Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Nanomechanical Properties of Bioinspired Organic–Inorganic Composite Films

The extraordinary mechanical performance of many biological materials has inspired numerous researchers to transfer the structural design principles found in nature to artificially made materials. [1] One intriguing example is nacre, which has a highly regular “brick-and-mortar” structure composed of alternating layers of mineral sheets separated by thin layers of organic “glue”. [2–6] This highly organized design results in a 1000-fold increase in toughness over its constituent materials, and furthermore enables an excellent combination of stiffness, strength and impact resistance. [7] The underlying toughening mechanism has been mainly attributed to enhanced crack deflection, through which efficient redistribution of the applied fracture load is achieved. [8,9]
Prediction Model Using Web Usage Mining Techniques

Popularity of WWW increasing day by day which results in the increase of web based services , due to which web is now largest data repository. In order to handle this incremental nature of data various prediction techniques are used. If the prefetched pages are not visited by user in their subsequent access there will be wastage network bandwidth as it is in limited amount. So there is critical requirement of accurate prediction method. As the data present on web is heterogeneous in nature and incremental in nature, during the pre-processing step hierarchical clustering technique is used. Then using Markov model category and page prediction is done and lastly page filtering is done using keywords.
Treating Arterial Stiffness in Metabolic Syndrome and Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus

Arterial stiffening characterizes ageing and several diseases related to increased cardiovascular (CV) risk such as the metabolic syndrome (MetS), type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM), hypertension, obesity and smoking. Several studies have shown that arterial stiffness is a strong, independent predictor of CV morbidity and mortality risk in such patient populations. Lifestyle measures and drugs frequently prescribed in MetS and T2DM patients such as hypolipidaemic, an- tihypertensive, hypoglycaemic and antiplatelet agents, may improve arterial stiffness, thus further reducing vascular risk. The current review considers the effects of these drugs and lifestyle changes on arterial stiffness in MetS and T2DM pa- tients. The potential clinical implications of such effects on treatment decisions in clinical practice remain to be estab- lished. Multifactorial interventions may be even more beneficial in terms of CV risk reduction and thus their impact on ar- terial stiffness should also be evaluated.
Single-package motion gesture sensor for portable applications

Proximity-based motion gesture sensors (MGSs) using IR LEDs have been widely researched for contactless human-machine interfaces. Conventional MGSs have incorporated discrete photodiodes into a receiver, which prevents them from being adopted for portable handheld devices because of their large size and high profile. This paper proposes a proximity-based contactless MGS that embeds photodiodes and a motion detection algorithm into a single package. The area and height of the proposed optical structure including photodiodes and an optical block are reduced by 96.2% and 71.7%, respectively, compared with the most recently developed MGS. Furthermore, the proposed sensor achieves a recognition rate of over 99.5% on average at various speeds of hand movements. A prototype system is implemented and tested for validation1.
Robust speech recognition using beamforming with adaptive microphone gains and multichannel noise reduction

This paper presents a robust speech recognition system using a microphone array for the 3rd CHiME Challenge. A minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer with adaptive microphone gains is proposed for robust beamforming. Two microphone gain estimation methods are studied using the speech-dominant time-frequency bins. A multichannel noise reduction (MCNR) postprocessing is also proposed to further reduce the interference in the MVDR processed signal. Experimental results for the ChiME-3 challenge show that both the proposed MVDR beamformer with microphone gains and the MCNR postprocessing improve the speech recognition performance significantly. With the state-of-the-art deep neural network (DNN) based acoustic model, our system achieves a word error rate (WER) of 11.67% on the real test data of the evaluation set.
Logical Partitioning without Architectural Supports

As a method for running multiple operating systems on one machine, we propose a new resource partitioning method we have named "single hardware with independent multiple operating systems" (SHIMOS). In SHIMOS, CPU and memory resources are partitioned by multiple native kernels without any architectural virtualization supports. There is nearly no slowdown, unlike VMs, because the kernel and user programs are executed directly by the real CPUs. To evaluate our method, we compare an implementation on x86 with VMs by running benchmarks simultaneously. From this comparison, we show that the method proposed is as fast as a real machine, and that it can be twice as fast as the existing VM method in executing I/O- oriented processes.
Evaluation of the Tensor Polynomial and Hoffman Strength Theories for Composite Materials

The Hoffman theory and the Tensor Polynomial (Tsai-Wu) theory with F 12 set equal to zero have been found to be preferred alternatives to the general Tensor Polynomial theory for predicting strength of filamentary composite laminae. These theories were used to predict failure of off-axis boron/epoxy and E-glass/epoxy test specimens and gave excellent agree ment with available experimental results. In lieu of additional experimental data on other materials and loading conditions, a numerical experiment was performed to estimate the errors for ten different composite systems under six different loadings. The maximum error in predicted failure loads among all cases was below 10 percent. These results suggest that the Hoff man failure theory and the Tensor Polynomial theory with F 12 = 0 can predict failure of practical filamentary composite materials under general biaxial loading with sufficient accuracy for engineering applications. Thus, use of either theory is recommended as a preferred alternative to the experimental determination of F 12 in the general Tensor Polynomial theory for orthotropic laminae.
Evaluation of a policy-based network management system for energy-efficiency

Energy efficiency features are being integrated in network protocols and management systems. Simulations can provide in put on how a particular algorithm would perform in different network conditions. However, building an environment that is able to comprehensively account for interactions between different network functions is difficult. A combination of emulation and implementation of major energy efficiency features provides a view closer to what may happen in a real deployment. Previously, we described a policy-based network management system that optimizes network paths with respect to energy efficiency. In this paper, we evaluate the system using software routers for emulating network equipment functionality. We discuss extensions we developed and trade-offs of employing a state-of-the-art Linux distribution to emulate an energy efficient router. The article then presents results from the evaluation of the management system and argues about the benefits of the emulation environment.
Extending the map cube operator with multiple spatial aggregate functions and map overlay

The map cube operator for spatial multidimensional databases supports spatial aggregation using geometric union and enables information visualization in maps. In this paper, we propose three extensions to the map cube operator. First, support for spatial aggregate functions other than geometric union. Second, support for several spatial aggregate functions simultaneously. Third, support for overlaying the map cube results with maps. In addition, we fix some grammar inconsistencies of this operator. We illustrate our proposed extensions and improvements in a case study about crimes.
Severe infective keratitis leading to hospital admission in New Zealand

Aim: To identify key risk factors and the management and outcome of severe infective keratitis leading to public hospital admission in New Zealand. Methods: Over a 2 year period, all admissions of presumed infective keratitis to Auckland Hospital were identified. The clinical records of all 103 cases were retrospectively reviewed with respect to clinical features, risk factors, management, and outcomes. Results: The mean time from first symptoms or signs and presentation to hospital was 8.9 (SD 15.5) days. The majority of subjects, 88%, had at least one of the risk factors commonly associated with infective keratitis including previous ocular surgery (30%), contact lens wear (26%), topical corticosteroid use (25%), and ocular trauma (24%). Corneal scraping was performed in 92% and of a total of 105 scrapes, 71% were positive. Bacteria were isolated in all these cases, the majority being Gram positive organisms (72%). The most common isolates identified were coagulase negative Staphylococcus (16%), Propionibacterium acnes (14%), Staphylococcus epidermidis (11%), and Streptococcus pneumoniae (9%). In addition, yeasts were isolated in 5%, fungi in 4%, virus in 2%, and chlamydia in 1%. Importantly, polymicrobial infection accounted for 33% of culture positive cases. Antimicrobial treatment was changed on the basis of culture results in 17 cases (16.5%). Median initial visual and final best corrected visual acuity was 6/36–6/48 (logMAR 0.86) (IQR 0.39–2.00) and 6/12–6/15 (logMAR 0.360) (IQR 0.15–1.70), respectively. Previous ocular surgery and topical corticosteroid use were significantly associated with poorer visual acuity. The mean hospital stay was 5.8 days and the median 4.0 (IQR 2.0–8.0) days. Longer duration of stay was associated with the presence of hypopyon, larger ulcers, previous ocular surgery, and poor visual acuity. Conclusions: Infectious keratitis is an important cause of ocular morbidity. A significant proportion of cases have potentially modifiable risk factors. Previous ocular surgery and topical corticosteroid use, in particular, were associated with poorer visual outcomes. Many cases of severe keratitis might be avoided, or their severity reduced, by appropriate education of patients and ophthalmologists.
A Review of Co-saliency Detection Technique: Fundamentals, Applications, and Challenges

Co-saliency detection is a newly emerging and rapidly growing research area in computer vision community. As a novel branch of visual saliency, co-saliency detection refers to the discovery of common and salient foregrounds from two or more relevant images, and can be widely used in many computer vision tasks. The existing co-saliency detection algorithms mainly consist of three components: extracting effective features to represent the image regions, exploring the informative cues or factors to characterize co-saliency, and designing effective computational frameworks to formulate co-saliency. Although numerous methods have been developed, the literature is still lacking a deep review and evaluation of co-saliency detection techniques. In this paper, we aim at providing a comprehensive review of the fundamentals, challenges, and applications of co-saliency detection. Specifically, we provide an overview of some related computer vision works, review the history of co-saliency detection, summarize and categorize the major algorithms in this research area, discuss some open issues in this area, present the potential applications of co-saliency detection, and finally point out some unsolved challenges and promising future works. We expect this review to be beneficial to both fresh and senior researchers in this field, and give insights to researchers in other related areas regarding the utility of co-saliency detection algorithms.
Fluorine Containing High-Silica Glasses for Speciality Optical Fibers

We investigated the codoping of different high-silica glasses (GeO2 – SiO2, B2O3 – SiO2) with fluorine with respect to the use of such glasses in actual optical fiber devices (fiber Bragg gratings, fiber lasers and amplifiers, optical filters, etc). It could be shown that there is a strong interaction between fluorine and the other dopants germanium and boron during gas phase deposition of the glassy layers. The doping concentration in dependence on the experimental conditions (gas concentrations, flow velocity, temperature) can be understood and quantitatively described on the basis of the chemical thermodynamics (equilibrium chemistry) of the systems. This makes possible the defined preparation of complex fiber structures in terms of refractive index profiles and multielement distributions.
Fast distributed consensu algorithms based on advection-diffusion processes

Distributed consensus algorithms have recently gained a large interest in sensor networks as a way to achieve globally optimal decisions in a totally decentralized way, that is without the need of sending all the data collected by the sensors to a fusion center. The goal of this work is to show that modeling a consensus algorithm as the homogenization process of a fluid through an advection-diffusion process provides a fundamental clue to design innovative consensus algorithms whose convergence rate can be increased by acting on the (equivalent) advection mechanism, without increasing the coverage radius of any sensor. In particular, we show the increase of convergence rate resulting from a proper interplay between advection and diffusion mechanisms.
Modifications in the laminar organization of peptide‐like immunoreactivity in the anuran optic tectum following retinal deafferentation

Substance P (SP)‐, leucine‐enkephalin (LENK)‐, cholecystokinin octa‐peptide (CCK8)bombesin (BOM)‐, and avian pancreatic polypeptide (APP)‐like immunoreactiyities were analyzed in the optic tectum of Rana pipiens 5–99 days after unilateral eye enucleation, or optic nerve ligation, by means of the peroxidase‐antiperoxidase and indirect fluorescence single and double labeling methods. The normal pattern (Kuljis and Karten, 1981, 1982c) of peptide‐like immunoreactivity was observed ipsilaterally to the operation. Contralateral deafferented tectae displayed conspicuous modifications in the normal pattern of peptide‐like immunoreactivity unique to each of the substances studied. The modifications of peptide‐like immunoreactivity observed varied depending both on the survival time and on the particular peptide analyzed, with either increment or diminution or disappearance–or combinations thereof–in the staining intensity of some of the peptide‐positive bands in the superficial one‐third (superficial neuropil) of the tectum. The onset of these changes is detectable immunocytochemicahy between the sixth and tenth day following deafferentation. By 2–4 weeks full expression of the long‐term changes is reached with no apparent further modification up to the 99th postoperative day. The rapid onset of these phenomena suggests the existence of a previously unrecognized retinal ganglion cell terminal peptidergic contribution to the tectum and/or rapid transsynaptic effects. The former possibility is suggested by recent observations demon‐strating peptide‐like immunoreactivity for SP, LENK, CCK8 and BOM in the retinal stump of ligated optic nerves (Kuljis and Karten, 1982b). The fact that no vertebrate retinal ganglion cells have been shown to contain any of these peptides (Brecha et al., 79; Famiglietti et al., 1980; Eldred and Karten, 1981; Karten et al., 1982), however, argues against the possibility of a retinal terminal contribution to peptide‐like immunoreactivity in the tectum and suggests that transsynaptic phenomena are involved.
Highly sensitive and selective optical fiber fluorescence sensor for lead ion detection in water using corrugated long period fiber grating

Optical fiber fluorescence sensors are widely used for chemical sensing. Intrinsic fluorescence sensors such as evanescent-wave sensors can be used for surface sensing while extrinsic sensors are used for bulk sensing. In intrinsic/ extrinsic fluorescence sensors, typically the side-wall/end-face of a single/multi-mode fiber is used. In this paper we introduce a novel intrinsic optical fiber fluorescence sensor which uses the side-wall of a large-core multi-mode fiber to collect the fluorescence from the bulk of samples. The method is to use a corrugated long period fiber grating, fabricated by a CO2 laser, to couple radiating modes to the core modes. Using the side-wall of a fiber helps to fabricate a multitarget or a distributed sensor. We also report the sensing of lead ions with concentration as low as few ppb in water using a novel fluorescence turn-on polymer as a chemical probe.
Hybrid robust LS-SVMR with outliers for MIMO system

In this study, a hybrid robust LS-SVMR approach is proposed to deal with training data sets with outliers dor MIMO system. The proposed approach consists of two stages of strategies. The first stage is for data preprocessing and a support vector regression is used to filter out outliers. Then, the training data set except for outliers, called as the reduced training data set, is directly used in training the non-robust least squares support vector machines for regression (LS-SVMR) for MIMO system in the second stage. Consequently, the learning mechanism of the proposed approach is much easier than the weighted LS-SVMR approach. Based on the simulation results, the performance of the proposed approach with non-robust LS-SVMR is superior to the weighted LS-SVMR approach for MIMO system when the outliers exist.
A High-Performance Memory-Efficient Architecture of the Bit-Plane Coder in JPEG 2000

The paper presents a high-performance architecture of the bit-plane coder for the embedded block coding algorithm in JPEG 2000. The architecture adopts a pipeline structure and is dedicated to generate two context-symbol pairs per clock cycle. A novel method called dynamic significance state restoring (DSSR) allows reduction of on-chip memories. The overall design is described in VHDL and synthesized for FPGA and ASIC technologies. Simulation results show that for FPGA Stratix devices, the engine can process about 22 million samples at the frequency of 66 MHz
Risk Factor Stratification for Intracranial Stenosis in Taiwanese Patients With Cervicocerebral Stenosis

Background Intracranial stenosis (ICS) is a major determinant of ischemic stroke in Asians. We determined the clinical significance of different risk factors and the role of ICS in Taiwanese patients with varied distributions of cervicocerebral stenosis. Methods and Results Presence of extracranial carotid stenosis (ECS, ≥70%) and ICS (>50%) was examined in 13 539 patients using ultrasonography and magnetic resonance angiography, respectively. Seven hundred thirty‐three patients with non‐ECS/ICS (n=372), isolated ICS (n=112), isolated ECS (n=121), or combined ECS/ICS (CEIS, n=128) were selected. Prevalence of ischemic stroke in each group was compared, and risk factors for stenosis were determined. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for each risk factor was calculated. Prevalence of ischemic stroke was highest in patients with CEIS (odds ratio 15.86; P<0.001), followed in decreasing order by those with isolated ICS (odds ratio 7.16; P<0.001), isolated ECS (odds ratio 1.77; P=0.011), and non‐ECS/ICS. Multivariate logistic regression analysis revealed that hypertension, coronary artery disease, and smoking were risk factors for isolated ECS; hypertension, diabetes mellitus, coronary artery disease, and smoking were risk factors for isolated ICS; and diabetes mellitus, coronary artery disease, and smoking were risk factors for CEIS. Smoking, diabetes mellitus, and coronary artery disease were the greatest contributors to CEIS, isolated ICS, and isolated ECS, respectively. Conclusions CEIS was associated with higher odds of ischemic stroke compared with isolated ICS and isolated ECS. Smoking and diabetes mellitus, major determinants of CEIS and isolated ICS, should be targeted in therapeutic strategies to reduce the risk of ischemic stroke.
Graph-Based Background Suppression for Scene Text Detection

Detecting text in video or natural scene image is quite challenging due to the complex background, various fonts and illumination conditions. The preprocessing period, which suppresses the nontext areas so as to highlight the text areas, is the basis for further text detection. In this paper, a novel graph-based background suppression method for scene text detection is proposed. Considering each pixel as a node in the graph, our approach incorporates pixel-level and context-level features into a graph. Various factors contribute to the unary and pair wise cost function which is optimized via max-flow/min-cut algorithm [16] to get a binary image whose nontext pixels are suppressed so that text pixels are highlighted. Furthermore, the proposed background suppression method could be easily combined with other detection methods to improve the performance. Experimental results on ICDAR 2011 competition dataset show promising performance.
Could the depression of obese patients suffering from chronic hepatitis C be temporarily improved?

Summary. Depression is an usual finding in patients suffering from chronic hepatitis C. Development of moderate to severe depressive symptoms occurs frequently during pegylated interferon/ribavirin treatment and is generally predicted by baseline depression scores. Furthermore, the obese patients have been found to be twice as likely to suffer from anxiety, impaired social interaction, and depression when compared with the no obese population. In order to evaluate the efficacy of a pharmacological treatment of depression, 68 obese patients with chronic hepatitis C, under or not antiviral therapy, were selected and enrolled into this open, controlled pilot study. Our population was divided in two groups: ‘on Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors plus support’, with individual titration of medication to adequate side‐effects, including thirty seven patients, and ‘on only support’, involving thirty one patients. Both groups were well balanced for gender, age and antiviral treatment. The selected patients had, at entry, a Beck Depression Inventory score of 24.5 ± 8.1 (mean ± SD). Therapeutic successful outcomes (a decreased score of ≥ 10 units compared to the baseline) were statistically more frequent in antidepressant drug‐treated group (P = 0.005); they were well predicted by dose of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. Thirty five percent of patients were non‐responder to Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. The drug tolerability was good. Nearly twenty percent of patients were responder to only support.
Energy harvesting properties of all-thin-film multiferroic cantilevers

We have measured electromagnetic energy harvesting properties of all-thin-film magnetoelectric (ME) heterostructures on Si cantilevers. The devices are built on a silicon oxide/nitride/oxide stack, and the ME layers consist of a magnetostrictive Fe0.7Ga0. 3 thin film and a Pb(Zr0.52Ti0.48)O3 piezoelectric thin film. The harvested peak power at 1 Oe is 0.7 mW/cm3 (RMS) at the resonant frequency (3.8 kHz) with a load of 12.5 kΩ. The resonant frequency was found to display DC bias magnetic field dependence indicative of a magnetization canting with respect to the cantilever easy axis as a result of interplay between the anisotropy and Zeeman energies.