Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Fabrication and Locomotion of Flexible Nanoswimmers

Small-scale robots with soft joints and hinges have recently attracted interest because these components allow for more sophisticated locomotion mechanisms. Here, we investigate two different types of nanoscale swimmers as depicted in Figure 1. One consists of a rigid magnetic head linked to a semi-soft tail (1-link swimmer). Another consists of a rigid magnetic head and tail connected by a soft hinge (2-link swimmer). Both swimmers exhibit undulatory locomotion under an applied oscillating magnetic field. The speeds of the swimmers are assessed as a function of the oscillating magnetic field frequency and the sweeping angle. We find that a resonance-like frequency increases as the length decreases, and, in general, the speed increases as the sweeping angle increases. Last, we show that 2-link swimmers can also swim in a corkscrew-like pattern under rotating magnetic fields.
Optimal Planning and Operation of Photovoltaic-Storage Systems Based on Multi-period Voltage Control at PCC

In the mode of active management, energy storage system (ESS) could smooth photovoltaic (PV) power output and make them participate in dispatching actively. Extending QV bus-type is used to describe the operation feature of point of common coupling (PCC) PV and ESS accessed to reasonably in the paper, then a method for multi-period PCC voltage setting considering source-load peak-valley characteristics is proposed. Considering system operational constraints, ESS operational constraints and capacity allocation constraints, a multi-objective optimization model of ESS capacity matching was constructed based on two aspects of daily gateway energy and capacity of ESS, solving Pareto optimal solution set to provide the decision-making basis for ESS capacity configuration and operation strategy. IEEE 33-bus case shows that the method in this paper could achieve ESS optimal allocation flexibly, and ESS operation states are all in reasonable range under the corresponding operation strategy. The result comparison shows that the proposed operation strategy has a significant effect on improving voltage quality, decreasing ESS configuration capacity and reducing the whole day energy loss, the results fully demonstrate the rationality and validity of the optimal model and the method for multi-period PCC voltage setting.
Self-Assembly Magnetic Chain Unit for Bulk Biomaterial Actuation

Untethered microrobot has been regarded as one of the most powerful tools for performing specific in vitro/vivo tasks, especially magnetic actuated microrobot owing to its biocompatible energy source. However, although numerous design and fabrication technologies of magnetic microrobot have been developed, the improvement of magnetic actuation manner reaches the limit, which mainly relies on the specific structure design (helix) or strong gradient magnetic field to realize locomotion. Inspired from surface cilia dependent paramecium swimming, this letter reports a new self-assembly magnetic actuation concept design for bulk biomaterial motion based on the partial asymmetrical heterofunction of magnetic chain units. Compared with the existing design and fabrication of magnetic microrobot actuators, our proposed self-assembly magnetic chain unit method is succinct, economical, structure unconstrained, and material unconstrained. In this work, the tanglesome bulk fiber fabrication based on flow-focusing microcapillary system is first introduced, which is utilized for structure unconstrained and material unconstrained actuation demonstration. Second, the six degrees of freedom electromagnetic coil system is proposed for presenting the magnetic actuation based on self-assembly magnetic chain units. After that, the self-assembly mechanism and magnetic control mechanism are developed to explain the fabrication and actuation procedure. Finally, the self-assembled magnetic chain units can achieve up to 150 $\mu$m length during the fabrication process, which can actuate bulk biomaterial with much larger size than itself. The self-assembly magnetic chain unit and actuation experimental results verify the feasibility and practicability of the above-mentioned concepts. This research opens new prospects for magnetic microrobot actuation, which is expected to advance the biomedical area, such as for in vitro/vivo targeted therapy and organ-on-a-chip research.
Improving Reinforcement Learning Pre-Training with Variational Dropout

Reinforcement learning has been very successful at learning control policies for robotic agents in order to perform various tasks, such as driving around a track, navigating a maze, and bipedal locomotion. One significant drawback of reinforcement learning methods is that they require a large number of data points in order to learn good policies, a trait known as poor data efficiency or poor sample efficiency. One approach for improving sample efficiency is supervised pre-training of policies to directly clone the behavior of an expert, but this suffers from poor generalization far from the training data. We propose to improve this by using Gaussian dropout networks with a regularization term based on variational inference in the pre-training step. We show that this initializes policy parameters to significantly better values than standard supervised learning or random initialization, thus greatly reducing sample complexity compared with state-of-the-art methods, and enabling an RL algorithm to learn optimal policies for high-dimensional continuous control problems in a practical time frame.
Lightweight and Compliant Long Reach Aerial Manipulator for Inspection Operations

The proximity between the multirotor blades and the environmental obstacles restricts the application of aerial manipulators in inspection tasks due to the risk of impacts, the limitation in the reach of the arm, and the physical interactions. This paper presents a long reach aerial manipulator consisting of a hexarotor platform equipped with a 2-DOF compliant joint arm attached at the tip of a one-meter-length link in passive pendulum configuration. The arm integrates magnetic encoders for force/torque estimation-control based on joint deflection, a range sensor in the forearm link for measuring the distance to the contact point, and a camera for visual inspection. A 2-DOF wearable exoskeleton interface has been developed, allowing the teleoperation of the arm with visual feedback in a more intuitive way. The paper also covers the kinematics and dynamics of the aerial manipulator, including the dynamics of the flexible long reach link. The developed system has been evaluated in test-bench and in outdoor flight tests.
Provably Secure Fine-Grained Data Access Control Over Multiple Cloud Servers in Mobile Cloud Computing Based Healthcare Applications

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) allows mobile users to have on-demand access to cloud services. A mobile cloud model helps in analyzing the information regarding the patients’ records and also in extracting recommendations in healthcare applications. In MCC, a fine-grained level access control of multiserver cloud data is a prerequisite for successful execution of end-users applications. In this paper, we propose a new scheme that provides a combined approach of fine-grained access control over cloud-based multiserver data along with a provably secure mobile user authentication mechanism for the Healthcare Industry 4.0. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed scheme is the first to pursue fine-grained data access control over multiple cloud servers in a MCC environment. The proposed scheme has been validated extensively in different heterogeneous environment where its performance was found good in comparison to other existing schemes.
Track Irregularity Feature Extraction Based on the Improved Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition

A method of extracting transient features of a non-stationary signal was proposed based on improved Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) and the Sliding Window Singular Value Decomposition. Through fast bandpass filtering, the instantaneous frequency and amplitude can be calculated, the Intrinsic Mode Function (IMF) can be got, and at the same time, problems existing in the original EEMD method, such as mode aliasing, can be solved. The track irregularity signal is studied with the method, and the statistical and analytic result indicates that there are relatively serious short wave and medium wave track irregularities in the sample signal. Analysis of track irregularities using improved EEMD is an effective method for guaranteeing the safe of railway transformation.
Capacitor Voltage Balancing Control Algorithm for Modular Multilevel Converter Based on the Dynamic Tiered Sorting

DC voltage control for modular multilevel converter (MMC) not only needs to control the total DC voltage, but also must control the capacitor voltage balancing of each sub-module (SM). The sorting-based traditional capacitor voltage balancing control algorithm is simple and easy to implement, but it needs to sort the capacitor voltages of all SMs of the valve arm and has low calculation efficiency. In this paper, a novel capacitor voltage balancing control algorithm based on the dynamic tiered sorting is proposed. By dynamically layering all sub-modules (SMs) on the valve arm, the number of SMs participating in the sorting is greatly reduced. Finally, the proposed algorithm is applied to the electromagnetic transient program of ADPSS (Advanced Digital Power System Simulator, ADPSS), and the correctness and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm are verified by the back-to-back MMC-HVDC simulation case. The results show that the proposed algorithm not only can achieve the same control effect as the traditional algorithm, maintain the stability of all SMs capacitor voltage on the valve arm, but also can greatly improve computational efficiency.
Emulating Software Defined Network Using Mininet and OpenDaylight Controller Hosted on Amazon Web Services Cloud Platform to Demonstrate a Realistic Programmable Network

In this paper, a Software Defined Network was created in Mininet using python script. An external interface was added in the form of an OpenDaylight controller to enable communication with the network outside of Mininet. The OpenDaylight controller was hosted on the Amazon Web Services elastic computing node. This controller is used as a control plane device for the switch within Mininet. The OpenDaylight controller was able to create the flows to facilitate communication between the hosts in Mininet and the webserver in the real-life network. In order to test the network, a real life network in the form of a webserver hosted on the Emulated Virtual Environment – Next Generation (EVE-NG) software was connected to Mininet.
Exploiting Locality for the Performance Analysis of Shared Memory Systems in MPSoCs

The integration trend and increased required computing power is driving the advent of common embedded consumer devices like MPSoCs platforms in the safety critical domain. MPSoCs often feature a shared tightly-coupled memory system where a careful management of data storage and transfers is a key enabler for performance. However, providing real-time guarantees for these platforms is extremely challenging as they rely on exploiting data locality to improve average latencies in shared-memory architectures. This effect is often disregarded by existing real-time analysis approaches which furthermore often focus solely on a single component of the memory system. In this paper, we propose a framework for the timing analysis of shared memory systems composed of on-chip scratchpad memories, off-chip DRAMs and DMA engines. The analysis captures the effect on the performance of the system of the locality of accesses, their interleaving and granularity.
A Novel Miniaturized Planar Ultra-Wideband Antenna

A novel miniaturized planar ultra-wideband antenna is proposed. The antenna design comprises an electromagnetically coupled structure and a tapered radiating slot, while a triangular slot is etched on the ground plane. The antenna miniaturization is realized by adopting an electromagnetically coupled structure formed by the notched half-ellipse patch and the strip attached to the ground. The proposed antenna can yield a large 10-dB impedance bandwidth ranging from 1.5 to 10.4 GHz with satisfactory radiation properties. It also features a physical size of 37.4 mm <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\times64$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm, equivalent to a compact electrical size of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.19\lambda \times 0.32 \lambda $ </tex-math></inline-formula> at 1.5 GHz. The important design parameters are analyzed to comprehend the operating principle of the antenna. A good agreement between the simulated and measured results is achieved.
Ambient Lights Influence Perception and Decision-Making

Today's computers are becoming ever more versatile. They are used in various applications, such as for education, entertainment, and information services. In other words, computers are often required to not only inform users of information but also communicate with them socially. Previous studies explored the design of ambient light displays and suggested that such systems can convey information to people in the periphery of their attention without distracting them from their primary work. However, they mainly focused on using ambient lights to convey certain information. It is still unclear whether and how the lights can influence people's perception and decision-making. To explore this, we performed three experiments using a ping-pong game, Ultimatum game, and Give-Some game, in which we attached an LED strip to the front-bottom of a computer monitor and had it display a set of light expressions. Our evaluation of the results suggested that expressive lights do affect human perception and decision-making. Participants liked and anthropomorphized the computer more when it displayed light animations. Particularly, they perceived the computer as positive and friendlier when it displayed green and low intensity light animation, while red and high intensity light animation was perceived as negative and more hostile. They consequently behaved with more tolerance and cooperation to the computer when it was positive compared with when it was negative. The findings can open up possibilities for the design of ambient light systems for various applications where human-machine interaction is needed.
The Coordination Between B Cell Receptor Signaling and the Actin Cytoskeleton During B Cell Activation

B-cell activation plays a crucial part in the immune system and is initiated via interaction between the B cell receptor (BCR) and specific antigens. In recent years with the help of modern imaging techniques, it was found that the cortical actin cytoskeleton changes dramatically during B-cell activation. In this review, we discuss how actin-cytoskeleton reorganization regulates BCR signaling in different stages of B-cell activation, specifically when stimulated by antigens, and also how this reorganization is mediated by BCR signaling molecules. Abnormal BCR signaling is associated with the progression of lymphoma and immunological diseases including autoimmune disorders, and recent studies have proved that impaired actin cytoskeleton can devastate the normal activation of B cells. Therefore, to figure out the coordination between the actin cytoskeleton and BCR signaling may reveal an underlying mechanism of B-cell activation, which has potential for new treatments for B-cell associated diseases.
Antiplatelet and Antithrombotic Activity of a Traditional Medicine, Hwangryunhaedok-Tang

Platelet activation and accumulation at the site of vascular injury are central to thrombus formation resulted in thrombotic disorders. Medicinal herbs could be one of the most important pharmaceutical agents that ameliorate thrombotic disorders, such as unstable angina, myocardial infarction, stroke, and peripheral vascular diseases. Hwangryunhaedok-tang (HRT) is a traditional herbal medicine that displays multiple biological properties including anti-inflammatory abilities. However, its role in platelet activation has not been fully studied. Hence, we examined whether HRT has a potent inhibitory effect on platelet aggregation and thrombus formation. We demonstrated that HRT (30, 50, and 100 μg/ml) significantly impaired thrombin- and collagen-related peptide-induced platelet aggregation, granule secretion, thromboxane B2 generation, and intracellular Ca2+ mobilization. Biochemical studies revealed that HRT is involved in inhibiting the phosphorylation of phospholipase C and protein kinase B. The oral administration of HRT (30, 50, and 100 mg/kg once daily for 1 and/or 7 days) efficiently ameliorates ferric chloride induced arterial thrombus formation in vivo. Tail bleeding time was not significantly increased. The qualitative phytochemical constituents of the HRT extract were investigated using high-performance liquid chromatography. Our results demonstrated that HRT shows potential antiplatelet and antithrombotic effects without affecting hemostasis. Hence, HRT could be an effective therapeutic agent for the treatment of thrombotic diseases.
Low Phenotypic Penetrance and Technological Impact of Yeast [GAR+] Prion-Like Elements on Winemaking

[GAR+] prion-like elements partially relieve carbon catabolite repression in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. They have been hypothesized to contribute to wine yeast survival and alcohol level reduction, as well as communication with bacteria and stuck fermentation. In this work, we selected [GAR+] derivatives from several genetic backgrounds. They were characterized for phenotypic penetrance, heritability and confirmed as prion-like through curing by desiccation. In terms of fermentation kinetics, the impact of the prion on anaerobic wine fermentation (natural grape juice) was either neutral or negative, depending on the genetic background. Likewise, residual sugars were higher or similar for [GAR+] as compared to the cognate [gar-] strains. The prions had little or no impact on glycerol and ethanol yields; while acetic acid yields experienced the highest variations between [GAR+] and [gar-] strains. Strains analyzed under aerobic conditions followed the same pattern, with either little or no impact on fermentation kinetics, ethanol or glycerol yield; and a clearer influence on volatile acidity. Although no clear winemaking advantages were found for [GAR+] strains in this work, they might eventually show interest for some combinations of genetic background or winemaking conditions, e.g., for reducing acetic acid yield under aerated fermentation.
Anti-microfouling Activity of Glycomyces sediminimaris UTMC 2460 on Dominant Fouling Bacteria of Iran Marine Habitats

Discovery of environmentally safe anti-fouling agent is currently of considerable interest, due to the continuous impact of biofoulers on the marine habitats and the adverse effects of biocides on the environment. This study reports the anti-adhesion effect of marine living Actinobacteria against fouling strains isolated from submerged panels in marine environments of Iran. The extract of Glycomyces sediminimaris UTMC 2460 affected the biofilm formation of Kocuria sp. and Mesorhizobium sp. , as the dominant fouling agents in this ecosystem, up to 93.2% and 71.4%, respectively. The metabolic activity of the fouler bacteria was reduced by the extract up to 17 and 9%, respectively. This indicated the bactericidal potency of the extract on cells in the biofilm state that enables the compound to be effective even once the biofilms are established in addition to the inhibition of biofilm initiation. Moreover, extra polymeric substance (EPS) production by fouling bacteria was reduced by 60–70%. The absence of activities against fouling bacteria in suspension and also the absence of toxic effect on Artemia salina showed the harmless ecological effect of the anti-microfouling extract on the prokaryotic and eukaryotic microflora of the studied Iran marine ecosystem. Metabolic profiling of G. sediminimaris UTMC 2460 revealed the presence of compounds with molecular formulae matching those of known anti-fouling diketopiperazines as major components of the extract. These results suggest that the extract of Glycomyces sediminimaris UTMC 2460 could be used as a potentially eco-friendly viable candidate in comparison to the synthetic common commercial anti-microfouling material to prevent the fouling process in marine habitats of Iran.
Is There a Threshold for Medication Adherence? Lessons Learnt From Electronic Monitoring of Drug Adherence

Medication adherence is a well-recognized problem in the management of patients with chronic diseases needing a long-term pharmacotherapy. While fighting against non-adherence, an important question frequently arises, i.e., how much adherence is enough to obtain the full treatment benefits? Most studies having attempted to answer this question have used large pharmacy records and health care databases to quantify the percentage of days covered by the prescribed treatment and hence deduce a threshold below which there appears to be fewer benefits from therapy. In the present paper, the use of data obtained using electronic monitoring of adherence is discussed as another means to assess adherence thresholds with a particular emphasis on hypertension. The data show that even with the use of electronic monitoring of adherence, which provides a comprehensive dosing history, it is extremely difficult to define an adherence threshold in hypertension. This is due to many factors that need to be taken into account, including not only the pattern of patients’ adherence and their clinical and environmental characteristics, but also the pharmacological characteristics of the prescribed drugs, the severity of the disease and many others. To determine adherence cut-offs more precisely, specific protocols should be designed to answer the question in various clinical conditions. These protocols should be conducted in well-defined patients’ groups, they should use the most reliable methods to measure adherence providing if possible a detailed dosing history perhaps combined with drugs levels in blood or urine. These studies should also choose the best methods to measure clinical endpoints, such as ambulatory blood pressure monitoring or home blood pressure in the case of hypertension. One important aspect is that datasets should be solid and large enough to be able to analyze adherence data as a continuous variable using newly developed mathematical models including new metrics catching the complexity of adherence. The rapid development of new technologies like devices, connectivity, and analytics, will probably provide new solutions to improve our ability to define valid and clinically useful adherence thresholds in various therapeutic areas.