Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Simple and Effective Usage of Word Clusters for CBOW Model

We propose a simple and effective method for incorporating word clusters into the Continuous Bag-of-Words (CBOW) model. Specifically, we propose to replace infrequent input and output words in CBOW model with their clusters. The resulting cluster-incorporated CBOW model produces embeddings of frequent words and a small amount of cluster embeddings, which will be fine-tuned in downstream tasks. We empirically show our replacing method works well on several downstream tasks. Through our analysis, we show that our method might be also useful for other similar models which produce word embeddings.
Explaining Word Embeddings via Disentangled Representation

Disentangled representations have attracted increasing attention recently. However, how to transfer the desired properties of disentanglement to word representations is unclear. In this work, we propose to transform typical dense word vectors into disentangled embeddings featuring improved interpretability via encoding polysemous semantics separately. We also found the modular structure of our disentangled word embeddings helps generate more efficient and effective features for natural language processing tasks.
A Review of Discourse-level Machine Translation

Machine translation (MT) models usually translate a text at sentence level by considering isolated sentences, which is based on a strict assumption that the sentences in a text are independent of one another. However, the fact is that the texts at discourse level have properties going beyond individual sentences. These properties reveal texts in the frequency and distribution of words, word senses, referential forms and syntactic structures. Dissregarding dependencies across sentences will harm translation quality especially in terms of coherence, cohesion, and consistency. To solve these problems, several approaches have previously been investigated for conventional statistical machine translation (SMT). With the fast growth of neural machine translation (NMT), discourse-level NMT has drawn increasing attention from researchers. In this work, we review major works on addressing discourse related problems for both SMT and NMT models with a survey of recent trends in the fields.
Induction d’apoptose par la p-Phénylènediamine dans un myélome murin

Objectif : Les mecanismes de toxicite et de genotoxicite induits par la Para-phenyleneDiamine (p-PD), un composant de la teinture pour cheveux suspecte d’etre carcinogene, sur des cellules tumorales murines, type P3X63Ag8.653 ont ete etudies. Methodes : L’effet de la p-PD sur la viabilite et celui sur la proliferation cellulaire ont ete evalues par la methode d’exclusion du bleu de trypan. Son effet sur l’ADN des cellules P3X63Ag8.653 a ete analyse apres une extraction d’ADN et une electrophorese sur gel d’agarose puis confirme par la technique TUNEL en cytometrie en flux. Resultats : Un blocage de la proliferation avec diminution de la viabilite cellulaire ont ete observes. La fragmentation de l’ADN dose-dependante temoignant de l’effet apoptotique a ete detectee sur gel d’agarose et confirmee par cytometrie en flux (technique TUNEL). Conclusion : Les resultats obtenus montrent que la p-PD induit in vitro un blocage de la proliferation cellulaire et une apoptose dose-dependante des cellules tumorales murines.
Named Entity Recognition in Multi-level Contexts

Named entity recognition is a critical task in the natural language processing field. Most existing methods for this task can only exploit contextual information within a sentence. However, their performance on recognizing entities in limited or ambiguous sentence-level contexts is usually unsatisfactory. Fortunately, other sentences in the same document can provide supplementary document-level contexts to help recognize these entities. In addition, words themselves contain word-level contextual information since they usually have different preferences of entity type and relative position from named entities. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to incorporate multi-level contexts for named entity recognition. We use TagLM as our basic model to capture sentence-level contexts. To incorporate document-level contexts, we propose to capture interactions between sentences via a multi-head self attention network. To mine word-level contexts, we propose an auxiliary task to predict the type of each word to capture its type preference. We jointly train our model in entity recognition and the auxiliary classification task via multi-task learning. The experimental results on several benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our method.
Nonexhaustive Cyclodextrin-Based Extraction Technique for the Evaluation of PAH Bioavailability

Traditionally, soil extraction techniques have been concerned with the determination of “total” organic contaminant concentrations, following an “exhaustive” extraction. However, in light of the increasing body of knowledge relating to organic contaminant availability and aging, such methods have little relevance to the amount of contaminant that may pose an ecological risk i.e., the “bioavailable” portion. Less exhaustive techniques have therefore been the subject of more recent approaches in the hope that they may access the “labile” or bioavailable pool. The use of an aqueous-based extraction technique utilizing hydroxypropyl-β-cyclodextrin (HPCD) is presented here for the extraction of PAHs from soil. The optimization of the method is described in terms of HPCD concentration, extraction time, and solution buffering. The procedure is then tested and validated for a range of 14C-labeled PAHs (phenanthrene, pyrene, and benzo[a]pyrene) added at a range of concentrations to a range of soil types. The amoun.
Testing Reliability of Biophilic Design Matrix Within Urban Residential Playrooms

Playtime in urban cities has become an indoor activity for children due to limited access to natural outdoor environments. This product of urbanization makes the case for the introduction of biophilic design. However, playrooms are often neglected as a possibility in designing a natural space indoors. Interior designers and other specialists lack a reliable tool to identify and incorporate biophilic features into the design of these indoor environments in urban settings. The Biophilic Interior Design Matrix (BID-M) developed by McGee and Marshall-Baker quantifies 52 of Kellert’s biophilic design attributes to assess their presence and absence within interior spaces. We expanded its use by testing the matrix in a new type of space, urban playrooms, and coded images of 45 children’s playrooms within Manhattan residential buildings in New York City, including assessing a larger sample and reliability rate compared to McGee and Marshall-Baker’s research. Inter-rater reliability of the overall design matrix and individual matrix items was measured with percent agreement and free-marginal multirater kappa. Reliability testing showed overall good reliability of the overall design matrix. Several matrix items had low reliability between raters. Our findings show that the BID-M needs to be modified to better assess urban interior spaces for children.
Growth of Core–Shell InP Nanowires for Photovoltaic Application by Selective-Area Metal Organic Vapor Phase Epitaxy

We report on the formation of core–shell pn junction InP nanowires using a catalyst-free selective-area metalorganic vapor-phase epitaxy (SA-MOVPE) method. A periodically aligned dense core–shell InP nanowire array was fabricated and used in photovoltaic device applications. The device exhibited open-circuit voltage (VOC), short-circuit current (ISC) and fill factor (FF) levels of 0.43 V, 13.72 mA/cm2 and 0.57, respectively, which indicated a solar power conversion efficiency of 3.37% under AM1.5G illumination. This study demonstrates that high quality core–shell structure nanowire fabrication is possible by SA-MOVPE and that the nanowire arrays can be used in integrated nanowire photovoltaic devices.
Surfactant-Induced Nanofibrous Architecture of Silk Fibroin Hydrogels

Hydrogels had been prepared by blending four types of surfactants such as alkyl betaine (zwitterion surfactant), tween 60 (non-ionic surfactant), sodium fatty alcohol ether sulfate (anionic surfactant) and silicone quaternary ammonium salt (cationic surfactant) with bombyx mori silk fibroin (SF) solution. Surfactant molecules would interact with SF molecules, resulting in lower critical micelle concentration (CMC). Gelation time measurements showed surfactants had significantly accelerated the hydrogelation process of SF solution, which could be controlled by the type or blend ratio of surfactants. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) indicated that the addition of surfactants affected the molecular secondary of SF. The results from X-ray diffraction indicated that surfactants and SF were only blended but phase separation with two kinds of crystalline structure. SEM images showed that the surfactants had significantly changed the morphology of hydrogels according to certain rules, especially non-ionic and cationic surfactants could induce silk fibroin solutions into porous and nanofibrous hydrogels. These results indicated that a novel and potential method not only can be used to accelerate hydrogelation process of SF solution but also can be used to alter the structural and morphological of SF hydrogels. Furthermore, the porous and nanofibrous hydrogels of SF induced by surfactants provided a novel strategy to mimic the nanofibrous structure of collagen in extracellular matrix (ECM).
Tea waste as adsorbent for ionic dyes

AbstractToxic dyes can be removed from textile effluents and recovered using dead biomass obtained, as waste from the food industry. In this work, tea waste (TW) was employed to assess its adsorptive capacity for the acidic and basic dyes that usually are present in textile industry waste water. Equilibrium and kinetic experiments were performed in batch and column mode. Adsorption equilibrium and fluid solid mass transfer constant data were analyzed through the concept of ion-exchange sorption isotherm. The equilibrium data were fitted with Langmuir and Freundlich models. Several operation variables, such as TW dosage, contact time, initial pH, and temperature, on the removal of dyes were investigated. The removal efficiency increased with increase in TW dosage. The adsorption process followed pseudo-first-order kinetics. Thermodynamic parameters like ΔH°, ΔS°, and ΔG° were analyzed. The processes were spontaneous for the acidic as well as basic dyes. These results suggest that TW is a potential low-cost.
The Chemical Composition of the Essential Oils from the Leaves, Bark and Fruits of Bursera simaruba (L.) Sarg. from Jamaica

Abstract Oils of the leaves, bark and fruits of Bursera simaruba collected from the Long Mountain region of Jamaica were isolated by hydrodistillation and analyzed by GC-FID and GC/MS. From our analyses of the oils from the leaves, bark and fruits 46, 54 and 19 components were identified which constituted 93.6%, 97.9% and 100% of the total oils. The leaf oils were dominated by sesquiterpenes (70.1%), the major ones being trans-cadina-1(6),4-diene (9.7%) followed by β-caryophyllene (9.0%), α-humulene (6.2%), β-elemene (5.6%) α-cadinol (4.7%), α-selin-11-en-4-ol (4.2%), caryophyllene oxide (3.2%) and δ-selinene (3.1%). The major monoterpenes were α-pinene (10.2%), myrcene (5.2%) and β-pinene (3.4%). The major monoterpene components of the bark were α-pinene (32.1%), β-pinene (13.5%) and isolimonene (5.6%) while the major sesquiterpenes were viridiflorol (7.1%), β-caryophyllene (4.9%), β-selinene (4.3%), α-humulene (3.1%) and caryophyllene oxide (3.1%). The fruit oil was characterized by a high portion of monoterpenes, the major ones being α-pinene (27.8%), β-pinene (24.1%), terpinen-4-ol (13.3%), sabinene (8.1%), iso-sylvestrene (4.9%), limonene (4.4%) and γ-terpinolene (3.5%).
Flexibility of Elongated Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate Micelles in Aqueous Sodium Chloride: A Small-Angle Neutron Scattering Study

Aqueous salt solutions containing elongated micelles of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) have been studied at 45 °C using small-angle neutron scattering. At NaCl concentrations in the 1−2 M range, the scattering data are consistent with semiflexible rather than rigid rodlike micelles, and this conclusion is consistent with previous studies of SDS micelles using small-angle scattering. However, until now quantitative determinations of micellar flexibility, that is, of persistence lengths, especially as a function of ionic strength, have not been available. By making measurements in the range of scattering vectors appropriate for this length scale and by incorporating the effect of intermicellar interactions into the fitting protocol, it has been possible to determine persistence lengths accurately. Partitioning of the values into intrinsic and electrostatic components is discussed, and the results are compared with data for the highly flexible anionic polyelectrolyte sodium polystyrenesulfonate. The one-dimens.
Optical and Photophysical Properties of the Oxazole Yellow DNA Probes YO and YOYO

The photophysical properties of the optical DNA probe YOYO (homodimeric derivative of oxazole yellow) have been characterized in terms of the monomeric part, the YO chromophore. In aqueous solutions YO is virtually nonfluorescent but upon binding to DNA its fluorescence quantum yield is strongly increased. A similar enhancement of the fluorescence is observed for YO in the viscous solvent glycerol. The high fluorescence quantum yield of YO, when bound to DNA or in a viscous solution, is proposed to be a result of decreased rotational mobility around the internuclear bridge between the two aromatic ring systems. This hypothesis is based on similar values of the activation energies for the temperature-dependent nonradiative decay processes (E(A) = 53 kJ/mol) and viscous flow (E(A) = 63 kJ/mol), suggesting related rate-limiting mechanisms. A single electronic transition is found to be responsible for the intense visible absorption band. This conclusion is based on the observation of an essentially wavelength-independent reduced linear dichroism and similarly wavelength independent fluorescence anisotropy, and the fact that the emission spectrum is very nearly a mirror image of the absorption spectrum. The conclusion is further supported by quantum mechanical calculations (CNDO/S). By combination of measurements of fluorescence anisotropy of YO in glycerol and linear dichroism of YO in a stretched poly(vinyl alcohol) film, the transition moment of the strong visible absorption band was found to be nearly long axis polarized, in agreement with the CNDO/S calculations. The low-energy electronic transition and its polarization direction in the YO chromophore remain essentially unperturbed in the YOYO dye, suggesting that the results obtained for the excited state of the YO chromophore are applicable also to YOYO. One difference, though, is that in aqueous solutions the two YO chromophores of YOYO interact with each other, forming an internal dimer, resulting in a distorted absorption spectrum.
Physical Properties and Cation Arrangement of Oxides with Spinel Structures II. Electronic Conductivity

The relations between the electronic conductivity of certain spinels and the arrangement of the cations in the crystal structure (see preceding paper) are studied. Several arguments favor the assumption that Fe3O4 contains both divalent and trivalent iron in the 16‐fold position. The transition point in the neighborhood of liquid‐air temperature is probably associated with an increased degree of order at low temperature in the distribution of the 8 electrons between the 16 Fe‐lattice points per unit cell. The considerably increased conductivity below the transition points shows tetragonal anisotropy when the crystal is cooled in a magnetic field. The possible distributions of the electrons in the crystal at low temperature are discussed. In more complicated spinels, containing other metal atoms as well as iron in both the divalent and the trivalent state, the electronic interchange is more or less inhibited by the foreign metal atoms. The higher values of their resistance in comparison to that of Fe3O4 ca.
Study of hybrid mixture explosions

The work of this thesis aims at studying the explosive phenomenon of hybrid mixtures to get insights into the driving mechanisms and the explosion features affecting the course of hybrid mixture explosion. This is achieved by means of an extensive experimental study that developed in the following steps: - Measurement of the ignitability and the explosion severity; - Study of the flame propagation. The explosion experiments were performed in a 20 l Siwek bomb; instead, the flame propagation experiments were performed in a new equipment: a tube of 1 m length and 7x7 cm square. The hybrid mixture under examination was a mixture of methane and nicotinic acid in air. Results allow the definition of four different regimes of the gas/dust/air mixture explosion in the plane dust concentration vs. fuel concentration. And the flame propagation behaviour of the mixture gives a further contribution to the explanation of the different regimes.
Preparation of porous Si and TiO2 nanofibres using a sulphur‐templating method for lithium storage

Highly porous Si/TiO2 composite nanofibres were prepared using a unique sulphur‐templating method combined with electrospinning. The structure, morphology, surface area, phase and composition of these nanofibres were characterized using Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, powder X‐ray diffraction, surface area analyser and thermogravimetric analyser. The specific surface area of Si/TiO2 porous NFs is as large as 387 m2 g−1, whose silicon capacity can be maintained above 1580 mAh g−1 in 180 cycles.
dStyle-GAN: Generative Adversarial Network based on Writing and Photography Styles for Drug Identification in Darknet Markets

Despite the persistent effort by law enforcement, illicit drug trafficking in darknet markets has shown great resilience with new markets rapidly appearing after old ones being shut down. In order to more effectively detect, disrupt and dismantle illicit drug trades, there’s an imminent need to gain a deeper understanding toward the operations and dynamics of illicit drug trading activities. To address this challenge, in this paper, we design and develop an intelligent system (named dSytle-GAN) to automate the analysis for drug identification in darknet markets, by considering both content-based and style-aware information. To determine whether a given pair of posted drugs are the same or not, in dStyle-GAN, based on the large-scale data collected from darknet markets, we first present an attributed heterogeneous information network (AHIN) to depict drugs, vendors, texts and writing styles, photos and photography styles, and the rich relations among them; and then we propose a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) based model over AHIN to capture the underlying distribution of posted drugs’ writing and photography styles to learn robust representations of drugs for their identifications. Unlike existing approaches, our proposed GAN-based model jointly considers the heterogeneity of network and relatedness over drugs formulated by domain-specific meta-paths for robust node (i.e., drug) representation learning. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed dStyle-GAN represents the first principled GAN-based solution over graphs to simultaneously consider writing and photography styles as well as their latent distributions for node representation learning. Extensive experimental results based on large-scale datasets collected from six darknet markets and the obtained ground-truth demonstrate that dStyle-GAN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Based on the identified drug pairs in the wild by dStyle-GAN, we perform further analysis to gain deeper insights into the dynamics and evolution of illicit drug trading activities in darknet markets, whose findings may facilitate law enforcement for proactive interventions.
Tailoring the effect of antibacterial polyelectrolyte multilayers by choice of cellulosic fiber substrate

Abstract There is a need for new, antibacterial cellulose-based materials. Antibacterial cellulosic fibers with irreversibly attached polyvinylamine (PVAm) and polyacrylic acid (PAA) in multilayers were developed based on a water-based physical adsorption process. The antibacterial substance is thus prevented from leaching, in contrast to materials containing, for example, silver. It was shown on fibers from different sources that the antibacterial effect against both Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtilis can be tailored. The efficiency correlated with the initial fiber charge, which in turn correlated with the amount of adsorbed PVAm. In the case of highly charged fibers, the antibacterial efficacy was more than 99.9%. A sustainable antibacterial material can be obtained in a simple way based on a water-based process.
Synthesis of mesoporous titanium dioxide by soft template based approach: characterization and application in dye-sensitized solar cells

The present work demonstrates the usefulness of the soft-template directed approach in preparing mesoporous titanium dioxide and applying it in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). Mesoporous titanium dioxide with nanograins of dimension in the range, 16–20 nm were prepared through the soft-templating approach using various cationic surfactants such as octyl-, dodecyl-, cetyl trimethylammonium bromide with different surfactant compositions and titania precursor concentrations. As-synthesized mesoporous titanium dioxide samples were characterized by TGA, PXRD, FESEM, HRTEM and surface area measurements, used as photo-electrode material in DSSCs. Under global AM 1.5 solar irradiation, the best photovoltaic performance of 7.5% with a short circuit photocurrent density of 14.2 mA/cm−2, an open circuit voltage of 748 mV, and a fill factor of 70.83% were obtained for the DSSC using a film of mesoporous TiO2 synthesized from the cetyl trimethylammoniumbromide surfactant. In contrast, the use of commercial titania powder P25 resulted in an efficiency of 5.0% under similar conditions. The structural and morphological merits of these template-directed materials will be especially addressed in comparison with their traditional bulk forms.
FirmAE: Towards Large-Scale Emulation of IoT Firmware for Dynamic Analysis

One approach to assess the security of embedded IoT devices is applying dynamic analysis such as fuzz testing to their firmware in scale. To this end, existing approaches aim to provide an emulation environment that mimics the behavior of real hardware/peripherals. Nonetheless, in practice, such approaches can emulate only a small fraction of firmware images. For example, Firmadyne, a state-of-the-art tool, can only run 183 (16.28%) of 1,124 wireless router/IP-camera images that we collected from the top eight manufacturers. Such a low emulation success rate is caused by discrepancy in the real and emulated firmware execution environment. In this study, we analyzed the emulation failure cases in a large-scale dataset to figure out the causes of the low emulation rate. We found that widespread failure cases often avoided by simple heuristics despite having different root causes, significantly increasing the emulation success rate. Based on these findings, we propose a technique, arbitrated emulation, and we systematize several heuristics as arbitration techniques to address these failures. Our automated prototype, FirmAE, successfully ran 892 (79.36%) of 1,124 firmware images, including web servers, which is significantly (≈ 4.8x) more images than that run by Firmadyne. Finally, by applying dynamic testing techniques on the emulated images, FirmAE could check 320 known vulnerabilities (306 more than Firmadyne), and also find 12 new 0-days in 23 devices.