Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Application of quality function deployment in product improvement of power strips

Many organizations aim to improve their performance in customer satisfaction with a product due to competition between organizations in an industry. Bangkok Cable Co., Ltd. also wants to gain a competitive advantage. In this research, the conversion of qualitative techniques (Quality Function Deployment) is used to develop and improve power strips, which are the products of Bangkok Cable. The power strips are developed according to customer requirement by using the matrices of QFD technique: (1) Product Planning and (2) Design Deployment. The developed and improved prototypes are evaluated by a group of product customers. The results of this study reveal that the average satisfactory values of all new prototypes compared with the old products are respectively increased from 3.31 to 3.61 and 3.72 points or increased about 9.31% and 12.43%, and the percentage of satisfaction compared with competitors are increased from −7.17% to 1.47% and 4.38%, respectively.
Abnormal vehicle behavior induced using only fabricated informative CAN messages

We present a method for influencing vehicle behaviors using only informative Controller Area Network (CAN) messages. Some recent vehicle attack techniques have been shown to have a significant impact on the automotive industry. Almost all previous studies employ active CAN messages that induce actions for the attacks, but there have been no studies that explicitly use only the informative CAN messages. Furthermore, very few investigations have reported successful attacks regarding acceleration which is significant. This is the first report of using only informative CAN messages in an attack especially targeting a driving-support system. Through experiments, we show that abnormal acceleration or deceleration is induced using informative messages regarding the wheel speed when a cruise control system is activated. We also find that the speed limit control of the cruise control system can be disabled and the parking assist function can be abruptly canceled without driver intention using such kinds of messages. The experimental results reveal that fabricated informative CAN messages can manipulate the vehicle to yield improper behavior. We mention solutions that mitigate such attacks. We believe that this study will bring a new perspective to automotive security toward system design.
An asymmetrical multilevel inverter with minimum number of switches for 1-φ grid-connected applications

This paper proposes a novel 1-φ asymmetrical multilevel inverter (MLI) topology. The proposed MLI topology can provide seventeen voltage levels in the output with less number of power components. This seventeen level inverter (SLI) consists of eleven power switches and two sets of unequal dc sources (two V and two 3V). The seventeen voltage levels are generated through various possible combinations of four input dc sources through the power switches. Another important feature of this SLI topology is that maximum four switches conduct in any mode, which results in reduced conduction losses thus improving the efficiency of the system. A comparison of the SLI with existing MLI topologies shows that the number of required power components is significantly lower. The 3-φ extension of the proposed SLI is discussed. Further, the extended version of 1-φ SLI to n-level MLI is also discussed. A modulation strategy is proposed to control the output of the 1-φ SLI. To validate the SLI, simulations are carried out in Matlab-Simulink for the 2kw power rating grid connected system. This SLI feeds high quality power into the grid with a THD of 2.36%.
Weight Loss Maintenance and Cellular Aging in the Supporting Health Through Nutrition and Exercise Study

Objective The aim of the study was to determine, within a weight loss clinical trial for obesity, the impact of intervention arm, weight change, and weight loss maintenance on telomere length (TL). Methods Adults (N = 194) with a body mass index between 30 and 45 were randomized to a 5.5-month weight loss program with (n = 100) or without (n = 94) mindfulness training and identical diet-exercise guidelines. We assessed TL at baseline and 3-, 6-, and 12-month postbaseline in immune cell populations (primarily in peripheral blood mononuclear cells [PBMCs], but also in granulocytes and T and B lymphocytes). We defined weight loss maintenance as having lost at least 5% or 10% of body weight (tested in separate models) from preintervention to postintervention, and having maintained this loss at 12 months. We predicted that greater weight loss and weight loss maintenance would be associated with TL lengthening. Results Neither weight loss intervention significantly predicted TL change nor did amount of weight change, at any time point. Across all participants, weight loss maintenance of at least 10% was associated with longer PBMC TL (b = 239.08, 95% CI = 0.92 to 477.25, p = .049), CD8+ TL (b = 417.26, 95% CI = 58.95 to 775.57, p = .023), and longer granulocyte TL (b = 191.56, 95% CI = −4.23 to 387.35, p = .055) at 12 months after accounting for baseline TL. Weight loss maintenance of 5% or more was associated with longer PBMC TL (b = 163.32, 95% CI = 4.00 to 320.62, p = .045) at 12 months after accounting for baseline TL. These tests should be interpreted in light of corrections for multiple tests. Conclusions Among individuals with obesity, losing and maintaining a weight loss of 10% or more may lead to TL lengthening, which may portend improved immune and metabolic function. TL lengthening in this study is of unknown duration beyond 12 months and requires further study. Trial Registration: Clinicaltrials.gov identifier NCT00960414; Open Science Framework (OSF) preregistration: https://osf.io/t3r2g/.
Accurate Traffic Splitting on Commodity Switches

Traffic splitting is essential for load balancing over multiple servers, middleboxes, and paths. Often the target traffic distribution is not uniform (e.g., due to heterogeneous servers or path capacities). A natural approach is to implement traffic split in existing rule matching tables in commodity switches. In this paper we suggest an analytical study of such an approach. To do that, we relate the description of distributions in switches to signed representations of positive integers. We suggest an optimal algorithm that minimizes the number of rules needed to represent a weighted traffic distribution. Since switches often have limited rule-table space, the target distribution cannot always be exactly achieved. Accordingly, we also develop a solution that, given a restricted number of rules, finds a distribution that can be implemented within the limited space. To select among different solutions, we describe metrics for quantifying the accuracy of an approximation. We demonstrate the efficiency of the solutions through extensive experiments.
Work in Progress : Prediction of Solar Energy for Infrastructure based Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are used in scenarios where many sensors need to collect data and exchange with a central base station. These battery powered devices are expected to have a long lifetime as frequent battery replacement is labor intense and in some cases may not be possible due to deployment constraints. Ambient energy harvesting is a promising approach to replenish the energy. However, the current day harvesters typically the size of the sensor node, cannot provide perineal power to sensor nodes and thus energy-neutral operation is non trivial due to the spatio-temporal variations in the source and the low efficiencies of the harvesters. A smart approach is to adapt the system according to the incoming energy. In this paper, we aim to predict the solar energy with the assistance of a discrete time Markov chain. The base station conveys the diurnal and seasonality cycles of the source to the sensor nodes. The nodes use this data to predict and budget their energy. This approach is a practical one since base stations exchange data periodically with nodes and are capable of heavier computation and storage. The accuracy of our method is evaluated with data from CONFRRM.
Neurophysiological correlates of bradykinesia in Parkinson’s disease

Many neurophysiological abnormalities have been described in the primary motor cortex of patients with Parkinson's disease. However, it is unclear whether there is any relationship between them and bradykinesia, one of the cardinal motor features of the condition. In the present study we aimed to investigate whether objective measures of bradykinesia in Parkinson's disease have any relationship with neurophysiological measures in primary motor cortex as assessed by means of transcranial magnetic stimulation techniques. Twenty-two patients with Parkinson's disease and 18 healthy subjects were enrolled. Objective measurements of repetitive finger tapping (amplitude, speed and decrement) were obtained using a motion analysis system. The excitability of primary motor cortex was assessed by recording the input/output curve of the motor-evoked potentials and using a conditioning-test paradigm for the assessment of short-interval intracortical inhibition and facilitation. Plasticity-like mechanisms in primary motor cortex were indexed according to the amplitude changes in motor-evoked potentials after the paired associative stimulation protocol. Patients were assessed in two sessions, i.e. OFF and ON medication. A canonical correlation analysis was used to test for relationships between the kinematic and neurophysiological variables. Patients with Parkinson's disease tapped more slowly and with smaller amplitude than normal, and displayed decrement as tapping progressed. They also had steeper input/output curves, reduced short-interval intracortical inhibition and a reduced response to the paired associative stimulation protocol. Within the patient group, bradykinesia features correlated with the slope of the input/output curve and the after-effects of the paired associative stimulation protocol. Although dopaminergic therapy improved movement kinematics as well as neurophysiological measures, there was no relationship between them. In conclusion, neurophysiological changes in primary motor cortex relate to bradykinesia in patients with Parkinson's disease, although other mechanisms sensitive to dopamine levels must also play a role.
Motivating Content Sharing and Trustworthiness in Mobile Social Networks

Mobile social networks (MSNs) enable users to discover and share contents with each other, especially at ephemeral events such as exhibitions and conferences where users could be strangers. Nevertheless, the incentive of users to actively share their contents in MSNs may be lacking if the corresponding cost is high. Besides, as users in MSN share contents in an impromptu way as they move, it makes them vulnerable to malicious users who may want to disseminate false contents. This is because users may not have knowledge about the peers they are socially connecting with in the network. In this paper, we propose MCoST, a mechanism that motivates content sharing in MSN and ensures that only trustworthy contents are shared. The mechanism is built on users’ collective bidding, content cost sharing, and trust evaluation while guaranteeing individual rationality. MCoST enables content providers to share contents with multiple users simultaneously by utilizing the broadcast nature of wireless transmission. The cost of the content is collectively compensated by the content receivers through the content bidding mechanism in MCoST. In ensuring that users can establish the trustworthiness of their encounters’ contents, MCoST incorporates a robust trust evaluation framework that guarantees that content reviews are immutable and tamper-proof, resistive to sybil, and rejection attacks, and that users cannot have multiple and fake identities in the network or reject negative reviews about their contents. This is achieved by integrating a distributed cryptographic hash-chained content review mechanism in the design of MCoST. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed mechanism efficiently evaluates contents’ trustworthiness by detecting and discriminating review-chains under sybil or rejection attacks and reduces the time and cost to collect the desired contents by 86% and 40%, respectively, and improves network utilization by 50%.
Performance analysis of mobility prediction based proactive wireless caching

We study a mobility prediction based proactive wireless caching scheme for two-tier cellular networks consisting of a base station (BS) tier and a device-to-device (D2D) tier. Two scenarios are considered: popular contents cached only at BSs, and popular contents cached at both BSs and MTs. We model user mobility as a Markov renewal process to predict user moving paths and residence time. Then we analyse the hit-rate performance to evaluate the presented schemes. By formulating content placement to maximize the hit-rate as optimization problems, we provide the optimal solution for the first scenario and develop a greedy mobility prediction based proactive wireless caching (MPPC) scheme for the second. Through analysis we show that the hit-rate achieved by MPPC is at least exp(1)−1/exp(1) of the optimal hit-rate. The numeric results show that the MPPC can dramatically improve the hit-rate performance, compared with random caching and most popular caching (MPC) schemes. We show that the hit-rate achieved by MPPC outperformances MPC by 26% at most when MTs are not able to cache. Besides we present the impact of the moving speed on the hit-rate performance of MPPC for MTs.
Software defined radio based receivers using RTL — SDR: A review

Software defined Radio is one of the most important and latest technique for modern wireless communication. SDR is a radio which can be tuned to any frequency band which the hardware supports, implement different modulation and demodulation schemes and different signal types and standard(s) in the same device by using reconfigurable hard-are and using powerful software. This paper provides a detailed analysis of SDR based radio receivers that can be implemented by using SDR systems. The main types of devices that can be implemented using SDR are only Radio Receiver, only Radio Transmitter and a Transceiver which provide function for both transmitter and receiver. Implementation of SDR devices using MATLAB, Simulink, GNU Radio and Single Board Computer is also discussed in this paper. The availability of low cost SDR hardware with good functional capability has reduced the overall cost of SDR system. This paper also provides a comparison between different types of radio systems developed using SDR and their performance analysis is also provided.
A framework for spectrum demand estimation for safety ITS applications

This paper introduces a framework for spectrum demand estimation considering the different requirements of direct Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, in particular safety Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) applications. Based on this framework, an analysis of the impact of these requirements on the overall spectrum demand assuming LTE-based V2X is presented. The analysis shows that spectrum needs increase remarkably for reliability higher than 90%, which is the typical requirement for safety ITS applications. Moreover, the number of vehicles within channel resource reuse distance has the strongest impact on the total spectrum demand. This factor can overshadow the impact of other requirements, such as message size or vehicles speed. This framework provides good basis for future work focusing on understanding the spectrum needs for the safety ITS applications via direct V2X communications or via a combination of direct V2X and cellular V2X communication.
Development and Evaluation of “Chronic Illness Care Smartphone Apps” on Nursing Students’ Knowledge, Self-efficacy, and Learning Experience

This study developed smartphone-based virtual experiential nursing applications to care for patients with chronic illness, especially patients with hypertension and diabetes, and evaluated the effect of the applications on nursing students’ knowledge, self-efficacy, and learning experiences. Applications using gamification elements were developed according to the steps of assessment, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. Knowledge and self-efficacy were assessed via questionnaires, while learning experiences were assessed via six focus group interviews after the applications were used for 1 week. Quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive analysis, &khgr;2 test, Fisher’s exact test, t test for the homogeneity of participants (experimental, 49; control, 43), an independent t test, and a paired t test for effectiveness in each group. Qualitative data were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis. Knowledge on hypertension (t = 4.41, P < .001) and diabetes (t = 2.45, P < .009), as well as self-efficacy for hypertension (t = 3.08, P < .002) and diabetes (t = 1.75, P < .043), significantly improved in the experimental group compared to the control group. Students may use the applications as complementary learning resources without the limitations of time and space, and students were satisfied overall with their use. The chronic illness care smartphone applications are effective learning resources that assist students in assessing patients’ health problems and implementing nursing care plans to improve patient conditions.
Blue-blocking spectacles lenses for retinal damage protection and circadian rhythm: evaluation parameters

There is evidence for the effect of blue light on circadian cycle and ocular pathologies. Moreover, the introduction of LED lamps has increased the presence of blue light. In the last two years, many different blue blocking ophthalmic lenses have been introduced. Due to the different effect of blue light on ocular media and circadian rhythm, we have defined two indices that describe the level of protection of the lenses towards the retina and the circadian cycle under different lighting as for example daylight and tablet. These indexes can help in individuating the right lens for ocular protection.
Simulating the optical properties of graphene nanodisks for photothermal therapy

Photothermal therapy, the process of converting light from a laser into heat strong enough to destroy cancer cells, has risen as a promising, safe and minimally invasive means for the treatment of cancer. Designing nanoparticles that can efficiently absorb light and convert it to heat is of critical importance for photothermal therapy. In the recent years, graphene has emerged as a tunable, versatile and promising material in a wide range of applications. There is a lack of studies on graphene based nanoparticles for photothermal therapy. This work presents the use of the finite elements method to calculate the absorption efficiency spectra of single and multiple layer graphene nanodisks of different sizes for the first time. For a graphene sheet, the electromagnetic properties were described in terms of the surface conductivity by Kubo model of conductivity. The results show that increasing the number of graphene layers or radii of nanodisks, increases the absorption efficiency. It was also noticed that the shapes of the absorption spectra of the graphene nanodisks do not have resonance peaks like those of the gold nanoparticles and instead have a more constant response. Despite the fact that the graphene nanodisks demonstrated possess much weaker absorption in comparison to gold nanoparticles, it is expected that increasing the number of layers further would increase the absorption efficiency till it becomes comparable to or maybe even better than gold nanoparticles. The results show the feasibility of graphene based nanoparticles for photothermal therapy and encourage more research on the topic.
Indoor localization by detecting 80 key bits with downlink interleave division multiple access

In this paper, a wireless cellular network based indoor localization approach is presented. After receiving the positioning request, initialized from a mobile device during the training stage, the surrounding Base Stations (BSs), which are typically equipped with massive antenna array elements, can measure the Angle of Arrival (AoA) of the positioning request signal. Being unsimilar to the conventional AoA localization approaches, the BSs will not communicate with each other and localize the mobile device cooperatively. Instead, each BS simply encodes its own longitude, latitude and AoA information within a 80-bit small packet. Further, before delivering the data to the mobile device, downlink Interleave Division Multiple Access (IDMA) is exploited. Hence, during the measurement stage, the mobile device receives the superposition of the data packet from multiple BSs. Downlink IDMA manages to detect the superimposed data robustly even under the asynchronous environment. Numerical results exhibit that 90% of the realizations can yield a positioning error smaller than one meter, under very low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR).
Efficacy of relacin combined with sodium hypochlorite against Enterococcus faecalis biofilms

Abstract Objective Relacin is a synthetic molecule that targets RelA, an essential protein in a conserved bacterial stress response system. It was shown to inhibit bacterial growth. The aims of this study were to evaluate the antimicrobial effect of relacin combined with sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) on Enterococcus faecalis biofilms and to evaluate the cytotoxicity of relacin. Material and Methods 48-h E. faecalis OG1RF biofilms were treated by various concentrations of relacin in order to determine its inhibitory concentration. Then, the 48-h biofilms were treated either with 1-min NaOCl (0.01%, 0.05%) alone, or in combination of relacin. As a means of comparison, the biofilms of ΔrelA were also treated by 1-min NaOCl (0.01%, 0.05%, 0.25%). The treatment efficacy was determined by agar plate count assays. The cytotoxicity of relacin was examined on human gingival epithelial cells Ca9-22 and murine fibroblasts NIH-3T3 by a methyl thiazolyltetrazolium (MTT) assay and a lactate dehydrogenase assay. Statistical analysis was performed by one-way or two-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Bonferroni’s post-hoc test and an independent Student’s t-test. A significance level of p<0.05 was used. Results Relacin inhibited the growth of OG1RF biofilms partially at 8 mM and fully at 14 mM. The relacin (14 mM) and NaOCl combined treatment resulted in significantly higher treatment efficacy than NaOCl treatment alone. At 0.05% NaOCl, the combined treatment resulted in 5.65 (±0.19) log reduction in biofilm viability. The ΔrelA biofilms were more susceptible to NaOCl treatment than the wild type biofilms at 0.25% NaOCl. Relacin at 14 mM was not toxic to host epithelial cells and fibroblasts. Conclusions The combination of relacin with a low concentration of NaOCl was effective and not cytotoxic.