Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Co-Deposition and Characterization of Hydroxyapatite-Chitosan and Hydroxyapatite-Polyvinylacetate Coatings on 304 SS for Biomedical Devices

During the last decades, biomaterials have been deeply studied to perform and improve coatings for biomedical devices. Metallic materials, especially in the orthopedic field, represent the most common material used for different type of devices thanks to their good mechanical properties. Nevertheless, low/medium resistance to corrosion and low osteointegration ability characterizes these materials. To overcome these problems, the use of biocoatings on metals substrate is largely diffused. In fact, biocoatings have a key role to confer biocompatibility properties, to inhibit corrosion and thus improve the lifetime of implanted devices. In this work, the attention was focused on Hydroxyapatite-Chitosan (HA/CS) and Hydroxyapatite-Polyvinylacetate (HA/PVAc) composites, that have been studied as biocoatings for 304 SS based devices. Hydroxyapatite was selected for its osteoconductivity thanks to its chemical structure similar to bones. Furthermore, Chitosan and Polyvinylacetate are largely used yet in medical field (e.g. antibacterial agent or drug deliver) and in this work were used to create a synergic interaction with hydroxyapatite to increase the strength and bioactivity of coating. Biocotings were obtained by galvanic deposition process that does not require an external power supply. It is a spontaneous electrochemical deposition in which materials with different standard electrochemical potential were short-circuited and immersed in an electrolytic solution. Electrons supply for the cathodic reaction in the noblest material comes from oxidation of the less noble material. SEM, EDS, XRD and RAMAN were performed for chemical-physics characterization of biocoatings. Polarization and impedance measurements have been carried out to evaluate corrosion behavior. Besides, in-vitro cytotoxicity assays have been done for the biological features.
Optimasi Parameter Proses Injection Molding Terhadap Inner Snap Diameter dan Netto Produk Pot Cream 10 Gram Metode Response Surface

Along with the times and advances in science and technology, plastics are increasingly being used by people in various products because of their diverse interests. Many industries make plastic as the main raw material in the production process. Processing of plastic seeds until it became finished products can be done in many ways one of them is injection molding. But there are some obstacles when plastic products are made in large quantities, so they need to improve the quality of products they are produced.One way to improve the quality of products is by optimizing the parameters. Parameter optimization is a technique used in the manufacturing process to produce the best product. This study aims to optimize injection molding parameters such as injection time, injection pressure and holding time to optimize inner snap diameter and netto on pot cream products. Each parameter has 3 levels which are designed using Box-Behnken method. In this research using ANOVA method to analyze experimental data and the optimization of inner snap diameter and netto in injection molding process is done by using response surface method.Based on the results, it is known that the parameters of injection time, and holding time has an influence on the inner snap diameter. While for the netto all parameters have influence such as injection time, injection pressure, and holding time. For optimization, the configuration of injection time parameter is 3.74 seconds, injection pressure is 47%, and holding time is 1.5 seconds which produce 46.11 mm of inner snap diameter and netto 8.7 gram.
User Testing of a Continuum Manipulator for Assistive Technology

The application of continuum manipulators as assistive robots is discussed and tested through the use of Bendy ARM, a tendon-driven continuum manipulator prototype. Two rounds of user testing were completed to evaluate the potential of this robot to aid disabled individuals in the completion of activities of daily living. In the first round of user testing, 14 able-bodied subjects successfully completed the prescribed task (pick-and-place) using multiple control schemes after being given a brief introduction and one minute of practice with each scheme. In the second round of user testing, subjects chosen from the first round of testing (n = 3) demonstrated between 29.45 and 48.91 percent improvement in completion time across three sessions (twelve trials total) of a peg-in-hole task, and between 8.39 and 33.81 percent improvement across two sessions (six trials total) of a task involving opening and closing a drawer. Based on these results, it is posited that continuum manipulators merit further consideration as a safer and more cost-effective alternative to existing commercially available assistive robotic manipulators.
Forests Policies and Programmes in India: Implications for Climate Change Adaptation

Climate change is a major global environmental and developmental challenge and climate proofing of vulnerable sectors, programmes, natural systems and communities by integrating adaptation and mitigation options into planning process are increasingly becoming an integral part of development. The basic premises on which this could happen are the national and sectoral policies that govern any programmes and actions implemented on ground. This study reviews existing policies, plans and programmes and their implications for climate change. Based on the analyses, key areas of research, policy initiatives and institutional and capacity development needs have been identified, to facilitate climate change adaptation. The forest policies formulated so far in India have been broadly aimed at conservation, reduction of pressure on forests and provisioning of biomass to the large forest dependent population for their fuel and fodder needs apart from generating revenue through production and sale of timber. However, these have not been formulated with climate change as a consideration and therefore may become less effective as climate change and its impacts become increasingly evident. The study clearly identifies that the current policies and programmes have elements/features and activities that directly or indirectly contribute positively towards adaptation, although the primary implications are towards biodiversity and to some extent ecosystem functioning. It finally highlights the need for incorporating climate change concerns in forest sector development programmes and also to address the issue of climate change.
Integration of Grid and Local Batch Resources at DESY

As one of the largest resource centres DESY has to support differing work flows of users from various scientific backgrounds. Users can be for one HEP experiments in WLCG or Belle II as well as local HEP users but also physicists from other fields as photon science or accelerator development. By abandoning specific worker node setups in favour of generic flat nodes with middleware resources provided via CVMFS, we gain flexibility to subsume different use cases in a homogeneous environment. Grid jobs and the local batch system are managed in a HTCondor based setup, accepting pilot, user and containerized jobs. The unified setup allows dynamic re-assignment of resources between the different use cases. Monitoring is implemented on global batch system metrics as well as on a per job level utilizing corresponding cgroup information.
Identifying the influencing factors on the quality of China’s forestry exports

Purpose China is not only the biggest importing country of the raw materials of forest products, but also the biggest exporting country of intermediate and final forest products. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach The authors use the Khandelwal (2010) method and trade data from 2000 to 2014 of bilateral forest products between China and ten main developed countries to evaluate the quality of China’s forestry imports and exports. Subsequently, the influencing factors of product quality are analyzed. Findings The results show that the current export quality of plywood and fiberboard is decreasing, and the export quality of particleboard and paper products is on the rise. A further study finds that several factors have the positive effects on the quality of forestry exports, including gross domestic product of the importing country, forestry export value of the importing country as well as the number of forestry higher education graduates of the exporting country. Moreover, the study also finds that the status of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation member has a negative effect on the quality of forestry exports, while the distance cost has a negative influence on fiberboard, paper and paperboard. Practical implications The study suggests that China needs to strengthen the research and development investment on forest products, and improve the quality of forest products to promote the trade development of forestry exports. Originality/value The existing literature has not shown much research regarding the quality of China’s forestry exports through econometric analysis. Therefore, the research results provide new perspective about the influencing factors on China’s forestry trade activities.
EHEALTH EUROCAMPUS: AN INNOVATIVE EDUCATIONAL FRAMEWORK TO TRAIN QUALIFIED PROFESSIONALS IN THE EMERGING EHEALTH SECTOR

The aim of this paper is to present the results of an initiative called the eHealth Eurocampus (http://ehealtheurocampus.eu), whose main goal is to define a framework to prepare professionals for the eHealth work environment. To do so, three main activities have been organized: develop eHealth learning materials, international intensive study programs for both health science and IT students and international training seminars for researches and professors. The eHealth Eurocampus project is an EU-funded Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership for higher education (September-2016 / August-2019) which aims at preparing qualified professionals able to cope with the challenge of “fostering a spirit of innovation in eHealth in Europe as the way forward to ensure better health and better and safer care for EU citizens, a more skilled workforce, more efficient and sustainable health and care systems, new business opportunities” (EC eHealth Action Plan 2012-2020). The consortium of the eHealth Eurocampus project along with the participants of the designed activities have created an original eHealth teaching-learning framework where university professors, students, researchers, and clinicians are able to share their experiences and knowledge with the aim of improving the skills of graduates in order to improve their employability. These are the organized activities and the topics that have been covered: - eHealth learning materials. Five courses of 6 ECTS each have been developed in the following topics: innovation and entrepreneurship, IT for a longer independent life, robotics for health care, graphics and medical imaging and eHealth applications and tools. - Intensive study programs. Three international summer schools for both health and IT students have been organized with an interdisciplinary approach. The first one deal with innovation and entrepreneurship in eHealth. The second one is focused on applications and tools for longer independent life. And robotics, graphics and medical imaging are covered in the third one. The summer schools have proven to be the best testbed for the learning materials and for innovative teaching methodologies in interdisciplinary context. - Training seminars. When you face the training of qualified eHealth professionals it is critical to have good educators. Two training seminars have been organized with the goal of share experiences and knowledge among practitioners, university teachers and researches of the health and IT fields. The topics covered in the seminars are eHealth Teaching Challenges and Accessibility, Inclusion, and Rehabilitation using IT, respectively. In this paper, we will introduce in detail the different activities carried out, the results and conclusions of this teaching-learning framework and how the different stakeholders would take advantage of it.
Secrecy Energy Efficiency Optimization for Downlink Two-User OFDMA Networks With SWIPT

Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), as a promising technology by which mobile devices are designed by both information decoding and energy harvesting at the same time, has recently drawn significant interests. However, in multiuser scenario, a challenging physical layer security issue arises as the confident messages sent to the intended information receivers may be eavesdropped by other receivers. To address this problem, in this paper, secrecy energy efficiency maximization (SEEM) problem is investigated for two-user orthogonal frequency-division multiple access networks with SWIPT. Specifically, a power splitting scheme is adopted for each user, which would split received radio frequency signals into two independent parts for information decoding and energy harvesting, respectively. Taking both the individual secrecy quality of service requirement and the individual harvested energy constraint into consideration, the SEEM problem is formulated as a nonlinear fractional programming problem. Moreover, according to Dinkelbach's method, a power allocation and power splitting (PAPS) algorithm is proposed by solving the equivalent convex optimization problem. Finally, numerical results verify the impact of static circuit power consumption, maximum transmit power, power split ratio, subcarrier bandwidth, and path loss on secrecy energy efficiency of our PAPS algorithm.
Identifying And Managing Software Project Risks With Proposed Fuzzy Regression Analysis Techniques : Maintenance Phase

Many software projects have a very high failure rate in spite of much effort has been put for its succession. Risk is not always avoidable, but it is controllable on software development projects. The aim of this paper is to present a new mining technique that introduced the fuzzy multiple regression analysis to manage the risks in a software development project in the maintenance phase. The results show that all risks in software projects were significant in software project manager's perspective. This paper, we used fuzzy multiple regression analysis techniques to compare the risk management techniques to each of the software risk factors to determine if they are effective in mitigating the occurrence of each software risk factor in maintenance phase. The study has been conducted on a group of software project managers, which the top ten software risk factors in the maintenance phase and thirty risk management techniques were presented to the respondents. As the result, this output gives greatly improve of probability of software project success.
Malware detection for Thai Android applications using regularized logistic regression

Android applications have widely served for this generation of smartphone customers. As a consequence, malwares have also increased and caused severe security risks. Therefore, an efficient malware detection system, especially for Android applications, has become more interesting and necessary to deal with the next generation malwares. Machine learning approach has proven its capability to identify whether an application is benign or malicious, by interpreting it as a dichotomous malware-detected classification. A permission required by each of Android application can be considered as a promising feature, despite having to take a large number of them into account. Both regularization and feature selection improve generalization performance of a classifier. In this study, Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) and elastic net are carried out and their performances are compared on data set of Thai Android applications and malwares. The regularized logistic regression with simultaneous feature selections provide more efficient malware detection system. The experimental results indicate that both LASSO and elastic net have their own benefits for malware classification. The LASSO with an efficient feature selection requires only 18 permissions of feature to develop the malware classification with minimum deviance and 10 permissions for a parsimonious model. The elastic net is able to detect the malware with 95% accuracy, more feature requirement notwithstanding.
Carving out a domain for the market: boundary making in European environmental markets

Abstract This paper proposes to analyse the politics of markets by problematizing the boundary between markets and policy. We show that this boundary has been central in the construction of European carbon markets through the Emissions Trading System, and we put these in contrast with two other European environmental markets – the market for clean technologies organized by the Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control directive and the market for sustainable biofuels organized by the Renewable Energy Directive. We use these examples to analyse the operations through which boundaries are manufactured, maintained and contested. The case of European environmental markets allows us to study the political consequences of articulating the relations between markets and policy in terms of boundary-work, and to identify potential alternatives.
Vote centers and turnout by election type in Texas

The use of vote centers—specific locations in a county where all voters will vote—is on the rise nationwide, as more than a dozen states used this process by 2018. More states are moving toward using voting centers to remedy the problem of low voter turnout, with the assumption that the centralization of voting to several core county locations will increase voter accessibility. What we have less clear information about is the effect of vote centers on turnout in individual elections across several cycles. Using a natural experiment in Texas—a state that has three fixed election cycles—we find vote centers have a small positive impact on traditionally lower turnout elections but no effect on higher turnout elections. The cumulative impact of vote centers has a small effect on turnout over time. These results suggest a more cautious assessment is needed when considering the use and impact of vote centers.
Agency and geopolitics: Brazilian formal independence and the problem of Eurocentrism in international historical sociology

Abstract The main narratives that explain the development of the modern international order fall short of incorporating the historical peculiarities of processes of state-formation in non-European contexts. To overcome that limitation, this paper argues that class agency must be taken as a core element to understand the social and geopolitical struggles that shape each case of transition towards modern sovereignty in its historical particularity. This is informed by the Brazilian historical experience. In that case, statehood can only be understood as an outcome of the disputes of its ruling landowning class against Portuguese colonialism, mediated by the British informal empire throughout the 19th century. In order to bring all these elements together, I follow the tradition of political Marxism to reconceptualize the very notion of “geopolitics” by grounding it in class-based strategies of reproduction and spatialization. The result is an agency-centred and radically historicist theoretical framework that rejects structuralist transhistorical logics of development. It also argues against the latent Eurocentrism present in theories of state-formation that are grounded on the European experience and simply transposed to other contexts by stressing the agency of non-European subjects in the making of their own history.
Evaluating the Impact of Energy-Aware Routing on Software-Defined Networking Performance

Increasing power consumption and CO2 emissions generated by large data networks have become a major concern over the last decade. For this problem, the emerging paradigm of Software-Defined Networks (SDN) can be seen as an attractive solution. In these networks an energy-aware routing model could be easily implemented leveraging the control and adta plane separation. This paper investigates the impact of energy-aware routing on SDN performance. To that end, we propose a novel energy-aware mechanism that reduces the number of active links in SDN with multiple controllers, considering in-band control traffic, i.e. links are shared between data and control plane traffic. The proposed strategy exploits knowledge of the network topology combined with traffic engineering techniques to reduce the overall power consumption. Therefore, two heuristic algorithms are designed: a static network configuration and a dynamic energy-aware routing. Significant values of switched-off links are reached in the simulations using real topologies and demands data. Moreover, obtained results confirm that crucial network parameters such as control traffic delay, data path latency, link utilization and TCAM occupation are affected by the performance-agnostic energy- aware model.
Audit Quality and Accounting Conservatism

This objective of this study is to examine the impact of audit quality on accounting conservatism in Turkey. Using three different measures of accounting conservatism, we report that audit quality, in terms of brand name auditor and industry specialist auditor, is positively related to conservatism. Our results hold after controlling for operating cash flow, leverage, firm age and sales growth. Overall, the evidence is consistent that accounting conservatism complements firms in the Turkish business environment that engage with high quality auditors to mitigate agency costs.
Determining the Optimum Number of Paths for Realization of Multi-path Routing in MPLS-TE Networks

Multi-Protocol Label Switching for Traffic Engineering (MPLS-TE) technology is an intelligent and advanced tool for handling traffic through the core networks and implementing new services based on virtual transport. Since MPLS-TE combines channel and network layer mechanisms, network administrators can optimally integrate and allocate the traffic loads while maintaining the speed of technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology. In this paper, the problem of the developed algorithm of multi-path routing which allows us to determine the optimum number of independent shortest paths is theoretically solved. In details, the article proposes a way for finding the set of shortest paths using Dijkstra's algorithm, and then determination of the maximum flow for each of the shortest paths based on the mathematical concepts and finally, introducing the solution of the multi-criteria optimization problem for a set of shortest paths. According to our approach, optimizing the use of resources in the core networks is possible with using the MPLS-TE technology.
Discovering Geographic Knowledge in Data Rich Environments, Final Report

Author(s): Miller, Harvey J.; Han, Jiawei | Abstract: The goal of this NCGIA-Varenius workshop and research initiative was to find new automated methods for filtering large amounts of raw geographic data into more user-consumable forms of knowledge. This includes: i) spatial data mining; ii) content-based and knowledge-based retrieval; iii) development of multi-media spatial data types; iv) on-line analytic processing; v) refinement of non-parametric statistics; vi) incorporation of computational intelligence techniques (such as neural networks and AI expert systems) into spatial data analysis. A key objective of the "geographic knowledge discovery" (GKD) workshop was to bring together the diverse stakeholders in GKD and spatial data mining. This report provides an overview of the workshop, lists the workshop participants, and provides the position papers submitted in response to the open Call for Participation. The final section summarizes workshop presentations and discussion.