Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Towards Reliable Wireless Industrial Communication With Real-Time Guarantees

Increased mobility coupled with a possible reduction of cabling costs and deployment time makes wireless communication an attractive alternative for the automation industry and related application areas. Methods compensating for the high probability of bit errors accompanying wireless transmissions are, however, needed. This is predominantly important in industrial applications with strict reliability and timing requirements, which cannot be met by standard communication protocols as, e.g., TCP. In this paper, a way of combining retransmissions with real-time worst-case scheduling analysis is presented that can offer both a high grade of reliability and hard real-time support. The presented solution handles one or several retransmission attempts of erroneous data without jeopardizing already guaranteed delay bounds of other packets. A real-time analysis for a full-duplex, asymmetric link, utilizing the novel retransmission scheme and supporting both piggybacked and nonpiggybacked acknowledgments, is provided. A simulation study is presented that evaluates the performance of the retransmission scheme for bit-error rates typically experienced in wireless communication. The results clearly indicate a possible reduction of the message error rate by several orders of magnitude.
PREDATOR DAMAGE CONTROL: 1980 to 1986

Author(s): Wade, Dale A. | Abstract: This discussion is an update from Wade (1980) which summarized executive and other decisions relating to cancellation of the predacides in 1972. This review continues that summary of major events from January 1980 to the present. Major political factors, predator damage control, and research findings during this period are briefly discussed. A chronology of administrative and judicial decisions and related events is appended (Appendix A).
Stabilization of Stewart platform using Higher Order Sliding Mode control

This paper presents a technique to control the Stewart platform using Higher Order sliding Mode(HOSM). For a given position of the platform, the leg lengths are estimated using inverse kinematics and the corresponding leg velocities are estimated in finite time using a super twisting observer. The desired position of the platform has been achieved in finite time using a higher order sliding mode controller. The effectiveness of this control technique has been proved with simulation results.
Differential evaluation: A cache‐based technique for incremental update of graphical displays of structures

Many applications of graphical man‐machine interfaces require incremental update of an image, with controllable time granularity, having multiple views of the information, generated by modular, maintainable software having minimal resource overhead. A technique called differential evaluation is presented that addresses these needs. Instead of driving the display from a data structure, it uses an ad‐hoc display procedure in conjunction with a FIFO cache to generate and maintain the display. Maintaining displays of variable structure is accomplished through the use of conditional mechanisms in the display procedure. The technique has been extended to meet many different needs, such as the use of graphic contexts, display of overlapping objects, double‐buffering, and a variety of user input schemes. The efficiency of the technique, in time and storage, permits its use with modest equipment. It has been used for several years in a number of industrial user interfaces.
China's retreat from equality : income distribution and economic transition

The past half-century has seen many hopes raised and some dashed, a succession of fears and false alarms, and both triumphs and calamities that were almost entirely unexpected. This work offers a short but sweeping history of world politics since 1945: America's postwar pre-eminence and the hopes that attended the creation of the United Nations the Cold War and the emergence of a volatile Third World economic transformations and the twin threat of nuclear and ecological disaster the crumbling of the Soviet system and the short-lived promise of a peaceful, prosperous and democratic new world. The author describes these momentous changes concisely in an effort to show how we got here from there and what we might have learned along the way.
Optimal intercell coordination for multiple user classes with elastic traffic

We consider the intercell coordination problem between two neighboring cells, assuming that the traffic in the system consists of elastic downlink data flows. In this case, there is an option of completely switching off one base station at certain times, which reduces interference and enables a higher service rate in the neighboring base station. We use a flow level queueing model to describe the evolution of the system based on a symmetric capacity region. Recent results by Verloop and Núñez-Queija show that, assuming a single class of flows for each cell, the stochastically optimal dynamic policy is to have both stations switched on whenever there are users in both cells. In this paper, we consider a system where the two stations are able to provide services to two different classes of users - the near ones and the far ones. In this setting, the stochastic optimality of the Both Stations On policy does not necessarily hold, but it may still be a close-to-optimal policy, at least for minimizing the mean flow delay. We present a systematic method based on the policy improvement algorithm of the theory of the Markov Decision Processes to generate a near-optimal state-dependent resource allocation policy. Our numerical experiments with these two dynamic policies indicate that the Both Stations On policy is, indeed, close to optimal even when there are multiple user classes.
Sovereign Nations or Reservations?: An Economic History of American Indians

“All societies face the problem of preventing those who exercise the legitimate powers of government from using such power to transfer societal wealth–or additional power–to themselves. The task is to limit the role of those in power to that of ‘third party’ enforcer rather than self-interested primary party, in disputes and social decisions over the use of a society’s resources. Success at this task stands out as a distinguishing characteristic of those sovereign nations that have been able to develop economically from those that have not. ” – Anderson, Terry L. p. 10. quoting Cornell and Kalt; p.234-235 in Property Rights and Indian Economies.
The Relationship between Collegiality and Student Achievement in Georgia Secondary Schools

A number of research studies attempted to link what goes on routinely as behaviors, beliefs, and practices in schools, to student achievement (Keedy, 1991; Krisko, 2001; Williams, 2008). The purpose of this study is to explore specific collegiality (what personnel do) perceptions of certified school personnel and their relationship (if any) to student achievement. A survey instrument was developed by the researcher for data collection, and was analyzed using Statistical Programming for the Social Sciences (SPSS). This was a quantitative study for exploring the collegiality perceptions of the certified school personnel in both achieving (AS) and struggling to achieve (STA) schools and their sub-group of administrators, teachers, and certified staff to student achievement. This research study was a quantitative study. Data was collected by the researcher who developed a school collegiality perception survey (SCPS) instrument that comprised of seven collegiality factors and 21 rated items with a cluster of 3 items for each factor. The researcher used the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software. The researcher surveyed 326 participants in six Georgia high schools and examined the collegiality factors of 3 sub-groups: administrators, teachers, and certified staff. The collegiality perceptions were then compared to data on student achievement.
Automated Facial Expression Analysis

Human Emotion Recognition Clips Utilised Expert System was designed to recognise and interpret facial expressions of the observed person in an automatic way [1]. Still, input to HERCULES has been manually supplied. Through integrating HERCULES into the Integrated System for Facial Expression Recognition (ISFER) a complete process of automatic analysis of facial expressions has been achieved [2]. ISFER forms a part of the project Automated System for Non-verbal Communication [3] which is an ongoing project at the Knowledge Based Systems department of Delft University of Technology. The theoretical formulation of the implemented facial expression recognition has been acquired from FACS [4]. The interpretation of the recognised facial expression is currently based [1][7] on the recognition of so-called six basic emotions defined by Ekman [5][6]: happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, disgust and anger. Validation of the implemented knowledge and performing of the facial expression analysis in a completely automated way, are the main topics of this paper.
Magnetic Resonance Imaging-Based Radiomic Profiles Predict Patient Prognosis in Newly Diagnosed Glioblastoma Before Therapy

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used to diagnose and monitor brain tumors. Extracting additional information from medical imaging and relating it to a clinical variable of interest is broadly defined as radiomics. Here, multiparametric MRI radiomic profiles (RPs) of de novo glioblastoma (GBM) brain tumors is related with patient prognosis. Clinical imaging from 81 patients with GBM before surgery was analyzed. Four MRI contrasts were aligned, masked by margins defined by gadolinium contrast enhancement and T2/fluid attenuated inversion recovery hyperintensity, and contoured based on image intensity. These segmentations were combined for visualization and quantification by assigning a 4-digit numerical code to each voxel to indicate the segmented RP. Each RP volume was then compared with overall survival. A combined classifier was then generated on the basis of significant RPs and optimized volume thresholds. Five RPs were predictive of overall survival before therapy. Combining the RP classifiers into a single prognostic score predicted patient survival better than each alone (P < .005). Voxels coded with 1 RP associated with poor prognosis were pathologically confirmed to contain hypercellular tumor. This study applies radiomic profiling to de novo patients with GBM to determine imaging signatures associated with poor prognosis at tumor diagnosis. This tool may be useful for planning surgical resection or radiation treatment margins.
7.1 Quantum Computation 7 Quantum Computing Applications of Genetic Programming

Quantum computers are computational devices that use the dynamics of atomic-scale objects to store and manipulate information. Only a few, small-scale quantum computers have been built to date, but quantum computers can in principle outperform all possible classical computers in significant ways. Quantum computation is therefore a subject of considerable theoretical interest that may also have practical applications in the future. Genetic programming can automatically discover new algorithms for quantum computers [Sp ctor et al., 1998]. We describe how to simulate a quantum computer so that the fitness of a quantum algorithm can be determined on classical hardware. We then describe ways in which three different genetic programming approaches can drive the simulator to evolve new quantum algorithms. The approaches are standard tree-based genetic programming, stack-based linear genome genetic programming, and stackless linear genome genetic programming. We demonstrate the techniques on four different problems: thetwo-bit early promiseproblem, thescaling majority-onproblem, the four-item database search problem, and thetwo-bit and-orproblem. For three of these problems (all but majority-on) the automatically discovered algorithms are more efficient than any possible classical algorithms for the same problems. One of the better-than-classical algorithms (for the two-bit and-orproblem) is in fact more efficient than any previously known quantum algorithm for the same problem, suggesting that genetic programming may be a valuable tool in the future study of quantum programming.
Controlled oxygen therapy and pulmonary heart failure

One hundred and sixty-six episodes of pulmonary heart failure were treated in 40 patients with chronic bronchitis. The natural history of the disease is described when controlled oxygen is the principal therapy. Only eight episodes of heart failure required intermittent positive pressure ventilation. Despite careful attention to the details of the controlled oxygen technique the longterm survival of these patients was no better than during an earlier period when oxygen was either not given or administered intermittently for short periods. The implications of this finding are discussed.
Bayesian blind PARAFAC receivers for DS-CDMA systems

In this paper an original Bayesian approach for blind detection for code division multiple access (CDMA) systems in presence of spatial diversity at the receiver is developed. In the noiseless context, the blind detection/identification problem relies on the canonical decomposition (also referred as parallel factor analysis [Sidiropoulos, IEEE SP'00], PARAFAC). The author in [Bro,INCINC'96] proposes a suboptimal solution in least-squares sense. However, poor performances are obtained in presence of high noise level. The recently emerged Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) signal processing method provides a novel paradigm for tackling this problem. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.
Research of Internet of Things applied to manufacturing execution system

IOT (Internet of Things) is a highly information-oriented technology which can achieve real-time status Information of things by sensing devices. IOT manages, coordinate and control things through linking these sensing devices by communications network, and dealing with status Information intelligently. Design of MES (Manufacturing Execution System) based on IOT implements real-time monitoring throughout the manufacturing process and comprehensive management of enterprises to implement “integrated management and control” truly. It is significant to perfect function, compensate the lack of control and management of MES.
Echo-cardiographic segmentation: Via feature-space clustering

Segmentation in echo-cardiographic images is a difficult task due to the presence of speckle noise, low contrast and blurring. We present a novel method based on clustering performed in the feature space. A new feature-based image representation is proposed. It is obtained by computing a local feature descriptor at every pixel location. This descriptor is derived using the Radon-Transform to effectively characterise local image context. Next, an un-supervised clustering is performed in the feature space to segment regions in the image. The performance of the proposed method is tested on both synthetic and real images. A comparison against well established feature descriptors is carried out to demonstrate the strengths and applicability of the proposed representation. Overall, the results indicate promise in the strategy of doing segmentation of noisy data in image descriptor space.
Honeypots in the Cloud

Honeypots are systems used to trap, monitor, and identify erroneous requests within a network. For this project we conducted a study using honeypots within various cloud computing platforms ( such as Amazon EC2, Windows Azure etc.) with the objective of learning more about what kind of packets they receive. We used various honeypots such as Dionaea, Kippo, and Amun on our cloud instances and gathered data about where attacks came from, what kinds of attacks were made, and differences among cloud instances. We discovered that most attack traffic comes from the US and China and that most attacks are on SSH and HTTP. We also found that for the most part, attack traffic among the clouds was quite similar. We also identified Dionaea and Kippo as the honeypots which are most effective in the cloud setting.
Channel-and-Circuits Aware, Energy-Efficient Coding for High Speed Links

In order to achieve high throughput while satisfying energy and density constraints, both the data rates and the energy efficiency of high-speed chip-to-chip interconnects need to increase. This project aims to extend the link system design to incorporate energy-efficient channel coding techniques. To enable the systematic characterization of different codes, we have developed a new statistical simulator [1]. The simulator employs a divide-andconquer approach to fully account for the effect of long residual interference on the received voltage for systematic binary-linearblock-coded transmissions. It is therefore the first link simulator to accurately account for dependencies in transmitted data instead of approximating the transmissions as independent (uncoded). This method is of most use for high-rate codes, but it remains valid for both arbitrarily long channel lengths and block lengths. The resulting probability distributions are computed analytically and are therefore accurate at the low bit-error-rates (BER) required in high-speed links. Integrating the voltage probability distributions computed through the previously described technique yields individual cross-over probabilities for different bit locations in a codeword. The resulting difference in the cross-over probabilities of individual bits compared to the cross-over probability of an uncoded system indicates the extent to which coupling residual interference with the data correlation due to binary linear block coding affects the performance of the system. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate this effect for two different link channels. Although the present focus is on developing simple codes tailored for interferencedominated environments, the current framework also allows for the characterization of classical error-detecting codes. For links with relatively well-compensated interference and low noise correlation, the channel can be approximated as binary-symmetric. The individual crossover probabilities are therefore sufficient to compute the error probabilities after error correction. This property was verified in [1] for some typical link channels and down to BERs achievable by Monte Carlo simulation.
Iron and pH Homeostasis Intersect at the Level of Fur Regulation in the Gastric Pathogen Helicobacter pylori

ABSTRACT Helicobacter pylori persistently colonizes the stomach of the majority of the world's population and is a tremendous medical burden due to its causal role in diverse gastric maladies. Since the stomach is a constantly changing environment, successful colonization of H. pylori within this niche requires regulation of bacterial gene expression to cope with the environmental fluctuations. In H. pylori, the ferric uptake regulator (Fur) has been shown to play an intricate role in adaptation of the bacterium to two conditions known to oscillate within the gastric mucosa: iron limitation and low pH. To extend our knowledge of the process of regulation and adaptation in H. pylori, we show that Fur is required for efficient colonization of the Mongolian gerbil: the mutant strain exhibits a 100-fold increase in the 50% infectious dose, as well as a 100-fold defect in competitive colonization, when coinfected with wild-type bacteria. Furthermore, we used DNA microarrays to identify genes whose expression was altered in a Fur-deficient strain. We show that the Fur regulon of H. pylori consists of approximately 30 genes, most of which have been previously annotated as acid stress associated. Finally, we investigate the role of Fur in acid-responsive modulation of gene expression and show that a large number of genes are aberrantly expressed in the Fur mutant specifically upon acid exposure. This fact likely explains the requirement for this regulator for growth and colonization in the stomach.
A new second order nonlinear tracking differentiator and application

A Second-order nonlinear tracking differentiator (SONTD) constructed by a symbol function sign and a linear saturation function sat has good tracking and differential performances for smooth continuous input functions, but it isn't appropriate for step type of input functions, In order to overcome the defects of the SONTD constructed by sign and sat, a new nonlinear saturation function composed of a sine function and a sign function is introduced, and a new type of second-order nonlinear TD is constructed based on the nonlinear saturation function. The new SONTD is used in Passivity based control of voltage source PWM rectifiers to improve the transient performances of rectifiers. Simulation results show that the new type of SONTD has good tracking and differential performances for step type of input functions, but it isn't appropriate for smooth continuous input functions.
Respiration of metal (hydr)oxides by Shewanella and Geobacter: a key role for multihaem c-type cytochromes

Dissimilatory reduction of metal (e.g. Fe, Mn) (hydr)oxides represents a challenge for microorganisms, as their cell envelopes are impermeable to metal (hydr)oxides that are poorly soluble in water. To overcome this physical barrier, the Gram‐negative bacteria Shewanella oneidensis MR‐1 and Geobacter sulfurreducens have developed electron transfer (ET) strategies that require multihaem c‐type cytochromes (c‐Cyts). In S. oneidensis MR‐1, multihaem c‐Cyts CymA and MtrA are believed to transfer electrons from the inner membrane quinone/quinol pool through the periplasm to the outer membrane. The type II secretion system of S. oneidensis MR‐1 has been implicated in the reduction of metal (hydr)oxides, most likely by translocating decahaem c‐Cyts MtrC and OmcA across outer membrane to the surface of bacterial cells where they form a protein complex. The extracellular MtrC and OmcA can directly reduce solid metal (hydr)oxides. Likewise, outer membrane multihaem c‐Cyts OmcE and OmcS of G. sulfurreducens are suggested to transfer electrons from outer membrane to type IV pili that are hypothesized to relay the electrons to solid metal (hydr)oxides. Thus, multihaem c‐Cyts play critical roles in S. oneidensis MR‐1‐ and G. sulfurreducens‐mediated dissimilatory reduction of solid metal (hydr)oxides by facilitating ET across the bacterial cell envelope.
A series of exponential step-down switched-capacitor converters and their applications in two-stage converters

There is a demand for low-power high-voltage-gain transformerless DC-DC converters. It is difficult to achieve this kind of conversion with good efficiency through a buck converter. The two-stage converter is proven to be an effective solution for such applications. In this paper, a series of exponential step-down switched-capacitor (ESC) converters that achieve the benefits of high-voltage-gain conversion, but comprise fewer switches than other switched-capacitor converter topologies, is proposed. The ESC converters are applicable as first-stage converters in the two-stage power conversion solution. Experimental results validating the idea are provided.
Evaluation of Tools and Cutting Conditions on Carbon Fibre Reinforced Laminates

The distinctive characteristics of carbon fibre reinforced plastics, like low weight or high specific strength, had broadened their use to new fields. Due to the need of assembly to structures, machining operations like drilling are frequent. In result of composites inhomogeneity, this operation can lead to different damages that reduce mechanical strength of the parts in the connection area. From these damages, delamination is the most severe. A proper choice of tool and cutting parameters can reduce delamination substantially. In this work the results obtained with five different tool geometries are compared. Conclusions show that the choice of an adequate drill can reduce thrust forces, thus delamination damage.