILE ELECTRONIC COMMERCE

The possibility of making the Internet accessible via mobile telephone has generated an important opportunity for electronic commerce. Nevertheless, the performances of mobile devices and intrinsic characteristics of wireless environments impose a set of constraints for mobile commerce development. The authors have developed alternative mechanisms based on standard technologies in order to improve delivery of information, usability, security, management and service personalization for clients on mobile environment.
Mitochondrial Integrity and Function in Atherogenesis

Background—Coronary atherosclerotic disease remains the leading cause of death in the Western world. Although the exact sequence of events in this process is controversial, reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RS) likely play an important role in vascular cell dysfunction and atherogenesis. Oxidative damage to the mitochondrial genome with resultant mitochondrial dysfunction is an important consequence of increased intracellular RS. Methods and Results—We examined the contribution of mitochondrial oxidant generation and DNA damage to the progression of atherosclerotic lesions in human arterial specimens and atherosclerosis-prone mice. Mitochondrial DNA damage not only correlated with the extent of atherosclerosis in human specimens and aortas from apolipoprotein E−/− mice but also preceded atherogenesis in young apolipoprotein E−/− mice. Apolipoprotein E−/− mice deficient in manganese superoxide dismutase, a mitochondrial antioxidant enzyme, exhibited early increases in mitochondrial DNA damage and a phenotype of accelerated atherogenesis at arterial branch points. Conclusions—Mitochondrial DNA damage may result from RS production in vascular tissues and may in turn be an early event in the initiation of atherosclerotic lesions.
A sociological study of Indigenous adolescent offending in Queensland

The aim of this thesis is to achieve a better understanding of Indigenous adolescent offending in Queensland. Although much has been written on this topic, there has been no research into patterns of Indigenous adolescent offending across urban, rural and remote areas in Queensland, or anywhere else in Australia. Similarly, no studies have compared a wide range of demographic, social, economic and cultural factors with rates of Indigenous adolescent offences. This study shows that there are discernible differences in rates and patterns of Indigenous adolescent offences across different geographical areas of Queensland. The similarities and differences are explained using a sociological perspective, with particular emphasis on the work of Jock Young. The study is based on offence data supplied by the Queensland Police Service for 110 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in Queensland for the period from 1 July 2005 to 30 June 2007. The LGAs were further categorised according to geographical and social characteristics, resulting in 27 ‘urban’, 49 ‘rural’, 19 ‘Aboriginal’, and 15 ‘Island’ councils or LGAs. After an initial comparison of Indigenous and non-Indigenous adolescent offending to put the study in context, Indigenous adolescent offending in the four categories of LGA was analysed according to the sex of the offender, the age of the offender, the type of offence committed, and the type of police action taken against the offender. Following on from this examination of rates and patterns of offending, correlation and regression analyses were used to elucidate relationships between Indigenous adolescent offending and various social, economic and cultural variables.
Performance analysis of PMMA - TiO2 nanocomposite dielectrics

Polymer nanocomposites are defined as polymers in which small amounts of nano-meter size fillers are homogeneously dispersed by only several weight percentages. Addition of just a few weight percent of the nano-fillers has profound impact on the physical, chemical, mechanical and electrical properties of polymers. In this paper, PMMA - TiO2 nanocomposite is synthesized and its characteristics are studied. To further understand the dielectric behavior of polymer nanocomposites, experiments are conducted for the measurement of dielectric permittivity and tan delta (loss tangent) of PMMA - TiO2 nanocomposites low filler concentrations (1%, 3% & 5%) over a frequency range of 100 Hz – 10 MHz. There are significant variations in permittivity and tan delta with respect to unfilled PMMA, some interesting trends are observed with respect to the frequencies of measurement.
QoS Routing using OLSR with Optimization for Flooding

Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is the self organizing collection of mobile nodes. The communication in MANET is done via a wireless media. Ad hoc wireless networks have massive commercial and military potential because of their mobility support. Due to demanding real time multimedia applications, Quality of Services (QoS) support in such infrastructure less networks have become essential. QoS routing in mobile Ad-Hoc networks is challenging due to rapid change in network topology. Consequently, the available state information for routing is inherently imprecise. QoS routing may suffer badly due to several factors including radio interference on available bandwidth, and inefficient flooding of information to the adjacent nodes. As a result the performance of the network degrades substantially. This paper aims at the solution for energy efficient QoS routing by best utilization of network resources such as energy and bandwidth. A comparative study shows that despite the overhead due to QoS management, this solution performs better than classical OLSR protocol in terms of QoS and efficient utilization of energy.
THE EUROPEANIZED REGIONAL POLICY AND MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNANCE AFTER 1988

L’objectif de la politique de cohesion ne represente pas la creation des conditions pour la dependance financiere, sinon pour l’augmentation socio-economique. C’est pourquoi la surveillance et la mesure de l’impact politique sont cruciales pour le proces de deroulage politique. La politique de cohesion nous offre une opportunite extraordinaire d’examiner le mode dans lequel la politique est affectee par l’europeanisation. Elle a comme base une politique qui a eu, traditionnellement, un caractere nationnel, mais, a partir de 1989 on a assiste a l’introduction d’un nouveau niveau europeen vu sa structure et son contenu.
MURS: Mitigating Memory Pressure in Data Processing Systems for Service

It has been shown that in-memory computing systems suffer from serious memory pressure. The memory pressure will affect all submitted jobs. Memory pressure comes from the running tasks as they produce massive long-living data objects in the limited memory space. The long-living objects incur significant memory and CPU overheads. Some tasks cause the heavy memory pressure because of the operations and dataset they process, which in turn affect all running tasks in the system. Our studies show that a task often call several API functions provided by the need to constant memory space, while some need the linear memory space. As different models have different impact on memory pressure, we propose a method of classifying the models that the tasks belong to. The method uses the memory usage rate as the classification criteria. Further, we design a scheduler called MURS to mitigate the memory pressure. We implement MURS in Spark and conduct the experiments to evaluate the performance of MURS. The results show that when comparing to Spark, our scheduler can 1) decrease the execution time of submitted jobs by up to 65.8%, 2) mitigate the memory pressure in the server by decreasing the garbage collection time by up to 81%, and 3) reduce the data spilling, and hence disk I/Os, by approximately 90%.
Modeling and using context: Past, present and future

Over the ten years a community on context has emerged. Brézillon (1999) proposed a survey of the literature about context in artificial intelligence. There is a now series of conference on context, a web site and a mailing list. The number of web pages with the word “context” has been multiply by four in the last five years. Being among the instigators of the use of context in real-world applications, we present in this paper the evolution of our thoughts over the last years and the result that is obtained as a representation formalism based on contextual graphs and used in a real-world application called SART. We also point out some similarities between contextual graphs and some models developed in other domains. As a kind of compilation, this paper sums up and gives some comments on papers that we published along these last years.
Dynamical stability of collisionless stellar systems and barotropic stars: the nonlinear Antonov first law

We complete previous investigations on the dynamical stability of barotropic stars and collisionless stellar systems. A barotropic star that minimizes the energy functional at a fixed mass is a nonlinearly dynamically stable stationary solution of the Euler-Poisson system. Formally, this minimization problem is similar to a condition of “canonical stability” in thermodynamics. A stellar system that maximizes an H-function at fixed mass and energy is a nonlinearly dynamically stable stationary solution of the Vlasov-Poisson system. Formally, this maximization problem is similar to a condition of “microcanonical stability” in thermodynamics. Using a thermodynamical analogy, we provide a derivation and an interpretation of the nonlinear Antonov first law in terms of “ensembles inequivalence”: a spherical stellar system with f = f (� )a nd f � (� ) < 0 is nonlinearly dynamically stable with respect to the Vlasov-Poisson system if the corresponding barotropic star with the same equilibrium density distribution is nonlinearly dynamically stable with respect to the Euler-Poisson system. This is similar to the fact that “canonical stability implies microcanonical stability” in thermodynamics. The converse is wrong in case of “ensembles inequivalence” which is generic for systems with long-range interactions like gravity. We show that criteria of nonlinear dynamical stability can be obtained very simply from purely graphical constructions by using the method of series of equilibria and the turning point argument of Poincare, as in thermodynamics.
Grip strength and healthy aging

Grip strength is a well-known indicator of muscle strength. The trajectories of grip strength with increasing age refer to the aging and development process of muscle strength over one’s life span. The levels of muscle strength needed to perform activities of daily living or to prevent older people from developing disabilities are serious geriatric issues. Grip strength has been shown to decline with aging and to be a predictor of the development of geriatric problems, which suggests the lifelong management of grip strength has great potential for the promotion of healthy aging. The focus of this short review was to examine grip strength as an indicator of geriatric issues and to clarify the role of grip strength in relation to healthy aging.
Chloroflexi bacteria are more diverse, abundant, and similar in high than in low microbial abundance sponges.

Some marine sponges harbor dense and phylogenetically complex microbial communities [high microbial abundance (HMA) sponges] whereas others contain only few and less diverse microorganisms [low microbial abundance (LMA) sponges]. We focused on the phylum Chloroflexi that frequently occurs in sponges to investigate the different associations with three HMA and three LMA sponges from New Zealand. By applying a range of microscopical and molecular techniques a clear dichotomy between HMA and LMA sponges was observed: Chloroflexi bacteria were more abundant and diverse in HMA than in LMA sponges. Moreover, different HMA sponges contain similar Chloroflexi communities whereas LMA sponges harbor different and more variable communities which partly resemble Chloroflexi seawater communities. A comprehensive phylogenetic analysis of our own and publicly available sponge-derived Chloroflexi 16S rRNA gene sequences (> 780 sequences) revealed the enormous diversity of this phylum within sponges including 29 sponge-specific and sponge-coral clusters (SSC/SCC) as well as a 'supercluster' consisting of > 250 sponge-derived and a single nonsponge-derived 16S rRNA gene sequence. Interestingly, the majority of sequences obtained from HMA sponges, but only a few from LMA sponges, fell into SSC/SCC clusters. This indicates a much more specific association of Chloroflexi bacteria with HMA sponges and suggests an ecologically important role for these prominent bacteria.
The Current State of Access Control for Smart Devices in Homes

Although connected devices and smart homes are now marketed to average consumers, little is known about how access-control systems for these devices fare in the real world. In this paper, we conduct three case studies that evaluate the extent to which commercial smart devices provide affordances related to access control. In particular, we examine an Internet-connected lighting system, bathroom scale, and door lock. We find that each device has its own siloed access-control system and that each approach fails to provide seemingly essential affordances. Furthermore, no system fully supports user understanding of access control for the home. We discuss future directions for usable access control in the home.
Translation equivalence in free groups

Motivated by the work of Leininger on hyperbolic equivalence of homotopy classes of closed curves on surfaces, we investigate a similar phenomenon for free groups. Namely, we study the situation when two elements g, h in a free group F have the property that for every free isometric action of F on an R-tree X the translation lengths of g and h on X are equal.
The Homeostasis Protocol: Avoiding Transaction Coordination Through Program Analysis

Datastores today rely on distribution and replication to achieve improved performance and fault-tolerance. But correctness of many applications depends on strong consistency properties--something that can impose substantial overheads, since it requires coordinating the behavior of multiple nodes. This paper describes a new approach to achieving strong consistency in distributed systems while minimizing communication between nodes. The key insight is to allow the state of the system to be inconsistent during execution, as long as this inconsistency is bounded and does not affect transaction correctness. In contrast to previous work, our approach uses program analysis to extract semantic information about permissible levels of inconsistency and is fully automated. We then employ a novel homeostasis protocol to allow sites to operate independently, without communicating, as long as any inconsistency is governed by appropriate treaties between the nodes. We discuss mechanisms for optimizing treaties based on workload characteristics to minimize communication, as well as a prototype implementation and experiments that demonstrate the benefits of our approach on common transactional benchmarks.
Leaning by Combining Memorization and Gradient Descent

We have created a radial basis function network that allocates a new computational unit whenever an unusual pattern is presented to the network. The network learns by allocating new units and adjusting the parameters of existing units. If the network performs poorly on a presented pattern, then a new unit is allocated which memorizes the response to the presented pattern. If the network performs well on a presented pattern, then the network parameters are updated using standard LMS gradient descent. For predicting the Mackey Glass chaotic time series, our network learns much faster than do those using back-propagation and uses a comparable number of synapses.
Selection of nonlinear function in integral sliding mode-based composite nonlinear feedback method for transient improvement of uncertain linear systems

The objective of this paper is to combine the composite nonlinear feedback and integral sliding mode strategies for fast and accurate robust tracking of a class of linear systems subject to uncertainties. In fact, the theory of integral sliding mode-based composite nonlinear feedback method is presented such that the resulting controlled output would track a target reference as fast as possible with small overshoot and without any steady state bias. The proposed control method retains the actual structure of composite nonlinear feedback controller in following the reference trajectory within a given accuracy and the invariance property of integral sliding mode method in rejecting disturbances and at the same time preserves the stability of the whole system. Also, a collection of nonlinear functions in different forms are studied to improve the reference tracking performance of the system. Simulation results show that the control law designed by this approach yields excellent performance.
Compensatory role of the cortico-rubro-spinal tract in motor recovery after stroke

Objectives: Studies on nonhuman primates have demonstrated that the cortico-rubro-spinal system can compensate for damage to the pyramidal tract (PT). In humans, so-called alternate motor fibers (aMF), which may comprise the cortico-rubro-spinal tract, have been suggested to play a similar role in motor recovery after stroke. Using diffusion tensor imaging, we examined PT and aMF in the context of human motor recovery by relating their microstructural properties to functional outcome in chronic stroke patients. Methods: PT and aMF were reconstructed based on their origins in primary motor, dorsal premotor, and supplementary motor cortices in 18 patients and 10 healthy controls. The patients' degree of motor recovery was assessed using the Wolf Motor Function Test (WMFT). Results: Compared to controls, fractional anisotropy (FA) was lower along ipsilesional PT and aMF in chronic stroke patients, but clusters of higher FA were found bilaterally in aMF within the vicinity of the red nuclei. FA along ipsilesional PT and aMF and within the red nuclei correlated significantly with WMFT scores. Probabilistic connectivity of aMF originating from ipsilesional primary motor cortex was higher in patients, whereas the ipsilesional PT exhibited lower connectivity compared to controls. Conclusions: The strong correlations observed between microstructural properties of bilateral red nuclei and the level of motor function in chronic stroke patients indicate possible remodeling during recovery. Our results shed light on the role of different corticofugal motor tracts, and highlight a compensatory function of the cortico-rubro-spinal system which may be used as a target in future restorative treatments.
The Higgs mass bound in the SUSY multi-Higgs-doublet model

The upper bound on the mass of the lightest Higgs boson is provided in the supersymmetric standard model with multi-Higgs doublets, up to two-loop order. Relatively large corrections are expected from the experimentally unconstrained extra Yukawa couplings. We calculate it including the two-loop leading-log contributions as a function of the scale $\Lambda$, below which the theory remains perturbative. Even for $\Lambda=10^{4}$ GeV, we obtain the upper bound of 140 GeV, which is heavier than that of the MSSM by 10 GeV.
A direct optimization approach for source reconstruction and NF-FF transformation using amplitude-only data

In this paper, we present a direct optimization procedure that utilizes phaseless electric field data over arbitrary shaped surfaces for the reconstruction of an equivalent magnetic current density that represents the radiating structure of an antenna under test. Once the equivalent magnetic current density is determined, the electric field at any point can be calculated. Numerical results (both simulated and experimental) are presented to illustrate the applicability of this approach for nonplanar near-field to far-field (NF-FF) transformation as well as to antenna diagnostics. The results are presented using both theoretical and experimental phaseless data over one and two planes.
Edgeworth-based approximation of Mutual Information for medical image registration

Mutual Information (MI) has been extensively used as a similarity measure in image registration and motion estimation, and it is particularly robust for 3D multimodal medical image registration. However, MI estimators are known i) to have a high variance and ii) to be computationally costly. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we propose a new similarity measure based on an Edgeworth-based third order expansion of MI and named 3-EMI in the following. This kind of approximation is well known in signal processing, and especially in Independent Components Analysis (ICA), but its computation is easier since data can be prewhitened contrary to images in registration. The performance of affine and non-rigid registrations based on the 3-EMI metric is studied through computer results in the context of cardiac multislice computed tomography. In fact, an estimate of the 3-EMI metric using sample statistics is compared to a histogram-based estimate of the standard normalized MI, showing a better robustness of the 3-EMI measure with respect to the range of the searched deformation. In addition, in practice, one part of the floating image may be missing regarding the reference image. Computer results show that our approach is less sensitive to such a practical problem.