Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Range-expanding plant species and their belowground neighbours : digging into novel interactions

In this thesis I studied plant-soil interactions of range-expanding plant species: plants that have expanded their range northward due to recent climate change. The interactions of these plant species with associated belowground organisms are predicted to change along their range expansion trajectory, as belowground organisms have limited dispersal capabilities. I show that nematode communities under range-expanding plant species indeed change along a latitudinal transect across Europe, but that range-expanding plant species only rarely experience less herbivory from nematodes in their new range compared to their original range. Greenhouse studies showed that in the new range, the direct and indirect interactions of range-expanding plant species with root-feeding nematodes differ from similar interactions of native plant species, but that the outcomes of such interactions are highly species-specific. The level of dissimilarity in root chemistry between range-expanding plant and related native plant species may determine the responses of native nematodes to range-expanding plant species in their new range. I also show that phylogenetic distance is not a good predictor of variation in plant-soil interactions among native and range-expanding plant species. Overall, my thesis shows that interactions of range-expanding plant species with soil organisms in their new range are species-specific, and that the impact of range-expanding plant species on communities in their new range cannot be easily predicted.
Stably Polarized Wideband Circular Microstrip Antenna Excited in TM12 Mode

One of the major drawbacks of the U-slotted wideband microstrip patch antennas, i.e., the polarization instability at the high-end frequencies, is addressed by utilizing the next broadside TM<sub>12</sub> mode in circular patch antennas. The proposed antenna is capable of generating stably polarized waves over a wide frequency range of ~45% (2.05–3.25 GHz), which is not the case with the reported literature on U-slotted wideband patch antennas. The antenna comprises the U-slot and appropriately positioned shorting vias to achieve the desired impedance and radiation characteristics. It is fed by an L-probe and loaded with four non-resonating arc slits to suppress the TM<sub>12</sub> mode’s E-plane sidelobes, which are very prominent otherwise. The polarization stability of the antenna is demonstrated through the surface current distributions on the patch, radiation patterns, and the <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$x$ </tex-math></inline-formula>- and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$y$ </tex-math></inline-formula>-polarized gain over the frequency range of interest.
Optimal Neighborhood Multiple Kernel Clustering With Adaptive Local Kernels

Multiple kernel clustering (MKC) algorithm aims to group data into different categories by optimally integrating information from a group of pre-specified kernels. Though demonstrating superiorities in various applications, we observe that existing MKC algorithms usually do not sufficiently consider the local density around individual data samples and excessively limit the representation capacity of the learned optimal kernel, leading to unsatisfying performance. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, called optimal neighborhood MKC with adaptive local kernels (ON-ALK), to address the two issues. In specific, we construct adaptive local kernels to sufficiently consider the local density around individual data samples, where different numbers of neighbors are discriminatingly selected on each sample. Further, the proposed ON-ALK algorithm boosts the representation of the learned optimal kernel via relaxing it into the neighborhood area of weighted combination of the pre-specified kernels. To solve the resultant optimization problem, a three-step iterative algorithm is designed and theoretically proven to be convergent. After that, we also study the generalization bound of the proposed algorithm. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the clustering performance. As indicated, the algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in recent literatures on six challenging benchmark datasets, verifying its advantages and effectiveness.
Social Networking Service Fatigue and Cessation: Focusing on Cultural and Gender Differences

Social Networking Service (SNS) is a part of our daily lives, with their positive and negative impacts. This study investigates SNS fatigue in men and women of different cultural backgrounds as well as the relationship between SNS fatigue and the intentions to cease SNS activities. The study results show that during SNS activities, women are more concerned for their reputation; participants with East Asian cultural backgrounds experience burdens with respect to relationships, and participants with Western cultural backgrounds experience fatigue with respect to privacy concerns. No statistical significance was identified between SNS fatigue and the intentions to cease SNS activity; although people experienced fatigue, they did not desire to stop SNS use. This study reveals that culture and gender impacts SNS fatigue, and few people quit SNS despite the fatigue. ■ keyword :∣Cessation∣Cultural Differences∣Gender Differences∣SNS∣Fatigue∣ 접수일자 : 2020년 05월 15일 수정일자 : 2020년 06월 09일 심사완료일 : 2020년 06월 09일 교신저자 : 최철환, e-mail : chulhwan.choi@khu.ac. kr 한국콘텐츠학회논문지 '20 Vol. 20 No. 7 548 internet services[1]. In 2018, Hootesuite[2] reported that SNSs have more than three billion monthly users, with nearly one million new users joining each month. Within SNS space, Facebook continues to have the largest user base with over two billion active users[3], and there are almost 100 million Twitter accounts[4]. The prevalence and exponential growth of SNSs indicate the importance of these platforms in today’s society. 1. Why do People Use SNS Sites? In general, a SNS is a web-based service that helps people establish social relationships online and provides a space to share information and topics of interest[5]. According to Urista, Dong, and Day[6], the main motivation for SNS use is efficient communication with others through certain mediums. In other words, SNSs help share photos, texts, and videos in a virtual space, much like the physical space[7]. Other key motivations include passing time[8], taking part in a society, or building up a follower base[9]. Ultimately, SNS use is driven by the aforementioned benefits, as well as identity performance[10]. Another key benefit influencing SNS usage, is the diversity of platforms, many of which are segmented into national or cultural categories, providing differentiated service platforms to meet the diverse wants and needs of a global customer base[5].
Target Tracking Based on Multiparameter Adaptive Adjustment for Autonomous Aerial Refueling

Autonomous aerial refueling (AAR) can improve the aircraft’s combat effectiveness, and drogue visual tracking is one of the key technologies for the success of AAR. Target tracking is challenging as high-speed drogue often undergo abrupt motions, leaving the vision field, and significant hollow background variation over time. To address these challenges, a tracker based on multiparameter adaptive adjustment is proposed. First, we propose a background awareness module to perceive the hollow background of the drogue, which contributes to fully utilize background information. Second, the parameter and feature adaptation module is proposed to optimize the parameters and features by combining the information of drogue motion and the changing background. Finally, the tracking result is determined by the designed adaptive fusion module that conduces to the elevation of the tracking accuracy. The three modules are effectively merged, allowing our system to track the hollow object robustly and leading to superior results on the drogue videos experiment in the sky compared with state-of-the-art trackers.
E-government and Digitalisation of Core Administrative Services for Citizens in Selected CEE Countries

Improved service delivery (services are easier to use, more convenient, of better quality etc.) has been perceived as one of the key goals of e-government initiatives, next to the improvement of government business processes (increase in internal efficiency, better information sharing, inter-operation, innovativeness, better decision-making, greater transparency and accountability, and greater proximity to citizens). Much has been heard about citizen-centricity in e-government definitions and programmes, but has e-government actually developed in a citizen-centric way, and can the e-government be citizen-centred if it does not focus on core administrative services for citizens?
Genomic signatures of extensive inbreeding in Isle Royale wolves, a population on the threshold of extinction

Extended runs of homozygosity harboring recessive mutations underlie severe inbreeding depression in Isle Royale wolves. The observation that small isolated populations often suffer reduced fitness from inbreeding depression has guided conservation theory and practice for decades. However, investigating the genome-wide dynamics associated with inbreeding depression in natural populations is only now feasible with relatively inexpensive sequencing technology and annotated reference genomes. To characterize the genome-wide effects of intense inbreeding and isolation, we performed whole-genome sequencing and morphological analysis of an iconic inbred population, the gray wolves (Canis lupus) of Isle Royale. Through population genetic simulations and comparison with wolf genomes from a variety of demographic histories, we find evidence that severe inbreeding depression in this population is due to increased homozygosity of strongly deleterious recessive mutations. Our results have particular relevance in light of the recent translocation of wolves from the mainland to Isle Royale, as well as broader implications for management of genetic variation in the fragmented landscape of the modern world.
To study the age of fusion of first costal cartilage with manubrium in North Indian Population.

INTRODUCTION The ﬁrst rib has a primary centre for the shaft that appears around 2nd month of intrauterine life. Secondary centres for the head and tubercle 1 appears around puberty. Fusion is completed by 20 years . The ﬁrst chondrosternal joint is an unusual variety of synarthrosis inaccurately called as synchondrosis. The attachment of the ﬁrst rib to sternum also 2 becomes a synostosis with age . Naked eye appearance of ﬁrst costal cartilage and its appearance radiographically seem to be a less addressed area. Since there is dearth of literature about the naked eye appearance and radiographic appearance of ﬁrst costal cartilage calciﬁcation in North Indian Population, this present study is conducted subsequently. Age estimation in cadavers, human remains and living individuals is important because it clariﬁes issues with signiﬁcant legal and social ramiﬁcations. ABSTRACT Objective - To study the age of fusion in sternal end of the costal cartilage of the ﬁrst rib with manubrium as seen with naked eyes. Methods - The present study has been conducted in the Department of Anatomy in collaboration with the Department of Forensic Medicine, Pt. B.D. Sharma PGIMS, Rohtak. For the study, the specimen comprised of 50 pairs of ﬁrst rib along with manubrium in both sexes in the age ranging from 15-30 years, collected from the cases of medico-legal autopsies done in Department of Forensic Medicine after taking proper consent from the legal heir of the deceased and were then cleaned and observed with naked eyes. Results - To study the age of fusion of ﬁrst costal cartilage with manubrium, the specimen were observed with naked eyes and were classiﬁed in the following categories- non fusion, beginning of fusion, active fusion, complete fusion. The mean age of non-fusion was 17.1 years in females and 16.2 years in males. The mean age of active fusion was 22.1 years in males and 23 years in females. The mean age of complete fusion was 27.4 years in males and 27.6 years in females. Conclusion -The fusion of ﬁrst costal cartilage with manubrium proceeds faster in males as compared to females.
A Practical Approach to Optimising Distribution Transformer Tap Settings

This paper proposes a method of determining the optimal tap settings for no-load distribution transformers with tap-changing capabilities that is practical to apply in real distribution networks. The risk of low voltage distribution networks violating voltage constraints is impacted by the increasing uptake of distributed energy resources and embedded generation. Some of this risk can be alleviated by suitably setting no-load transformer tap settings, however, modifying these taps requires customer outages and must be infrequent. Hence, loading over the entire year must be considered to account for seasonal variations when setting these taps optimally. These settings are determined using evolution strategy optimisation based on an average loading case. Monte Carlo simulations are used to calculate the probability that the terminal voltages on the distribution transformer secondary terminals violate the network voltage limits when the optimal set of taps for the average case is applied over a whole year. This algorithm was tested on several cases of a real distribution feeder of varying complexity, and produces a sufficiently-optimal set of taps without significant computation time.
An Accurate Noninvasive Blood Glucose Measurement System Using Portable Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Transfer Learning Framework

Diabetes is considered one of the life-threatening diseases in the world, which needs regular monitoring of blood glucose levels. In this article, we developed a portable system that makes near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technology available to non-professionals through a mobile application and a specially-made enclosure. It overcomes the shortcomings of traditional spectroscopy systems, such as large volume, high cost, complicated operation, and difficulty in online detection. To verify the feasibility of NIRS in noninvasive blood glucose concentration detection, after the pretreatment of the acquired original spectra, we compared two different feature extraction algorithms of synergy interval (Si) and genetic algorithm (GA). On this basis, two quantitative prediction models of partial least squares (PLS) and extreme learning machine (ELM) were established. The experimental results showed the model based on the combination of Si and GA and ELM (i.e., Si-GA-ELM model) as the most accurate among the selected models. At the same time, the prediction accuracy of the spectral waveband was higher than that of the full. To further overcome the difficulty of establishing a finite sample data model and reduce the influence of individual differences, the model transfer method TrAdaBoost was used to enhance the accuracy and stability of our model. The final experimental results show that the NIR spectrometer used is portable and light and can be encased as a handheld device form. Computation models combining machine learning and chemometric methods make the estimated blood glucose more feasible, which is an innovative work in noninvasive blood glucose measurement fields.
Using the Fisher Vector Representation for Audio-based Emotion Recognition

: Automatically determining speaker emotions in human speech is a frequently studied task, where various techniques have been employed over the years. An efficient method is to represent the utterances by employing the Bag-of-Audio-Words technique, inspired by the Bag-of-Visual-Words approach from the area of image processing. In the past few years, however, Bag-of-Visual-Words has been replaced by the so-called Fisher vector representation, as it was shown to give a better classification performance. Despite this, in audio processing, Fisher vectors to date have only been rarely applied. In this study, we show that Fisher vectors are also a viable way of representing features in speech technology; more precisely, we use them in the task of emotion classification. Based on our results on two datasets, Fisher vectors can be effectively employed for this task: we measured 4% relative improvements in the UAR scores for both corpora, which rose to 9-16% when we combined this approach with the standard paralinguistic one.
From feeding habits to food webs: exploring the diet of an opportunistic benthic generalist

Deep-sea benthic ecosystems are difficult to study, particularly when trying to clarify diet and trophic relationships. New Zealand scampi Metanephrops challengeri are endemic, commercially prized deep-sea lobsters that are bottom trawled. These lobsters are typically the dominant mobile megafaunal species in the deep-sea benthic habitat, and their burrowing behaviour plays an important role in bioturbation of seafloor habitats. DNA metabarcoding was undertaken on the gut contents of 66 scampi from 4 fishery management areas using COI and 18S rRNA markers to better understand their feeding habits and trophic role. Scampi were confirmed to be opportunistic benthic scavengers, with the gut samples containing over 150 species, ranging from small (e.g. alveolates) to large eukaryotes (e.g. fish). The main dietary components consisted of crabs and prawns, but also included macroalgae and fish. Significant differences were found among scampi gut contents when comparing season and geographic region, but not when comparing sex and size. Due to their generalist scavenging nature, scampi play an important role in the deep-sea benthic ecosystems and are natural benthic samplers that are well suited to being used as deep-sea ecosystem/biodiversity monitors.
Assessment of Interfacial Adaptation of New Endodontic Sealers to Root Canal Dentin with and Without a Main Guttaperch Cone: An SEM Analysis

Aim of the study: The aim of this study was to evaluate the interfacial adaptation of EndoSequence BC sealer, MTA Fillapex and Vioseal sealers to root canal Dentin with and without a main gutta-percha cone. Material and Methods: Total of 60 single-rooted human teeth with single canal were selected and the crowns were removed at the CEJ level to standardize the root length (16 mm). Samples were instrumented using Protaper next NiTi rotary system up to size X5. After irrigation and smear layer removal samples were randomly divided according to the sealer used into three groups of 20 samples each, and each group was further subdivided based on obturation technique into six subgroup three group with cone and three group without cone of 10 sample each. Samples were stored for 48 hours before testing. Horizontal sections were obtained for all samples to evaluate the adaptation of sealer using Scanning electron microscope. The data were analyzed statistically by one-way Anova and Tukay’s post-hoc test. Result: Vioseal showed significantly least gap and better adaptation (P<0.05) followed by MTA Fillapex then EndoSequence BC when obturated with cone were as EndoSequence BC show the least gap and better adaptation followed by Vioseal then MTA Fillapex when obturated without cone. The coronal level of all group had significantly more gaps compared to middle and apical third. Conclusion: All the three sealers showed different grades gap width along the whole length of root canal wall.
Multilayer Internet-of-Things Middleware Based on Knowledge Graph

Internet of Things (IoT) provides ubiquitous intelligence and pervasive interconnections to diverse physical objects. A key technology to seamlessly integrate different IoT devices into an IoT system is IoT middleware, a software system layer designed to be the intermediary between IoT devices and applications. However, two issues, communication gap and heterogeneous access, prevent the existing IoT middleware from effective application in an IoT system with heterogeneous standards and interfaces. To address this problem, inspired by a graph-based knowledge system for eliminating heterogeneity in business systems, we, in this article, propose a knowledge graph-based multilayer IoT middleware. The proposed multilayer IoT middleware introduces a new layer to bridge the gap between IoT devices with different communication protocols. It is able to uniformly manage all IoT devices by using an IoT knowledge graph. We evaluate the applicability of the proposed approach by a real-life IoT project, a remote monitoring project of rural sewage treatment stations located in Yunnan Province, China. We find that the proposed approach effectively resolves the communication gap and heterogeneous access problems that occurred in the system.
Harmonic Amplitude Dispersion: When Production Intrinsic Prior Meets Oxygen Concentration Detection of Pharmaceutical Glass Vials

In situ and accurate oxygen concentration detection is drawing great attention in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. This article proposes a novel concept of harmonic amplitude dispersion (HAD) under the framework of wavelength-modulation-based tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS/WMS). Then, a reliable production intrinsic prior to the long-term information entropy distribution pattern is learned from the demodulated second-harmonic signals. Interestingly, the performance in oxygen concentration detection can be improved in two rounds by the HAD concept. First, for accuracy, signal reconstruction is implicitly carried out during the HAD-based parameter optimization process for the horizontal span ( $k_{x}$ ) and the vertical tension ( $k_{y}$ ) in the Voigt spectral line modeling. This method is denoted as HAD signal reconstruction (HADSR). Second, for efficiency, with the guidance of HAD, only approximately 12% of reconstructed signals are fed into the online sequential extreme learning machine (OS-ELM) for further concentration classification, as the data with higher HADs are determined to be uninformative and are discarded early before data training to enable the classifier to be more compact. The detection framework of HADSR + OS-ELM was first verified on an automated vision inspection machine in an actual pharmaceutical manufacturing line. Promisingly, the proposed HAD robustly narrowed the average variance in the signal peak-to-peak values by nearly 30%, and together with the HAD-guided OS-ELM, an average detection accuracy of 98.1% within an acceptable time cost of 300 ms/vial was realized during a long-term test.
Laboratory investigations aimed at building a database for the interpretation of JWST spectra

Abstract The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is expected to be launched in 2021. The JWST’s science instruments will provide high quality spectra acquired in the line of sight to young stellar objects whose interpretation will require a robust database of laboratory data. With this in mind, an experimental work is in progress in the Laboratory for Experimental Astrophysics in Catania to study the profile (shape, width, and peak position) of the main infrared bands of molecular species expected to be present in icy grain mantles. Our study also takes into account the modifications induced on icy samples by low-energy cosmic ray bombardment and by thermal processing. Here we present some recent results on deuterium hydrogen monoxide (HDO), N-bearing species, and carbon dioxide (CO2).