Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Timing Jitter In Long-haul WDM Return-To-Zero Systems

Long distance fiber-optic telecommunication systems carry digital information over terrestrial distances ranging from 3,000 km to 5,000 km and transoceanic distances ranging from 5,500 km to 12,000 km. During the last 10 years these systems have evolved significantly. In 1988, only 2% of long distance traffic was carried by submarine cables. At this time, most traffic was transmitted via satellite connections. However, in 2000, 80% of the traffic was carried over optical fiber links already. The popularity of optical fiber systems is mainly due to the potentially huge bandwidth, and thus channel capacity, which was made available due to the dramatic progress in the development of optical fibers and amplifiers, transmitters and receivers during the past 10 years. In the late 1980s, electro-optic repeaters and fiber optics were introduced to long-haul transmission systems, replacing the copper cables. This first generation of transoceanic fiber systems carried 280 Mbit/s in a single channel at 1300 nm. With the invention of single-frequency laser diodes at around 1550 nm, and Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFA), Giga-bit-per-second systems could be built in the 1990s. The first transoceanic projects employing these technologies since 1996 were the TAT-12/13 project [148] and the TPC-5 network [14], initially, both operated at 5 Gbit/s. Today's long-haul transmission systems represent the fourth generation utilizing multiple carrier wavelengths, which had lead to an explosion of channel capacity. At the same time, deregulation of telecommunication mar-2 A. Richter-Timing Jitter in WDM RZ Systems Introduction kets and global success of the internet has driven the demand for higher and higher system capacity. In 1998, existing systems were upgraded to carry up to four coarsely spaced wavelengths. Today, new dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) systems are under construction that will soon deliver up to 1 Tbit/s of data per fiber over transoceanic distances. Conventionally, non return-to-zero (NRZ) modulation format has been used in long-haul transmission systems [148], [14]. These systems are based on the fact that fiber dispersion and nonlinearities are detrimental effects. NRZ is used advantageously as it provides minimum optical bandwidth, and minimum optical peak power per bit interval for given average power. However, with increased bitrates it has been shown that RZ modulation formats offer certain advantages over NRZ, as they tend to be more robust against distortions [23]. For instance, RZ modulation is more tolerant to non-optimized dispersion maps than NRZ schemes [113]. This can be explained by the fact that optimum balancing …
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as a Multidimensional Performance Measurement System Tool: Case the Company of Algeria Post

This paper aimed to clarify the role that the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as a performance measurement tool in the company of Algeria Post. The BSC is a strategic performance management system, has been proven suitable for the public sector as the financial aspect is not their only concern. The BSC is « A multidimensional performance measurement system that should serve as decision support for managers. It includes indicators of progress and delay as well as internal and external indicators. It organizes the measures in a coherent system around four balanced perspectives: financial perspective, customer perspective, internal process, learning, and growth ». (Kaplan. S & Norton, 2004, P186). This study focused to improve the company of Algeria Post overall performance, the management control systems established should be re-evaluated and its tools should be improved to ensure reactivity in the decision-making and the measuring of the company performance. Our work consists of proposing a new approach to the performance management system for the model of the BSC as a performance measurement tool in the company of Algeria Post. The purpose of this article is to answer the main question of the study: should the company rely on the balanced scorecard as a performance measurement tool to achieve its strategic goals? First able, we counted on the stages of scientific research by gathering information about the company of Algeria Post, after that to conduct our study, we opted for a qualitative approach, using documentary research, interviews, and observation as tools for data collection. In the course of our designing of the proposed model of the BSC for the company. During our design of the proposed model of the balanced scorecard for the company we decided to follow a specific methodology to obtain the desired results taking into account the governmental nature of the organization of the company’s. We deemed it necessary to apply a public sector BSC model, using a top-down principle from (Kaplan and Norton, 2014) combined with the implementation procedures described in the theoretical side by (Alain Fernandez, 2013). It is noted that through the performance indicators of the customer perspective that the company realized some respectful objectives, but most of them are short lived ones, simultaneously, the internal processes perspective was the most performing by focusing on improving the quality of electronic services and the commercial network as a whole.
Periodic Control of Power Electronic Converters

A key issue for power electronic converters is the ability to tackle periodic signals in electrical power processing to precisely and flexibly convert and regulate electrical power. This book provides complete analysis and synthesis methods for periodic control systems. It covers the control, compensation, and filtering of periodic signals in power electronic power processing and proposes a unified framework for housing periodic control schemes for power converters, providing a general proportional-integral-derivative control solution to periodic signal compensation in extensive engineering applications - a perfect periodic control solution for power electronic conversion. It provides number of demonstrative practical examples of the application of periodic control to: standalone constant-voltage-constant-frequency (CVCF) singlephase Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) inverters; standalone CVCF singlephase High Frequency Link (HFL) inverters; standalone CVCF three-phase PWM inverters; grid-connected single-phase inverters; grid-connected singlephase "Cycloconverter" type HFL rectifiers; grid-connected three-phase PWM inverters; programmable AC power sources; shunt active power filters; and UPS systems. Periodic Control of Power Electronic Converters is of key importance for researchers and engineers in the field of power electronic converter systems and their applications, for control specialists exploring new applications of control theory in power electronics, and for advanced university students in these fields.
From Tumor Cells to Endothelium and Gut Microbiome: A Complex Interaction Favoring the Metastasis Cascade

Metastasis is a complicated process through which tumor cells disseminate to distant organs and adapt to novel tumor microenvironments. This multi-step cascade relies on the accumulation of genetic and epigenetic alterations within the tumor cells as well as the surrounding non-tumor stromal cells. Endothelial cells constitute a major player in promoting metastasis formation either by inducing the growth of tumor cells or by directing them towards dissemination in the blood or lymph. In fact, the direct and indirect interactions between tumor and endothelial cells were shown to activate several mechanisms allowing cancer cells’ invasion and extravasation. On the other side, gastrointestinal cancer development was shown to be associated with the disruption of the gut microbiome. While several proposed mechanisms have been investigated in this regard, gut and tumor-associated microbiota were shown to impact the gut endothelial barrier, increasing the dissemination of bacteria through the systemic circulation. This bacterial dislocation allows the formation of an inflammatory premetastatic niche in the distant organs promoting the metastatic cascade of primary tumors. In this review, we discuss the role of the endothelial cells in the metastatic cascade of tumors. We will focus on the role of the gut vascular barrier in the regulation metastasis. We will also discuss the interaction between this vascular barrier and the gut microbiota enhancing the process of metastasis. In addition, we will try to elucidate the different mechanisms through which this bacterial dislocation prepares the favorable metastatic niche at distant organs allowing the dissemination and successful deposition of tumor cells in the new microenvironments. Finally, and given the promising results of the studies combining immune checkpoint inhibitors with either microbiota alterations or anti-angiogenic therapy in many types of cancer, we will elaborate in this review the complex interaction between these 3 factors and their possible therapeutic combination to optimize response to treatment.
Explicable Policy Search via Preference-Based Learning under Human Biases

As intelligent agents become pervasive in our lives, they are expected to not only achieve tasks alone but also engage in tasks that require close collaboration with humans. In such a context, the optimal agent behavior without considering the humans in the loop may be viewed as inexplicable , resulting in degraded team performance and loss of trust. Consequently, to be seen as good team players, such agents are required to learn about human idiosyncrasies and preferences for their behaviors based on human feedback and respect them during decision-making. On the other hand, human biases can skew the feedback and cause such learning agents to deviate from their original design purposes, leading to severe consequences. Therefore, it is critical for these agents to be aware of human biases and trade off optimality with human preferences for their behaviors appropriately. In this paper, we formulate the problem of Explicable Policy Search (EPS). We assume that human biases arise from the human’s belief about the agent’s domain dynamics and the human’s reward function. Directly learning the human’s belief and reward function is possible but largely inefﬁcient and unnecessary. We demonstrate that they can be encoded by a single surrogate reward function that is learned in a preference-based framework. With this reward function, the agent then learns a stochastic policy via maximum entropy reinforcement learning to recover an explicable policy. We evaluate our method for EPS in a set of continuous navigation domains with synthetic human models and in an autonomous driving domain with a human subject study. The results suggest that our method can effectively generate explicable behaviors that are more desirable under various human biases.
Vaccinated, What Next? An Efficient Contact and Social Distance Tracing Based on Heterogeneous Telco Data

The demand for safety-boosting systems is always increasing, especially to limit the rapid spread of COVID-19. Real-time social distance preservation is an essential application toward containing the pandemic outbreak. Few systems have been proposed which require infrastructure setup and high-end phones. Therefore, they have limited ubiquitous adoption. Cellular technology enjoys widespread availability and their support by commodity cellphones, which suggest leveraging it for social distance tracking. However, users sharing the same environment may be connected to different telecom providers of different network configurations. Traditional cellular-based localization systems usually build a separate model for each provider, leading to a drop in social distance performance. In this article, we propose CellTrace, a deep learning-based social distance preserving system. Specifically, CellTrace finds a cross-provider representation using a deep learning version of canonical correlation analysis. Different providers’ data are highly correlated in this representation and used to train a localization model for estimating the social distances. In addition, CellTrace incorporates different modules that improve the deep model’s generalization against overtraining and noise. We have implemented and evaluated CellTrace in two different environments with a side-by-side comparison with the state-of-the-art cellular localization and contact tracing techniques. The results show that CellTrace can accurately localize users and estimate the contact occurrence, regardless of the connected providers, with a submeter median error and 97% accuracy, respectively. In addition, we show that CellTrace has robust performance in various challenging scenarios.
Global Existence and Long time dynamics of a four compartment Brusselator Type system

In this work we consider a four compartment Brusselator system. The reaction terms of this system are of non constant sign, thus components of the solution are not bounded apriori, and functional means to derive apriori bounds will fail. We prove global existence of solutions, via construction of an appropriate lyapunov functional. Furthermore due to the sign changing nonlinearities, the asymptotic sign condition is also not satisfied, causing further difficulties in proving the existence of global attractor. These difficulties are circumvented via the use of the lyapunov functional constructed along with the use of the uniform gronwall lemma. We are able to prove the existence of an attractor for the system, improving previous results in the literature.The Hausdorff and fractal dimensions of the attractor are also shown to be finite.In particular we derive a lower bound on the Hausdorff dimension of the global attractor. We use numerical simulations,as well as numerical attractor reconstruction methods via nonlinear time series analysis, to validate our results.
Generalization of Sperner’s Theorem on the Number of Subsets of a Finite Set

Let a finite set R with n elements be given. A system $\alpha = \{ A_1 , \cdots ,A_r \} $ of r subsets of the set R for which $A_i A_j = \emptyset $ and $\sum A_i = R$ is called a decomposition of R. One says that two decompositions $\alpha = \{ A_i , \cdots ,A_r \} $ and $\beta = \{ B_1 , \cdots ,B_r \} $ are connected and writes $\alpha \sim \beta $ if for at least one i either $A_i \subset B_i $, or $B_i \subset A_i $. $K = \{ \alpha \} $ is the s-system of different decompositions if, for all $\alpha ,\beta \in K,\alpha \nsim \beta $. Let $N(K)$ be the number of possible decompositions. The theorem is:\[ \mathop {\max }\limits_K N(K) = \mathop {\max }\limits_{n_1 , \cdots ,n_r } \frac{{n! }} {{\left( {n_1 } \right)! \cdots \left( {n_2 } \right)! }}. \]
Enabling VirtIO Driver Support on FPGAs

Host-FPGA connectivity is critical for enabling a vast number of FPGA use cases in data centers, edge, and IoT. This interface must be reliable, robust, and uniform, whilst supporting necessary protocols and functionality. However, existing support for host-FPGA connectivity has several drawbacks on both the host and the device. This includes a lack of portability and poor upstream support, both of which can make it difficult for CPUs to easily and effectively leverage FPGAs. Native VirtIO drivers in the host operating system can help address some of these limitations, especially on the host side, but implementing device-side support for the VirtIO specification is a challenge due to the substantial hardware complexity involved. In this work, we present a framework for enabling FPGAs to interface native operating system VirtIO drivers on the host. To reduce the implementation overhead and improve portability, this framework uses both generic RTL blocks and modified, chip/device specific PCIe IP blocks. Moreover, this approach implements all the necessary data structures and functionality needed to meet the VirtIO specification requirements. We test the framework using the Xilinx DMA/Bridge Subsystem for PCI Express (XDMA) IP, implemented on an Alinx AX7A200 FPGA board (with a Xilinx XC7A200TFBG484-2 FPGA chip), and a host machine running the Fedora operating system. Our results show that the FPGA can be successfully enumerated as a VirtIO device, and interfaced using only native Linux VirtIO drivers.
Program derivation in acyclic graphs and related problems

paper' several derivations 0' algorIthms on acyclic graphs are presented. Acyclic graphs are shov.rn to be ilTlportant lor the solutIon of' a general COI~ITl of' recursive equations, and as such appear everyv.rhere in the pI~actice 01 progralTlIT1ing. In order to f'acilitate the construction of' compact and elegant derivations and to achieve tile necessary level of' abstractIon, some newnotation is introduced, as \. VeIl as an extension of' set and ['unction calculus. Fl.u-therrnoce. a nUlTlbsr 01 addItional prograrnJTling con.structs, such as elernent se~ection f'rorn. a set. a Pascal-llke if'-staternent and a greatly reduce the f'or-stat8IT1811t length or t~e lor sets, prograITls are introduced, 'W"hich and derivations: the 10r-stateITlent even ITlore so v.rhen used in cOITlbination -. vith theoreITls lor the relinenl.ent 01 expression or runction assigoITlents, stated and proved in this paper. Reler-ence to acyclic graphs requires kno-. vledge or -. vhat exactly cyclicity means. their uselulness Then the nl.ost character'ization Various delinitions are proved equivalent and vvith r'espect to program derivation is analyzed. suitable definition, equivalent to the lixed-point in Ill. Is Llsed to derive an algorithITl lor the -. vell-knovvn problem of' checking whether a given graph is cyclic. The set OJ end points of' unbounded paths turns out to piay an essential role here, and in all otherpl~oblerns in this paper. The central probleITl of' the paper concerns the computatIon 01 a general class of' lunctions all. the vertex set 01 an acyciic graph, def"ined by a particular f"orrn of' recursive equation, -. vhich is sho'W"n to have a unique solution. Solvipg this problelTl gives rise to t-. vo InterestIng Subpl"Oblerns: graph inversion 121 and topological sortIng (3)" For these problems, compact derivations of' algorlthlTlS are presented as '\-VeIl. The centz-"al problern is also solved lor equatIons addItIonally satisf"ying algorlthrn. a eel"tain split pn. ::>perty, leading Finally. t.he practical applicability to a ITlore elegant 0' t.he theory Is deITlonstrated by lneElnS oC a nurnber 01 typical examples, satisf"ying thIs spl it property" It is stl~essed that neithec tl1.e progralTlITling problems, nor theIr sol utions are the key issue her'e: lTlost of" them are not ne-. v. Ho-. vever, the abstr"act, COnlpv.ct and calculational style of" deriving algorithITls f'rom the pr-oblenl. specilicatlon, developed In this paper, is believed to siInplilY the solution 01 a '\-Vide class of" practical prograITlming problems. CSN 92/04 :JOO.F: 92/21-2
Preserving Privacy in Internet of Vehicles (IoV): A Novel Group-Leader-Based Shadowing Scheme Using Blockchain

Recent developments in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and vehicular adhoc networks (VANET) have revolutionized our infrastructure, making it safer, more convenient, and efficient. VANET provide smart traffic control, event allocation, and real-time information. Existing vehicles in VANET are now equipped with intelligent navigation, entertainment, and emergency applications. However, the highly connected nature of these vehicles poses a significant safety and security risk to drivers and assets which can result in life-threatening consequences. Location privacy is critical, and robust network security techniques should be used to counter threats in VANET environments. Existing schemes like obfuscation, mix-zones, and silent periods have preserved location privacy to some extent but have poor Quality of Service (QoS) and lack both efficiency and security. To address these issues, a shadowing scheme is introduced, which is an improvement of earlier schemes used for location privacy. This approach ensures better service to the vehicle by allowing precise location-based service (LBS) requests to the LBS server and uses blockchain technology for storing vehicular certificates. The inclusion of a group leader significantly reduces the time taken for implementing the scheme, improving efficiency and scalability. The anonymity set size increases over time, offering better privacy protection especially in densely populated areas. The proposed scheme overcomes drawbacks of existing techniques which includes reduced location accuracy and low-quality service in spatial obfuscation techniques, limited applicability and high tracking rate in shadow-based approaches, and reduced utility in distance-based schemes. Moreover, single point of failure and resource-intensive group formation in group-based schemes, and dependency on additional infrastructure in mix-zone-based schemes are also overcome. The proposed scheme’s experimental results validate it, showing that it outperforms current state-of-the-art schemes based on metrics, such as anonymity set size, entropy, and tracking success ratio.
GP3D: Generalized Pose Estimation in 3D Point Clouds: A case study on bin picking

—In this paper, we present GP3D, a novel network for generalized pose estimation in 3D point clouds. The method generalizes to new objects by using both the scene point cloud and the object point cloud with keypoint indexes as input. The network is trained to match the object keypoints to scene points. To address the pose estimation of novel objects we also present a new approach for training pose estimation. The typical solution is a single model trained for pose estimation of a speciﬁc object in any scenario. This has several drawbacks: training a model for each object is time-consuming, energy consuming, and by excluding the scenario information the task becomes more difﬁcult. Inthis paper, we present the opposite solution; a scenario-speciﬁc pose estimation method for novel objects that do not require retraining. The network is trained on 1500 objects and is able to learn a generalized solution. We demonstrate that the network is able to correctly predict novel objects, and demonstrate the ability of the network to perform outside of the trained class. We believe that the demonstrated method is a valuable solution for many real-world scenarios. Code and trained network will be made available after publication.