Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Improvements to Series Elastic Actuators

Actuators must be safe when interacting with humans, even in unexpected situations. Safety requires low impedance (low forces for a given perturbation) at all frequencies, not only in the actuator's stable bandwidth. Series elastic actuators (SEAs) are capable of achieving low impedance across all frequencies, though their force-frequency saturation envelope is decreased as a result. This paper examines ways to increase the force fidelity of SEAs by introducing inner control feedback loops and using appropriate sensor location. Findings include the superiority of a low fidelity sensor distal to stiction sources over a high fidelity sensor proximal to stiction and the superiority of an inner position feedback loop over an inner velocity feedback loop
Essays in Personnel Economics – Empirical Analyses on Further Training, Self-Employment Earnings, and Monetary Reference Points

Vor allem aufgrund einer beschrankten Verfugbarkeit von geeigneten Datensatzen auf der Firmenebene gibt es noch immer einen Mangel an empirischen Arbeiten im Bereich der Personalokonomik. Diese Dissertation beschaftigt sich mit mehreren Forschungsfragen und untersucht diese empirisch mit Langsschnittdatensatzen. Zunachst wird die Teilnahme von deutschen Arbeitnehmern an beruflicher Weiterbildung untersucht. Es zeigt sich, dass die Teilnahmeraten im Zeitraum von 1989 bis 2008 deutlich gestiegen sind. Daruber hinaus wird deutlich, dass die Grose des beschaftigenden Unternehmens sowie die individuelle berufliche Stellung den grosten Einfluss auf die Wahrscheinlichkeit der Weiterbildung ausuben. Anschliesend wird der Einfluss eines Wechsels von abhangiger Beschaftigung in die Selbststandigkeit auf das inviduelle Einkommen untersucht. Selbststandige in Deutschland verdienen im Schnitt deutlich mehr als Arbeitnehmer. Der individuelle Wechsel von abhangiger Beschaftigung in die Selbststandigkeit ist mit einem signifikanten Einkommensanstieg verbunden. Zuletzt beschaftigt sich die Arbeit mit monetaren Referenzpunkten von Fuhrungskraften der deutschen Chemie-Industrie. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass individuelle Lohngsteigerungen keinen Einfluss auf die Arbeitszufriedenheit der Fuhrungskrafte ausuben. Allerdings vergleichen diese sich mit anderen Managern im Arbeitsmarkt: Je hoher die Lohne dieser Referenzpersonen sind, desto niedriger ist die eigene Arbeitszufriedenheit.
In Vivo Induction of Tr1 Cells via Mucosal Dendritic Cells and AHR Signaling

Background Type 1 regulatory T (Tr1) cells, characterized by the secretion of high levels of the anti-inflammatory cytokine interleukin-10 (IL-10), play an important role in the regulation of autoimmune diseases and transplantation. However, effective strategies that specifically induce Tr1 cells in vivo are limited. Furthermore, the pathways controlling the induction of these cells in vivo are not well understood. Methodology/Principal Findings Here we report that nasal administration of anti-CD3 antibody induces suppressive Tr1 cells in mice. The in vivo induction of Tr1 cells by nasal anti-CD3 is dependent on IL-27 produced by upper airway resident dendritic cells (DCs), and is controlled by the transcription factors aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) and c-Maf. Subsequently, IL-21 acts in an autocrine fashion to expand and maintain the Tr1 cells induced in vivo by nasally administered anti-CD3. Conclusions/Significance Our findings identify a unique approach to generate Tr1 cells in vivo and provide insights into the mechanisms by which these cells are induced.
New Solutions of VoIP on Multi-hop Wireless Network

The effective provision of real-time, packet-based voice conversations over multi-hop wireless networks faces several stringent constraints not found in conventional packet-based networks. The wireless links in an ad hoc network are highly error prone and may go down frequently because of node mobility, interference, channel fading, and the lack of infrastructure, it is very difficult and challenging to implement voice transmission over multi-hop wireless networks. In this research, to maximize the performance of multi-hop wireless networks during voice transmission we choose some parameters and methodological approaches e.g. Since voice applications consume more energy than typical applications, we designed the ad hoc and adaptive control model to simulate our scheme.
Non-destructive Phenotypic Analysis of Early Stage Tree Seedling Growth Using an Automated Stereovision Imaging Method

A plant phenotyping approach was applied to evaluate growth rate of containerized tree seedlings during the precultivation phase following seed germination. A simple and affordable stereo optical system was used to collect stereoscopic red–green–blue (RGB) images of seedlings at regular intervals of time. Comparative analysis of these images by means of a newly developed software enabled us to calculate (a) the increments of seedlings height and (b) the percentage greenness of seedling leaves. Comparison of these parameters with destructive biomass measurements showed that the height traits can be used to estimate seedling growth for needle-leaved plant species whereas the greenness trait can be used for broad-leaved plant species. Despite the need to adjust for plant type, growth stage and light conditions this new, cheap, rapid, and sustainable phenotyping approach can be used to study large-scale phenome variations due to genome variability and interaction with environmental factors.
Comparing and modelling land use organization in cities

The advent of geolocated information and communication technologies opens the possibility of exploring how people use space in cities, bringing an important new tool for urban scientists and planners, especially for regions where data are scarce or not available. Here we apply a functional network approach to determine land use patterns from mobile phone records. The versatility of the method allows us to run a systematic comparison between Spanish cities of various sizes. The method detects four major land use types that correspond to different temporal patterns. The proportion of these types, their spatial organization and scaling show a strong similarity between all cities that breaks down at a very local scale, where land use mixing is specific to each urban area. Finally, we introduce a model inspired by Schelling's segregation, able to explain and reproduce these results with simple interaction rules between different land uses.
Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) mimics cocaine in its physiological and behavioral effects but induces distinct changes in NAc glucose

Methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) is generally considered to be a more potent cocaine-like psychostimulant, as it shares a similar pharmacological profile with cocaine and induces similar physiological and locomotor responses. Recently, we showed that intravenous cocaine induces rapid rise in nucleus accumbens (NAc) glucose and established its relation to neural activation triggered by the peripheral drug actions. This study was conducted to find out whether MDPV, at a behaviorally equivalent dose, shares a similar pattern of NAc glucose dynamics. Using enzyme-based glucose sensors coupled with amperometery in freely moving rats, we found that MDPV tonically decreases NAc glucose levels, a response that is opposite to what we previously observed with cocaine. By analyzing Skin-Muscle temperature differentials, a valid measure of skin vascular tone, we found that MDPV induces vasoconstriction; a similar effect at the level of cerebral vessels could be responsible for the MDPV-induced decrease in NAc glucose. While cocaine also induced comparable, if not slightly stronger peripheral vasoconstriction, this effect was overpowered by local neural activity-induced vasodilation, resulting in rapid surge in NAc glucose. These results imply that cocaine-users may be more susceptible to addiction than MDPV-users due to the presence of an interoceptive signal (i.e., sensory cue), which may result in earlier and more direct reward detection. Additionally, while health complications arising from acute cocaine use are typically cardiovascular related, MDPV may be more dangerous to the brain due to uncompensated cerebral vasoconstriction.
Palettes of Vaccines and Immunostimulatory Monoclonal Antibodies for Combination

Various monoclonal antibodies (mAb) target immune system molecules to enhance immunity by costimulating T cells (i.e., CD137, OX40, CD40, GITR) or interfering in coinhibitory signals (i.e., CTLA-4, PD-1). These powerful agents can be guided by cancer vaccines to enhance immunity against tumor but not self tissues. Clinically powerful therapeutic synergies are at hand.
Identifying significant genes from microarray data

Microarray technology is a recent development in experimental molecular biology which can produce quantitative expression measurements for thousands of genes in a single, cellular mRNA sample. These many gene expression measurements form a composite profile of the sample, which can be used to differentiate samples from different classes such as tissue types or treatments. However, for the gene expression profile data obtained in a specific comparison, most likely only some of the genes will, be differentially expressed between the classes, while many other genes have similar expression levels. Selecting a list of informative differential genes from these data is important for microarray data analysis. In this paper, we describe a framework for selecting informative genes, called ranking and combination analysis (RAC), which combines various existing informative gene selection methods. We conducted experiments using three data sets and six existing feature selection methods. The results show that the RAC framework is a robust and efficient approach to identify informative gene for microarray data. The combination approach on two selecting methods almost always performed better than the less efficient individual, and in many cases, better than both. More significantly, when considering all three data sets together, the combination approach, on average, outperforms each individual feature selection method. All of these indicate that RCA might be a viable and feasible approach for the microarray gene expression analysis.
Lifted Fundamental Matrices for Mixtures of Central Projection Systems

We study the epipolar geometry between views acquired by mix tures of central projection systems including catadioptric sensors and cameras with lens d istortion. Since the projection models are in general non-linear, a new representation for the geom etry of central images is proposed. This representation is the lifting through Veronese maps of the image plane to the 5D projective space. It is shown that, for most sensor combinations, t here is a bilinear form relating the lifted coordinates of corresponding image points. We analy ze the properties of the embedding and explicitly construct the lifted fundamental matrices i n order to understand their structure. The usefulness of the framework is illustrated by estimating th e epipolar geometry between images acquired by a paracatadioptric system and a camera with radi al distortion.
Ontology agents in FIPA-compliant platforms: A survey and a new proposal

In 2001, FIPA delivered a specification suggesting that each MAS should integrate an “Ontology Agent” (OA) offering services for ontology management. These services should include ontology discovery, maintenance, matching, as well as translation of expressions between different ontologies or content languages. Currently, no FIPA-compliant OA exists that implements all of them. One of the reasons is that providing a service for ontology matching is not an easy task, and coping with translation between ontologies and/or content languages may be even harder. In this paper we survey the state of the art in the area, and we describe our prototypical implementation of an OA for Jade able to match ontologies. Besides “standard” ontology matching algorithms, our OA offers a “matching via upper ontologies” method that, as we showed in a recent technical report, improves the precision of the matching w.r. t. the use of traditional techniques.
CHANGE ORDER INSURANCE POLICY (COIP) IN THE U.S. DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY: IS THERE ANY LIKELIHOOD OF ACCEPTANCE?

To the student of the Georgia Institute of Technology, keep thriving and pushing yourselves beyond your limits. Always remind yourselves that only the sky is the limit. " In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity " Albert Einstein. Progress and Service! iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank God for providing me with the strength and power to go through this process and get to this point in time. This truly was a life-changing experience, where all the suffering and long nights have made it all worth the reward of satisfaction at the end. I would like to thank my father and mother for their continuous guidance and support, without whom I would not have been the man that I am today. Also, the support and motivation that my two sisters have provided me with have made everything worthwhile. To Layal, thank you for being there, bearing with me through every step of the way, and for your constant support and inspiration. I would also like to thank my mentor, Vic Maloof, for being such an inspiring role model, as well as Roy Beeson, who both tremendously helped me all throughout my gradual development in Atlanta on a personal and professional level. For the most part, a big thank you to my advisor, Ennis Parker, for giving me the patience all throughout this challenging journey. I must say that this was such an adventure. Thank you Dr. Castro and Dr. Song for the continuous help and feedback. Thank you Brenda for continuously helping me get out of my comfort zone and pushing me past the boundaries I had occasionally limited myself to. Thank you to my friend Tony for helping me get through and better understand statistical analysis. Finally, I would like to thank all my friends in the school of Building Construction at Georgia Tech for all the help, as well as all the professionals who helped me with the survey, research, and interview processes.
Applying the NGF-enhanced Domain Green's Function Method to the analysis of antenna arrays and ground planes of finite sizes

In this work, antenna arrays will be analysed in the presence of ground planes that are both of finite extent. A hybrid approach between a partitioned MoM scheme called the Numerical Green's Function (NGF) and the Domain Green's Function Method (DGFM) is presented, viz., the NGF-enhanced DGFM. The method allows for computationally efficient simulations, in that various array configurations can be investigated without solving again the part of the problem associated with the ground plane.
LDPC Coded Adaptive Transmission over Fading Channels

This paper first develops a simple closed form expression for the bit error rate (BER) of low density parity check coded (LDPC) M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (MQAM) signals as a function of the signal constellation, received signal to noise ratio (SNR), and LDPC code parameters. Based on this new expression, joint optimization of the SNR target and transmission rate is studied for LDPC coded MQAM signals to maximize the average spectral efficiency (ASE) subject to an average transmit power constraint over Rayleigh flat fading channels. Total or truncated channel-inversion strategies are exploited for the inner-loop power control, since data rate and outer-loop SNR target are adapted either to coded BER (CBER) or to the SNR with instantaneous CBER constraint. It is shown that the use of BER-based adaptation instead of SNR-based adaptation is even more beneficial in coded systems than in un-coded systems in terms of ASE performance. Indeed some of our numerical examples show that adaptation based on CBER has up to 2-2.5 dB power saving over SNR-based adaptation on the ASE of coded systems.
Approximate Entropy Detection Spectrum Sensing in Cognitive Radio

As a new type of radio system, Cognitive Radio (CR) is able to sense the spectrum condition, and according to the result of spectrum sensing to determine the free available frequency band for transmission, in which, the key problem is how to determine whether the spectrum band is idle. The letter presents a new spectrum sensing approach based approximate entropy (ApEn) to determine what spectrum is occupied in frequency. Simulation and analytical results show that the value of ApEn always decreases as the SNR increases, and the detector based ApEn have ability to effectively complete the spectrum sensing.
Super-resolution Magnetic Resonance Image Reconstruction with k-t SPARSE-SENSE at its Core

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) super-resolution image reconstruction algorithm, is presented in the paper. It is shown that the approach improves MRI spatial resolution in cases Compressed Sensing (CS) sequences are used. Compressed sensing (CS) aims at signal and images reconstructing from significantly fewer measurements than were traditionally thought necessary. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a fundamental medical imaging technique struggles with an inherently slow data acquisition process. The use of CS to MRI has the potential for significant scan time reductions, with visible benefits for patients and health care economics. In this study our goal is to combine Super-Resolution image enhancement algorithm with CS framework to achieve high resolution MR output. Both methods emphasize on maximizing image sparsity on known sparse transform domain and minimizing fidelity. The presented algorithm considers the cardiac and respiratory movements.
Domain ontology driven data mining: a medical case study

This paper reports a domain ontology-driven approach to data mining on a medical database containing clinical data on patients undergoing treatment for chronic kidney disease. Each record within the dataset is comprised of a large number (up to 96) of quantitative and qualitative metrics which represent the physiological state of a particular patient on a particular day of treatment. One of the challenges of mining such a dataset is that the meaning of many of the metrics/attributes is not easily understood by someone who is not familiar with the domain of kidney disease and treatment, and it is not clear which of the attributes are useful in data mining. This paper explores the possibility of utilizing a medical domain ontology as a source of domain knowledge to aid in both extracting knowledge and expressing the extracted knowledge in a useful format. We describe an approach in which the domain ontology is used to categorize attributes in preparation for mining 'association rules' in the data; the mined rules were then reviewed by comparison to domain knowledge derived from a domain expert in order to gauge their 'usefulness'. We conclude that domain ontology driven data mining can obtain more meaningful results than naïve mining.
Parallel Construction of Approximate kNN Graph

Building k-nearest neighbor (kNN) graphs is a necessary step in such areas as data mining and machine learning. So in this paper, we attempt to study the kNN furthermore, we first propose a parallel algorithm for approximate kNN graph construction and then apply the kNN graph to the application of clustering. Experiments show that our MPI/OpenMP mixed mode codes can make the construction of approximate kNN graph faster and make the parallelization and implementation easier. Finally, we compare the results of agglomerative clustering methods by using our parallel algorithm to illustrate the applicability of this method.
Psychometric properties of the Arabic version of the Belief into Action Scale

ABSTRACT The Belief into Action Scale (BIAC) is a comprehensive measure of religious involvement intended for monotheistic religious traditions. We examine the psychometric properties of an Arabic version of the BIAC for administration in Muslim populations. A convenience sample of Arabic-speaking Muslims completed an online survey including the 10-item Arabic BIAC and other psychosocial and religious measures. Psychometric properties of the BIAC were examined, including internal reliability, test–retest reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and factor analytic validity. Two hundred and eleven participants completed the BIAC (100% Muslim, average age 31.9, 54% male). The average score was 47.6 (SD = 15.7). Cronbach alpha was . 80 (95% CI .76–.84) and intra-class correlation coefficient between two administrations (n = 30) was . 88 (95% CI .77–.94). Convergent validity was demonstrated by high correlations between the BIAC and existing religiosity scales (r = .52–.58); divergent validity by weak correlations with psychosocial measures (.09–.21); construct validity by high correlations between individual items and total scale score (r’s .53–.72); factor analytic validity by a single factor that explained 81.8% of the scale’s variance and predictive validity by small correlations with psychosocial outcomes in expected directions. The Arabic BIAC is a reliable and valid scale for assessing religious involvement in Muslim Arabic-speaking populations.
Expression of protein tyrosine kinase 6 (PTK6) in nonsmall cell lung cancer and their clinical and prognostic significance

Aim: The aim of the study was to validate the expression of protein tyrosine kinase 6 (PTK6) in nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and to evaluate its clinicopathological and prognostic significance. Methods: We first conducted a meta-analysis on the mRNA profiling data sets of NSCLC in the Oncomine database. Then, one of the most significantly upregulated tyrosine kinase targets, PTK6, was further validated by immunohistochemistry in 104 primary NSCLC tumors. Furthermore the association between PTK6 expression, the clinical parameters, and overall survival was further analyzed. Results: Using the Oncomine database, we identified a list of tyrosine kinase genes related to NSCLC, among which PTK6 was the second most overexpressed gene (median rank = 915, P = 2.9 × 10−5). We further confirmed that NSCLC tumors had a higher expression level of PTK6 than normal pulmonary tissues. Moreover, high PTK6 expression correlated positively with shorter overall survival time, but not with other clinicopathological characteristics. In the multivariate Cox regression model, high PTK6 expression was demonstrated to be an independent prognostic factor for NSCLC patients. Conclusion: Our results validated that PTK6 was found to be overexpressed in a proportion of NSCLC samples, and was associated with a poor prognosis, suggesting that this subgroup of NSCLC patients might benefit from PTK6 inhibitors in the future.
Using the HMAC-Based One-Time Password Algorithm for TLS Authentication

Transport Layer Security (TLS) constitutes the main protocol used to secure the exchanges in the Internet. Indeed, this protocol assures the server authentication based generally on public key certificates but the client authentication is rarely required and if it is assured, its identity is sent in clear text. In this paper, we propose TLS-HOTP protocol, an extension to TLS to provide client authentication based on pre-shared keys (PSK) using the HMAC-Based One-Time Password (HOTP) algorithm. These pre-shared keys are symmetric keys, but the client's key is stored in a secure token, ensuring its mobility. The extension also provides client identity protection to ensure the protection of client credentials. In order to analyze the security of TLS-HOTP, we provide a formal validation of the protocols security goal achievement.