Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Surface Effects Considerations for the Design of Casimir Actuated Nanoswitches

New techniques that can control Casimir forces in nanosacle structures may soon ensure the physical realization of switchable Casimir-force devices. In order to provide useful insights into the behaviour of this class of switches, the idea of Casimir-force actuation window has been proposed here to assist in the design of such switches. The influence of surface effects including residual surface stress and surface elasticity on the pull-in parameters of Casimir actuated switches has been demonstrated. These effects, together with other currently known difficulties due to uncertainties such as surface roughness and trapped electric charge may hinder the realization of this class of devices. An Euler-Bernoulli beam model has been employed to demonstrate surface effects in a nanocantilever switch, and numerical solutions employing a finite difference approach have been obtained for the static bending of this switch. The results demonstrate that surface effects play a significant role in the selection of basic design parameters of Casimir actuated switches, such as static deflection and detachment length. Threshold value of residual surface stress is also studied for these switches. The predictions reveal that exclusion of surface effects in Casimir-force actuation window may result in non-functional switch designs.
A micromachined CMOS distributed amplifier by CMOS compatible ICP deep-trench technology

A CMOS-process-compatible backside inductively coupled-plasma (ICP) dry etching technology to form deep trenches underneath the inductors of RF ICs is developed to enhance the performance of RF ICs with on-chip inductors. A 1-12.6-GHz CMOS distributed amplifier (DA) was designed and implemented in a standard CMOS process. The DA exhibits good input 1-dB compression point (P/sub 1 dB/) of -2 dBm and input third intercept point of 7 dBm both at 2.4 and 5.8 GHz. The authors demonstrate that a significant improvement in power gain (S/sub 21/) and noise figure (NF) can be achieved by conducting the proposed backside ICP dry etching to selectively remove the silicon underneath the inductors of the DA. The result shows that a 1.06-dB increase in S/sub 21/ (from 9.7 to 10.76 dB) and a 0.87-dB decrease (from 5.51 to 4.64 dB) in NF are achieved at 5.8 GHz mainly due to the improvement of the quality factor of the inductors in the DA. This means that this backside ICP dry-etching technique is very promising for system-on-a-chip applications.
Modeling Framework to Analyze Effect of Multiple Traffic Information Service Providers on Traffic Network Performance

Along with the increasing popularity of mobile smart devices such as smartphones and tablet personal computers, traffic information is coming to drivers through many intelligent traffic applications. Many countries have multiple traffic information service providers (ISPs), who make every effort to improve their service quality to influence more people to subscribe to their services. Because such a commercial environment is developing, a study of the effect of multiple ISPs on road network performance is necessary. Therefore, a modeling framework of day-to-day dynamics in which multiple ISPs compete and cooperate with each other to enhance their subscriber service quality is developed in this study. A realistic information acquisition and learning mechanism that ensures consistent updating of individually perceived day-by-day travel times is incorporated for driver behavior in this framework. A bounded rational behavior model was adopted for route choice decisions. The framework is capable of investigating the effects of any potential competition or cooperation of multiple ISPs in the traffic information market in terms of their information-sharing strategies. Numerical experiments on a real network were conducted to analyze the impact of such interactions on the network performance. The results showed that a cooperative system was not necessarily the best for network performance and that there was an optimal level of market penetration of traffic information services in transportation networks beyond which the benefits no longer increased or even worsened.
Measurement of fluid motion and temperature changes in the real model of the heat exchanger using pLIF

The aim of this project is a qualitative and quantitative experimental description of a development of the fluid flow inside the real model of a stratification tank of the heat exchanger. The experimental research deals with the Particle Image Velocimetry method and Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence Method. The results of this project provide the worthy information about the fluid behaviour, boundary condition and risen fluid flow inside the tank model. This final outcome is necessary for the verification and validity of the analysis models and simulations.
Corrections to “Advanced Dynamic Simulation of Supercapacitors Considering Parameter Variation and Self-Discharge” [Nov 11 3377-3385]

In the above titled paper (ibid., vol. 26, no. 11, pp. 3377-3385, Nov. 2011), one of the author's names was spelled incorrectly, and should be Kyo-Beum Lee. Also, the affiliation of S. Choi was incorrect and should read, "S. Choi is with the Department of Control and Instrumentation Engineering, Seoul National University of Science and Technology. " The bio photo of W. Choi was also left out and is presented here.
Reducing operating voltage from 3, 2, to 1 volt and below-challenges and guidelines for possible solutions [CMOS]

We discuss challenges to reducing integrated circuit power consumption by reducing operating voltage, and guidelines for possible solutions via processing technology and circuit design. Migrating from 3-Volt to 2-Volt operation, the key issue is optimizing the processing technology to maintain the performance. At 1 Volt, interfacing low-voltage circuits with standard I/O becomes the main challenge. To go below 1 Volt, we must re-visit transistor design issues very carefully.
A wide-range logarithmic electrometer with improved accuracy and temperature stability

A seven-decade temperature-compensated logarithmic electrometer is presented. Temperature compensation is achieved by using an array of four matched monolithic bipolar transistors and straightforward postprocessing techniques. Use of this method results in <1% error over the temperature range of -18 to 71 degrees C for the upper five decades of current. Errors resulting from variable forward current emission coefficients of the logarithmic elements are eliminated. Problems associated with the temperature compensation of logarithmic amplifiers are identified and discussed. Conventional temperature-compensation techniques and associated errors are reviewed. The implementation of the new temperature-compensation technique is described and compared with conventional methods. Sources of errors are identified, and error minimization procedures are presented. Experimental results and data analysis illustrating the performance of the design are given. <<ETX>>
How Do Users Browse a Portal Website? An Examination of User Eye Movements

Summary. This study examined the eye movement patterns of users browsing a web-based portal interface. Results demonstrate consistent scan patterns in both 2 and 3-column portal layouts. In the 2-column portal, users viewed the page through the top, left channel and proceeded to scan the rest of the portal page in a reverse 'S' pattern by row. In the 3-column portal layout, users typically started scanning in the top, center channel, and then proceeded to scan in a reverse 'S' pattern through the rest of channels by row. Implications of these results to portal design are discussed.
Loss characteristics of coplanar waveguide transmission lines fabricated with copper nanoparticles

This article investigates the high frequency characteristics of coplanar waveguide (CPW) lines fabricated with inkjet‐printing technology on BT substrates. The optimal metallic thickness of a printed CPW line is approximately estimated to be 3 μm. When printed lines with higher electrical conductivity are realized through additional surface preparation steps, the findings of this study suggest that the RF performance level of these printed lines will be comparable to that of the copper clad laminate lines in the microwave frequency region. Finally, aspects of such improvements as well as applications of these types of printed lines are discussed. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 52: 780–782, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.24987
Neuroevolution-based efficient field effect transistor compact device models

Artificial neural networks (ANN) and multilayer perceptrons (MLP) have proved to be efficient in terms of designing highly accurate semiconductor device compact models (CM). Their ability to update their weight and biases through the backpropagation method makes them highly useful in learning the task. To improve the learning, MLP usually requires large networks and thus a large number of model parameters, which significantly increases the simulation time in circuit simulation. Hence, optimizing the network architecture and topology is always a tedious yet important task. In this work, we tune the network topology using neuro-evolution (NE) to develop semiconductor device CMs. With input and output layers defined, we have allowed a genetic algorithm (GA), a gradient-free algorithm, to tune the network architecture in combination with Adam, a gradient-based backpropagation algorithm, for the network weight and bias optimization. In addition, we implemented the MLP model using a similar number of parameters as the baseline for comparison. It is observed that in most of the cases, the NE models exhibit a lower root mean square error (RMSE) and require fewer training epochs compared to the MLP baseline models. For instance, for patience number 10 with different number of model parameters, the RMSE for test dataset using NE and MLP in unit of log(ampere) are 0.1461, 0.0985, 0.1274, 0.0971, 0.0705, and 0.2254, 0.1423, 0.1429, 0.1425, 0.1391, respectively, for the 28nm technology node at foundry.
ME-ACP: Multi-view Neural Networks with Ensemble Model for Identification of Anticancer Peptides

Cancer remains one of the most threatening diseases, which kills millions of lives every year. As a promising perspective for cancer treatments, anticancer peptides (ACPs) overcome a lot of disadvantages of traditional treatments. However, it is time-consuming and expensive to identify ACPs through conventional experiments. Hence, it is urgent and necessary to develop highly effective approaches to accurately identify ACPs in large amounts of protein sequences. In this work, we proposed a novel and effective method named ME-ACP which employed multi-view neural networks with ensemble model to identify ACPs. Firstly, we employed residue level and peptide level features preliminarily with ensemble models based on lightGBMs. Then, the outputs of lightGBM classifiers were fed into a hybrid deep neural network (HDNN) to identify ACPs. The experiments on independent test datasets demonstrated that ME-ACP achieved competitive performance on common evaluation metrics.
the Usage of artificial intelligence in recognition of embossed numbers on billet

The article is focused on the recognition and localization of numbers on steel billets. Serial numbers are embossed to each billet. Our automated solution allows product identification without human interaction. There are several problems caused by embossing to the hot steel. First, the numbers are not clearly visible. There is a lot of noise around the serial number which causes shadows and reflections. Next, the surface of the billet is rough with grooves and ridges. These issues affect object detection. As a part of the 4 th Industrial Revolution, artificial intelligence and neural networks are used to automate production. Object recognition identifies which numbers are presented in the image. Another problem occurs when the serial number is located anywhere on the billet surface. The aim is to detect multiple objects in the scene using a single neural network. Our proposed solution is based on an extremely fast and accurate model from a class of deep learning algorithms. To localize and identify individual numbers, the You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm is implemented. It predicts bounding boxes and assigns classes from category 0 – 9. The approach is fully automatic and detects embossed numbers in real time. A custom dataset and annotations for train the model is created. Due to the lack of training images, data augmentation is used to extend a dataset by increasing the amount of data.
High Power Duplexers

The various circuit arrangements used in duplexers are analyzed in terms of their power-handling ability in two situations: first, where the bandwidth is narrow so that insertion loss determines maximum Q, and second, where large bandwidths are required and the maximum Q is determined by available Q band-width products. In both cases the ATR duplexer has an advantage. Arc loss was measured for folded cylinder TR tubes. At medium current densities the results agree well with experimental measurements in dc positive columns. At high current densities a constant conductivity is reached. Graphs of power-handling ability for a unity coupler duplexer using different methods of cooling are presented. It is shown that the requirements for easy firing and long life limit the achievable recovery time.
Driver drowsiness detection system under infrared illumination for an intelligent vehicle

Statistics on traffic accidents reveal that human error is the main cause of deaths and injuries on roads worldwide every day. In order to reduce the amount of such fatalities, a module for an advanced driver assistance system, which caters for automatic driver drowsiness detection and also driver distraction, is presented. Artificial intelligence algorithms are used to process the visual information in order to locate, track and analyse both the driver's face and eyes to compute the drowsiness and distraction indexes. This real-time system works during nocturnal conditions as a result of a near-infrared lighting system. Finally, examples of different driver images taken in a real vehicle at nighttime are shown to validate the proposed algorithms.
A Novel Parameter Varying Controller Synthesis Method for Quadrotor Control

This paper presents a method to design robust gain scheduled controller for parameter varying plants. The controller is to be used in an adaptive control architecture to obtain better performance than a robust controller for the control of multiple configuration of quadrotors. The proposed approach is based on the a priori selection of an interpolation formula. It takes advantage of recent advances in structured and multi-channel fixed-order Hinf synthesis to derive a low order controller with a meaningful structure. The resulting observer/state feedback controller remains easy to implement. The efficiency of the controller is demonstrated with its implementation on quadrotors UAV and the subsequent flight tests.
A computational method for pricing of delivery service in a logistics network

In this paper, the problem of finding a fast computational method for pricing of the delivery service in a logistics network is analysed. The objective is to develop a supporting method for effective interaction among logistics service providers and customers. We make use of an analytical function to predict the final total cost of distribution and to develop an interaction protocol that, using the function, leads to a final win-win solution, in which the majority of the customers have agreed to accept a delivery time comporting a reduction of total distribution costs. We also validated the method by use of simulation software, evaluating the results in terms of cost-efficiency and stability. The experimental results show how the method led to a decrease in total costs.
Long-term model-based performance of ground heat exchangers

Ground-coupled heat pumps are highly efficient HVAC systems that provide heating and cooling for buildings. The high initial cost of drilling boreholes is one of the primary reasons that limit the widespread application of a ground-coupled heat pump. It is very important to develop numerical models that are capable of predicting and evaluating the performance of the ground heat exchanger throughout its entire life span. In this article, heat transfer inside the borehole is simplified as a one-dimensional (vertical) quasi-steady-state model. The equivalent circuit method is used to solve for the constant heat flux at the borehole wall, which becomes the boundary condition for heat transfer outside the borehole. A two-dimensional (vertical and radial) transient model is developed to analyze heat transfer outside the borehole. The thermal resistances and capacitances of the ground are corrected when interference from adjacent boreholes is taken into consideration. These coupled equations are solved using the bisection method. This numerical model is applied to a theoretical office building using a ground-coupled heat pump located in Chicago as a case study. The results show that the temperature of the ground between two adjacent boreholes rises about 3°C (5.4°F) after a 20-year operation, which results in an increase of the overall annual energy consumption for the ground-coupled heat pump of about 1.4%.
Design as materials research: building a cathedral to last 500 years

‘A city seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep apart from a small downtown not yet two centuries old and a few other pockets of ancientry, Los Angeles is instant architecture on an instant townscape. ’ (Banham, 1971) Two opposing attitudes shape the built environment of North America: the myth of transience and the myth of permanence.
JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY'S STRATEGY TO ENGAGE WITH THE REGION THROUGH THE DEVELOPMENT OF A SINGAPORE CAMPUS: RE-IMAGING THE TROPICS

The following paper provides a single longitudinal case study of an organisation that has employed strategy, policy and even procurement of space, within the tropical zone, in order to achieve its goals, of teaching & learning and research which are grounded in a sense of place. Much of the data has been gleaned from a literature review, interviews with key stakeholders and additional selected documents held by the University, all other information in this paper is supported by observational data. Whilst this paper does not seek to break new ground within the transnational education industry, it does attempt to provide a case study offering comparative data for other approaches and initiatives in higher education. As this paper seeks to report on nine years of operation in Singapore it is by no means a complete story. The final phase in embedding the strategic initiatives are currently being realised through a Tri-Campus Integration Strategy, where staff from all campuses contribute to an alignment of policies and procedures aimed at making one University in two Countries on three Campuses located in Townsville, Cairns and Singapore.
Minimal state-space realization of factorable 2-D transfer functions

An algorithm is presented for the minimal state-space realization of a two-dimensional (2-D) transfer function for the special case when the numerator or the denominator of the 2-D transfer function is factorable. The state-space representation is directly derived by inspection from a circuit block diagram realization of the 2-D system. The algorithm does not require that the numerator or the denominator polynomial be factored out, as opposed to other known techniques. >
Acellular dermal matrix graft for ventral corporal lengthening orthoplasty in 2-stage proximal hypospadias repair

Background Correcting ventral curvature (VC) by lengthening the ventral corpora using a graft has been verified feasible, but still has been associated with the recurrence. The use of acellular dermal matrix (ADM) in the setting of tissue reconstruction has captured the attention of many surgeons. There are few reports on the use of ADM exclusively as correction of VC. Thus, we evaluate the safety and effectiveness of repairing the defect with ADM for straightening the VC in proximal hypospadias repair. Methods We retrospectively analyzed the records of patients with proximal hypospadias who underwent ventral corporal lengthening with graft in staged repair from January 2013 to December 2019. Those with curvature greater than 30° after urethral plate transection were enrolled. ADM was used for repairing the defect left by transversely transection of tunica albuginea. Patient outcomes were compared with the non-matched control group who underwent the same procedure with tunica vaginalis (TV) repair. Patient demographics, operative techniques, complications, reoperations were summarized and compared between 2 groups. Results Forty-three patients underwent ventral lengthening with ADM repair after transverse urethral plate transection and 35 patients with TV patching respectively. At a mean follow-up of 10 months in those with the first-stage ventral lengthening, 5 of 43 (11.6%) in ADM group was detected with recurrent VC, while 2 of 35 (5.7%) in TV group were observed with recurrent curvature contemporarily (P=0.363). At a mean follow-up of 46.8 and 45.3 months, persistent curvature in ADM group was not significantly different comparing to TV group (1/43, 2.3% vs. 1/35, 2.9%; P=0.883). Conclusions Ventral corporal lengthening using ADM graft may facilitate correction of VC without increasing the risk of urethroplasty complications. It offers a promising material that can be safe, effective and simple to use and provides psychological and aesthetic benefits. Additional series assessment and further randomized controlled trials will elucidate the clinical impact of using ADM with ventral lengthening.
Exploiting the data-rate potential of MIMO channels: multi-stratum space-time coding

There is a high potential with respect to Shannon capacity in having a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel. In this paper a new MIMO coding approach, called multi-stratum space-time coding (MSSTC) is presented The principle of MSSTC is to partition the data stream and to transmit the substreams on separate strata. The transmission on every stratum is based on space-time block coding (STBC) yielding full diversity. Orthogonal superposition of the strata results in independent transmit symbols and enables therefore a high data rate. Decoding may be done successively stratum by stratum yielding reasonable receiver complexity. The structural properties inherent in MSSTC make it a robust scheme for varying channel conditions. A Shannon capacity comparison to other MIMO schemes like V- and D-BLAST is presented showing the robustness of MSSTC in different environments.