Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A resonant current regulator based microgrid control strategy with smooth transition between islanded and grid-connected modes

Microgrids consisting of distributed generators (DGs) have the ability to operate connected to the utility grid and also in stand-alone (island) mode. In both cases, frequency and voltage regulation across the microgrid must be ensured, and the DGs should share their generation equally. The transition of the microgrid between the two operating modes also needs to be seamless, which is conventionally achieved by switching between current or voltage based control, depending on the system context. This paper presents a new microgrid control strategy that exploits the intrinsic droop characteristics of a PR current regulator to achieve these objectives for both modes of microgrid operation. The strategy incorporates a predictive regulator to achieve dynamic voltage control within one fundamental cycle, a frequency adaptation strategy for islanded mode, and ensures DG power sharing. Simulation and experimental results obtained for a microgrid transitioning between both modes are used to verify the performance of the proposed strategy.
Gates and Oscillators II: Zeitgebers and the Network Model of the Brain Clock

Circadian rhythms in physiology and behavior are regulated by the SCN. When assessed by expression of clock genes, at least 2 distinct functional cell types are discernible within the SCN: nonrhythmic, light-inducible, retinorecipient cells and rhythmic autonomous oscillator cells that are not directly retinorecipient. To predict the responses of the circadian system, the authors have proposed a model based on these biological properties. In this model, output of rhythmic oscillator cells regulates the activity of the gate cells. The gate cells provide a daily organizing signal that maintains phase coherence among the oscillator cells. In the absence of external stimuli, this arrangement yields a multicomponent system capable of producing a self-sustained consensus rhythm. This follow-up study considers how the system responds when the gate cells are activated by an external stimulus, simulating a response to an entraining (or phase-setting) signal. In this model, the authors find that the system can be entrained to periods within the circadian range, that the free-running system can be phase shifted by timed activation of the gate, and that the phase response curve for activation is similar to that observed when animals are exposed to a light pulse. Finally, exogenous triggering of the gate over a number of days can organize an arrhythmic system, simulating the light-dependent reappearance of rhythmicity in a population of disorganized, independent oscillators. The model demonstrates that a single mechanism (i.e., the output of gate cells) can account for not only free-running and entrained rhythmicity but also other circadian phenomena, including limits of entrainment, a PRC with both delay and advance zones, and the light-dependent reappearance of rhythmicity in an arrhythmic animal.
Activation of visceral insular cortex in response to ethanol sensory cues after prolonged ethanol exposure

OF THE THESIS Activation of Visceral Insular Cortex in Response to Ethanol Sensory Cues After Prolonged Ethanol Exposure by Jerrold C. Penprase Master of Arts in Psychology San Diego State University, 2016 The insular cortex has been implicated in the acquisition and maintenance of substance abuse disorders via regulation of an organism’s responsiveness to drug-associated sensory cues. Neuroimaging studies have indicated a role for the insula in response to drugrelated stimuli and the experience of drug craving, conversely lesions to the insula have been shown to result in a reduction in craving and increased ability to abstain in addicted smokers. Insular inactivation in rodents disrupts conditioned preference for environments previously paired with amphetamine or nicotine and prevents/suppresses cue-induced reinstatement of drug seeking. These effects are believed to reflect a disruption in insula-mediated processing of interoceptive state information activated by drug-related cues. With regard to alcohol, the chemosensory cues accompanying its administration are among the most salient predictors of its postabsorptive effects, and may stimulate affective state information processed by the insula. Prior research in our lab has demonstrated that pharmacological inactivation of the visceral interoceptive insula suppresses chemosensory cue reactivity to ethanol. The aim of the current study was to examine differences in ethanol cue-elicited activation of the visceral insular cortex in subjects with and without a history of chronic ethanol exposure. Adult Wistar rats (n=12/group) initially received chronic exposure to 20% ethanol, 0.5% saccharin, or water alone (naive) for five weeks in an intermittent-access voluntary drinking paradigm. After completion of the chronic exposure phase, naive and experienced subjects consumed a fixed volume of their corresponding exposure stimulus and c-Fos expression within the visceral insula was measured 90 minutes after cue exposure. Significant levels of intake and preference for both ethanol and saccharin were observed during the chronic exposure phase. Analysis of stimulus-induced Fos expression revealed strong activation of the dorsal visceral insula by 20% ethanol in the alcohol naive group, while significantly reduced in alcoholexperienced subjects. Lower levels of visceral Fos expression were observed in both saccharin-naive and saccharin-experienced animals, but did not significantly differ from controls. These data demonstrate robust oral ethanol-elicited neuronal activity within the visceral region of the insular cortex in rodents, suggesting the insula may play an important role in processing of novelty/prior experience of ethanol-related stimuli.
Is adolescence a sensitive period for depression? Behavioral and neuroanatomical findings from a social stress model

Objectives: Sex differences in depressive symptoms emerge during adolescence, with females more at risk than males. However, adverse life events during development have greater impact on males. An animal model that incorporates behavioral and anatomical changes following adolescent stress is needed. Experimental Design: Sprague‐Dawley rats were exposed to social stress (SS; isolation housing during P30–35) or remained group‐housed (GRP) and tested in the forced swim test (FST), the triadic learned helplessness model (LH), and the elevated plus maze. Western immunoblots of myelin basic protein (MBP) and synaptophysin (SVP) and spinophillin indexed synaptic and dendritic plasticity, respectively. Principal Observations: At P36, SS increased climbing behavior in both sexes, and decreased the latency to immobility in females following a 15 min inescapable swim in the FST. Depressive‐like behaviors were differentially elevated in both sexes 24 h later. GRP females exhibited higher levels of depression‐related behaviors than GRP males in both FST and LH paradigms. SS significantly increased depressive behaviors in the FST in males, and impaired their ability to escape shock previously conditioned to be controllable. SS decreased open arm time in females only. The greatest reductions in synaptic plasticity proteins were observed in the prefrontal cortex: spinophillin (19.1%), SVP (7.9%), and MBP (48.7%, males only). Smaller reductions in spinophillin were observed in the hippocampus and amygdala. Conclusions: Adolescent separation produces both behavioral and neural changes associated with stress‐related depression and anxiety. Additional work is needed to improve our understanding of stress as it relates to depression during this vulnerable period of development. Synapse 62:22–30, 2008. © 2007 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
Dust grain growth in the interstellar medium of 5 < z < 6.5 quasars

Aims. We investigate whether stellar dust sources i.e. asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars and supernovae (SNe) can account for dust detected in 5 5 QSOs, whereas SNe may be able to account for dust in some QSOs. However, they require very high dust yields even for a top-heavy initial mass function. Conclusions. This suggests additional non-stellar dust formation mechanism e.g. significant dust grain growth in the interstellar medium of at least three out of nine z > 5 QSOs. SNe (but not AGB stars) may deliver enough heavy elements to fuel this growth.
Evolutionary Stability in Alternating-Offers Bargaining Gamesl

This paper characterizes modified evolutiona.rily stable strategies (MESSes) in Rubinstein’s alternating-offers, infinite-horizon bargaining game. The MESS concept modifies the idea of an neutrally stable strategy by favoring a simple strategy over a more complex strategy when both yield the same payoff. Our complexity notion is weaker than the common practice of counting states in automata. If strategy A is a MESS, then the use of A by both players is a Nash equilibrium in which an agreement is achieved immediately, and neither player would be willing to delay the agreement by one period in order to achieve the other player’s share of the surplus. Each player’s share of the surplus is then bounded between the shares received by the two players in the unique subgame-perfect equilibrium of Rubinstein’s game. As the probability of a breakdown in negotiations becomes small (or discount factors become large), these bounds collapse on the subgame-perfect equilibrium. These results continue to hold when offers must be made in multiples of a smallest monetary unit. JourncLl of Economic Literature Classification Numbers C70, C78
A three‐dimensional model for system design evolution

We represent the life cycle of the design of a system in a three‐dimensional space with engineering, reengineering, and reuse axes. The three‐dimensional model is evolution‐oriented. It incorporates not only the evolution that occurs after the product has been produced and delivered, but also three types of system design evolution that take place before the product is produced. Associated with each axis are a mathematical operator and its inverse. These operators, together with their inverses, can describe the various systems engineering activities. The model can be used to describe the life cycle of a product line, the evolution of an individual product within that product line, and even the evolution of an individual artifact. The model can be used in conjunction with any life‐cycle model and any set of artifacts. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 5, 264–273, 2002
A topological coverage algorithm for mobile robots

In applications such as vacuum cleaning, painting, demining and foraging, a mobile robot must cover an unknown surface. The efficiency and completeness of coverage is improved via the construction of a map of covered regions while the robot covers the surface. Existing methods generally use grid maps, which are susceptible to odometry error and may require considerable memory and computation. This paper proposes a topological map and presents a coverage algorithm in which natural landmarks are added as nodes in a partial map. The completeness of the algorithm is argued. Simulation tests show over 99% of the surface is covered; 85% for real (Khepera) robot tests. The path length is about 10% worse than optimal in simulation tests, and about 20% worse than optimal for the real robot, which are within theoretical upper bounds for approximates solutions to traveling salesman based coverage problems. The proposed algorithm generates shorter paths and covers a wider variety of environments than topological coverage based on Morse decompositions.
Designing Effective Health Communications: A Meta-Analysis

A meta-analysis of health communications examines the influence of 22 tactics and six individual characteristics on intentions to comply with health recommendations. The analysis indicates that message tactics have a significant influence on intentions toward health-related recommendations even after the authors account for individual differences. In addition, the authors examine when message tactics interact with individual characteristics to determine intentions. The results, which are based on 60 studies involving nearly 22,500 participants, show that there is significant opportunity to tailor health communications more efficiently to different market segments.
Learning Multiple Diagnosis Codes for ICU Patients with Local Disease Correlation Mining

In the era of big data, a mechanism that can automatically annotate disease codes to patients’ records in the medical information system is in demand. The purpose of this work is to propose a framework that automatically annotates the disease labels of multi-source patient data in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). We extract features from two main sources, medical charts and notes. The Bag-of-Words model is used to encode the features. Unlike most of the existing multi-label learning algorithms that globally consider correlations between diseases, our model learns disease correlation locally in the patient data. To achieve this, we derive a local disease correlation representation to enrich the discriminant power of each patient data. This representation is embedded into a unified multi-label learning framework. We develop an alternating algorithm to iteratively optimize the objective function. Extensive experiments have been conducted on a real-world ICU database. We have compared our algorithm with representative multi-label learning algorithms. Evaluation results have shown that our proposed method has state-of-the-art performance in the annotation of multiple diagnostic codes for ICU patients. This study suggests that problems in the automated diagnosis code annotation can be reliably addressed by using a multi-label learning model that exploits disease correlation. The findings of this study will greatly benefit health care and management in ICU considering that the automated diagnosis code annotation can significantly improve the quality and management of health care for both patients and caregivers.
Design and simulation of wideband patch antenna for wireless application

In this paper L-strip Electromagnetically coupled rectangular patch antenna is proposed and simulated results were obtained by HFSS tool. The frequency range covered by this single antenna is 1800 MHZ to 2370 MHZ with -10db return loss with optimal height of the patch from the ground plane 16.8mm. The antenna parameters which influence the gain, bandwidth, return loss was analyzed and graphs are plotted. The design mainly focuses on 3G internet services. It covers the DCS, PCS and UMTS. In addition, significant matching and high gain of 10.8 dB at 2.4GHz is obtained.
The Ecology of Strategic Positioning : Mutualism , Competition and Inertia

We develop an ecological theory of the strategic positioning of all firms in an organizational population across its evolution. Drawing on established ecological theories and notions of strategic positioning from the management literature, we contend that processes of mutualism, competition, and inertia shape the propensity of firms to move in the market space. Accordingly, we derive hypotheses about the effects of direct niche overlap, market segment crowding, niche width and resource abundance on strategic movement. Analyses of the transition rate between market segments of firms in the U.S. auto industry between 1895 and 1981 confirm the predictions of the theory and suggest that organizational movement is a fundamental ecological process that leads to shifts in demographic distributions and evolution of structure in an organizational population. The results also suggest that the organizational ecology paradigm can be extended if the movement dynamic is explicitly considered as it may reveal the operation of under-theorized mechanisms not attended to in typical founding, growth, and survival models.
A Possible Methodology of Research in Scholar Evaluation. Evaluation Theoretical and Methodological Approaches

Under the interest of educational research, as Theory of Evaluation, school evaluation, stage and important process of teaching approach has benefited from "change", "transformation", "rearrangement", "transfer", so that the "sample test", evaluation, criteria, grading result became components of a process whose analysis they matter in terms of refining, straightening the educational program and student further development. Therefore, acquisitions, academic progress, social implications are values pursued by the Evaluation Theory. Not just what? and why? (content), but how? and what for? (process). Borrowing paradigm, contemporary school evaluation must take into consideration both actors of the process (evaluated and evaluator) – they speak about making co-responsible and accompanying the person who learns, but also relations between stages of pedagogical process (teaching, learning, assessment). We can talk about roles and relationships of those involved in evaluative process.
Lifted Inequalities for 0-1 Mixed-Integer Bilinear Covering Sets

In this paper, we study 0-1 mixed-integer bilinear covering sets. We derive several families of facet-defining inequalities via sequence-independent lifting techniques. We then show that these sets have polyhedral structures that are similar to those of certain fixed-charge single-node flow sets. As a result, we obtain new facet-defining inequalities for these sets that generalize well-known lifted flow cover inequalities from the integer programming literature.
Detecting and correcting failed segmentations of radiological images using a knowledge-based approach

The segmentation of images with poor contrast characteristics is an important issue in medical computer vision. Often image segmentation results are either oversegmented, with "objects" divided into parts, or incorrectly segmented, with two or more anatomies segmented as one single object. This problem occurs in all types of segmentation approaches, but is of particular importance in the field of region-growing algorithms, which are used in many medical applications, presenting the definition of stable and reliable segmentation parameters. We present a new knowledge-based method, based on an extension of the inexact consistent labelling method, that enables the automated consistency checking of the results of region-growing segmentations and is capable to automatically "fitting" erroneous segmentations, when they are oversegmented, when there exists a reliable domain model that can be used to guide a tree search procedure in the space. This allows the use of oversensitive parameters when an exact segmentation is not reliable.
The SHA-3 competition: lessons learned

Cryptographic hash functions play a central role in cryptography: they map arbitrarily large input strings to fixed length output strings. The main applications are to create a short unique identifier to a string, to transform a string with a one-way mapping, and to commit to a string or to confirm its knowledge without revealing it. Additional applications are the mapping of group or field elements to strings, key derivation and the extraction of entropy. The main security requirements are preimage and second preimage resistance, collision resistance and indifferentiability from a random oracle. During the last three decades, more than 200 hash functions designs have been published; many of those have been cryptanalyzed, including widely used schemes such as MD5 and SHA-1. Moreover, there was a lack of theoretical understanding of their constructions; as a consequence, structural flaws were identified in widely used designs. These concerns also undermined to some extent the confidence in the SHA-2 hash functions, that have been designed for long term security. As a consequence, the US National Institute for Standards and Technology has organized an open competition. The competition started in November 2007; after five years of intense design, analysis and debate the Keccak function was announced as the winner in October 2012. The new FIPS standard is expected to be published in 2014. This extended abstract will identify some lessons learned during this competition.
Effects of Formation Epoch Distribution on X-Ray Luminosity and Temperature Functions of Galaxy Clusters

We investigate statistical properties of galaxy clusters in the context of a hierarchical clustering scenario, taking into account their formation epoch distribution; this study is motivated by the recent finding by Fujita and Takahara that X-ray clusters form a fundamental plane in which the mass and the formation epoch are regarded as two independent parameters. Using the formalism that discriminates between major mergers and accretion, the epoch of a cluster formation is identified with that of the last major merger. Since tiny mass accretion following formation does not much affect the core structure of clusters, the properties of X-ray emission from clusters are determined by the total mass and density at their formation time. Under these assumptions, we calculate X-ray luminosity and temperature functions of galaxy clusters. We find that the behavior of the luminosity function differs from the model that does not take into account formation epoch distribution; the behavior of the temperature function, however, is not much different. In our model, the luminosity function is shifted to a higher luminosity and shows no significant evolution up to z ~ 1, independent of cosmological models. The clusters are populated on the temperature-luminosity plane, with a finite dispersion. Since the simple scaling model in which the gas temperature is equal to the virial temperature fails to reproduce the observed luminosity-temperature relation, we also consider a model that takes into account the effects of preheating. The preheating model reproduces the observations much more accurately.
Symbolic Model Checking Algorithms for Temporal-Epistemic Logic

The paper presents ordered binary decision diagram based symbolic model checking algorithms for fragments of a temporal-epistemic logic based on the temporal logic CTL∗ with operators for the knowledge and common knowledge of multiple agents. The knowledge operators are interpreted with respect to several distinct semantics: observational, clock, synchronous perfect recall and asynchronous perfect recall.
A Unifying Framework for Learning the Linear Combiners for Classifier Ensembles

For classifier ensembles, an effective combination method is to combine the outputs of each classifier using a linearly weighted combination rule. There are multiple ways to linearly combine classifier outputs and it is beneficial to analyze them as a whole. We present a unifying framework for multiple linear combination types in this paper. This unification enables using the same learning algorithms for different types of linear combiners. We present various ways to train the weights using regularized empirical loss minimization. We propose using the hinge loss for better performance as compared to the conventional least-squares loss. We analyze the effects of using hinge loss for various types of linear weight training by running experiments on three different databases. We show that, in certain problems, linear combiners with fewer parameters may perform as well as the ones with much larger number of parameters even in the presence of regularization.