Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Using Bittorrent and SVC for efficient video sharing and streaming

Massive and large scale content distribution over Internet is attracting a lot of research efforts as many challenges remain to be solved. Recent studies show that Internet video including video-to-TV and video calling is dominating the Internet traffic. As Internet becomes widely accessible to wired, mobile and wireless users, it is important to design a system that can ensure video streaming across variable network conditions while simultaneously handling devices and end-user heterogeneities. Most of the proposed solutions, such as CDN and peer-to-peer (P2P), solve the scalability problem but fail to handle receiver's heterogeneity. In this paper, we combine P2P network and SVC (Scalable Video Coding) to provide an efficient video sharing and streaming system. Our solution consists of an SVC layered extension of the widely used Bittorrent protocol to support real-time content delivery with different video qualities given the receivers capabilities. Thus, we propose different optimization techniques to organize peers in an overlay. The results, obtained by means of simulation, show that our system outperforms solutions that relay on single layer streams such as AVC (Advanced Video Coding) and this in terms of receivers perceived QoS.
Optical trapping with Bessel beams generated from semiconductor lasers

In this paper, we study generation of Bessel beams from semiconductor lasers with high beam propagation parameter M2 and their utilization for optical trapping and manipulation of microscopic particles including living cells. The demonstrated optical tweezing with diodegenerated Bessel beams paves the way to replace their vibronic-generated counterparts for a range of applications towards novel lab-on-a-chip configurations.
Identifying and Resolving Entities in Text

Author(s): Durrett, Gregory Christopher | Advisor(s): Klein, Dan | Abstract: When automated systems attempt to deal with unstructured text, a key subproblem is identifying the relevant actors in that text---answering the "who" of the narrative being presented. This thesis is concerned with developing tools to solve this NLP subproblem, which we call entity analysis. We focus on two tasks in particular: first, coreference resolution, which consists of within-document identification of entities, and second, entity linking, which involves identifying each of those entities with an entry in a knowledge base like Wikipedia.One of the challenges of coreference is that it requires dealing with many different linguistic phenomenon: constraints in reference resolution arise from syntax, semantics, discourse, and pragmatics. This diversity of effects to handle makes it difficult to build effective learning-based coreference resolution systems rather than relying on handcrafted features. We show that a set of simple features inspecting surface lexical properties of a document is sufficient to capture a range of these effects, and that these can power an efficient, high-performing coreference system.Our analysis of our base coreference system shows that some examples can only be resolved successfully by exploiting world knowledge or deeper knowledge of semantics. Therefore, we turn to the task of entity linking and tackle it not in isolation, but instead jointly with coreference. By doing so, our coreference module can draw upon knowledge from a resource like Wikipedia, and our entity linking module can draw on information from multiple mentions of the entity we are attempting to resolve. Our joint model of these tasks, which additionally models semantic types of entities, gives strong performance across the board and shows that effectively exploiting these interactions is a natural way to build better NLP systems.Having developed these tools, we show that they can be useful for a downstream NLP task, namely automatic summarization. We develop an extractive and compressive automatic summarization system, and argue that one deficiency it has is its inability to use pronouns coherently in generated summaries, as we may have deleted content that contained a pronoun's antecedent. Our entity analysis machinery allows us to place constraints on summarization that guarantee pronoun interpretability: each pronoun must have a valid antecedent included in the summary or it must be expanded into a reference that makes sense in isolation. We see improvements in our system's ability to produce summaries with coherent pronouns, which suggests that deeper integration of various parts of the NLP stack promises to yield better systems for text understanding.
Automated Image Analysis and Contiguity Estimation for Liquid Phase Sintered Tungsten Heavy Alloys

In this study an automated software model using digital image processing techniques is proposed for extracting the image characteristics and contiguity of liquid phase sintered tungsten heavy alloys. The developed model takes a typical image as input and processes it with no human intervention and provides the corresponding image characteristics and contiguity value. The image processing algorithm includes segmentation, binding point extraction, phase connection, particle count and contiguity estimation stages. For the output, microstructural parameters such as tungsten particle size, amount of tungsten phase and contiguity are determined. The model is implemented by using 6 different scanning electron microscope images of liquid phase sintered 90W-7Ni-3Fe and 93W-4.9Ni-2.1Fe allloys. The results indicate that relative to the manual measurements, the automated model can correctly estimate the contiguity with an error in the vicinity of 5.6% - 2.9% for these two alloys. The developed software can easily be adapted to be used for other microstructures. It is also provided as open-source and available for other researchers.
Development and Evaluation of Guidelines for Producing an Interactive Movie

This report proposes and evaluates a set of guidelines for the design and development of an interactive movie suitable for delivery over IP. Interactive movies are defined with regards to narrative-based entertainment and put into context within the wider field of interactive television over various different delivery methods. The guidelines deal with the considerations that are necessary in order to identify an appropriate media format and network infrastructure, as well as the design of the software required to support the relevant interactivity. The existing and emerging solutions for these elements of an interactive movie are examined with regards to the requirements that have been identified. Increased broadband take-up has gone some way to providing sufficient bandwidth to deliver broadcast quality digital Audio-Visual content. This digital format allows iTV content to be controlled and interacted with, which provides the basis for an entirely new medium for storytelling and narrative structure such as the interactive movie. Using Internet Protocol (IP) for iTV delivery has unique advantages of each connected appliance being individually addressable, which paves the way for new interactive services, as well as scalability over various devices and existing compatible standards, allowing IP to be a long-term solution. The guidelines are evaluated by building a prototype interactive movie and conclusions are drawn as to their success and appropriateness for building interactive movies now and in the future. Based upon these findings the guidelines are further refined and presented. Figueirado, R. MSc Multimedia and Interactive Systems, 2002. 4
The Achilles Tendon

Achilles tendon disorders are among the most common conditions seen by sports medicine physicians. The request for radiological assessment and for radiologically assisted therapy is on the steady increase. Thus understanding the anatomy and biomechanics of the Achilles tendon is crucial to the effective radiological diagnosis and thus the management of such conditions.
The anti-Candida activity by Ancillary Proteins of an Enterococcus faecium strain

An antimycotic activity toward seven strains of Candida albicans was demonstrated erstwhile by a wild-type Enterococcus faecium isolated from a penguin rookery of the Antarctic region. In the present study the antimicrobial principle was purified by ion exchange and gel permeation chromatography and further was analyzed by LC-ESI-MS/MS. In the purification steps, the dialyzed concentrate and ion exchange fractions inhibited C. albicans MTCC 3958, 183, and SC 5314. However, the gel filtration purified fractions inhibited MTCC 3958 and 183. The data obtained from the LC-ESI-MS/MS indicate that the antimicrobial activity of the anti-Candida protein produced by E. faecium is facilitated by Sag A/Bb for the binding of the indicator organism's cell membrane. Partial N-terminal sequence revealed 12 N-terminal amino acid residues and its analysis shown that it belongs to the LysM motif. The nucleotide sequence of PCR-amplified product could detect 574 nucleotides of the LysM gene responsible for binding to chitin of the cell wall of Candida sp.
Cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access in 5G systems with SWIPT

In this paper, the application of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is investigated. A new cooperative SWIPT NOMA protocol is proposed in which near NOMA users which are close to the source act as energy harvesting relays to help far NOMA users. By assuming that all users are spatially randomly located in the network, new analytical expressions for outage probability are derived both for the near and far users, in order to characterize the performance of the proposed protocol. The diversity of both the near and far users is analyzed to demonstrate that the use of SWIPT will not jeopardize the diversity order compared to the conventional NOMA. Numerical results are also provided to verify the accuracy of the developed analytical results.
Approximate capacity of a class of Gaussian relay-interference networks

In this paper we study the Gaussian relay-interference network, in which relay (helper) nodes are to facilitate competing information flows over a wireless network. We examine this problem for certain regimes of channel values, when one of the cross-links is dominated by noise, resulting in Z and/or S configurations for the networks. For these Gaussian ZZ and ZS networks, we establish an approximate characterization of the rate region. The outer bounds to the capacity regions are established using genie-aided techniques that extend the methods used for the Gaussian interference channel to the relay-interference network. For the inner bound of the ZZ network, we utilize a new interference management scheme, termed interference neutralization, which was inspired by our earlier study of such deterministic networks. This technique allows for over-the-air interference removal, without the transmitters having complete access to the interfering signals.
Development and Characterization of a Green Fluorescent Protein-Based Bacterial Biosensor for Bioavailable Toluene and Related Compounds

ABSTRACT A green fluorescent protein-based Pseudomonas fluorescens strain A506 biosensor was constructed and characterized for its potential to measure benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and related compounds in aqueous solutions. The biosensor is based on a plasmid carrying the toluene-benzene utilization (tbu) pathway transcriptional activator TbuT from Ralstonia pickettii PKO1 and a transcriptional fusion of its promoter PtbuA1 with a promoterless gfp gene on a broad-host-range promoter probe vector. TbuT was not limiting, since it was constitutively expressed by being fused to the neomycin phosphotransferase (nptII) promoter. The biosensor cells were readily induced, and fluorescence emission after induction periods of 3 h correlated well with toluene, benzene, ethylbenzene, and trichloroethylene concentrations. Our experiments using flow cytometry show that intermediate levels of gfp expression in response to toluene reflect uniform induction of cells. As the toluene concentration increases, the level of gfp expression per cell increases until saturation kinetics of the TbuT-PtbuA1 system are observed. Each inducer had a unique minimum concentration that was necessary for induction, with Kapp values that ranged from 3.3 ± 1.8 μM for toluene to 35.6 ± 16.6 μM for trichloroethylene (means ± standard errors of the means), and maximal fluorescence response. The fluorescence response was specific for alkyl-substituted benzene derivatives and branched alkenes (di- and trichloroethylene, 2-methyl-2-butene). The biosensor responded in an additive fashion to the presence of multiple inducers and was unaffected by the presence of compounds that were not inducers, such as those present in gasoline. Flow cytometry revealed that, in response to toxic concentrations of gasoline, there was a small uninduced population and another larger fully induced population whose levels of fluorescence corresponded to the amount of effectors present in the sample. These results demonstrate the potential for green fluorescent protein-based bacterial biosensors to measure environmental contaminants.
On a method of asymptotic evaluation of multiple integrals

In this paper, some of the formal arguments given by Jones and Kline [J. Math. Phys., v. 37, 1958, pp. 1-28] are made rigorous. In particular, the reduction procedure of a multiple oscillatory integral to a one-dimensional Fourier transform is justified, and a Taylor-type theorem with remainder is proved for the Dirac 8-function. The analyticity condition of Jones and Kline is now replaced by infinite differentiability. Connections with the asymptotic expansions of Jeanquartier and Malgrange are also discussed.
Cross-Lingual Taxonomy Alignment with Bilingual Biterm Topic Model

As more and more multilingual knowledge becomes available on the Web, knowledge sharing across languages has become an important task to benefit many applications. One of the most crucial kinds of knowledge on the Web is taxonomy, which is used to organize and classify the Web data. To facilitate knowledge sharing across languages, we need to deal with the problem of cross-lingual taxonomy alignment, which discovers the most relevant category in the target taxonomy of one language for each category in the source taxonomy of another language. Current approaches for aligning cross-lingual taxonomies strongly rely on domain-specific information and the features based on string similarities. In this paper, we present a new approach to deal with the problem of cross-lingual taxonomy alignment without using any domain-specific information. We first identify the candidate matched categories in the target taxonomy for each category in the source taxonomy using the cross-lingual string similarity. We then propose a novel bilingual topic model, called Bilingual Biterm Topic Model (BiBTM), to perform exact matching. BiBTM is trained by the textual contexts extracted from the Web. We conduct experiments on two kinds of real world datasets. The experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the designed state-of-the-art comparison methods.
Effects of titanium dioxide and tartrazine lake on Z-axis resolution and physical properties of resins printed by visible-light 3D printers

Purpose The aim of this paper is to examine the effects of light controlling system that combined high refractive particles (n-TiO2 [titanium dioxide – TiO2]) and tartrazine lake dye (TL dye) on thickness, flexural strength, flexural modulus and surface details of the 3D-printed resin. Design/methodology/approach Influences of different concentrations of n-TiO2 and TL dye in light-cured resin formulations for 3D printing (3DP) application were evaluated, including curing thickness, flexural strength and surface details under scanning electron microscopy. Findings The polymerization thickness of samples containing both n-TiO2 and TL dye was lower compared to samples with TL dye solely. Samples containing more n-TiO2 and more TL dye exhibited lower flexural strength and modulus. Ramp models showed that for samples containing 1 per cent TL dye, when their n-TiO2 content increased from 1 to 5 per cent, surface laminate structures became sharper. However, when the TL dye content doubled to 2 per cent, the surface laminate structures were indefinite compared to 1 per cent TL dye-containing counterparts. Originality value In visible-light 3DP, light controlling system in cooperate dye with high refractive particles provides better energy distribution and scattering control. High refractive particles, dyes and light exposure time had influenced the surface resolution and mechanical properties of the 3DP products.
Glycogen Synthase Kinase-3 Inactivation Is Not Required for Ischemic Preconditioning or Postconditioning in the Mouse

The inactivation of glycogen synthase kinase-3β (GSK-3β) is proposed as the event integrating protective pathways initiated by preconditioning and other interventions. The inactivation of GSK-3 is thought to decrease the probability of opening of the mitochondrial permeability transition pore. The aim of this study was to verify the role of GSK-3 using a targeted mouse line lacking the critical N-terminal serine within GSK-3β (Ser9) and the highly homologous GSK-3α (Ser21), which when phosphorylated results in kinase inactivation. Postconditioning with 10 cycles of 5 seconds of reperfusion/5 seconds of ischemia and preconditioning with 6 cycles of 4 minutes of ischemia/6 minutes of reperfusion, similarly reduced infarction of the isolated perfused mouse heart in response to 30 minutes of global ischemia and 120 minutes of reperfusion. Preconditioning caused noticeable inactivating phosphorylation of GSK-3. However, both preconditioning and postconditioning still protected hearts of homozygous GSK-3 double knockin mice. Moreover, direct pharmacological inhibition of GSK-3 catalytic activity with structurally diverse inhibitors before or after ischemia failed to recapitulate conditioning protection. Nonetheless, cyclosporin A, a direct mitochondrial permeability transition pore inhibitor, reduced infarction in hearts from both wild-type and homozygous GSK-3 double knockin mice. Furthermore, in adult cardiac myocytes from GSK-3 double knockin mice, insulin exposure was still as effective as cyclosporin A in delaying mitochondrial permeability transition pore opening. Our results, which include a novel genetic approach, suggest that the inhibition of GSK-3 is unlikely to be the key determinant of cardioprotective signaling in either preconditioning or postconditioning in the mouse.
Automated analysis of dependent feature models

Feature models specify valid combinations of features in software product lines. With dependent feature models (DFMs), we apply separation of concerns to feature models for two main benefits. First, we can modularize feature models into parts relevant to groups of stakeholders. Second, we are able to model dependencies between different software product lines in a multi-product-line scenario. To ensure consistency and correctness of DFMs, we have to apply analyses, such as dead-feature detection. We discuss why DFMs challenge the detection of inconsistencies, present how to reuse existing analyses for DFMs, and propose new analyses to supplement existing ones. We apply automated analyses in five steps and evaluate the approach using DFMs specified in VELVET by our prototype VeAnalyzer.
Intercomparison and evaluation of global aerosol microphysical properties among AeroCom models of a range of complexity

Many of the next generation of global climate models will include aerosol schemes which explicitly simulate the microphysical processes that determine the particle size distribution. These models enable aerosol optical properties and cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) concentrations to be determined by fundamental aerosol processes, which should lead to a more physically based simulation of aerosol direct and indirect radiative forcings. This study examines the global variation in particle size distribution simulated by 12 global aerosol microphysics models to quantify model diversity and to identify any common biases against observations. Evaluation against size distribution measurements from a new European network of aerosol supersites shows that the mean model agrees quite well with the observations at many sites on the annual mean, but there are some seasonal biases common to many sites. In particular, at many of these European sites, the accumulation mode number concentration is biased low during winter and Aitken mode concentrations tend to be overestimated in winter and underestimated in summer. At high northern latitudes, the models strongly underpredict Aitken and accumulation particle concentrations compared to the measurements, consistent with previous studies that have highlighted the poor performance of global aerosol models in the Arctic. In the marine boundary layer, the models capture the observed meridional variation in the size distribution, which is dominated by the Aitken mode at high latitudes, with an increasing concentration of accumulation particles with decreasing latitude. Considering vertical profiles, the models reproduce the observed peak in total particle concentrations in the upper troposphere due to new particle formation, although modelled peak concentrations tend to be biased high over Europe. Overall, the multi-model-mean data set simulates the global variation of the particle size distribution with a good degree of skill, suggesting that most of the individual global aerosol microphysics models are performing well, although the large model diversity indicates that some models are in poor agreement with the observations. Further work is required to better constrain size-resolved primary and secondary particle number sources, and an improved understanding of nucleation and growth (e.g. the role of nitrate and secondary organics) will improve the fidelity of simulated particle size distributions. © 2014 Author(s).
Monte Carlo Study of Ultimate Channel Scaling in Si and In$_{\rm 0.3}$Ga$_{\rm 0.7}$As Bulk MOSFETs

A detailed analysis of nonequilibrium electron transport in n-type Si and In0.3Ga0. 7As MOSFETs scaled into ultimate limit of 5-nm gate length is carried out using ensemble Monte Carlo device simulations. The analysis is based on simulations of ID-VG characteristics for a template, 25-nm gate length Si MOSFET compared against previous results from various Monte Carlo device codes, and for an equivalent 25-nm gate length In0.3Ga0. 7As MOSFET. The transistors are then laterally scaled from a gate length of 25 nm to 20, 15, 10 and 5 nm monitoring the average electron velocity, energy, and sheet density along the channel at a supply voltage of 1.0 V. A degradation of the injection velocity with the scaling of a gate/channel length is observed. While we have found a decrease in the overall electron velocity profile along the Si channel for gate lengths smaller than 10 nm and a decrease in the injection velocity from a gate length of 20 nm, the increase in the intrinsic drain current in the scaling process is continuous thanks to the increasing velocity at the drain side. However, the velocity in the InGaAs channel MOSFETs increases steadily during the scaling but the increase in the intrinsic drain current is less pronounced. This is the result of a source starvation, due to a low density of states in III-V semiconductors, which cannot provide a large enough electron sheet density in the channel. This effect is partially mitigated by the enhancement of density of states as a proportion of electrons in the source/drain transfers to upper valleys with a larger electron effective mass.