Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Backstepping zur Synchronisierung nichtlinearer dynamischer Systeme

Zusammenfassung Es wird eine systematische Methode zum Entwurf synchronisierender Regler für Systeme in strenger Rückkopplungsform entwickelt. Dabei wird die Äquivalenz unter statischer Zustandsrückführung der gegebenen Systeme zu passiven Systemen ausgenutzt und eine neue Variante des Backstepping-Verfahrens vorgestellt. Es wird gezeigt, dass sich ein Kollektiv identischer Agenten synchronisiert, wenn das Kommunikationsnetzwerk zu allen Zeitpunkten stark zusammenhängend und ausgeglichen ist. Die Methode wird anhand zweier Beispiele illustriert. Abstract This article presents a methodology to derive control laws synchronizing systems given in strict-feedback form. It exploits feedback equivalence of such systems to passive systems and uses a modified backstepping design. The control laws provably synchronize a collective of identical agents if the underlying communication network is balanced and strongly connected at all times. Two examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the design.
Bearing currents and their relationship to PWM drives

This paper examines AC motor shaft voltages and the resulting bearing currents when operated under pulse width modulation (PWM) voltage source inverters. The paper reviews the mechanical and electrical characteristics of the bearings and motor in relation to shaft voltages and bearing currents. A brief review of previous work is addressed including the system model and experimental results. The theory of electric discharge machining (EDM) is presented including component calculations of the system elements. The effect of system elements on shaft voltages and bearing currents are evaluated experimentally and the results compared to theory. A design calculation is proposed that provides the relative potential for EDM. Finally, the paper presents quantitative results on one solution to the shaft voltage and bearing current problem.
Sustained Striatal Activity Predicts Eudaimonic Well-Being and Cortisol Output

Eudaimonic well-being—a sense of purpose, meaning, and engagement with life—is protective against psychopathology and predicts physical health, including lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Although it has been suggested that the ability to engage the neural circuitry of reward may promote well-being and mediate the relationship between well-being and health, this hypothesis has remained untested. To test this hypothesis, we had participants view positive, neutral, and negative images while fMRI data were collected. Individuals with sustained activity in the striatum and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to positive stimuli over the course of the scan session reported greater well-being and had lower cortisol output. This suggests that sustained engagement of reward circuitry in response to positive events underlies well-being and adaptive regulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis.
Inf-sup estimates for the Stokes problem in a periodic channel

We derive estimates of the Babuska-Brezzi inf-sup constant {beta} for two-dimensional incompressible flow in a periodic channel with one flat boundary and the other given by a periodic, Lipschitz continuous function h. If h is a constant function (so the domain is rectangular), we show that periodicity in one direction but not the other leads to an interesting connection between {beta} and the unitary operator mapping the Fourier sine coefficients of a function to its Fourier cosine coefficients. We exploit this connection to determine the dependence of {beta} on the aspect ratio of the rectangle. We then show how to transfer this result to the case that h is C{sup 1,1} or even C{sup 0,1} by a change of variables. We avoid non-constructive theorems of functional analysis in order to explicitly exhibit the dependence of {beta} on features of the geometry such as the aspect ratio, the maximum slope, and the minimum gap thickness (if h passes near the substrate). We give an example to show that our estimates are optimal in their dependence on the minimum gap thickness in the C{sup 1,1} case, and nearly optimal in the Lipschitz case.
Clickprints on the Web: Are There Signatures in Web Browsing Data?

We address the question of whether people have unique signatures - or clickprints - when they browse the Web. The importance of being able to answer this can be significant given applications to electronic commerce in general and in particular online fraud detection, a major problem in electronic commerce costing the economy billions of dollars annually. In this paper we present a general framework and specific formulations of this "unique clickprint determination problem". We explore one specific formulation for which we show how the unique clickprint determination problem can be cast more generally as an aggregation problem. To solve this we develop formal methods to determine the optimal amount of user data that must be aggregated before unique clickprints can be deemed to exist.
Consensus in multi-agent systems with second-order dynamics and non-periodic sampled-data exchange

In this paper consensus in second-order multi-agent systems with a non-periodic sampled-data exchange among agents is investigated. The sampling is random with bounded inter-sampling intervals. It is assumed that each agent has exact knowledge of its own state at all times. The considered local interaction rule is PD-type. The characterization of the convergence properties exploits a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional method, sufficient conditions for stability of the consensus protocol to a time-invariant value are derived. Numerical simulations are presented to corroborate the theoretical results.
Towards Online Localization and Recovery for Faulty Components in Component-Based Applications

Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software components have been extensively used by applications over the world. However, COTS components always carry issues that might and sometimes only take place at runtime, in particular, when combined with other components. This might bring serious trouble for the application's dependability. Based on the industry experiences that lots of faulty components usually occupy excessive resources, this paper proposes an approach to localize the faulty components in an application automatically through analyzing the resource usage of components. Once a faulty component interferes with the application's performance, our approach generates an anomaly report, localizes the faulty component, and enables component level recovery to remove the negative impact. We have implemented a prototype and demonstrated its effectiveness on the well-known JPetStore benchmark with performance overhead of less than 3%.
Neurocircuitry of Stress Integration: Anatomical Pathways Regulating the Hypothalamo-Pituitary-Adrenocortical Axis of the Rat1

Abstract The hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis is recruited by the organism in response to real or perceived threats to homeostasis (“stress”). Regulation of this neuroendocrine system is accomplished by modulation of secretory tone in hypophysiotrophic neurons of the medial parvocellular paraventricular nucleus. Excitation of these neurons is mediated by several sources: direct (and perhaps indirect) inputs from brainstem neurons regulating autonomic tone/arousal; circumventricular organs monitoring blood and CSF constituents; and local-circuit neurons within the hypothalamus and basal forebrain. The latter are predominantly GABAergic; notably, these areas are targets for descending GABAergic input from limbic structures, and may promote PVN secretory activity via disinhibition. Neurosecretory paraventricular nucleus neurons are inhibited by glucocorticoid–dependent and –independent mechanisms. Glucocorticoid negative feedback appears to act both locally and in extrahypothalamic loci, and is likely integrated in a region- and stressor-specific manner. Inhibitory input to the medial parvocellular paraventricular nucleus emanate predominantly from the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and hypothalamus, and are likely regulated by neuroendocrine homeostats. Descending limbic inhibitory information appears to act through excitation of these inhibitory inputs. Overall, integration of stressful information is a multi-faceted process integrating prior experience and real or anticipated homeostatic disruption into appropriate activation and deactivation of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenocortical axis.
Physcomitrella patens Has Kinase-LRR R Gene Homologs and Interacting Proteins

Plant disease resistance gene (R gene)-like sequences were screened from the Physcomitrella patens genome. We found 603 kinase-like, 475 Nucleotide Binding Site (NBS)-like and 8594 Leucine Rich Repeat (LRR)-like sequences by homology searching using the respective domains of PpC24 (Accession No. BAD38895), which is a candidate kinase-NBS-LRR (kinase-NL) type R-like gene, as a reference. The positions of these domains in the genome were compared and 17 kinase-NLs were predicted. We also found four TIR-NBS-LRR (TIR-NL) sequences with homology to Arabidopsis TIR-NL (NM_001125847), but three out of the four TIR-NLs had tetratricopeptide repeats or a zinc finger domain in their predicted C-terminus. We also searched for kinase-LRR (KLR) type sequences by homology with rice OsXa21 and Arabidopsis thaliana FLS2. As a result, 16 KLRs with similarity to OsXa21 were found. In phylogenetic analysis of these 16 KLRs, PpKLR36, PpKLR39, PpKLR40, and PpKLR43 formed a cluster with OsXa21. These four PpKLRs had deduced transmembrane domain sequences and expression of all four was confirmed. We also found 14 homologs of rice OsXB3, which is known to interact with OsXa21 and is involved in signal transduction. Protein–protein interaction was observed between the four PpKLRs and at least two of the XB3 homologs in Y2H analysis.
Non-Epistemic Values in Adaptive Management: Framing Possibilities in the Legal Context of Endangered Columbia River Salmon

Courts have determined that adaptive management does not satisfy the Endangered Species Act's requirement to use the ‘best available science’. This is due, in part, to the failure to recognise the role of non-epistemic values in science. We examine the role of values in the legal controversy over the scientific reports and adaptive management plans for endangered salmon in the Columbia River Basin. To do this, we employ philosophical concepts related to risk and uncertainty that demonstrate how non-epistemic values are internal to science. We describe how, because adaptive management is a method for dealing with inductive risk, by remaining flexible, responsive and adaptive in those circumstances where the costs of making a mistake are very high, it requires special attention to ensure that it remains useful. We conclude that, because non-epistemic values will inevitably influence the ‘best available science’, it is critical that they are clarified in any adaptive management planning so that we can ensure the salmon conservation that the ESA mandates. Fortunately, because adaptive management is iterative in nature and includes opportunities for engagement between policymakers and scientists, it enables clarification of non-epistemic values through making standards of evidence transparent, acknowledging aims and goals and dealing with uncertainty at the institutional level.
Arm up administrators: automated vulnerability management

With the continuous flood of vulnerabilities of computers, vulnerability management is a very important task for administrators to keep systems as secure as possible. Facing numerous attackers armed with complicated, automated tools, current manual vulnerability management by administrators is so time-consuming, error-prone. Administrators also do need automated defensive tools. This paper proposes an open framework of automated vulnerability management that dramatically alleviates the burden of administrators and improves the security of systems. In this framework, we present three XML based markup languages, Common Vulnerability Markup Language (CVML), System Information Markup Language (SIML), Network System Markup Language (NSML) to express crucial information related to systems and vulnerabilities to facilitate automated exchange and processing. Host vulnerability managers (HVMs) running on the target host maintain the crucial system information in SIML, receive vulnerability advisories in CVML from various sources, decide what vulnerabilities exist, and try to fix vulnerabilities automatically if possible. Domain vulnerability managers (DVMs) are responsible for the vulnerability management in NSML of the local network. DVMs correlate reports from HVMs and scan for network-based vulnerabilities in this domain. We have implemented a prototype of the framework that shows the effectiveness and efficiency of our solution.
25 T(cid:3)op/s Multibillion-Atom Molecular Dynamics Simulations and Visualization/Analysis on BlueGene/L

We demonstrate the excellent performance and scalability of a classical molecular dynamics code, SPaSM, on the IBM BlueGene/L supercomputer at LLNL. Simulations involving up to 160 billion atoms (micron-size cubic samples) on 65,536 processors are reported, consistently achieving 24.4(cid:150)25.5 T(cid:3)op/s for the commonly used Lennard-Jones 6-12 pairwise interaction potential. Two extended production simulations (one lasting 8 hours and the other 13 hours wall-clock time) of the shock compression and release of porous copper using a more realistic many-body potential are also reported, demonstrating the capability for sustained runs including on-the-(cid:3)y parallel analysis and visualization of such massive data sets. This opens up the exciting new possibility of using atomistic simulations at micron length scales to directly bridge to mesoscale and continuum-level models.
Anomaly Behavior Analysis for Web Page Inspection

As the Internet prevails, people access web services directly via web browsers over the network. However, most websites are not developed with sufficient security consideration. Hackers have taken the advantage of web application vulnerabilities to inject malicious codes into web pages. A victim who visits such a malicious web page will be compromised. Therefore, an efficient malicious web detection method is needed to prevent users from being compromised. Based on our observation, malicious web pages have uncommon behavior in order to evade from detection of Antivirus software. The anomaly behavior such as code encoding makes malicious web pages different from normal benign web pages. Current researches have noticed pattern-matching approach is not suitable to detect malicious web pages anymore, and then proposes a new detection method. The proposed method, a client-side malicious web page detection method, is based on anomaly behavior analysis. It focuses on distinguishing the behavior difference between malicious and benign web pages. The experimental results show that the proposed method can identify malicious web pages and alarm the website visitors efficiently.
Symmetric Encryption in RFID Authentication Protocol for Strong Location Privacy and Forward-Security

RFID tag carries vital information in their operation and thus concerns on privacy and security issues do arise. The problem of traceability is critical in open radio frequency environments. An adversary can trace and interact with tag and this is referred as tracking. Nevertheless, with a strong authentication mechanism, uprising security problems in RFID systems can be solved. We had demonstrated current vulnerabilities and proposed our authentication mechanism to overcome them. As long as the secret information stays secret, tag forgery is not possible. Targeting RFID tag with short tag ID, we employ a resource friendly symmetric encryption scheme, which is a stream cipher building block to enhance the security features in active type RFID tag.
Modeling, Diagnosis, and Control of Fuel-Cell-Based Technologies and Their Integration in Smart Grids and Automotive Systems

Society is gradually becoming aware that the current energy system based on the use of fossil fuels is inefficient, highly polluting, and finite supply. Within the scientific community and industry stakeholders, there is a unified agreement that indicates that hydrogen (H2), as an energy vector, combined with other sources of alternative energy, represents a safe and viable option to mitigate the problems associated with hydrocarbon combustion because the entire system can be developed as an efficient, clean, and sustainable energy source. In this context, the change from the current energy system to a new system with a stronger involvement of H2 relentlessly involves the introduction of fuel cells as elements of efficient energy conversion.
Efficacy of secondary isoniazid preventive therapy among HIV-infected Southern Africans: time to change policy?

Objective: To determine the efficacy of secondary preventive therapy against tuberculosis (TB) among gold miners working in South Africa. Design: An observational study. Setting: Health service providing comprehensive care for gold miners. Methods: The incidence of recurrent TB was compared between two cohorts of HIV-infected miners: one cohort (n = 338) had received secondary preventive therapy with isoniazid (IPT) and the other had not (n = 221). Results: The overall incidence of recurrent TB was reduced by 55% among men who received IPT compared with those who did not (incidence rates 8.6 and 19.1 per 100 person-years, respectively; incidence rate ratio, 0.45; 95% confidence interval 0.26–0.78). The efficacy of isoniazid preventive therapy was unchanged after controlling for CD4 cell count and age. The number of person-years of IPT required to prevent one case of recurrent TB among individuals with a CD4 cell count < 200 × 106 cells/l, and ⩾ 200 × 106 cells/l was 5 and 19, respectively. Conclusion: Secondary preventive therapy reduces TB recurrence: the absolute impact appears to be greatest among individuals with low CD4 cell counts. International TB preventive therapy guidelines for HIV-infected individuals need to be expanded to include recommendations for secondary preventive therapy in settings where TB prevalence is high.
On The Consensus Threshold For The Opinion Dynamics Of Krause–Hegselmann

In the consensus model of Krause–Hegselmann, opinions are real numbers between 0 and 1, and two agents are compatible if the difference of their opinions is smaller than the confidence bound parameter ∊. A randomly chosen agent takes the average of the opinions of all neighboring agents which are compatible with it. We propose a conjecture, based on numerical evidence, on the value of the consensus threshold ∊c of this model. We claim that ∊c can take only two possible values, depending on the behavior of the average degree d of the graph representing the social relationships, when the population N approaches infinity: if d diverges when N→∞, ∊c equals the consensus threshold ∊i~0.2 on the complete graph; if instead d stays finite when N→∞, ∊c =1/2 as for the model of Deffuant et al.
Models for laser ablation of polymers.

UV laser ablation of polymers was discovered 20 years ago.1,2 This effect has many fascinating applications in lithography, micromechanics, and medicine. For the last 20 years, more than 103 papers describing this phenomenon were published (see, e.g., comprehensive reviews, refs 3-7). Despite the high research activity, the nature of UV laser ablation of polymers is still far from being fully understood, e.g., one can find contradictory interpretations of the same results in different papers. Originally, UV laser ablation of polymers was believed to be a pure photochemical effect, resulting from the direct bond breaking by UV photons.8-10 Gradually, investigators obtained evidence that laser heating of materials is significant and a pure thermal nature of laser ablation was considered.11-13 Here we use the term “photothermal”7 for the process resulting from laser heating of material. Polymers are complex materials; therefore, laser ablation of polymers is also a complicated phenomenon. In this paper, we will focus on the models of laser ablation. In addition, we inevitably have to answer the question of what are the specific features of laser ablation of polymers that distinguish them from the laser ablation of other materials (metals, semiconductors, inorganic dielectrics, molecular solids). There are several approaches to modeling of polymer ablation. The authors of this paper represent one of the “schools”; thus, our view of the problem is somewhat subjective. Despite the complex nature of laser ablation, we prefer to develop simplified models (e.g., “pure” photochemical or “pure” photothermal), and analyze them in detail to be able to assign specific features, which are experimentally observed for a particular ablation mechanism. We start with the photochemical model. In fact, the first consideration of laser ablation10 employed a very simple but constructive idea that takes into account the specific feature of polymer materials. This idea is that polymers consist of long molecular chains with strong, covalent, bonds inside. At the same time, molecules belonging to different chains interact weakly. Therefore, polymer material becomes simple molecular solid (i.e., easily removed material), if we break the long polymer chains into small pieces by direct photochemical effect (UV photons are considered to have energy pω exceeding the energy of * Corresponding author, e-mail: bit@appl.sci-nnov.ru. † Institute of Applied Physics Russian Academy of Sciences. ‡ Data Storage Institute. 519 Chem. Rev. 2003, 103, 519−552
Prototype development of a hand-held robotic light pipe for intraocular procedures

Light pipe is a tool providing illumination for delicate operations inside the eyeball in an eye surgery. Traditional light pipes with straight shafts have to be reoriented in order to enlarge its illustration range, which implies more risk of damage to the sclera and requires greater operation space for the handle. In order to overcome these limitations, this paper has proposed a novel robotized handheld light pipe based on concentric tubular structure. Tube parameters are selected based on the anatomical dimension of eyeballs. Novel actuation designs are described to meet the requirements of the intraocular procedures. Intuitive control scheme is implemented to facilitate surgeons' operations. Furthermore, the benefit of the precurved tube compared with that of a straight tube is evaluated through experiments. It has been demonstrated that the proposed design as a light pipe holds the promise of enhancing intraocular surgeries.
Deep Brain Stimulation for Movement Disorders

Stereotactic technique and the introduction of deep brain stimulation (DBS) can be considered two milestones in the field of surgical neuromodulation. At present the role of DBS in the treatment of clinically and epidemiologically relevant movement disorders is widely accepted and DBS procedures are performed in many clinical centers worldwide. Here we review the current state of the art of DBS treatment for the most common movement disorders: Parkinson’s disease, essential tremor, and dystonia. In this review, we give a brief description of the candidate patient selection criteria, the different anatomical targets for each of these condition, and the expected outcomes as well as possible side effects.