Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
CFD prediction of vortex induced vibrations and fatigue assessment for deepwater marine risers

Using 3D computational fluid dynamics techniques in recent years have shed significant light on the Vortex Induced Vibrations (VIV) encountered by deep-water marine risers. The fatigue damage accumulated due to these vibrations has posed a great concern to the offshore industry. This paper aims to present an algorithm to predict the crossflow and inline fatigue damage for very long (L/D > 10 3 ) marine risers using a Finite-Analytical Navier-Stokes (FANS) technique coupled with a tensioned beam motion solver and rainflow counting fatigue module. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) method has been used to simulate the turbulence in the flow. An overset grid system is employed to mesh the riser geometry and the wake field around the riser. Risers from NDP (2003) and Miami (2006) experiments are used for simulation with uniform, linearly sheared and non-uniform (non-linearly sheared) current profiles. The simulation results including inline and crossflow motion, modal decomposition, spectral densities and fatigue damage rate are compared to the experimental data and useful conclusions are drawn.
The Long-Run Impact of Tracking High-Achieving Students: Evidence from Boston's Advanced Work Class

Previous work on tracking high-achieving elementary and middle students in the US has shown little impact on short-run test scores. I provide the first estimates of the long-run impacts of tracking using data from the Boston Public Schools’ (BPS) program for highachieving students, Advanced Work Class (AWC). AWC is an accelerated curriculum in 4th through 6th grades with dedicated classrooms. BPS offers AWC to students who score well on a 3rd grade exam. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity approach, I estimate the causal effect of AWC on standardized test scores, AP, SAT, high school graduation and college entrance. Like other programs for high-achieving students, AWC has little impact on test scores. However, it improves longer-term academic outcomes. AWC increases Algebra 1 enrollment by 8th grade, AP exam taking, especially in calculus, and college enrollment. It also has large positive effects on high school graduation for minority students. College enrollment increases are particularly large for elite institutions. One year of AWC attendance triples the rate of matriculation at a “most competitive” university. Using a multiple instrument strategy, I test several potential channels for program effects to operate and find suggestive evidence that teacher effectiveness and math acceleration account for AWC effects, with little evidence that peer effects contribute to gains. ∗For making the data available for this project, I thank Kamal Chavda of the Boston Public Schools and Carrie Conaway of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and their staffs. Special thanks go to Josh Angrist, Chris Avery, and Larry Katz for their guidance and feedback. I am grateful to Natalie Bau, Josh Goodman, Peter Hull, Laszlo Sandor, and seminar participants at Harvard for helpful comments and discussions. Financial support from the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, the Taubman Center for State and Local Government, and the Multidisciplinary Program on Inequality and Social Policy, all at the Harvard Kennedy School, and institutional support from the School Effectivness and Inequality Institute at MIT are gratefully acknowledged.
Extracting malicious behaviours

: In recent years, the damage cost caused by malwares is huge. Thus, malware detection is a big challenge. The task of specifying malware takes a huge amount of time and engineering effort since it currently requires the manual study of the malicious code. Thus, in order to avoid the tedious manual analysis of malicious codes, this task has to be automatised. To this aim, we propose in this work to represent malicious behaviours using extended API call graphs , where nodes correspond to API function calls, edges specify the execution order between the API functions, and edge labels indicate the dependence relation between API functions parameters. We define new static analysis techniques that allow to extract such graphs from programs, and show how to automatically extract, from a set of malicious and benign programs, an extended API call graph that represents the malicious behaviours. Finally, we show how this graph can be used for malware detection. We implemented our techniques and obtained encouraging results: 95.66% of detection rate with 0% of false alarms.
Unsupervised Learning Using Expectation Propagation Inference of Inverted Beta-Liouville Mixture Models for Pattern Recognition Applications

Abstract Learning statistical models successfully is both an essential and a challenging task for various pattern recognition and knowledge discovery applications. In particular, generative models such as finite and infinite mixture models have demonstrated to be efficient in terms of overall performance. In this paper, a robust framework based on an expectation propagation (EP) inference is developed to learn inverted Beta-Liouville (IBL) mixture models which is proper choice for positive data classification. Within the proposed EP learning method, the full posterior distribution is estimated accurately, the model complexity and all related parameters are evaluated simultaneously in a single optimization scheme. Extensive experiments using challenging real-world applications including recognition of facial expression, automatic human action categorization, and hand gesture recognition show the merit of our approach in terms of achieving better results than comparable techniques.
Fabrication and characterization of active nanostructures

Opondo, Noah F. Ph.D., Purdue University, August 2016. Fabrication and Characterization of Active Nanostructures . Major Professor: Saeed Mohammadi. Three different nanostructure active devices have been designed, fabricated and characterized. Junctionless transistors based on highly-doped silicon nanowires fabricated using a bottom-up fabrication approach are first discussed. The fabrication avoids the ion implantation step since silicon nanowires are doped in-situ during growth. Germanium junctionless transistors fabricated with a top down approach starting from a germanium on insulator substrate and using a gate stack of high-k dielectrics and GeO2 are also presented. The levels and origin of low-frequency noise in junctionless transistor devices fabricated from silicon nanowires and also from GeOI devices are reported. Low-frequency noise is an indicator of the quality of the material, hence its characterization can reveal the quality and perhaps reliability of fabricated transistors. A novel method based on low-frequency noise measurement to envisage trap density in the semiconductor bandgap near the semiconductor/oxide interface of nanoscale silicon junctionless transistors (JLTs) is presented. Low-frequency noise characterization of JLTs biased in saturation is conducted at different gate biases. The noise spectrum indicates either a Lorentzian or 1/f. A simple analysis of the low-frequency noise data leads to the density of traps and their energy within the semiconductor bandgap. The level of noise in silicon JLT devices is lower than reported values on transistors fabricated using a top-down approach. This noise level can be significantly improved by improving the quality of dielectric and the channel interface. A micro-vacuum electron device based on silicon field emitters for cold cathode emission is also presented. The presented work utilizes vertical Si nanowires fabricated by
Pengaruh Lama Masa Kerja terhadap Kesehatan Paru Pekerja Perusahaan Beton

Introduction: There are currently 7.06 million Indonesians employed in the construction industry, including precast concrete companies. Workers at this industrial location were constantly exposed to production dust, which could be harmful to their health. The emergence of lung disorders is one of these health issues. Objective: This research aimed to see how the length of service affected the lung health of workers in precast concrete plants. Method: An analytic-observational study with a cross-sectional approach is used in this research method. The information was gathered from 160 employees at an Indonesian precast concrete company. All information was collected by filling out questionnaires and performing a spirometry test to see if there were any lung health issues. Results and discussion: According to the findings, respondents ranged in age from 19 to 58 years old. All respondents were divided into two groups based on their years of service: those with less than ten years of service (97.9%) and those with more than ten years (39.7%). As many as 57 workers aged over ten years had normal FEV1.0/FVC results. Conclusion: There is no significant relationship between the length of service and the lung health of concrete workers (p-value = 0.648). A thorough analysis is needed to determine other factors related to the lung health of construction workers, according to the researchers' recommendations for further research.
Dicationic Bis-Pyridinium Hydrazone-Based Amphiphiles Encompassing Fluorinated Counteranions: Synthesis, Characterization, TGA-DSC, and DFT Investigations

Quaternization and metathesis approaches were used to successfully design and synthesize the targeted dicationic bis-dipyridinium hydrazones carrying long alkyl side chain extending from C8 to C18 as countercation, and attracted to halide (I-) or fluorinated ion (PF6-, BF4-, CF3COO-) as counteranion. Spectroscopic characterization using NMR and mass spectroscopy was used to establish the structures of the formed compounds. In addition, their thermal properties were investigated utilizing thermogravimetric analyses (TGA), and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The thermal study illustrated that regardless of the alkyl group length (Cn) or the attracted anions, the thermograms of the tested derivatives are composed of three stages. The mode of thermal decomposition demonstrates the important roles of both anion and alkyl chain length. Longer chain length results in greater van der Waals forces; meanwhile, with anions of low nucleophilicity, it could also decrease the intramolecular electrostatic interaction, which leads to an overall interaction decrease and lower thermal stability. The DFT theoretical calculations have been carried out to investigate the thermal stability in terms of the Tonset. The results revealed that the type of the counteranion and chain length had a substantial impact on thermal stability, which was presumably related to the degree of intermolecular interactions. However, the DFT results illustrated that there is no dominant parameter affecting the thermal stability, but rather a cumulative effect of many factors of different extents.
Male Adaptive Plasticity Can Explain the Evolution of Sexual Perception Costs

Sensory perception of environmental cues has been shown to trigger plastic responses that can induce important fitness costs, including the dramatic modulation of aging across distant taxa. For example, male Drosophila melanogaster suffer a marked decrease in fitness, characterized by faster reproductive and actuarial aging, if they perceive female cues but fail to mate shortly after (aging via sexual perception). While this has been a breakthrough for our understanding of the mechanisms of aging, it raises the question of why such plastic responses evolved. Here, we used D. melanogaster to ask whether sexual perception costs may be a by-product of adaptive plastic responses to female cues. We found that (a) short-term perception (1 day) of female cues before mating opportunities increases male relative lifetime reproductive success in a competitive environment, (b) medium-term perception (3–7 days) is neutral, and (c) long-term perception (15 days) leads to reproductive costs. We then ran mathematical simulations under a wide range of sociosexual and demographic scenarios to show that such plastic male responses can be adaptive whenever mating rates fluctuate within the range experienced by D. melanogaster and other insects in the wild, suggesting that this may be a widespread strategy in nature. Finally, we show that, because the short-term benefits of plastic responses will be acquired mostly by high-quality males while long-term costs will be paid mostly by low-quality males, sexual perception can significantly magnify sexual selection (15%–27% average increase in the opportunity for selection).
Influence of Dietary Supplementation with Boswellia serrata and Salix alba on Performance and Blood Biochemistry in Free-Range Leghorn Laying Hens

This study was conducted to evaluate the safety and the beneficial effects of dietary supplementation with Boswellia serrata (Bs) and Salix alba (Sa) in Leghorn hens during the critical pre-laying and laying phases. A total of 120 pullets, 17 weeks of age, were assigned to two groups (Control—C; Treated—T, n = 60 each). For 12 weeks, the T group received a diet supplemented with 0.3% of dry extracts of Bs (5%) and Sa (5%). The study lasted 19 weeks. Productive performance, serum analytes, H/L ratio, IgA and anti-IBV antibodies were investigated. Water intake was significantly higher, while body and egg weight was significantly lower for the T group (p < 0.05). No other differences were detected in performance parameters, serum analytes, IgA and H/L ratio excluding t0, with a significantly (p < 0.05) higher H/R ratio and higher titers of anti-IBV antibody for the T group. Overall, the data obtained in this study show that the supplementation with Bs and Sa was safe and resulted in an increase in water consumption, a decrease in egg weight, and a sedative effect in the hens. In the future, it would be interesting to test this supplement in hens reared on intensive farms.
Lossless microwave photonic delay line using a ring resonator with an integrated semiconductor optical amplifier

Optical delay lines implemented in photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are essential for creating robust and low-cost optical signal processors on miniaturized chips. In particular, tunable delay lines enable a key feature of programmability for the on-chip processing functions. However, the previously investigated tunable delay lines are plagued by a severe drawback of delay-dependent loss due to the propagation loss in the constituent waveguides. In principle, a serial-connected amplifier can be used to compensate such losses or perform additional amplitude manipulation. However, this solution is generally unpractical as it introduces additional burden on chip area and power consumption, particularly for large-scale integrated PICs. Here, we report an integrated tunable delay line that overcomes the delay-dependent loss, and simultaneously allows for independent manipulation of group delay and amplitude responses. It uses a ring resonator with a tunable coupler and a semiconductor optical amplifier in the feedback path. A proof-of-concept device with a free spectral range of 11.5 GHz and a delay bandwidth in the order of 200 MHz is discussed in the context of microwave photonics and is experimentally demonstrated to be able to provide a lossless delay up to 1.1 to a 5 ns Gaussian pulse. The proposed device can be designed for different frequency scales with potential for applications across many other areas such as telecommunications, LIDAR, and spectroscopy, serving as a novel building block for creating chip-scale programmable optical signal processors.
Ensuring the Efficacious Iron Fortification of Foods: A Tale of Two Barriers

Iron fortification of foods has always been a challenge. This is because iron fortification compounds vary widely in relative absorption; because many foods undergo unacceptable changes in color or flavor from the addition of iron; and because many of the iron-fortified foods contain potent inhibitors of iron absorption. These technical barriers have largely been overcome, and efficacious iron-fortified foods, that maintain or improve the iron status of women or children in long-term feeding studies, can be designed. Commercially fortified infant foods are efficacious, and other commercial iron-fortified foods targeted at women and children will provide a useful amount of iron provided the fortification level is adjusted according to the relative absorption of the iron compound. Technologies for the large-scale fortification of wheat and maize flour are also well established, and iron fortification of rice, using the recently developed extruded premix technique, is showing great promise. However, some important knowledge gaps still remain, and further research and development is needed in relation to iron (and iodine)-fortified salt and iron-fortified liquid milk. The usefulness of less-soluble iron compounds, such as ferrous fumarate, to fortify foods for infants and young children in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) also needs further investigation. A more formidable barrier to efficacious iron-fortified food has been reported in recent years. This is the infection-initiated inflammation barrier, which inhibits iron absorption in response to infection. This barrier is particularly important in LMICs where infections such as malaria and HIV are widespread, and gastrointestinal infections are common due to poor quality water supplies and sanitation. Another source of inflammation in such countries is the high prevalence of obesity in women. Most countries in sub-Saharan Africa have high inflammation which not only decreases the efficacy of iron-fortified and iron-biofortified foods but complicates the monitoring of large-scale iron fortification programs. This is because iron deficiency anemia cannot be differentiated from the more prominent anemia of inflammation and because inflammation confounds the measurement of iron status. There is an urgent need to better quantify the impact of inflammation on the efficacy of iron-fortified foods. However, at present, in LMICs with high inflammation exposure, infection control, cleaner water, improved sanitation, and a decrease in obesity prevalence will undoubtedly have a greater impact on iron status and anemia than the iron fortification of foods.
Spike-Wave Seizures, NREM Sleep and Micro-Arousals in WAG/Rij Rats with Genetic Predisposition to Absence Epilepsy: Developmental Aspects

The current study was done in Wistar Albino Glaxo Rijswijk (WAG/Rij) rats, which are genetically prone to develop spontaneous spike-wave discharges (SWDs) and are widely used as a genetic model of absence epilepsy. Here, we examined functional links between sleep and spike-wave epilepsy in aging WAG/Rij rats using advanced techniques of EEG analysis. SWDs, periods of NREM sleep and micro-arousals were automatically detected in three-channel epidural EEG recorded in freely moving WAG/Rij rats consequently at the age 5, 7 and 9 months. We characterized the developmental profile of spike-wave epilepsy in drug-naïve WAG/Rij rats and defined three epi-phenotypes—severe, mild and minor epilepsy. Age-related changes of SWDs were associated with changes in NREM sleep. Several signs of NREM sleep fragmentation were defined in epileptic WAG/Rij rats. It seems that spike-wave epilepsy per se promotes micro-arousals during NREM sleep. However, subjects with a higher number of micro-arousals (and NREM sleep episodes) at the age of 5 months were characterized by a reduction of SWDs between 5 and 7 months of age.
Location-Based Tower Defense - Designing an Outdoor Exergame

Increasing problems of physical inactivity has led to a growing interest in the field of exergaming. Exergames aim to use video games’ ability to excite and engage, and combine it with elements of physical activity and exercise. This has the potential to reach an audience living particularly sedentary lives. This study has explored the possibilities and challenges of outdoor exergames. A review of the field led to the design and development of a prototype of a location-based tower defense exergame for the smartphone platform. The user’s location is tracked using GPS and displayed on a map of the area. The game takes place on the map, requiring the player to physically move in order to change the position of her in-game avatar. The goal of the game is to stop computer-controlled enemies from reaching your base by building defensive towers and collecting power-up items. The game was tested on five male students with an interest in video games and exercise. The tests took place in a public park. Each participant played the game once, sessions lasting from 10 to 24 minutes. Observations and interviews indicated that the game was successfully able to engage and entertain the players, encouraging physical exertion. The players reported that it reduced focus on the physical effort expended. They were somewhat positive towards including such a game in their exercise schedule, on the condition that it included a multiplayer mode. Challenges associated with outdoor exergames were identified. These include inaccuracies in the location tracking, the risk of injury, and social barriers involved with playing games in public.
Decidability of Intuitionistic Sentential Logic with Identity via Sequent Calculus

The aim of our paper is twofold: firstly we present a sequent calculus for an intuitionistic non-Fregean logic ISCI, which is based on the calculus presented in the paper by Chlebowski and Leszczynska-Jasion, 'An Investigation into Intuitionistic Logic with Identity' (Bulletin of the Section of Logic 48(4), p. 259-283, 2019) and, secondly, we discuss the problem of decidability of ISCI via the obtained system. The original calculus from the mentioned paper did not provide the decidability result for ISCI. There are two problems to be solved in order to obtain this result: the so called loops characteristic for intuitionistic logic and the lack of the subformula property due to the form of the identity-dedicated rules. We discuss possible routes to overcome these problems: we consider a weaker version of the subformula property, guarded by the complexity of formulas which can be included within it; we also present a proof-search procedure such that when it fails, then there exists a countermodel (in Kripke semantics for ISCI).
Comparative Preparation Method and Associated Cost of Lignin–Cellulose Nanocrystals

Lignin is a natural source of UV-shielding materials, though its recalcitrant and heterogeneous structure makes the extraction and purification processes complex. However, lignin’s functionality can be directly utilised when it stays as native with cellulose and hemicellulose in plant biomass, rather than being separated. The fabrication process of this native lignin is sustainable, as it consumes less energy and chemicals compared to purified lignin; thus, it is an economic and more straightforward approach. In this study, the properties of native and purified lignin–cellulose nanocrystals (L–CNCs) sourced from hemp hurd waste were compared to explore the differences in their morphology, UV-shielding properties and chemical structure affected by their distinct fabrication process. These two kinds of L–CNCs were further added into polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) to evaluate their reinforcement characteristics. The resulting native L–CNCs/PVA film showed stronger UV-shielding ability than purified L–CNCs. Moreover, the native L–CNCs showed better compatibility with PVA, while the purified L–CNCs/PVA interfaces showed phase separation. The phase separation in purified L–CNCs/PVA films reduced the films’ tensile strength and Young’s modulus and increased the water vapour transmission. The laboratory-scale cost of native L–CNCs production (~AUD 80/kg) was only 10% of purified L–CNCs (~AUD 850/kg), resulting in a comparatively lower cost for preparing native L–CNCs/PVA composite films. Overall, this study shows that the proposed method of production and use of native L–CNCs can be an economic approach to deliver UV-shielding properties for potential applications, such as food packaging.