Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
0 Germanium-on-Silicon for Integrated Silicon Photonics

To meet the unprecedented demands for data transmission speed and bandwidth silicon integrated photonics that can generate, modulate, process and detect light signals is being developed. Integrated silicon photonics that can be built using existing CMOS fabrication facilities offers the tantalizing prospect of a scalable and cost-efficient solution to replace electrical interconnects. Silicon, together with commonly used dielectric materials in CMOS processes such as silicon dioxide, is a great material system for optical confinement and wave transmission in near infrared range. However, silicon is not a good choice for active photonic devices due to its transparency in such wavelength range. Germanium and GeSi alloy, the materials that have long been adopted to improve the performance of silicon transistors in many ways, have been showing their potential as the building blocks of such active integrated optical devices. This chapter discusses the research of using germanium and GeSi for silicon-integrated photodetection and light source in the contexts of material physics and growth, device design and fabrication. This introduction section briefly introduces the background of integrated silicon photonics and some germanium properties which are important for photonic applications. Next section focuses on waveguide-integrated germanium photodetectors which can readily be integrated with silicon waveguide on mature silicon or silicon-on-insulator (SOI) platform. The physics and design considerations of these devices are presented with details. The fabrication processes of these devices are also discussed with some extent. Next section includes a newly developed field that using germanium for light sources in silicon photonics applications such as light-emitting-diodes (LEDs) and lasers. There has been a few breakthroughs in this topic including the author’s work of epitaxial germanium LEDs and optically pumped lasers operating at room temperature. The physics of this unusual concept of using indirect band gap material for light emission is discussed in details and some important results are presented.
Trade determination in multi-attribute exchanges

Electronic exchanges are double-sided marketplaces that allow multiple buyers to trade with multiple sellers, with aggregation of demand and supply across the bids to maximize the revenue in the market. Two important issues in the design of exchanges are (1) trade determination (determining the number of goods traded between any buyer-seller pair) and (2) pricing. W address the trade determination issue for one-shot, multi-attribute exchanges that trade multiple units of the same good. The bids are configurable with separable additive price functions over the attributes and each function is continuous and piecewise linear. We model trade determination as mixed integer programming problems for different possible bid structures and show that even in two-attribute exchanges, trade determination is NP-hard for certain bid structures. We also make some observations on the pricing issues that are closely related to the mixed integer formulations.
Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface ∗

It is fairly standard to assume that a speech act consists of an illocutionary level of meaning, F , and a separate level of propositional content, p, such that F takes p as its argument, F (p). This paper is concerned (i) with establishing for one language, Cusco Quechua (CQ), to which of these two levels of meaning its evidential and its epistemic modal markers belong, and (ii) with developing a formal analysis of evidential and epistemic modal illocutionary modifiers. Illocutionary modifiers generally have not received much attention in the formal literature, and formal treatments of evidentials in other languages usually take them to be epistemic modals with evidential presuppositions. Along the way, it will also be argued that evidentiality and epistemic modality as semantic notions are not tied to either level of meaning, that is, both evidentials and epistemic modals occur on both levels. After introducing the relevant linguistic markers in CQ in section 1, I will discuss some tests for distinguishing between illocutionary and propositional-level modifiers and apply them to the CQ markers. Some of the tests can only positively identify propositional operators (embedding, scoping under propositional operators), and it is therefore quite difficult to positively establish an element as an illocutionary modifier. Section 3 begins to develop a formal analysis of these markers in sdrt, which is one of the few existing frameworks that integrates both levels of meaning. The account to be developed analyzes the evidentials as giving rise to evidential sincerity conditions which in turn affect the speaker’s beliefs.
A Schema for Adding Dependent Types to ML

We present an approach to enriching the type system of ML with a form of dependent types, where index objects are restricted to constraint domains C, leading to the DML(C) language schema. Pure inference for the resulting system is no longer possible, but we show that type-checking a sufficiently annotated program can be reduced to constraint satisfaction. We prove that DML(C) is conservative over ML, but the main technical contribution of the paper lies in our language design, including its elaboration and type-checking rules which make the approach practical. This has been demonstrated in related experiments where we obtained significant speedups in many examples by statically eliminating array bound checks. There constraints are linear equalities and inequalities over integers, solved by a variant of Fourier’s method.
Enabling Service Level Negotiation in a Self-Management Framework

Autonomic systems interaction is a challenging area of research. In this paper, we provide autonomic systems with a new interaction capability thanks to the negotiation of a service level in a self-management framework describing vertical and horizontal interactions. We use interoperable Web Services technologies to specify a service level negotiation protocol called SLNP and we present implementation results to evaluate the SLNP negotiation time according to different scenarios.
Formulas for the width of interval products

Sharp formulas for the width of the product of intervals are derivedwhich are simpler ahd more effective :than the ones previously, known. These formulas are useful in applications and they are appropriate tools for estimating the' quality of interval evaluations, proofs of such formulas will, in general, result in a number of different cases involving' longwinded cak'ulations. By utilizing certain functionals which are~ invariants of appropriate interval tranfformatiods the calculations are reduced to the ones required for. a minimum number of:cases,
Herbarium specimens reveal the footprint of climate change on flowering trends across north-central North America

Shifting flowering phenology with rising temperatures is occurring worldwide, but the rarity of co-occurring long-term observational and temperature records has hindered the evaluation of phenological responsiveness in many species and across large spatial scales. We used herbarium specimens combined with historic temperature data to examine the impact of climate change on flowering trends in 141 species collected across 116,000 km2 in north-central North America. On average, date of maximum flowering advanced 2.4 days °C−1, although species-specific responses varied from − 13.5 to + 7.3 days °C−1. Plant functional types exhibited distinct patterns of phenological responsiveness with significant differences between native and introduced species, among flowering seasons, and between wind- and biotically pollinated species. This study is the first to assess large-scale patterns of phenological responsiveness with broad species representation and is an important step towards understanding current and future impacts of climate change on species performance and biodiversity.
Detection of longitudinal cracks with a serrated columnar phased array transducer: A simulation study

In order to detect the longitudinal cracks on the outside surface of a hollow components, a novel pattern of ultrasonic phased array transducers is designed. The shape of the transducer surface is rectangular and is distributed on the outside surface of a column, with the longer side parallel to the central axis of the column. Meanwhile the transducers are rotated with a certain angle about the longer side of the transducer surface. According to the structure of the transducers, this novel array is named as serrated columnar array. In this paper, a serrated columnar array is placed in the center of the hollow axle. Because of the rotated angle, the surface of each transducer is oblique relative to the surface of the inner surface of the hollow component, the transducers are expected to generate transverse waves in the inspection component. A delayed law calculation method, based on Snell' law, for focus beam forming through the curved interface is described. Two transient acoustic finite element models, one with crack and the other without crack, are established by using the COMSOL software to verify the performance of this array design, one with crack and the other one without crack. With the designed focus delayed laws, transverse waves can be generated and focused at the crack position. By applying the focus laws to the reception channels, and sum up the echo signals, the signal retrieved from the model with a longitudinal crack is stronger than that from the model without cracks. The results show that this special array pattern is potential to serve as an ultrasonic non-destructive tool to detect the longitudinal cracks on the outside surface of hollow components.
A Distributed Trust Mechanism for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In a multi-hop hop mobile ad hoc network (MANET), mobile nodes cooperate with each other without using any infrastructure such as access points or base stations. The nodes' mobility and fundamentally limited capacity of the wireless medium, together with wireless transmission effects such as attenuation, multi-path propagation, and interference combine to pose significant challenges for security in MANETs. Traditionally, cryptographic mechanisms such as authentication and encryption are not capable of handling some kinds of attacks such as packet dropping by malicious nodes. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for detection of malicious packet dropping attack in MANET. The mechanism depends on a trust module based on the 'reputation' of different nodes in the network. Every node computes the reputation of its neighbors by directly monitoring their behaviors. The reputation information is gathered, stored, and exchanged between the nodes and computed under different scenarios. We have validated the scheme with some simulation work, which shows the feasibility and efficiency of performance of the protocol.
INFINITUDE OF ELLIPTIC CARMICHAEL NUMBERS

Abstract In 1987, Gordon gave an integer primality condition similar to the familiar test based on Fermat’s little theorem, but based instead on the arithmetic of elliptic curves with complex multiplication. We prove the existence of infinitely many composite numbers simultaneously passing all elliptic curve primality tests assuming a weak form of a standard conjecture on the bound on the least prime in (special) arithmetic progressions. Our results are somewhat more general than both the 1999 dissertation of the first author (written under the direction of the third author) and a 2010 paper on Carmichael numbers in a residue class written by Banks and the second author.
Resource Planning and Packet Forwarding for Next-generation Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks

Most earlier works in the area of wireless mesh network assume a single interface being equipped in each node. In this paper, we consider the next-generation wireless mesh networks in which each node may be equipped with multiple radio interfaces, each capable of running in one of several modes, one of several channels, and each capable of supporting multiple modulations. For example, from off-the-shelf components, one can easily construct a mesh node with multiple IEEE 802.11a/b/g radio interfaces. Our goal is to address the resource planning and packet forwarding issues in such an environment. The proposed methodology is based on linear programming with network flow principles and radio channel access/interference models. Given a network topology, traffic requirements, and gateway capacities, we show how to allocate network interface cards and their channels to fully utilize channel bandwidths. The results can be used by a wireless Internet service provider to plan their networks under a hardware constraint so as to maximize their profits. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work addressing resource planning in a wireless mesh network. Our numerical results show significant improvement in terms of aggregate network throughput with moderate network-layer fairness.
The Pax-6 homeobox gene is expressed throughout the corneal and conjunctival epithelia.

PURPOSE Heterozygous defects in the highly conserved PAX6 homeobox gene are associated with aniridia, an inherited human disorder affecting several ocular structures, including the adult cornea. This work establishes the pattern of Pax-6 gene expression in the surface epithelia of the late embryonic and adult eye. METHODS Chick embryo sections and wholemounts, as well as adult mouse and monkey tissues, were analyzed by in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry with probes specific to Pax-6. Western immunoblots were used to detect Pax-6 protein, and mRNA expression was analyzed by quantitative reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction. RESULTS In days 5 and 6 chick embryos, Pax-6 protein is found in the nuclei of all cells within the corneal epithelium and in the future conjunctiva. Although not detected in the cornea by in situ hybridization, Pax-6 mRNA is, in fact, present at levels comparable to those observed in the retina. In the mature mouse, Pax-6 protein was expressed in all cells of the corneal epithelium, the limbus, and the entire conjunctiva. Similar results were obtained for the monkey cornea. CONCLUSIONS These data indicate that in addition to its role in the embryo, Pax-6 is expressed strongly in surface epithelia of the adult cornea and conjunctiva. In cells of these tissues, the gene may function by regulating structural or secretory specializations. Pax-6 might play a direct role in the maintenance and proliferation of corneal stem cells, a vital process that appears to be defective in aniridia.
A novel perception based image categorization algorithm

Image categorization plays an important role in the field of image retrieval and automatic annotation. Most existing algorithms adopted the low-level visual features to represent an image and the well-known Bag-of-words model followed by the SVM classifier was employed to fulfill the classification task. In this paper, instead of using the traditional low-level visual features, we employ the perception theory and propose a novel image categorization algorithm based on the representation of images' topological properties, i.e., an image can be represented by a low-dimensional features (e.g., Euler characteristic, the number of holes) which is called the topological properties. Given the new representations of images, a naïve Bayes classifier is performed to fulfill the categorization task. The experimental results on the well-known image dataset show that based on the topological representation, the image categorization performance can be well improved.
Shape Detection, Analysis and Recognition

This paper surveys the various techniques for shape recognition and analysis with emphasis on robustness. Specifically, a review of boundary shape analysis methods and techniques is presented followed by description and experimental results of a new technique, based on Markov Shape Theory, that may alleviate the problems experienced by classical methods for shape analysis and boundary extraction in the presence of various kinds of noise.
Sensitive research topics: netnography revisited

Purpose – This paper discusses how netnography can be applied in order to conduct covert research on sensitive research topics. An analysis of a Danish internet message board on cosmetic surgery illustrates suggestions concerning modifications of netnography guidelines.Design/methodology/approach – Owing to the relevance of studying sensitive research topics – in particular when access to informants is difficult – netnography has been applied in an analysis of cross consumer online‐communication about cosmetic surgery on a Danish internet message board. Methodological stages and procedures including entree, data collection, analysis and interpretation have been followed. In terms of research ethics and member checks, however, the suggested guidelines have been modified.Findings – Empirical findings verify that consumers use internet message boards in order to exchange information and advice about cosmetic surgery. Especially the opportunity to masquerade and to cover their identities allows them to expres.
Evaluation of New Deal for Young People in Scotland: phase 1

entrants to New Deal for Young People (NDYP) in Scotland. Face-to-face interviews took place with 1,147 respondents between February and September 1999. The report describes the characteristics of New Deal participants, their experience and perceptions of the programme and makes some comparisons with participants in England and Wales. The phase 2 survey will follow up on the same respondents around 9 months to one year later and will focus on labour market outcomes.
Re ections on Bandit Problems and Selection Methods in Uncertain Environments

The behavior of selection methods used in evolutionary algorithms that operate in uncertain environments is investigated in the framework of parametric two{armed bandit problems. Asymptotically optimal selection strategies are based on the sequential probability ratio test which is proved to perform up to four times better than analogous strategies based on the optimal xed size sample test. A variant of local binary tournament selection in a spatially structured population is shown to behave like a sequential test provided that the population size is optimally adjusted.
Role of the N-Terminal Seven Residues of Surfactant Protein B (SP-B)

Breathing is enabled by lung surfactant, a mixture of proteins and lipids that forms a surface-active layer and reduces surface tension at the air-water interface in lungs. Surfactant protein B (SP-B) is an essential component of lung surfactant. In this study we probe the mechanism underlying the important functional contributions made by the N-terminal 7 residues of SP-B, a region sometimes called the “insertion sequence”. These studies employed a construct of SP-B, SP-B (1–25,63–78), also called Super Mini-B, which is a 41-residue peptide with internal disulfide bonds comprising the N-terminal 7-residue insertion sequence and the N- and C-terminal helices of SP-B. Circular dichroism, solution NMR, and solid state 2H NMR were used to study the structure of SP-B (1–25,63–78) and its interactions with phospholipid bilayers. Comparison of results for SP-B (8–25,63–78) and SP-B (1–25,63–78) demonstrates that the presence of the 7-residue insertion sequence induces substantial disorder near the centre of the lipid bilayer, but without a major disruption of the overall mechanical orientation of the bilayers. This observation suggests the insertion sequence is unlikely to penetrate deeply into the bilayer. The 7-residue insertion sequence substantially increases the solution NMR linewidths, most likely due to an increase in global dynamics.
Synthesis of crystals with a programmable kinetic barrier to nucleation

A central goal of chemistry is to fabricate supramolecular structures of defined function and composition. In biology, control of supramolecular synthesis is often achieved through precise control over nucleation and growth processes: A seed molecule initiates growth of a structure, but this growth is kinetically inhibited in the seed's absence. Here we show how such control can be systematically designed into self-assembling structures made of DNA tiles. These structures, “zig-zag ribbons,” are designed to have a fixed width but can grow arbitrarily long. Under slightly supersaturated conditions, theory predicts that elongation is always favorable but that nucleation rates decrease exponentially with increasing width. We confirm experimentally that although ribbons of different widths have similar thermodynamics, nucleation rates decrease for wider ribbons. It is therefore possible to program the nucleation rate by choosing a ribbon width. The presence of a seed molecule, a stabilized version of the presumed critical nucleus, removes the kinetic barrier to nucleation of a ribbon. Thus, we demonstrate the ability to grow supramolecular structures from rationally designed seeds, while suppressing spurious nucleation. Control over DNA tile nucleation allows for proper initiation of algorithmic crystal growth, which could lead to the high-yield synthesis of micrometer-scale structures with complex programmed features. More generally, this work shows how a self-assembly subroutine can be initiated.
Multilevel Petri Nets for Modeling and Simulating Organizational Dynamic Behavior

The modeling and simulation of the dynamic behavior of organizational systems is essential for understanding their current functionality and for supporting business process analysis and reengineering. The behavior of organizational systems is viewed here in terns of the behavior of their business processes. Multilevel Modified Petri Nets are used as the underlying formalism for modeling and simulating organizational systems behavior at various abstraction levels. Each level of abstraction corresponds to one or more levels of the involved part of the organizational hierarchy. The constructed models represent existing or redesigned business processes. Simulation and graphical animation are used for discovering problems in existing business processes as well as in the proposed solutions. The whole approach is supported by a development environment called ERMIS.