Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
The Kählerian geometry of quantum model order reduction with applications in the simulation of open quantum systems

This article presents numerical techniques for simulating high-temperature and non-equilibrium quantum spin systems that are continuously measured and controlled. The notion of a “spin system” is broadly conceived, to encompass test masses as the limiting case of large-j spins, and in general the systems simulated are spatially inhomogeneous. The simulation technique has three stages: first the deliberate introduction of noise into the simulation, then the conversion of that noise into a informatically equivalent continuous measurement and control processes, and finally, projection of the trajectory onto a Kählerian state-space manifold having reduced dimensionality and possessing a Kähler potential of multilinear (i.e., product-sum) functional form; these state-spaces can be regarded as ruled algebraic varieties. To provide a unifying geometric context for this technique, the sectional curvature of ruled state-spaces is analyzed, and proved to be non-positive upon all sections that contain a rule. It is further shown that ruled state-spaces include the Slater determinant wave-functions of quantum chemistry as a special case and that these Slater determinant manifolds possess a Kähler-Einstein metric. It is suggested that the Riemannian curvature properties of ruled state-spaces generically account for the fidelity, efficiency, and robustness of projective trajectory simulation on these state-spaces. The resulting formalism is used to construct a positive P-representation for the thermal density matrix, and then to prove a formal equivalence between Caves’ amplifier noise limit and the standard quantum limit in test-mass monitoring. Single-spin detection by magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) is then simulated, and the data statistics are shown to be those of a random telegraph signal with additive white noise, to all orders, in excellent agreement with experimental results. Then a larger-scale spin-dust model is simulated, having no spatial symmetry and no spatial ordering; the high-fidelity projection of numerically computed quantum trajectories onto low-dimensionality Kähler state-space manifolds is demonstrated. Finally, a method for accomplishing public key exchange via spin-dust simulations is demonstrated; this method establishes the geometric equivalence of a set of problems in physics, engineering, and information theory.
Ruptured Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm after Endovascular Aortic Aneurysm Repair

In treating uncomplicated abdominal aortic aenurysm, endovascular aortic aneurysm repair (EVAR) has been employed as a good alternative to open repair with low perioperative morbidity and mortality. However, the aneurysm can enlarge or rupture even after EVAR as a result of device failure, endoleak, or graft migration. We experienced two cases of aneurismal rupture after EVAR, which were successfully treated by surgical extra-anatomic bypass.
Illegal references in a real-time Java concurrent environment

We consider the concurrent execution of several applications within a single JVM. In order to have a different GC per application, we introduce and define application-specific memory, building upon the real-time specification for Java (RTSJ) from the real-time Java expert group. The RTSJ memory model imposes strict assignment rules to or from memory areas preventing the creation of dangling pointers. An implementation solution to ensure the pointer safety of Java consists to check the imposed rules before executing each assignment statement by using write barriers
The Role of Wave-Induced Coriolis–Stokes Forcing on the Wind-Driven Mixed Layer

The interaction between the Coriolis force and the Stokes drift associated with ocean surface waves leads to a vertical transport of momentum, which can be expressed as a force on the mean momentum equation in the direction along wave crests. How this Coriolis-Stokes forcing affects the mean current profile in a wind-driven mixed layer is investigated using simple models, results from large-eddy simulations, and observational data. The effects of the Coriolis-Stokes forcing on the mean current profile are examined by reappraising analytical solutions to the Ekman model that include the Coriolis-Stokes forcing. Turbulent momentum transfer is modeled using an eddy-viscosity model, first with a constant viscosity and second with a linearly varying eddy viscosity. Although the Coriolis-Stokes forcing penetrates only a small fraction of the depth of the wind-driven layer for parameter values typical of the ocean, the analytical solutions show how the current profile is substantially changed through the whole depth of the wind-driven layer. It is shown how, for this oceanic regime, the Coriolis-Stokes forcing supports a fraction of the applied wind stress, changing the boundary condition on the wind-driven component of the flow and hence changing the current profile through all depths. The analytical solution with the linearly varying eddy viscosity is shown to reproduce reasonably well the effects of the Coriolis-Stokes forcing on the current profile computed from large-eddy simulations, which resolve the three-dimensional overturning motions associated with the turbulent Langmuir circulations in the wind-driven layer. Last, the analytical solution with the Coriolis-Stokes forcing is shown to agree reasonably well with current profiles from previously published observational data and certainly agrees better than the standard Ekman model. This finding provides evidence that the Coriolis-Stokes forcing is an important mechanism in controlling the dynamics of the upper ocean.
Fuzzy logic simulator for energy management algorithms testing

During July 2013 the Italian government definitively cut financial incentives for photovoltaic (PV) plants, leaving only tax benefits and a revised net metering scheme (known as “Scambio sul Posto”) for new PV installations. In this scenario, the design of a new PV plant ensuring savings on electricity bills is strongly related to household electricity consumption patterns. This paper introduces a novel Fuzzy approach to correctly size a residential PV plant and simulate the effects of energy management techniques in a case study. A cost benefits analysis is presented to quantify its effectiveness in the new net metering Italian scenario.
MCAO near-IR photometry of the globular cluster NGC 6388: MAD observations in crowded fields

Context. Deep photometry of crowded fields, such as Galactic globular clusters, is severely limited by the resolution of ground-based telescopes. On the other hand, the Hubble Space Telescope does not have the near-infrared (NIR) filters needed to allow large color baselines. Aims. In this work we demonstrate how ground based observations can reach the required resolution when using Multi-Conjugated Adaptive Optic (MCAO) devices in the NIR, such as the experimental infrared camera (MAD) available on the VLT. This is particularly important since these corrections are planned to be available on all ground-based telescopes in the near future. Methods. We demonstrate this by combining the infrared photometry obtained by MAD/VLT with ACS/HST optical photometry of our scientific target, the bulge globular cluster NGC 6388, in which we imaged two fields. In particular, we constructed color-magnitude diagrams with an extremely wide color baseline in order to investigate the presence of multiple stellar populations in this cluster. Results. From the analysis of the external field, observed with better seeing conditions, we derived the deepest optical-NIR CMD of NGC 6388 to date. The high-precision photometry reveals that two distinct sub-giant branches are clearly present in this cluster. We also use the CMD from the central region to estimate the distance [ $(m-M)_\circ=15.33$] and the reddening ($E(B-V)=0.38$) for this cluster. We estimate the age to be (~$11.5\pm 1.5$ Gyr). The large relative-age error reflects the bimodal distribution of the SGB stars. Conclusions. This study clearly demonstrates how MCAO correction in the NIR bands implemented on ground based telescopes can complement the high-resolution optical data from HST.
A formal view integration method

The design of an appropriate conceptual database scheme is one of the most difficult tasks in usual database applications. Especially, the design of a common global database scheme for many different user groups requires a great amount of effort and skill, because the desired scheme should fit a great variety of requirements and expectations. Here, view integration is a natural method that should help to manage the complexity of such a design problem. For each user group the requirements and expectations are separately collected and specified as views, that are subsequently integrated into a global scheme supporting all those different views. In this paper, we carefully develop a formal model, clarifying many notions and concepts, related to the view integration method. This formal model serves as a theoretical basis of our integration approach that uses equivalence preserving, local scheme transformations as the main integration operations.
Using context-window overlapping in synonym discovery and ontology extension

This paper describes a new, unsupervised procedure called Context-window overlapping for calculating the semantic distance between two terms. It is based on the distributional semantics hypothesis, and, in particular, in the fact that synonym words should be interchangeable in every context, and hyponyms can be substituted by their hyperonyms in most contexts. The procedure has been applied to synonym identiﬁcation, and to ontology extension. In the ﬁrst task, it has been evaluated with 80 syn-onym test questions from the TOEFL which already constitute a standard test set in this problem, and attains results similar to most other non-ensemble procedures. Interestingly, it clearly outperforms Latent Semantic Analysis, other procedure grounded on the Distributional Semantic hypothesis. Concerning ontology enrichment, the results obtained are promising, although they can still be much improved. Conclu-sions are drawn from this result, and we outline several possibilities for future work.
Relationship between viral load in blood

The role of the viral burden in the brain for the pathogenesis of human immunodeficiency virus-associated neurological disorders is still unclear. To address this issue, we have quantified the viral load in plasma, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and brain tissue of macaques infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV). We discovered that the viral strain used for infection determines the replicative capacity in microglial cells as well as the extent of neuropathological lesions and the occurrence of neurological symptoms. Moreover, the viral load in the brain parenchyma correlated with the development of overt neurological disease whereas the one in plasma did not. By comparing the viral load in three different compartments, we demonstrated that the viral burden in the CSF is influenced both by the viral replication in the periphery as well as in the brain parenchyma. According to these results, it is not the absolute amount of viral load in the CSF but rather the viral antigen contributed by the viral production within the brain which correlates with the development of neurological disease. In longitudinal studies, we observed that this autochthonous virus production, as evidenced by a ratio of the viral load in CSF to the one in plasma, takes place for a prolonged period of time before overt neurological signs are manifested. This finding suggests that this ratio could be used as a prognostic marker for immunodeficiency virus-induced neurological disease. Journal of NeuroVirology (2000) 6, 187 ‐ 201.
Malicious hypervisor and hidden virtualization of operation systems

Today virtualization technology is the focus of many new potential threats and introduces new security challenges that we must meet. The key problem is that malware can utilize the virtualization techniques of modern CPUs for “hidden virtualization” (invisible for user): to execute as a hypervisor and transform the working operation system (OS) into a “guest” state. In this work we analyzed and compared the functionality of several research virtual machine monitors (VMMs: BluePill, SubVirt, BitVisor) which can be used for hidden virtualization attack. A typical life circle of the hardware-accelerated VMM and mechanisms of hidden virtualization were also described. We also implemented the proof-of-concept prototype of research VMM and used it for tests with hidden virtualization of Linux operation systems. Our measurements demonstrated that malicious VMMs could efficiently hide their presence using hardware-accelerating technologies.
An automated course feedback system using opinion mining

This paper presents our experimental work on designing an automated web-based course feedback system that uses opinion mining to compute the overall feedback score. The system collects user responses through an online form. The online feedback form consists of a set of binary and graded response questions as well as a free-form input text box where a student can write about his overall experiences with the course. Every student is encouraged to write in detail about his experience. The text entered by the student in free form input text box is then used for opinion mining to label the feedback as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’. We have used an unsupervised SO-PMI-IR based approach for opinion mining. The final feedback of a course is thus a combination of an overall score (computed on various binary and graded questions) and a ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ label to mark the student's overall evaluation. We evaluated the system for more than 20 courses with a total of about 1000 reviews.
Effect of Moderate-Intensity Exercise on Plasma C-Reactive Protein and Aortic Endothelial Function in Type 2 Diabetic Mice

The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of moderate-intensity exercise on plasma levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) and tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) as markers of low-grade inflammation and endothelial function in diabetic (db/db) mice. Control and db/db mice were divided into sedentary and exercised groups. Aortic endothelial function was evaluated after two- and six-week exercises using a wire myograph. Plasma CRP levels were measured at baseline, and after two and six weeks of exercise. Baseline plasma CRP levels were significantly higher in db/db mice compared to control (P < .05). After two weeks of exercise, aortic endothelial function was significantly improved without affecting body weight or plasma CRP levels. Six weeks of exercise not only improved endothelial function, but also significantly reduced body weight and plasma CRP levels in db/db mice. Thus short-term exercise has beneficial effect on endothelial function without reducing low-grade inflammation while more prolonged exercise periods are required to reduce inflammatory markers.
Online Teaching Effectiveness: A Tale of Two Instructors

Upon completion of a graduate level course at the Open University of Israel, one instructor received very high student ratings while the other received very low ratings. We utilized this exceptional situation to perform ad hoc analyses of their course forums. The objective of this study was to map the dialogic behavior that occurred and to create suggestions for best practice and for worst practice in terms of active and passive participation, instructor response time, and the extent of teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence.
An optimal investment scheme based on ATM considering cloud security environment

There is an increasing use of cloud computing in information technology (IT) with the widening scope of cloud computing. However, some service owners are reluctant to adopt cloud computing because the associated security technologies have not yet matured. Cloud service providers need to invest in security to improve the use of cloud computing. Additionally, research on the security investment in cloud computing is still in its early stages; due to the lack of related work, most companies or organizations should not provide an unlimited budget for security investment. Therefore, we devised an optimal investment scheme for constructing cloud security services that considers budget and the features of cloud computing services. This scheme includes an evaluation of security vulnerabilities concerning potential security attacks, and we performed an evaluation of a security investment strategy based on attack tree map (ATM) that analyze cloud security threat and vulnerabilities. Finally, we demonstrated the proposed scheme by examining two case studies using different security investment strategies.
Sampled sinusoidal stimulation profile and multichannel fuzzy logic classification for monitor-based phase-coded SSVEP brain–computer interfacing

Objective. The performance and usability of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) can be improved by new paradigms, stimulation methods, decoding strategies, sensor technology etc. In this study we introduce new stimulation and decoding methods for electroencephalogram (EEG)-based BCIs that have targets flickering at the same frequency but with different phases. Approach. The phase information is estimated from the EEG data, and used for target command decoding. All visual stimulation is done on a conventional (60-Hz) LCD screen. Instead of the ‘on/off’ visual stimulation, commonly used in phase-coded BCI, we propose one based on a sampled sinusoidal intensity profile. In order to fully exploit the circular nature of the evoked phase response, we introduce a filter feature selection procedure based on circular statistics and propose a fuzzy logic classifier designed to cope with circular information from multiple channels jointly. Main results. We show that the proposed visual stimulation enables us not only to encode more commands under the same conditions, but also to obtain EEG responses with a more stable phase. We also demonstrate that the proposed decoding approach outperforms existing ones, especially for the short time windows used. Significance. The work presented here shows how to overcome some of the limitations of screen-based visual stimulation. The superiority of the proposed decoding approach demonstrates the importance of preserving the circularity of the data during the decoding stage.
Experimental validation of locomotion efficiency of worm-like robots and contact compliance

Biological vessels are characterized by their substantial compliance and low friction which present a major challenge for crawling robots for minimally invasive medical procedures. Quite a number of studies considered the design and construction of crawling robots, however, very few focused on the interaction between the robots and the flexible environment. In a previous study, we derived the analytical efficiency of worm locomotion as a function of the number of cells, friction coefficients, normal forces and local (contact) tangential compliance. In this paper, we generalize our previous analysis to include dynamic and static coefficients of friction, determine the conditions of locomotion as function of the external resisting forces and experimentally validate our previous and newly obtained theoretical results. Our experimental setup consists of worm robot prototypes, flexible interfaces with known compliance and a Vicon motion capture system to measure the robot positioning. Separate experiments were conducted to measure the tangential compliance of the contact interface which is required for computing the analytical efficiency. The validation experiments are shown to be in clear match with the theoretical predictions. Specifically, the convergence of the tangential deflections to an arithmetic series and the partial and overall loss of locomotion verify the theoretical predictions.
Adoption of e-government services in Macao

The Macao government and many governments worldwide are now developing and using the Internet to provide information and services to their citizens. These electronic services, often referred as e-government services, provide citizens with greater convenience in terms of accessing information and transacting services. To implement e-government successfully, it is important to determine the factors related to its acceptance. The purpose of this research was to assess and test the factors that are related to e-government acceptance. We drew on results obtained from prior studies on technology acceptance, e-commerce, and diffusion of innovation, and applied them to the context of e-government services in Macao. We gathered cross-sectional data from a questionnaire survey to test the factors that are hypothesized to be related to e-government adoption. The results of our analyses found that trust and compatibility explained more than 60 percent of the variance in intention to adopt e-government services in Macao. We discussed the implications of the results.
Encapsulation in PLGA-PEG enhances 9- nitro-camptothecin cytotoxicity to human ovarian carcinoma cell line through apoptosis pathway

Ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of the cancer-related death among women. 9-nitrocamptothecin (9-NC) is a water-insoluble derivative of camptothecin used for the treatment of patients with advanced ovarian cancer. Previous studies showed that the encapsulation of 9-NC in poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid, PLGA) nanoparticles increased the cytotoxic effect of the drug on different cancer cell lines. In the present study, the cytotoxic effects of 9-NC, 9-NC-loaded PLGA and PLGA-polyethylene glycol (PLGA-PEG) nanoparticles with varying degree of PEG (5, 10, and 15%) were evaluated on human ovarian carcinoma cell line. Furthermore, the mode of cell death induced by 9-NC and the optimized 9-NC-loaded PLGA-PEG nanoparticles on A2780 cell line were investigated. 9-NC incorporating nanoparticles were prepared by nanopercipitation method and their physicochemical characteristics were evaluated using standard methods. The results showed that activation of caspase-3 and -9 significantly increased by free 9-NC and PLGA-PEG loaded nanoparticles in A2780 cells. In contrast to the free drug which increased the activation of caspase-8, 9-NC-loaded PLGA-PEG nanoparticles did not alter the activation of caspase-8. Collectively, it appears that apoptosis induced by 9-NC incorporated in PLGA-PEG 5% occurred through the activation of caspase-9 rather than activation of caspase-8 which is the mediator of extrinsic pathway. Moreover, our results confirmed that 9-NC in nanoparticles at the level of gene expression potentiated down-regulation of Bcl-2, up regulation of Bax, and Smac/DIABLO leading to a decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential. Taken together, our results showed that 9-NC incorporated in PLGA-PEG 5% nanoparticles is able to induce apoptosis in A2780 human ovarian carcinoma cells and has the potential for the treatment of ovarian carcinoma.
Distributed Pivot Clustering with arbitrary distance functions

This paper describes an algorithm, Distributed Pivot Clustering (DPC), that differs from prior distributed clustering algorithms in that it requires neither an inexpensive approximation of the actual distance function nor that pairs of elements in the same cluster share at least one exact feature value. Instead, DPC requires only that the distance function satisfy the triangle inequality and be of sufficiently high-granularity to permit the data to be partitioned into canopies of optimal size based on distance to reference elements, or pivots. An empirical evaluation demonstrated that DPC can lead to accurate distributed hierarchical agglomerative clustering provided that the triangle inequality and granularity requirements are met.