Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Dual-Band High Efficiency Terahertz Meta-Devices Based on Reflective Geometric Metasurfaces

The wavelength-dependent behavior of the metasurface is one of the severe disadvantages in the metasurface-based applications, which greatly limits its applications. In this work, a novel reflective building block (unit cell) has been proposed to work at two arbitrary terahertz frequency bands with independent phase control at each band. The geometric phase building block can reflect the incident circularly polarized wave and convert it to the wave with opposite helicity and high conversion efficiencies at both bands. As proof of concept demonstrations, a dual-band cylindrical meta-lens and two vortex beam generators operating at 0.45 and 0.7 THz are investigated to verify the performance of the proposed building block. The simulated results of the metalens agree very well with the theoretical calculations, which are consistent with the design goals. Moreover, the designed vortex metasurfaces reveal a convenient and low-cost way to realize the vortex beam carrying different/same orbital angular momentum modes at two bands.
Understanding the influence of replacing cement with GGBS on compressive and flexural strengths of concrete at medium workability conditions

Concrete being one of the key ingredients in most civil engineering structures is undoubtedly and either directly or indirectly responsible for polluting the environment, especially while producing cement. Keeping this as a perspective, several researchers all over the world are finding ways and means to decrease the use of cement or replacing it with alternate materials without compromising the performance and quality of concrete. Though extensive research has been done in this area, an emphasis is given in this study on understanding the effect of replacing the cement with GGBS (Ground granulated blast furnace slag) on compressive and flexural strengths of concrete at upper range of medium degree of workability (slump of 80-100mm) as per IS 456-2000. It was noticed that though there is a decrease in compressive strength of concrete at replacements tried, compressive strengths up 50% replacement level are above the target mean strength of concrete. Improvement in flexural strength is noticed beyond 30% replacement of cement with GGBS.
An Analysis of Operational Cost of Internet Exchange Point Service

An internet data exchange point (IXP) is a connection between internet service providers (ISPs) to exchange data of the subscribers. It becomes an essential element of the internet service model, which can reduce the number of connection between the ISPs and also the installation cost. However, as the existing situation of the current internet connection, which ISPs are connected directly to each other, encouraging them to use the IXP is a delicate problem. This work presents another cost advantage of IXP usage. A case study of Thailands internet network is used to present the analysis. The relations amount connection number, the distance and operation cost of IXP are derived. Computation results are used to demonstrate the assumption. The results show that IXP can reduce the individual ISP operational cost and also the market operational cost when a number of connection is over a certain number.
Approximate Random Dropout for DNN training acceleration in GPGPU

The training phases of Deep neural network (DNN) consumes enormous processing time and energy. Compression techniques utilizing the sparsity of DNNs can effectively accelerate the inference phase of DNNs. However, it can be hardly used in the training phase because the training phase involves dense matrix-multiplication using General Purpose Computation on Graphics Processors (GPGPU), which endorse regular and structural data layout. In this paper, we propose the Approximate Random Dropout that replaces the conventional random dropout of neurons and synapses with a regular and online generated patterns to eliminate the unnecessary computation and data access. We develop a SGD-based Search Algorithm that producing the distribution of dropout patterns to compensate the potential accuracy loss. We prove our approach is statistically equivalent to the previous dropout method. Experiments results on multilayer perceptron (MLP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) using well-known benchmarks show that the speedup rate brought by the proposed Approximate Random Dropout ranges from 1.18–2.16 (1.24–1.85) when dropout rate is 0.3–0.7 on MLP (LSTM) with negligible accuracy drop.
Oligodendrocytes in mouse corpus callosum are coupled via gap junction channels formed by connexin47 and connexin32

According to previously published ultrastructural studies, oligodendrocytes in white matter exhibit gap junctions with astrocytes, but not among each other, while in vitro oligodendrocytes form functional gap junctions. We have studied functional coupling among oligodendrocytes in acute slices of postnatal mouse corpus callosum. By whole‐cell patch clamp we dialyzed oligodendrocytes with biocytin, a gap junction‐permeable tracer. On average 61 cells were positive for biocytin detected by labeling with streptavidin‐Cy3. About 77% of the coupled cells stained positively for the oligodendrocyte marker protein CNPase, 9% for the astrocyte marker GFAP and 14% were negative for both CNPase and GFAP. In the latter population, the majority expressed Olig2 and some NG2, markers for oligodendrocyte precursors. Oligodendrocytes are known to express Cx47, Cx32 and Cx29, astrocytes Cx43 and Cx30. In Cx47‐deficient mice, the number of coupled cells was reduced by 80%. Deletion of Cx32 or Cx29 alone did not significantly reduce the number of coupled cells, but coupling was absent in Cx32/Cx47‐double‐deficient mice. Cx47‐ablation completely abolished coupling of oligodendrocytes to astrocytes. In Cx43‐deficient animals, oligodendrocyte‐astrocyte coupling was still present, but coupling to oligodendrocyte precursors was not observed. In Cx43/Cx30‐double deficient mice, oligodendrocyte‐to‐astrocyte coupling was almost absent. Uncoupled oligodendrocytes showed a higher input resistance. We conclude that oligodendrocytes in white matter form a functional syncytium predominantly among each other dependent on Cx47 and Cx32 expression, while astrocytic connexins expression can promote the size of this network. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.
IBM’s Qiskit Tool Chain: Working with and Developing for Real Quantum Computers

Quantum computers promise substantial speedups over conventional machines for many practical applications. While considered "dreams of the future" for a long time, first quantum computers are available now which can be utilized by anyone. A leading force within this development is IBM Research which launched the IBM Q Experience – the first industrial initiative to build universal quantum computers and make them accessible to a broad audience through cloud access. Along this initiative, the tool Qiskit has been launched which enables researchers, teachers, developers, and general enthusiasts to write corresponding code and to run experiments on those machines. At the same time, this provides an ideal playground for the design automation community which – through Qiskit – can deploy improved solutions e.g. on designing and realizing quantum applications. This special session summary aims to provide an introduction into Qiskit and is showcasing selected success stories on how to work with and develop for it. In addition to that, it provides corresponding references to further readings in terms of tutorials and scientific papers as well as links to publicly available implementations for Qiskit extensions.
Research on Dynamic Supply Chain Coordination through Advertising with Reference Price Effect

To better understand the dynamic supply chain coordination with advertising activities, this paper considers the reference price effect, and studies a two-echelon supply chain composing of one manufacturer and one retailer in the dynamic situations of Nash non-cooperative game, Stackelberg game and cooperative game respectively. In our differential game models, market demand is influenced by the goodwill and the difference between reference price and actual price. Advertising activities play a significant role in enhancing goodwill which further increases in reference price. The results indicate that it is a kind of Pareto improvement for the manufacturer. , the retailer and the whole supply chain from Nash non-cooperative game to Stackelberg game and finally to cooperative game. The numerical analyses further confirm the research results.
Basketball Movements Recognition Using a Wrist Wearable Inertial Measurement Unit

The traditional basketball training is unable to be quantified and shared with others for it heavily relies on the coach's experience. In this paper, we develop an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to collect movement data of the basketball player and identify his postures, which helps improve the coach's guidance and the athletes' skills in a quality manner. Additionally, the IMU sensor is designed to recognize nine kinds of basic basketball movements, such as stand, walk, run, jump, in-situ dribble, dribble while walking, dribble while running, set shot, and jump shot. Experimentally, the IMU sensor is worn on the player's right wrist. Meanwhile, the player's movements are captured by the sports camera (GoPro Hero 6) for reference. Further, five features are extracted from y-axis acceleration (YAA) data and z-axis angular velocity (ZAAV) data for the analysis of basketball movements. Finally, a 98.9% accuracy rate of recognizing each basic basketball movement of one player is achieved by using a neural network algorithm.
A Multi-Level-Denoising Autoencoder Approach for Wind Turbine Fault Detection

The effective fault detection of wind turbines (WTs) can greatly help to improve their availability and reduce their operation and maintenance costs. In this context, data-driven fault detection approaches have attracted a lot of interests due to the availability of a large amount of monitoring sensor data containing rich information related to health conditions of WTs. However, sensor data collected from WTs are naturally multivariate and highly nonlinear correlated with redundant information and significantly contaminated measurement noise, which makes the WT fault detection more challenging. To this end, this paper develops a multivariate data-driven fault detection (MDFD) framework based on a recently emerged neural network algorithm named denoising autoencoder (DAE). Instead of using a single fixed noise level in the traditional DAE, a novel multi-level-denoising autoencoder (MLD-AE) method is proposed to enhance the representation learning ability by designing different multi-level noise adding schemes. The proposed MLD-AE could better discover useful patterns at multiple corrupted scales and capture nonlinear dependencies from noisy multivariate sensor data, therefore robustly reconstruct the original signal with the preserved largest information. The proposed framework and method are evaluated on both simulated data from a generic 5 MW WT benchmark and SCADA data from a real wind farm. The results demonstrate that our proposed MLD-AE-based fault detection approach significantly outperforms traditional DAE, AE, and linear PCA approaches, which has great potentials for practical applications in the wind industry.
Hot Spot Visualization Analysis of Energy Storage Technology

This study visualize the literature in the field of energy storage technology in the core database of Web of Science from 2003 to 2017. And also reviews the structure and content of the research network of foreign energy storage technologies, using cluster analysis of co-citation of quotations and co-occurrence analysis of Keywords and authors of literature. This reveals the key literature, hot topics and research cooperation in the field of energy storage. It is hoped that the research results of the article can provide valuable reference and reference for research and development in the field of energy storage technology. Research findings: The hotspot of energy storage technology has gradually turned from early lithium-ion batteries, traditional capacitors and fuel cells to supercapacitors, asymmetric capacitors and phase change energy storage. The research on energy storage materials has also gradually shifted from the initial material selection and performance exploration to the design of composite nanomaterials and material structures.
Quantifying Crosstalk Among Interferon-γ, Interleukin-12, and Tumor Necrosis Factor Signaling Pathways Within a TH1 Cell Model

Combining experiments with mathematical modeling provides insights into the responses of T cells to cytokines. Modeling the T Cell Response The fate of T cells involved in an immune response is determined in part by the cytokine milieu. Despite our extensive knowledge of the receptors, signaling proteins, and cytokines involved, how downstream signaling pathways interact to determine T cell fate is unclear. Klinke et al. measured receptor abundance, signaling protein activation, cytokine production, and cell population changes and used these parameters to construct mathematical models to gain insights into the signaling pathways in a mouse T cell line that were stimulated by the cytokine interleukin-12 (IL-12). This combined approach uncovered previously unappreciated aspects of IL-12 signaling that determined the T cell response and serves as an example of how mathematical modeling can refine our understanding of signaling pathways. T helper (TH) cells integrate biochemical cues present in the tissue microenvironment and produce cytokines that orchestrate immune responses. Previous discoveries have revealed a qualitative understanding of how TH cells process this biochemical information; however, the lack of methods to quantify how well these depictions apply to a particular cell type limits our ability to translate our knowledge of the immune response from one biological system to another. We used model-based inference methods and quantitative flow cytometric analysis in mouse TH1 cells to determine the relative contributions of different putative branches in the signaling network that responds to the cytokine interleukin-12 (IL-12), which links innate and adaptive immunity. The response of TH1 cells to IL-12 exhibited hysteresis because it depended on both current and past exposure and engaged a positive feedback mechanism through the direct activation of signal transducer and activator of transcription 1. The hysteresis in the dose-response curve to IL-12 created a transient “memory” by sustaining cytokine secretion after the withdrawal of the stimulus. In summary, this combined experimental and computational approach illustrates how model-based inference can be used to better understand how cells process and act upon biochemical cues present in the tissue microenvironment.
A Novel Intelligent Fault Detection Scheme for Rolling Bearing Based on Morphological Multiscale Dispersion Entropy

This paper develops a novel fault detection method for rolling bearing based on morphological multiscale dispersion entropy (MMDE). MMDE is mainly made up of two parts (i.e. morphological filtering and multiscale dispersion entropy (MDE)). Concretely, the original vibration data under different fault status is first preprocessed by morphology-hat product operation (MHPO). Afterwards, MDE of the filtered signal is calculated for the purpose of feature extraction under multi-fault conditions. Finally, the constructed fault feature matrix is fed into particle swarm optimization-based support vector machine (PSO-SVM) for realizing the identification of different bearing fault conditions. The efficacy of the presented method is validated by applying the experimental examples. Results demonstrate that MMDE can work more effectively in recognizing bearing fault type than several popular entropies (e.g. MDE, MPE and MSE).
Contamination Management of Broad-Range or Specific PCR: Is There Any Difference?

We read with interest the exchange of correspondence between Millar et al. ([5a][1]) and Vandecasteele et al. ([6][2]) about the contamination management of broad-range ribosomal DNA PCR. The latter should certainly require more stringent measures than specific PCR, but this may prove theoretical.
On the experimental protocol in Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning

The VRFT (Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning) is a model-free method for the design of feedback controllers in a linear setting. In practical applications, two main critical issues are the undermodeling of the controller structure and the measurement noise. This paper proposes an optimized experimental protocol, in order to better cope with these two critical points, without giving up on the main properties of the methodology.
Humanoid Navigation: An Intelligent Computer Vision Based Approach

With an increasing demand towards use of humanoids in industrial automation and other related applications, navigation and path planning has emerged as one of the most promising area of research since last few decades. The current investigation is devoted towards the use of a computer vision technique integrated with the sensory network of a humanoid robot for navigation in a complex environment. Here, humanoid NAO has been used for navigational purpose. The basic problem that arises in the use of only a sensory network of a humanoid is that the ultrasonic sensors mounted on the humanoid NAO can detect and measure the distance between the obstacles and the humanoid but not their exact location. This leads to a deadlock situation when both the sensors detect the same obstacle simultaneously, or a very large sized obstacle comes exactly in front of the humanoid. Therefore, the camera mounted on the NAO itself is integrated with the sensors to provide a decision making ability when a deadlock situation arises. The proposed technique is tested with the humanoid NAO in a real-time experimental setup, and satisfactory results are obtained.
Insights on Anisotropic Dissipative Quantum Transport in n-Type Phosphorene MOSFET

We study the quantum dissipative transport in Phosphorene n-type metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) in armchair and zigzag directions. The transport equations are solved quantum mechanically under the nonequilibrium Green's function (NEGF) formalism and relies on a single-band effective mass Hamiltonian. The treatment of electron phonon scattering is done under the self consistent Born approximation (SCBA). We investigate in detail the effect of different acoustic and optical phonon modes on the drain current of the device for different channel lengths. We show that optical phonon mode with a deformation potential constant of 8.07x10^8 eV/cm and energy 0.0421 eV plays the most important role in electron phonon scattering and subsequent degradation of ON current in devices along both directions. We also find that effect of electron phonon scattering is more pronounced along zigzag direction.
On the use of causal feature selection in the context of machine-learning indirect test

The test of analog, mixed-signal and RF (AMS-RF) circuits is still considered as a matter of human creativity, and although many attempts have been made towards their automation, no accepted and complete solution is yet available. Indeed, capturing the design knowledge of an experienced analog designer is one of the key challenges faced by the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) community. In this paper we explore the use of causal inference tools in the context of AMS-RF design and test with the goal of defining a methodology for uncovering the root causes of performance variation in these systems. We believe that such an analysis can be a promising first step for future EDA algorithms for AMS-RF systems.
Accurate Estimation of Gait Altitude Using One Wearable IMU Sensor

We present a novel method of estimating gait altitude by using the acceleration and angular velocity data obtained from a single Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensor. High-precision foot tracking and vertical positioning were achieved by using this method. The inherent drifts of IMU sensors, which may cause cumulative errors for position estimation, were reduced by using our algorithm. Firstly, a multitude-threshold detection method was used to determine the stance phase and swing phase in gait movement. Secondly, a zero-velocity update was performed in the stance phase to minimize the drift error when the single foot is stationary. Finally, in the swing phase, the motion direction was represented by quaternion, and the gait altitude was estimated using a method that combines a Complementary Filter (CF) algorithm and a Target-error Compensation algorithm. Experimental results show that this method can effectively reduce inherent drifts of wearable IMU sensors and ensure accurate estimation of gait altitude.
Proteolytic refolding of the HIV‐1 capsid protein amino‐terminus facilitates viral core assembly

After budding, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) must ‘mature’ into an infectious viral particle. Viral maturation requires proteolytic processing of the Gag polyprotein at the matrix–capsid junction, which liberates the capsid (CA) domain to condense from the spherical protein coat of the immature virus into the conical core of the mature virus. We propose that upon proteolysis, the amino‐terminal end of the capsid refolds into a β‐hairpin/helix structure that is stabilized by formation of a salt bridge between the processed amino‐terminus (Pro1) and a highly conserved aspartate residue (Asp51). The refolded amino‐terminus then creates a new CA–CA interface that is essential for assembling the condensed conical core. Consistent with this model, we found that recombinant capsid proteins with as few as four matrix residues fused to their amino‐termini formed spheres in vitro, but that removing these residues refolded the capsid amino‐terminus and redirected protein assembly from spheres to cylinders. Moreover, point mutations throughout the putative CA–CA interface blocked capsid assembly in vitro, core assembly in vivo and viral infectivity. Disruption of the conserved amino‐terminal capsid salt bridge also abolished the infectivity of Moloney murine leukemia viral particles, suggesting that lenti‐ and oncoviruses mature via analogous pathways.
Position Consensus of Higher Order Integrator Agents

In this paper, we investigate the problem of position consensus for a group of agents modeled as higher order integrators. A distributed control methodology is proposed which combines static and dynamic feedback controllers. The design of the static feedback controller is independent of the underlying communication topology. The coupling among agents is accomplished in the dynamic controller. This combined structure of the control protocol ensures position consensus among agents with final velocity settling to zero. A reduction in the number of design parameters is also discussed. Numerical simulations justify the efficacy of the control protocol proposed in this paper.
A CNN-Based Computational Encoding Model for Human V2 Cortex

The computation encoding models, used to predict human brain activity from natural image stimuli, can be performed as a function simulator of human vision information process. In the traditional computational encoding models for human V2 cortex, due to the lack of higher visual feature and information processing hierarchy, it is difficult to achieve expected predict performance. Here, activated by the properties of CNN, we trained a CNN as an encoding model for human V2 cortex, which can be trained for predicting stimuli-evoked response measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results reveal that the CNN-based encoding model can achieve a higher performance, proves that CNN have advantages in encoding higher visual areas. This finding provides a new framework for the human vision encoding models and helps to further understand of the human vision mechanism from the computational point view.