Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Decoupling Control of Multiactive Bridge Converters Using Linear Active Disturbance Rejection

Multiactive bridge (MAB) converter is a promising solution for integrating multiple renewable sources, storage, and loads for various applications. However, the MAB converter is challenging to control due to the inherent coupling between the port power flows. To that end, this article presents a decoupling control strategy based on linear active disturbance rejection control. The proposed controller observes the coupling disturbance using a linear extended state observer and subsequently rejects the observed disturbance resulting in dynamic decoupling. Experiments conducted on a 2-kW 100-kHz Si-C-based four-port MAB converter laboratory prototype illustrate the decoupling performance of the proposed control strategy. Compared to the traditional decoupling control strategy, the proposed approach is decentralized and model independent, only requiring information regarding its order.
Channel State Information-Based Cryptographic Key Generation for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Due to the sensitivity of the information exchanged in Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication, generating secret keys is critical to secure these communications. As nature is open access, distributed keys are more vulnerable to attacks in the vehicular environment. Physical layer key generation methods using wireless channel characteristics show promise in preventing such attacks, generating keys independently, and removing the need for distribution. In this paper, we present a novel key generation approach in a real vehicular environment based on Channel State Information (CSI), including a new algorithm for key bit extraction. We implemented our algorithm using USRP B210 Software-Defined Radios (SDR) and the industry-standard V2X communication protocol: IEEE 802.11p. The proposed key generation protocol uses the CSI values of each sub-carrier as a source of randomness, from which bits are extracted using a new QAM demodulator quantizer (QAM-Dem-Quan). We compared our technique to state-of-the-art Received Signal Strength (RSS)-based approaches, and show that our method achieves better performance. Moreover, we reached a min-entropy of approximately 70% for the generated keys and a key generation rate of less than $150~\mu \text{s}$ /key for key lengths ranging from 16 to 128 bits.
Transport-Induced Losses in Alkaline Anion Exchange Membranes and Solid Oxide Fuel Cell Anodes

Fuel cell systems are capable of providing power for a wide range of applications. In order to improve the performance and lifetime of fuel cell systems, transport induced losses are considered. For portable power applications, alkaline anion exchange membrane (AEM) fuel cells are one option. However the ion transport through the membrane is a significant performance loss. Understanding how these membranes operate and how to increase ion mobility is important for minimizing transport losses. One factor which affects AEM performance is the local hydration in the membrane and water-membrane diffusion coefficient. By studying water transport using water flux measurements, predictions can be made for effective ion-membrane diffusion coefficients and ionic conductivity as functions of the local hydration in the membrane. Comparing the ionic conductivity results to experimental measurements, equilibrium constants can be calculated for different ionic species in the membrane to the fixed side chain groups. Understanding how dissociation of mobile ions affects transport through the membrane can be useful for designing new membranes with higher ionic conductivities. Transport losses also affect stationary power systems such as solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) which suffer from degradation mechanisms such as oxidation of the electronic conductor nickel in the anode. When nickel oxidizes, there is a significant decrease in the material electronic conductivity and as well as an increase in the particle volume. With the
COVID-19 Artificial Intelligence Diagnosis Using Only Cough Recordings

Goal: We hypothesized that COVID-19 subjects, especially including asymptomatics, could be accurately discriminated only from a forced-cough cell phone recording using Artificial Intelligence. To train our MIT Open Voice model we built a data collection pipeline of COVID-19 cough recordings through our website (opensigma.mit.edu) between April and May 2020 and created the largest audio COVID-19 cough balanced dataset reported to date with 5,320 subjects. Methods: We developed an AI speech processing framework that leverages acoustic biomarker feature extractors to pre-screen for COVID-19 from cough recordings, and provide a personalized patient saliency map to longitudinally monitor patients in real-time, non-invasively, and at essentially zero variable cost. Cough recordings are transformed with Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient and inputted into a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture made up of one Poisson biomarker layer and 3 pre-trained ResNet50's in parallel, outputting a binary pre-screening diagnostic. Our CNN-based models have been trained on 4256 subjects and tested on the remaining 1064 subjects of our dataset. Transfer learning was used to learn biomarker features on larger datasets, previously successfully tested in our Lab on Alzheimer's, which significantly improves the COVID-19 discrimination accuracy of our architecture. Results: When validated with subjects diagnosed using an official test, the model achieves COVID-19 sensitivity of 98.5% with a specificity of 94.2% (AUC: 0.97). For asymptomatic subjects it achieves sensitivity of 100% with a specificity of 83.2%. Conclusions: AI techniques can produce a free, non-invasive, real-time, any-time, instantly distributable, large-scale COVID-19 asymptomatic screening tool to augment current approaches in containing the spread of COVID-19. Practical use cases could be for daily screening of students, workers, and public as schools, jobs, and transport reopen, or for pool testing to quickly alert of outbreaks in groups. General speech biomarkers may exist that cover several disease categories, as we demonstrated using the same ones for COVID-19 and Alzheimer's.
Gun Owners Support the Right Not to Bear Arms

Donna’s Law would allow individuals who fear suicide to prevent their own impulsive gun purchases. Research shows that many people would sign up, and versions of Donna’s Law have passed in Washington State and Virginia. This study is the first to assess public support for enacting Donna’s Law. We find broad support overall, including majority support among Republicans and gun owners. There is room for consensus around this voluntary measure to reduce gun suicide.
Community Detection via Local Learning Based on Generalized Metric With Neighboring Regularization

Community detection has long been a fundamental problem in network analysis. A great deal of previous research has regarded community detection as an optimization process, where a variety of internal quality metrics are typically treated as objective functions, such as modularity ( ${Q}$ ) and weighted community clustering (WCC). However, purely optimizing a predefined quality metric probably results in an extreme unbalance in the scale of the detected communities, e.g., few giant communities with many very small communities. To reveal the true mesoscopic structure inside a big network under the suitable number of communities, we propose a novel community detection framework called LL-GMR, which is a local learning framework based on generalized metric with neighboring regularization. LL-GMR is qualified for both nonoverlapping and overlapping detection tasks. In LL-GMR, we propose a generalized representation and illustrate that it can be instantiated into 12 well-known internal quality metrics. When the generalized metric is used as an objective function, we encode node-level and community-level neighborhood information into two regularization terms to alleviate the dilemma of unbalanced communities. The experimental results show that our LL-GMR consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art community detection approaches in terms of discovering ground-truth communities in six real-life networks.
ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF BROILER PRODUCTION IN ENVIRONMENT CONTROLLED HOUSES IN DISTRICT FAISALABAD

Poultry industry has become the second largest industry of Pakistan. The share of poultry meat is 30% in total meat production of Pakistan (GOP, 2015-16). Modern broiler industries are much described by mass broiler production with a high turnover of investment but low profit per broiler. Success in business is mostly determined by the skills of business persons to control the cost of production. For fine tuning of the poultry business farmers especially with reference to profitability broiler farmers/researchers need to assess the contribution of each management factor for competing in international markets where the profit margins are decreasing (Ceveger and Yalcin, 2003). Increase in production efficiency of broiler farms is mainly due to advancement in equipment and housing technology. However, Liang et al., (2013) enumerated that housing and equipment changes are not the only factors behind the increased production efficiency of the broiler industry. Broiler strains’ genetic improvement for growth rate, feed efficiency and liveability are other factors that augment the increased efficiency of broilers. After the involvement of yearly strain developments and related health and nutritional programs are considered, modern broiler housing with better environmental-control ability is significant for enhancing weight gain, liveability and feed conversion (Liang et al., 2013). In Pakistan, broilers are generally reared in open-sided houses. In mild climates these open sided houses may not cause major problem for broiler farming. On the other hand, it would become difficult in open-sided houses when the environmental conditions are harsh in summer or winter seasons. Severe production losses may occur resulting in economic losses if an optimum environment is not confirmed within the houses (Zahir-ud-Din et al., 2005). There are no hard and fast rules for increasing the profit from broiler production. Maximum profit can be attained by receiving a peak margin over the variable cost. There are two traditions to increase the profit margin. Firstly, profits need to be increased, whichever through reaching advanced levels of production or through marketing the product at a higher price. Secondly, the variable cost should be decreased as much as possible (Samarakoon and Samarasinghe, 2012). In this changing scenario broiler farmers are shifting to controlled environment housing system and automated feed and water equipment etc. there is a dire need to optimize the inputs by fine tuning the practices and operations to optimize outputs for longer term survival. A lot of work is required to re-establish the already established practices especially with reference to changing production system for the improvement of Pakistan poultry industry. The present study was planned Pak. J. Agri. Sci., Vol. 55(3), 693-695; 2018 ISSN (Print) 0552-9034, ISSN (Online) 2076-0906 DOI: 10.21162/PAKJAS/18.5800 http://www.pakjas. com.pk
Assessment of the effect of artificial sweeteners on glucose metabolism and gut microbiota

II ACKNOWLEDGEMENT . IV DEDICATION . V TABLE OF CONTENTS . VI LIST OF TABLES . XII LIST OF FIGURES . XIII ABBREVIATIONS . XIV CHAPTER I: . 16 GENERAL INTRODUCTION . 16 1.
6-1-2006 Identifier-Based Discovery in Large-Scale Networks

The design of any network mechanism that requires collaboration among selfish agents could only benefit from accounting for the complex social and economic interactions and incentives of the agents using the design. This chapter presents a broad treatment of the main economic issues that arise in the context of identifier-based discovery on large scale networks, particularly on the Internet. An “identified” object (such as a node or service), referred to as a player, demands to be discoverable by the rest of the network on its “identifier”. A discovery scheme provides such a service to the players and incurs a cost for doing so. Providing such a service while accounting for the cost and making sure that the incentives of the players are aligned is the general economic problem that we address in this work. After introducing the identifier-based discovery problem, we present a taxonomy of discovery schemes and proposals based on their business model and we pose several questions that are becoming increasingly important as we proceed to design the inter-network of the future. An incentive model for distributed discovery in the context of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and path-vector protocols in general is then presented. We model BGP route distribution and computation using a game in which a BGP speaker advertises its prefix to its direct neighbors promising them a reward for further distributing the route deeper into the network. The neighbors do the same thing with their direct neighbors, and so on. The result of the this cascaded route distribution is a globally advertised prefix and hence discoverability. We present initial results on the existence of equilibria in the game and we motivate our ongoing work. Joud Khoury · Chaouki T. Abdallah 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque NM 87131, USA; e-mail: {jkhoury, chaouki}@ece.unm. edu
BANDWIDTH BOUNDS OF INFINITE PLANAR ARRAY ELEMENTS

BANDWIDTH BOUNDS OF INFINITE PLANAR ARRAY ELEMENTS FEBRUARY 2020 HSIEH-CHI CHANG, B.Sc., NATIONAL CHIAYI UNIVERSITY M.Sc., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Do-Hoon Kwon For elements of an infinite planar phased array in free space and an infinite conductor-backed free standing planar phased array, fundamental bandwidth bounds are derived from the optical theorem for periodic scatterers. The bounds are based on Gustafsson’s theory of fundamental bandwidth limits for electrically small antennas of arbitrary shape, but extended to periodic configurations. The element bandwidth bound is found to be a function of the strengths of the induced static dipole moments in constant background fields as well as the unit-cell dimensions and the scan angle. Explicit bandwidth bound expressions are found for narrowband and ultrawideband array cases. For elements of an infinite conductor-backed planar phased array with a dielectric substrate, fundamental bandwidth bounds are derived by Doane based on the Fano’s method. A general conductor-backed array is modeled as transmission line terminated with a shorted load. The input reflection coefficient is expanded in long wavelength
The middle ear of Baikal seal (Pusa sibirica Gmelin, 1788)

The structure of the middle ear of pinnipeds is determined by the need to adapt to special living conditions: to stay in water and on land. Reichmuth C. et al. (2013) found that in pinnipeds sensitivity of the underwater hearing is not worse than that in aquatic cetaceans and sirens. On land, many seals and sea lions hear no worse than land predators. G.N. Solntseva studied the structure of the organ of hearing of pinnipeds (Solntseva, 2006; 2013; 2017) and identified differences in the structure of the middle ear of eared and real seals. The intraspecific differences in superfamilies were not found. There are no data on the structure of the organ of hearing of the Baikal seal which, unlike other representatives of these seals, lives in fresh water. The aim of this research is study the anatomical structure of the middle ear of the Baikal seal.
Un nouveau taxon de la famille des Apocynaceae pour La Réunion : Leptadenia cf. madagascariensis Decne (Gentianales : Apocynaceae)

First report of Leptadenia madagascariensis Decne to La Reunion Island. The species is already known from other localities in the Southwest Indian Ocean area (at least Madagascar, the Comoro archipelago and Juan de Nova), where it is assumed native. The species name madagascariensis seems confused and might be considered as the African synonym of L. reticulata (Retz.) Wight & Arn. , a species mostly cited from subtropical Asia. Finally, we propose to include the species under the name L. cf. madagascariensis in the Flora Index of Reunion Island as a cryptogenic species. In the meantime, we call for more in-depth studies to assess the true origin and ecological significance of the species
Understanding student expectations in developing environmental science courses

Developing relevant and innovative University courses is a complex and often difficult task. This is particularly true when developing environmental science courses as the banner of environmental science has the potential to include an extremely vast array of subject material and course content. Added to this is the diversity of students entering these courses, and their associated course expectations and aspirations. A third component that cannot be ignored when developing courses includes employer demands and expectations of graduates at course completion. As tertiary educators we therefore have the challenge of developing innovative environmental science courses that are academically challenging, but meet the expectations of students, staff and potential future employers. To ensure that we meet this challenge it is vital that we determine the expectations of all relevant parties (students, staff, and potential employers) and develop our courses accordingly. Here we report on the 'student expectations' component of this. To determine student expectations we conducted a survey of all commencing first year environmental science students. The survey asked students to provide information on drivers for course selection, preferred learning styles, the importance of different approaches to teaching, subject interest areas and employment aspirations. Our results found that environmental science students have a preference for fieldwork and hands-on experience and are very supportive of teaching that combines different teaching methods. On-line teaching was not supported by commencing environmental science students. Commencing students showed a very strong interest in key subject areas of environmental science such as Wildlife, animal conservation, national and marine parks, conservation and marine Wildlife; however, some of the critical areas of environmental science such as population statistics, social sciences and chemistry did not attract the same level of interest. Most commencing students had some idea on where they would like to gain employment on course completion. Knowledge relating to student expectations is Vital, particularly when designing courses, developing specific unit content and undertaking marketing and course information sessions. With this knowledge we can be confident that students enrolling in environmental science will, to a large extent, have their expectations met.
THE POTENTIAL ROLE OF CHICKEN MEAT IN TRANSMISSION OF CAMPYLOBACTER JEJUNI TO CONSUMERS

Food-borne zoonotic diseases are a significant and widespread global public health threat. Campylobacter jejuni is a most common contaminant of chicken meat. This study was conducted to investigate the presence of C. jejuni and some of its virulence genes in chicken meat in New Valley, Egypt and determine their zoonotic impacts. A total of 300 chicken meat specimens were collected from 100 freshly slaughtered from breast (pectoral), thigh, and liver (100 of each) from (healthy and diarrheic) live bird markets and analyzed for C. jejuni load using specific and selective nutrient media and molecular diagnosis. The identified strains were screened for virulence factors (VirB11, fla A and Iam) genes. The results revealed thatthroughout 300 meat samples, C. jejuni was detected in 74 (24.67%). The highest microbial load was in liver samples (26%) followed by pectoral (25%) then thigh muscle samples (23%). The virulence gene markers of C. jejuni was detected in chicken meat and liver samples as ViroB11 (2.27%), fla A gene (3.34%) and Iam gene (26.66%). Out of 50 diarrheic patients with food-poising signs 18 (36%) was positive for C. jejuni. The virulence markers genes in the human isolates showed that the prevalence of VirB11 gene, fla A, and Iam genes was 14.29 %, 71.43%, and 35.71%, respectively. In conclusion, this survey revealed that raw poultry meat available for consumers in ElKharga, Egypt was contaminated with zoonotic C. jejuni that might represent a threat to public health.
Holographic entanglement entropy decomposition in an anisotropic gauge theory

We study holographic entanglement entropy in spatially anisotropic field theory. We observe that for the background we consider in this paper, to a good approximation, the holographic entanglement entropy can be decomposed into two terms. One of them is the entanglement entropy of the isotropic field theory at fixed temperature and the other term is only a function of anisotropy parameter. Moreover, for large enough values of anisotropy parameter, our numerical results indicate that the entanglement entropy in the perpendicular direction to anisotropic direction is greater than the parallel case.
The Molecular Basis for Restoring Function to Oncogenic p53 Mutants

Author(s): Wallentine, Bradley Dale | Advisor(s): Luecke, Hartmut | Abstract: The tumor suppressor p53 is the most commonly mutated gene in cancers, with approximately half of all tumors containing a p53 mutation. p53 normally functions to moderate cell growth, incite DNA repair, and induce apoptosis in response to cellular stresses. Mutation of p53 gene leads to the p53 protein losing its tumor suppressor activity within the cell. Despite being the most commonly mutated gene in cancer, there are currently no drugs in the clinic able to target p53 and restore its function as a tumor suppressor. This thesis work encompasses the use of structural and biophysical techniques to understand the molecular basis for restoring function to oncogenic p53 mutants. First, I helped solve the X-ray crystal structures of oncogenic and rescue mutations in p53 in order to better understand possible molecular mechanisms for restoring function to mutant p53 (Chapter 2). Next working with our collaborators, I helped establish that a small molecule that is able to restore activity to mutant p53 would likely act by thermodynamically stabilizing the p53 structure (Chapter 3). Last, I discovered a small molecule which greatly stabilizes mutant p53, causes cancer cells containing mutant p53 to undergo massive cell death, and is continuing to show great promise as a p53 reactivating pharmacophore (Chapter 4).
Sire breed effect on carcass and temperament traits

This paper aimed to identify and evaluate the effects of sire breed on temperament and productive traits of different cross-breeds between Nellore (NE), Tabapua (TB), and Brahman (BR) bulls mated with Angus cows (AN), as well as the relationship between temperament and productive traits. The productive traits measured in this study include slaughter weight and post weaning weight gain. Temperament was assessed by flight-speed (FS). Carcass data collected in this study include hot carcass weight, hot carcass percentage, cold dressing percentage, carcass length, initial pH, ultimate pH, subcutaneous fat thickness and carcass longissimus muscle area. The sire breed effect was greater for slaughter weight. Hot carcass weight was not affected by the sire breed. The longissimus muscle area was larger for AN x TB and AN x NE crossbreeds than for AN x BR crossbreeds. Subcutaneous fat thickness and cold dressing percentage were not affected by sire breed. The offspring of NE, TB, and BR sires mated with AN cows had similar carcass measurements, except for the longissimus muscle area, which was smaller for offspring sired by the Brahman breed. The temperament trait was not influenced by sire breed.