Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Parallel implementation of position-based biologicalsoft tissue deformation

With the development of the medical training systems and surgical simulation techniques, the improvement of deformable soft tissue simulation becomes highly demanded. Realtime performance of simulation algorithm is the most urgent bottleneck problem that needs to solve. This paper introduces a solution to implement deformable simulation of biological soft tissue in real time. This is accomplished through the use ofhierarchical position based dynamics, implemented usingCUDA parallel framework. The simulation results are directly sent to vertex buffer objectfor rendering to avoid the costly communication between CPU and GPU. The experimental results show significate improvements on performance in comparison to CPU algorithm.
The need for comparable criteria in multilingual studies

Book synopsis: This book critically examines the effects of language specificity on phonological acquisition and disorder through a collection of empirical studies of children learning typologically very different languages. The studies address many theoretical, clinical and methodological issues, such as: What role do developmental universals and the ambient language play in language acquisition? How should one account for the similarities and differences in the phonological development between normally and atypically developing children, between monolingual and bilingual children, and between bilingual children sharing one language? What implications do these similarities and differences have for clinical assessment and diagnosis? The book provides much-needed baseline information for clinical assessment and diagnosis.
Increasing Bluetooth Low Energy communication efficiency by presetting protocol parameters

: Standard protocols are important regarding the compatibility of devices provided by different vendors. However, specific applications have various requirements and do not always need all features offered by standard protocols, making them inefficient. This paper focuses on standard Bluetooth Low Energy modifications, reducing control overhead for the intended healthcare application. Specifically, the connection establishment, device pairing, and connection parameter negotiations have been targeted. The simulation-based experiments showed over 20 times reduction of control-overhead time preceding a data transmission. It does not just directly increase the energy efficiency of communication; it also prolongs the time for sensor-based end devices to spend in an energy-saving mode. The result is a longer runtime of such sensor devices powered by batteries
The shortest path detection for unmanned aerial vehicles via genetic algorithm on aerial imaging of agricultural lands

By using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for improving fertility of large agricultural lands in the GAP region, it is aimed to guide the end users through processing of the aerial images obtained by using image processing algorithms. The productivity problem of "Agriculture" sector that has the most important role in the economic development of the region directly has been solved in an innovative way by improving the fertility of agricultural lands. Related to the UAVs used for this process, the most important problem to consider is limited battery life. Therefore, it is very important to calculate the optimum route to reduce the flight time and to scan the large agricultural lands in the shortest time. In this paper, the shortest path problem is optimized by using the genetic algorithm for scanning large agricultural lands and collecting data. In the study, the points taken by UAV according to the field of view of the images are determined. The shortest path has been calculated by using genetic algorithm so that images can be taken from these determined points within a minimum flight time.
Monitoring and prediction of drought by Markov chain model based on SPI and new index in Isfahan

Drought evaluation and associated prediction are essential for water resource management. Most of previous studies analysed and predicted drought pattern in Isfahan based on the standardised precipitation index (SPI). Due to the high evapotranspiration in Isfahan, the SPI index, which is based on precipitation alone may not be sufficient to monitor and estimate drought pattern. So, it is vital to analyse and predict drought phenomenon at this region based on the new index (standardised precipitation-evaporation index - SPEI) that considers potential evapotranspiration in addition to the precipitation. Hence drought analysis is performed based on SPI and SPEI in Isfahan. The results indicate that there is some difference between two indices. Finally, SPEI and the Markov chain model are applied to predict the drought patterns in a 30 years period in the long-term future. It is predicted that the percentage of aridity state will increase comparison with the past decade.
Big Data Approach towards Networking, Data Transfer, IOT and Security: A Review

Big Data has emerged as an advanced discovery for large scale data collection. Data generated by large instruments that generates semi structured and unstructured information. This information must be analysed using big data tools and must be listed and stored in such a way that it can be used for further references and usages. Data transfer is now an essential function for various discoveries, particularly within big data environments. There are various time-constraints, performance constraint. Combing the technology of Internet devices and Big Data which helps in analyzing and processing a large number of data sets that is collected from heterogeneous sources, which in turn are characterized by weak structuring and high speed of updating. Malicious attacks that can eventually prevent network services are unavoidable. Thus, in this Big data technology, particularly machine learning, has been widely used for intrusion/anomaly detection, little has been done in networking that is developed by software.
Sensorless Control of Electric Drives – A Technological Review

Electric drive without electrical and mechanical sensors is the critical obligation in most of the industrial applications due to its user-friendly hardware, lower maintenance, low cost, more reliability, etc. To replace the sensors, a number of schemes are employed, which extract the sensored data from the known parameters by using the machine model and/or its mechanical structure. In the past few years, researchers developed a variety of sensorless schemes for various applications by using different drives and their control algorithms to make it vigorous in any electrical, mechanical, and physical environments. In this paper, more than 275 publications were critically reviewed and the technological progression was presented for the sensorless control of electric drives by various motor control techniques. In addition to this, the review of sensorless AC drive system and its application was also studied and presented.
MAPPING GLACIER CHANGES USING CLUSTERING TECHNIQUES ON CLOUD COMPUTING INFRASTRUCTURE

Abstract. Climate change and its effects are taking more importance nowadays; and glaciers are one of the most affected ecosystems by that, considering that the energy of Earth’s surface and its temperature may be directly related to glacier temporal changes. Then, the comprehension of glaciers behaviour, by its retreating or melting critical conditions, can be achieved by the analysis of Remote Sensing data, but considering the unprecedented volumes of information currently provided by satellites sensors, we can refer to this analysis as a big data problem. Machine learning techniques have the potential to improve the analysis of this type of data; however, most current machine learning algorithms are unable to properly process such huge volumes of data. In the attempt to overcome the computational limitations related to Remote Sensing Big Data analysis, we implemented the K-Means and Expectation Maximization algorithms, as distributed clustering solutions, exploiting the capabilities of cloud computing infrastructure for processing very large datasets. The solution was developed over the InterCloud Data Mining Package, which is a suite of distributed classification methods, previously employed in hyperspectral image analysis. In this work we extended the functionalities of that package, by making it able to process multispectral images using the aforementioned clustering algorithms. To validate our proposal, we analysed the Ausangate glacier, located on the Andes Mountains, in Peru, by mapping the changes in such environment through a multi-temporal Remote Sensing analysis. Our results and conclusions are focused on the thematic accuracy and the computational performance achieved by our proposed solution. Thematic accuracy was assessed by comparing the automatically detected glacier areas by the clustering approaches against the manually selected ground truth data. We compared the computational load involved in executing the clustering processes sequentially and in a distributed fashion, using a local mode and cluster configuration over a cloud computing infrastructure.
Formal analysis and applications of direct anonymous attestation

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is a combination of information and communication technologies used in transportation systems to improve efficiency and safety for transport users. It also encompasses the growing field of connected and autonomous vehicles that is expected to have significant benefits for the economy and overall safety of travel. Two of the main challenges within ITS are managing the scalability of large networks, and securing communication between ITS entities, especially given that entities may be malicious and need to be revoked. To address security and privacy concerns within ITS, public key infrastructure (PKI) has been deployed in vehicular communication architectures. Such architectures detail how entities (vehicles, road-side units, etc.) communicate with each other and how their credentials need to be revoked when they become malicious so that they cannot continue to communicate with other entities. This thesis covers both analysis of protocols within existing architectures and also proposes new architectures. Our work contributes to the analysis of existing architectures for revocation. We present a symbolic analysis of existing REWIRE protocols using the Tamarin Prover, and show that not all their desired security goals are met. We propose a new variant of REWIRE called O-Token which addresses the required properties based on vehicular public key infrastructure. Vehicular communication architectures are becoming more heterogeneous and therefore there is active research in identifying how vehicles can themselves become a root of trust for supporting secure communications in ITS. We present a new vehicular communication architecture, based on trusted computing, which removes the need for additional PKI infrastructure within an ITS. It enables secure operations to be performed within vehicles without relying on constant message exchange with infrastructure. The novelty of our architecture is the use of Direct Anonymous Attestation to manage the security and privacy of entities, to improve the scalability and revocation in large networks. Furthermore, the architecture is resilient to colluding trusted third party infrastructure. Our final contribution is an analysis of one variant of Direct Anonymous Attestation, ECC-DAA, based on the ISO/IEC 20008-2:2013 standard. We evaluate whether it provides the security and privacy guarantees needed in order for it to be a central technique within our scalable vehicular communication architecture. Our symbolic analysis of an ECC-DAA specification using the Tamarin Prover identifies an attack which exploits a single compromised trusted platform module to undermine other uncompromised ones. We propose a solution and demonstrate the revised specification ensures the protocol's robustness.
A High Step up DC/DC Converter with Reduced Input Current Ripple

In this paper, a modified DC/DC high step up converter is proposed. Maximum power point tracking, which is very important in photovoltaic (PV) applications, is dependent on input current ripple of the PVs. In some other converters where the input current ripple is high, maximum power point cannot track properly. Therefore the proposed converter is designed based on the premise of reducing input current ripple compatible with the photovoltaic energy sources. The converter has six different modes, which are detailed in this paper. All inductor currents are illustrated and the sizing of the inductors used in the proposed structure calculated. The output voltage gain and input current ripple are investigated. The proposed converter is compared to other recent high step up converters from the angle of input current ripple. Finally, simulations are done in the PSCAD/EMTDC software package to verify the operations of the proposed converter.
How Does It All Unfold? The Role of Format Layout in the User Experience of Medical Instructions for Use

Well-designed instructions for use (IFUs) reduce medical device risk and facilitate regulatory review. This study evaluated two common IFU formats (booklet and foldout) to identify benefits and drawbacks for comprehension and use. In an A/B usability test, 16 adults simulated the preparation of a dose of medicine and were asked to find critical information using instructions in each of the formats. They then compared the two formats and completed a standardized health literacy assessment. Our results showed that the foldout presented an accessible overview of the steps while the booklet showed ease-of-use benefits, particularly for those with lower health literacy scores. Our results indicate that physical design decisions impact the user experience, and that they should be carefully evaluated to provide an optimal IFU.
Command and Control for Managing Patient Flow

Patient flow is the movements of the patient through the healthcare system that can greatly affect quality and cost of care (Hall, Belson, Murali, & Dessouky, 2006). Managing patient flow requires various medical professionals to communicate about patient status and coordinate on performing tasks (Alhaider, Lau, Davenport, Morris, & Tuck, 2018). Murphy, Barth, Carlton, Gleason, and Cannon (2014) advocated a job role designed to facilitate such communication and coordination for patient flow. Other studies on patient flow emphasize on the communication and coordination aspects (Martinez et al., 2018; Wong, Caesar, Bandali, Agnew, & Abrams, 2009), alluding to the potential benefits of establishing a command and control center for managing patient flow in hospitals. However, there is limited command and control research targeting patient flow that might have prevented hospitals from establishing such centers.
Relay-Aided Outdoor-to-Indoor Communication in Millimeter-Wave Cellular Networks

In this article, we examine the feasibility of serving an indoor mobile terminal (MT) by an outdoor base station (BS) in urban millimeter-wave (mmWave) cellular networks. Toward this, we consider two scenarios: 1) the signal reaches the reference MT directly by penetrating the building where it is located and 2) the communication is assisted by a relay placed on the rooftop of the building that conveys through a waveguide the desired signal to an indoor transmit antenna located at the floor where the reference MT is located. By using a stochastic-geometry-based framework, we derive for both scenarios, analytical expressions for the coverage and average rate, which exhibit a good match with respect to the simulations. In addition, from these expressions, we gain important insights regarding the performance comparison of the two scenarios. In particular, it is analytically proved and validated by the simulations that relaying notably enhances the performance of the low-rate MTs even under substantial waveguide losses. However, for such losses, the average rate in the relaying case can become worse than the case without relays.
Classifying Sentences in Court Case Transcripts using Discourse and Argumentative Properties

Information that is available in court case transcripts which describes the proceedings of previous legal cases are of significant importance to legal officials. Therefore, automatic information extraction from court case transcripts can be considered as a task of huge importance when it comes to facilitating the processes related to the legal domain. A sentence can be considered as a fundamental textual unit of any document which is made up of text. Therefore, analyzing the properties of sentences can be of immense value when it comes to information extraction from machine-readable text. This paper demonstrates how the properties of sentences can be used to extract valuable information from court case transcripts. As the first task, the sentence pairs were classified based on the relationship type which can be observed between the two sentences. There, we defined relationship types that can be observed between sentences in court case transcripts. A system combining a machine learning model and a rule-based approach was used to classify pairs of sentences according to the relationship type. The next classification task was performed based on whether a given sentence provides a legal argument or not. The results obtained through the proposed methodologies were evaluated using human judges. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study where discourse relationships between sentences have been used to determine relationships among sentences in legal court case transcripts. Similarly, this study provides novel and effective approaches to identify argumentative sentences in court case transcripts.
PIR Schemes With Small Download Complexity and Low Storage Requirements

In the classical model for (information theoretically secure) Private Information Retrieval (PIR) due to Chor, Goldreich, Kushilevitz and Sudan, a user wishes to retrieve one bit of a database that is stored on a set of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> servers, in such a way that no individual server gains information about which bit the user is interested in. The aim is to design schemes that minimise the total communication between the user and the servers. More recently, there have been moves to consider more realistic models where the total storage of the set of servers, or the per server storage, should be minimised (possibly using techniques from distributed storage), and where the database is divided into <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-bit records with <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${R}>1$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, and the user wishes to retrieve one record rather than one bit. When <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is large, downloads from the servers to the user dominate the communication complexity and so the aim is to minimise the total number of downloaded bits. Work of Shah, Rashmi and Ramchandran shows that at least <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${R}+1$ </tex-math></inline-formula> bits must be downloaded from servers in the worst case, and provides PIR schemes meeting this bound. Sun and Jafar have considered the download cost of a scheme, defined as the ratio of the message length <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${R}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and the total number of bits downloaded. They determine the best asymptotic download cost of a PIR scheme (as <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${R}\rightarrow \infty $ </tex-math></inline-formula>) when a database of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${k}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> messages is stored by <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> servers. This paper provides various bounds on the download complexity of a PIR scheme, generalising those of Shah et al. to the case when the number <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${n}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of servers is bounded, and providing links with classical techniques due to Chor et al. The paper also provides a range of constructions for PIR schemes that are either simpler or perform better than previously known schemes. These constructions include explicit schemes that achieve the best asymptotic download complexity of Sun and Jafar with significantly lower upload complexity, and general techniques for constructing a scheme with good worst case download complexity from a scheme with good download complexity on average.
Design and Analysis of PWM Inverter for 100KVA Solid State Transformer in a Distribution System

Conventional Magnetic Transformers are key components in a distribution system as it performs several functions like voltage transformation and isolation. However due to increase in penetration of renewable energies into distribution system, existing conventional transformers are expected to be replaced by a solid-state transformer (SST) which offers several advantages as reported in literature. SST can also be used to connect AC or DC grids because it can be operated at a much higher frequency and voltage which results in reduction in the size of conventional transformers as size of transformer is inversely proportional to frequency. In this paper, design and analysis of a 3-phase PWM Inverter using half – bridge topology for 11kV/381V, 100kVA solid-state transformer (SST) is presented for power distribution system application. The mathematical model of SST is developed using analytical calculations and then implemented in MATLAB simulation program. Finally it is implemented in hardware in a laboratory for a half-bridge topology. The main system has been virtually created in order to actualize the conversion from DC to AC.
An Adaptive Uniform Distribution ORB Based on Improved Quadtree

ORB (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF) feature is wildly applied in visual SLAM because of its excellent computational efficiency and stability. Aiming at the problem of uneven distribution of ORB feature, and improving the calculate efficiency of feature extraction at the same time, we proposed an ORB feature extraction algorithm based on improved quadtree in this paper. The proposed algorithm will select the threshold adaptively for FAST extraction according to the gray image instead of the value set artificially. And then we set different depth of quadtree according to the expected feature number which decreases as the number of image pyramid layers increases to reduce redundancy. The remained key points selected by Harris score will distribute well in the image. The results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the uniformity of ORB feature, and reduce feature extraction time compared to the algorithm in ORB_SLAM, it has certain application value for the realization of real-time SLAM system.