Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
FcγR-Binding Is an Important Functional Attribute for Immune Checkpoint Antibodies in Cancer Immunotherapy

T cells play critical roles in anti-tumor immunity. Up-regulation of immune checkpoint molecules (PD-1, PD-L1, CTLA-4, TIM-3, Lag-3, TIGIT, CD73, VISTA, B7-H3) in the tumor microenvironment is an important mechanism that restrains effector T cells from the anti-tumor activity. To date, immune checkpoint antibodies have demonstrated significant clinical benefits for cancer patients treated with mono- or combination immunotherapies. However, many tumors do not respond to the treatment well, and merely blocking the immune suppression pathways by checkpoint-regulatory antibodies may not render optimal tumor growth inhibition. Binding of the antibody Fc-hinge region to Fc gamma receptors (FcγRs) has been shown to exert a profound impact on antibody function and in vivo efficacy. Investigation of immune checkpoint antibodies regarding their effector functions and impact on therapeutic efficacy has gained more attention in recent years. In this review, we discuss Fc variants of antibodies against immune checkpoint targets and the potential mechanisms of how FcγR-binding could influence the anti-tumor activity of these antibodies.
Analysis of Forward Stimulated Brillouin Scattering in Nanoscale SiGe Waveguides by Tailoring Optical Forces

We propose and design SiGe strip waveguides and silicon waveguides with SiGe cover layers to tailor optical forces. The forward stimulated Brillouin scattering (FSBS) in these SiGe waveguides are analyzed by considering the effects of SiGe concentration on the optical forces. In the radiation-enhanced configuration, electrostrictive forces can constructively add to or destructively interfere with radiation pressure, depending on the concentration. The silicon waveguides with graded-varying cover layers provide a means of enhancing photon–phonon interaction and rewriting the selection rule of excited acoustic modes. The numerical simulation results indicate that SiGe strip waveguides can realize the largest net Stokes’ amplification up to 10.32 dB. Compared to traditional pure silicon waveguides, the silicon waveguides with graded-varying cover layers have an improvement of about 40% on Brillouin gain and at least 2.5 dB on net Stokes’ amplification. Our proposed SiGe waveguides offer an effective approach to implement flexible FSBS in silicon-based chip.
Real-Time Polyphonic Pitch Detection on Acoustic Musical Signals

This paper presents an algorithm for fundamental frequency detection on polyphonic acoustic musical signals, based on a new ‘raking’ method over the frequency-domain spectra. The algorithm is evaluated as a classifier, and boasts a good accuracy (83.20%) compared to other such methods, as well as the ability to function effectively in real-time, with a running-speed below 140ms per window evaluated. This proves to be real-time for the use-case, as the latency between an auditory stimulus and its perception by a person has been shown to be longer than this. The algorithm itself runs in linear-time, but is thus slowed by the O(nlog(n)) Fast Fourier Transform during preprocessing. Though the algorithm fails to account for certain edge-cases with overlapping harmonics as well as certain instruments, future work and improvements are also presented, paving the way for further research.
Modified approach for global MPP finding under partial shading

Today, despite the presence of well-developed and high efficient Maximum Power Point Trackers (MPPT) in all PV stations, remains the problem of their proper functionality during partial shading. Existing MPPT algorithms use sequential search procedures, therefore, they may falsely operate during partial shading. The reason of this obstacle is numerous local maximums appearing in the P-I or P-V characteristic curves. This impedes conventional MPPT systems to find the global maximum (GM) and significantly restricts the ultimate electric output of PV plants.The present article proposes the improved algorithm for MPPT functionality. The method based on a photo-current estimation of each PV panel. Owing this information, submitted algorithm provides permanent assessment of the upper and the low limits of regulating parameter (a current or a voltage) between which its optimal value that ensures GM is located. Further, conventional MPPT entering the work can easily find the nearest maximum that obviously is GM.Present work describes this new method to find more accurate and fast estimations of the GM boundaries and to keep GM even during fast changings partial shading conditions, which will cause the higher overall efficiency of MPPT.
THE PERSPECTIVE AND THE EFFECTS OF ROBOTICS COURSES IN SCHOOL EDUCATION

This research has focused on exploring how the introduction of robotics classes in school can improve the educational process, especially in the direction of teaching children with the abilities of the 21 century, due to the new robotics that are attracting more and more. Two groups of students from a state school in Bucharest, Secondary School Nr. 195, participated in this research. The experimental group participated in the Robotics course and the control group participated in a course on Applied Mathematics in Transmission of the Movement, over a seven weeks period, in the year 2017. At that time, the students in both groups were in 3rd grade, their average ages was 9-10 years. The group that conducted the Robotics course had 33 students, and the group that developed the Applied Mathematics course in Transmitting the Movement had 37 students. For this research, LEGO kits such as Lego Mindstorm have been used and assimilated, allowing students to work in teams. This facilitated the understanding of the basic notions, and the children subsequently succeeded in expressing and developing their own ideas. The notions of robotics, the basic technological concepts have been easily assimilated by groups of students aged 10. Student debates, mathematical problem solving, teamwork, and the interest of children in the process of designing robots shows that robotics is a winning discipline.
Disturbance-Observer-Based Compliance Control of Electro-Hydraulic Actuators With Backdrivability

This letter proposes an intrinsically backdrivable electro-hydraulic torque actuator (EHTA) and associated control algorithms that could lead to the design of a high-performance interactive robot system. The EHTA consists of (electro-hydraulic) backdrivable servovalves and double vane rotary hydraulic actuators. It is represented as a flexible actuator model considering servovalve dynamics and fluid dynamics. In the flexible actuator structure, the interaction stability is not guaranteed because the EHTA is a noncollocated system. However, due to the use of backdrivable servovalves, the EHTA is rigidly represented in the finite frequency region that a robot operates in daily life; it has the property of finite frequency passivity. Based on this property, a disturbance observer was designed to compensate for friction effects and model uncertainties. Then, the compliance control was applied to the friction-free actuator. Consequently, we achieved the actuator with a torque sensitivity of 0.1 Nm and a maximum torque output of approximately 100 Nm. The proposed actuators and controllers were evaluated through experiments.
Haze and Thin Cloud Removal via Sphere Model Improved Dark Channel Prior

Haze and cloud seriously degrade the quality of optical remote sensing images, which largely decrease their interpretability and intelligibility. In this letter, we propose a two-stage haze and thin cloud removal method based on homomorphic filtering (HF) and sphere model improved dark channel prior (DCP). Compared with current dehazing methods, the most advantage of the proposed method is that our method can deal with uneven haze, thick haze, and thin cloud. We observe that haze and cloud are highly related to the illumination component and mainly located in the low frequency of an image. Thus, we adapt HF to enhance the haze image, which makes the distribution of haze more even. In the second stage, we analyze the drawback of DCP, i.e., the transmission estimated by DCP is very sensitive to noise. To draw this issue, we propose a novel sphere model to estimate a more accurate transmission map. The sphere model improved DCP is more suitable for thick haze images than the traditional DCP. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the compared state-of-the-art methods. The source code and data sets used in the letter are made public.1 1http://www.escience. cn/people/lijiayuan/index.html
Insights Into the Evolution of Staphylococcus aureus Daptomycin Resistance From an in vitro Bioreactor Model

The extensive use of daptomycin for treating complex methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections has led to the emergence of daptomycin-resistant strains. Although genomic studies have identified mutations associated with daptomycin resistance, they have not necessarily provided insight into the evolution and hierarchy of genetic changes that confer resistance, particularly as antibiotic concentrations are increased. Additionally, plate-dependent in vitro analyses that passage bacteria in the presence of antibiotics can induce selective pressures unrelated to antibiotic exposure. We established a continuous culture bioreactor model that exposes S. aureus strain N315 to increasing concentrations of daptomycin without the confounding effects of nutritional depletion to further understand the evolution of drug resistance and validate the bioreactor as a method that produces clinically relevant results. Samples were collected every 24 h for a period of 14 days and minimum inhibitory concentrations were determined to monitor the acquisition of daptomycin resistance. The collected samples were then subjected to whole genome sequencing. The development of daptomycin resistance in N315 was associated with previously identified mutations in genes coding for proteins that alter cell membrane charge and composition. Although genes involved in metabolic functions were also targets of mutation, the common route to resistance relied on a combination of mutations at a few key loci. Tracking the frequency of each mutation throughout the experiment revealed that mutations need not arise progressively in response to increasing antibiotic concentrations and that most mutations were present at low levels within populations earlier than would be recorded based on single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) filtering criteria. In contrast, a serial-passaged population showed only one mutation in a gene associated with resistance and provided limited detail on the changes that occur upon exposure to higher drug dosages. To conclude, this study demonstrates the successful in vitro modeling of antibiotic resistance in a bioreactor and highlights the evolutionary paths associated with the acquisition of daptomycin non-susceptibility.
Multi-Speaker Direction of Arrival Estimation using SRP-PHAT Algorithm with a Weighted Histogram

A direction of arrival (DOA) estimator for concurrent speakers in a reverberant environment is presented. The DOA estimation task is formulated in the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) in two stages. In the first stage, a single narrow-band DOA per time-frequency (T-F) is selected, since the speech sources are assumed to exhibit disjoint activity in the STFT domain. The narrow-band DOA is obtained as the maximum of the narrow-band steered response power phase transform (SRP-PHAT) localization spectrum at that T-F bin. In addition, for each narrow-band DOA, a quality measure is calculated, which provides the confidence in the estimated decision. In the second stage, the wide-band localization spectrum is calculated using a weighted histogram of the narrow-band DOAs with the quality measures as weight. Finally, the wide-band DOA estimation is obtained by selecting the peaks in the wide-band localization spectrum. The results of our experimental study demonstrate the benefit of the proposed algorithm as compared to the wide-band SRP-PHAT algorithm in a reverberant environment.
Highly Sensitive Vector Curvature Sensor Based on Two Juxtaposed Fiber Michelson Interferometers With Vernier-Like Effect

In this paper, a highly sensitive vector curvature sensor based on two juxtaposed fiber Michelson interferometers (MI) with Vernier-like effect has been proposed and verified. Different from the structures of the conventional Vernier effect which are composed of the cascaded elements, the proposed configuration consists of two juxtaposed MIs. A triple-core fiber (TCF) is connected with a quite short piece of dual-side-hole fiber (DSHF), and the core of the DSHF and the two eccentric cores of the TCF are respectively constituted two juxtaposed MIs. The Vernier-like effect is caused by the very small refractive index difference between the two eccentric cores of the TCF. The most outstanding feature of the proposed structure is that the two MIs are both sensitive to curvature with opposite sensitivities, which makes the curvature sensitivity magnification factor twice that of the conventional Vernier effect structure. Experimental results show that the curvature sensitivity of the structure can reach $-60.84~{\mathrm {nm/m}}^{-1}$ .
AN ONLINE LEARNING APPROACH TO WIRELESS COMPUTATION OFFLOADING

Fog computing extends cloud computing and services to the edge of networks, bringing advantages of the cloud closer to where data is created and acted upon. To support real time applications, latency performance is a crucial metric in fog computing. In this paper, we consider a sequential decision-making problem for computation offloading with unknown dynamics in which a mobile user offloads its arrival tasks to associated fog nodes (FNs) at each time slot. The queue of arrival tasks at each FN is modeled as a Markov chain. In order to provide satisfactory quality of experience, the network latency, which is directly associated with the queue condition, needs to be minimized. Taking advantage of reinforcement learning, the sequential decision-making problem is formulated as a restless multi-armed bandit problem. We construct a policy with interleaved exploration and exploitation stages, which achieves a regret with sub-linear order. Both analytical and simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in dealing with sequential decision-making problem.
An obstacle avoidance system for mobile robotics based on the virtual force field method

Una tarea básica que debe realizar un robot móvil autónomo al desenvolverse en un medio físico es trasladarse desde su posición actual hacia una ubicación deseada. Para lograrlo, debe tener la capacidad de evadir posibles obstáculos presentes en su entorno. Sin embargo, el empleo de sensores introduce errores de medición que contribuyen a la existencia de incertidumbre en la percepción del estado en que se encuentra el robot. En este trabajo se desarrollará e implementará un algoritmo de evasión basado en el método de fuerzas virtuales para la planificación de rutas. Este algoritmo se basa en un principio de optimización heurística del balance entre dos objetivos de diseño, la convergencia rápida hacia el punto de destino y la navegación segura libre de colisiones. El sistema de evasión será probado en un robot móvil, el Pioneer 3at<sup>®</sup>, utilizando los sonares frontales para la detección.
Threshold Voltage Variability in Nanosheet GAA Transistors

Nanosheet gate-all-around (GAA) field-effect transistor (NSFET) is a potential replacement for the FinFET at advanced technology nodes owing to better control of short-channel effects and higher drive current. Due to the increased complexity of the GAA stacked structure, new forms of process variability come into the picture, which are dominant over the conventional process variability such as metal gate granularity (MGG) and line edge roughness (LER) for FinFETs. In this article, we show one such process variability called as metal thickness variation (MTV). MTV causes WF mymargin variations on the gates of the GAA sheet transistor and results in a significant <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V}_{T}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> variability. The impact of MTV is studied using an analytical framework. We studied three variants of NSFETs and reported variability in terms of key device design parameters such as intersheet spacing and metal thicknesses. The results presented here help in designing the process flow for a type of NSFET to minimize the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${V}_{T}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> variability.
Runtime On-Stack Parallelization of Dependence-Free For-Loops in Binary Programs

With the multicore trend, the need for automatic parallelization is more pronounced, especially for legacy and proprietary code where no source code is available and/or the code is already running and restarting is not an option. In this paper, we engineer a mechanism for transforming at runtime a frequent for-loop with no data dependencies in a binary program into a parallel loop, using on-stack replacement. With our mechanism, there is no need for source code, debugging information or restarting the program. Also, the mechanism needs no static instrumentation or information. The mechanism is implemented using the Padrone binary modification system and pthreads, where the remaining iterations of the loop are executed in parallel. The mechanism keeps the running program state by extracting the targeted loop into a separate function and copying the current stack frame into the corresponding frames of the created threads. Initial study is conducted on a set of kernels from the Polybench workload. Experimental results show from 2× to 3.5× speedup from sequential to parallelized code on four cores, which is similar to source code level parallelization.
Small Signal Stability Analysis of Distribution Networks With Electric Springs

This paper presents small signal stability analysis of distribution networks with electric springs (ESs) installed at the customer supply points. The focus is on ESs with reactive compensation only. Vector control of ES with reactive compensation is reported for the first time to ensure compatibility with the standard stability models of other components such as the interface inverter of distributed generators (DGs). A linearized state-space model of the distribution network with multiple ESs is developed which is extendible to include inverter-interfaced DGs, energy storage, active loads, etc. The impact of distance of an ES from the substation, proximity between adjacent ESs and the R/X ratio of the network on the small signal stability of the system is analyzed and compared against the case with equivalent DG inverters. The collective operation of ESs is validated through simulation study on a standard distribution network.
Neural Network Multi-label Learning Based on Enhancing Pairwise Labels Discrimination for Obstetric Auxiliary Diagnosis

The data-driven medical health information processing has become a new development direction, especially the auxiliary diagnosis based on the electronic medical records (EMRs), which is of great significance to improve population health. In this paper, to obtain excellent obstetric auxiliary diagnostic results, the Chinese obstetric EMRs is analyzed and processed, and finally the auxiliary diagnosis task is transformed into a multi-label classification problem. Moreover, two effective global error functions are proposed by enhancing pairwise labels discrimination to improve the Backpropagation for Multi-label Learning (BP-MLL) that depends on the neural network model. The experiment results of some public multi-label datasets and the Chinese obstetric dataset show that the two error functions have better overall performance compared with BP-MLL original error function and some well-established multi-label learning algorithms.
Dependence of the Perceptual Discrimination of High-Frequency Vibrations on the Envelope and Intensity of Waveforms

Humans perceive and discriminate high-frequency tactile vibrations based on the intensity and envelope of the stimuli. However, no studies have investigated exactly how the envelope and intensity each affect the ability to discriminate. The objectives of this paper are to identify the boundary at which the envelope begins not to strongly affect the ability to discriminate vibrations and to investigate the effects of the carrier frequency and intensity on the discrimination ability. The results of our testing showed that the ability to discriminate was dependent on the envelope frequency and that the ability to discriminate sinusoidal and amplitude-modulated (AM) vibrations in which the envelope frequency ranged from 12 to 50 Hz was higher than that required to discriminate sinusoidal and AM vibrations in which the envelope frequency was above 80 Hz. When the envelope frequency of an AM vibration was 125 Hz, the ability to discriminate sinusoidal and AM vibrations was found to be low and no significant difference was noted in comparison to discriminating AM vibrations with the same envelope frequency. These results suggest that the boundary for envelope perception was at an envelope frequency of around 80–125 Hz at low intensities and that the carrier frequency had little effect on the discrimination, although the discrimination ability tended to increase as the intensity increased.
Corrosion Mechanism for Copper Sulfide Formation Induced by Dibenzyl Disulfide in Oil-Immersed Insulation

This paper investigated the influence of paper-wrapped on the deposition of sulfur corrosion on the insulation winding (paper-wrapped copper conductor) in oil-immersed insulation containing dibenzyl disulfide (DBDS). The distribution of sulfur corrosion deposit on a 500-kV electric reactor was investigated and analyzed, and the properties of oil were analyzed. Aging experiments were also conducted for oil–paper insulation with 500-mg/kg DBDS under IEC 62535 corrosion test condition. The corrosion degree of insulation winding was evaluated, and the properties of oil were also discussed. Results showed that the enwinding pattern of the insulating paper on the copper conductor affected the deposition distribution of copper sulfide to be an alternate appearance of a non-corroded crevice and a strip-shaped corrosion deposit on the copper conductor according to the results of field and laboratory. Furthermore, for the insulation winding, the increased number of paper layers on the copper conductor led to the aggravation of sulfur corrosion, prevented the diffusion of copper ions in the oil, and accelerated the formation of acids, which co-affected the properties of the oil. The enwinding of insulating paper on the copper conductor led to the appearance of a tiny crevice on the insulation winding, which is an important occurrence precondition of crevice corrosion. Finally, the mechanism underlying crevice corrosion for insulation winding was theorized as electrochemical corrosion leading to copper sulfide formation.