Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Plume mixing determines contaminant leakage from saturated chemically heterogeneous porous subsurfaces

We show the impact that stretching and mixing has on the fate of plumes of waterborne contaminant solutes transported through a chemically heterogeneous, partially adsorbing porous medium, at a typical Péclet number characterizing saturated ﬂows in subsurfaces, Pe = O (1) . Via pore-scale lattice Boltzmann simulations, we follow the dynamic of a passive scalar injected in a packed bed consisting of a mixture of chemically inert and adsorbing spherical particles. By varying the fraction of the adsorbers, randomly and uniformly distributed in the porous volume, and the adsorption rate, we ﬁnd that the waterborne solute forms diﬀerent plumes emerging between pairs of adsorbing particles. The plumes are stretched at a rate linearly increasing with time and inversely proportional to the adsorbers’ interparticle dimensionless distance (cid:96) ∗ ξ = (cid:96) ξ /d , with d being the pore size. We provide a relationship between the characteristic small-scale scalar concentration width σ B and the adsorption-induced stretching rate. The stretching process competes with diﬀusion broadening to asymptotically determine σ B /d ∝ ( Pe /(cid:96) ∗ ξ ) − 1 / 2 and sets the characteristic scale of concentration width larger than the characteristic pore size, that is σ B > d . Because of the latter condition, small scalar structures overlap among adjacent pores until mass transport and adsorption are equilibrated at a time t ξ , when the plume is well-mixed at a larger scale, corresponding to its transverse cross-section dimension. The plume mixing rate related to the average ﬂow velocity 1 / ( Ut ξ ) very well approximates a macrohomogenous adsorption coeﬃcient, thus predicting the macroscopic adsorption process and the probability of solute leakage from the porous volume. On the basis of these observations, we also derive the probability of formation of large solute plume volumes, which we ﬁnd to exponentially decay with large (cid:96) ∗ ξ and small fraction of adsorbers. three-dimensional homogeneous materials. It has been shown how the speciﬁc topological traits
CD2: Fine-grained 3D Mesh Reconstruction with Twice Chamfer Distance

Monocular 3D reconstruction is to reconstruct the shape of object and its other information from a single RGB image. In 3D reconstruction, polygon mesh, with detailed surface information and low computational cost, is the most prevalent expression form obtained from deep learning models. However, the state-of-the-art schemes fail to directly generate well-structured meshes, and we identify that most meshes have severe Vertices Clustering (VC) and Illegal Twist (IT) problems. By analyzing the mesh deformation process, we pinpoint that the inappropriate usage of Chamfer Distance (CD) loss is a root cause of VC and IT problems in deep learning model. In this article, we initially demonstrate these two problems induced by CD loss with visual examples and quantitative analyses. Then, we propose a fine-grained reconstruction method CD2 by employing Chamfer distance twice to perform a plausible and adaptive deformation. Extensive experiments on two 3D datasets and comparisons with five latest schemes demonstrate that our CD2 directly generates a well-structured mesh and outperforms others in terms of several quantitative metrics.
Collaborative Bimanual Manipulation Using Optimal Motion Adaptation and Interaction Control

This work developed collaborative bimanual manipulation for reliable and safe human-robot collaboration, which allows remote and local human operators to work interactively for bimanual tasks. We proposed an optimal motion adaptation to retarget arbitrary commands from multiple human operators into feasible control references. The collaborative manipulation framework has three main modules: (1) contact force modulation for compliant physical interactions with objects via admittance control; (2) task-space sequential equilibrium and inverse kinematics optimization, which adapts interactive commands from multiple operators to feasible motions by satisfying the task constraints and physical limits of the robots; and (3) an interaction controller adopted from the fractal impedance control, which is robust to time delay and stable to superimpose multiple control efforts for generating desired joint torques and controlling the dual-arm robots. Extensive experiments demonstrated the capability of the collaborative bimanual framework, including (1) dual-arm teleoperation that adapts arbitrary infeasible commands that violate joint torque limits into continuous operations within safe boundaries, compared to failures without the proposed optimization; (2) robust maneuver of a stack of objects via physical interactions in presence of model inaccuracy; (3) collaborative multi-operator part assembly, and teleoperated industrial connector insertion, which validate the guaranteed stability of reliable human-robot co-manipulation.
Mining Function Homology of Bot Loaders from Honeypot Logs

Self-contained loaders are widely adopted in botnets for injecting loading commands and spawning new bots. While researchers can dissect bot clients to get various information of botnets, the cloud-based and self-contained design of loaders effectively hinders researchers from understanding the loaders' evolution and variation using classic methods. The decoupled nature of bot loaders also dramatically reduces the feasibility of investigating relationships among clients and infrastructures. In this paper, we propose a text-based method to investigate and analyze details of bot loaders using honeypots. We leverage high interaction honeypots to collect request logs and define eight families of bot loaders based on the result of agglomerative clustering. At the function level, we push our study further to explore their homological relationship based on similarity analysis of request logs using sequence aligning techniques. This further exploration discloses that the released code of Mirai keeps spawning new generations of botnets both on the client and the server side. This paper uncovers the homology of active botnet infrastructures, providing a new prospect on finding covert relationships among cybercrimes. Bot loaders are precisely investigated at the function level to yield a new insight for researchers to identify the botnet's infrastructures and track their evolution over time.
Strict Half-Singleton Bound, Strict Direct Upper Bound for Linear Insertion-Deletion Codes and Optimal Codes

Let <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathcal C}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> be an <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$[n, k]$ </tex-math></inline-formula> linear code over the finite field <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathbb F}_{q}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Let <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d_{I}({\mathcal C})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> denote its insertion-deletion (insdel for short) distance, which characterizes the insdel error-correcting capability of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathcal C}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. To determine the insdel distances of linear codes is a very challenging problem. In this paper we propose a strict half-Singleton upper bound <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d_{I}({\mathcal C}) \leq 2(n-2k+1)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> if <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathcal C}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> does not contain the codeword with all 1s, which generalizes the half-Singleton bound on the insdel distances of linear codes due to Cheng-Guruswami-Haeupler-Li, and a stronger direct upper bound <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d_{I}({\mathcal C}) \leq 2(d_{H}({\mathcal C})-t)$ </tex-math></inline-formula> under a weak condition, where <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$t\geq 1$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is a positive integer determined by the generator matrix and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$d_{H}({\mathcal C})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> denotes the Hamming distance of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\mathcal C}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. A sufficient condition for a linear code attaining the strict half-Singleton bound is given. We prove that the code length of an optimal binary linear insdel code with respect to the (strict) half-Singleton bound is about twice its dimension and conjecture that optimal binary linear insdel codes have exact parameters <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$[{2k, k, 4}]$ </tex-math></inline-formula> or <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$[{2k+1, k, 4}]$ </tex-math></inline-formula> with respect to the half-Singleton bound or the strict half-Singleton bound, respectively. Moreover, interestingly explicit optimal linear insdel codes attaining the (strict) half-Singleton bound, with the code length being independent of the finite field size, are given.
Statistical and Computational Complexities of BFGS Quasi-Newton Method for Generalized Linear Models

The gradient descent (GD) method has been used widely to solve parameter estimation in generalized linear models (GLMs), a generalization of linear models when the link function can be non-linear. In GLMs with a polynomial link function, it has been shown that in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, due to the problem's strong convexity and smoothness, GD converges linearly and reaches the final desired accuracy in a logarithmic number of iterations. In contrast, in the low SNR setting, where the problem becomes locally convex, GD converges at a slower rate and requires a polynomial number of iterations to reach the desired accuracy. Even though Newton's method can be used to resolve the flat curvature of the loss functions in the low SNR case, its computational cost is prohibitive in high-dimensional settings as it is $\mathcal{O}(d^3)$, where $d$ the is the problem dimension. To address the shortcomings of GD and Newton's method, we propose the use of the BFGS quasi-Newton method to solve parameter estimation of the GLMs, which has a per iteration cost of $\mathcal{O}(d^2)$. When the SNR is low, for GLMs with a polynomial link function of degree $p$, we demonstrate that the iterates of BFGS converge linearly to the optimal solution of the population least-square loss function, and the contraction coefficient of the BFGS algorithm is comparable to that of Newton's method. Moreover, the contraction factor of the linear rate is independent of problem parameters and only depends on the degree of the link function $p$. Also, for the empirical loss with $n$ samples, we prove that in the low SNR setting of GLMs with a polynomial link function of degree $p$, the iterates of BFGS reach a final statistical radius of $\mathcal{O}((d/n)^{\frac{1}{2p+2}})$ after at most $\log(n/d)$ iterations.
How environment affects active particle swarms: a case study

We investigate the collective motion of self-propelled agents in an environment filled with obstacles that are tethered to fixed positions via springs. The active particles are able to modify the environment by moving the obstacles through repulsion forces. This creates feedback interactions between the particles and the obstacles from which a breadth of patterns emerges (trails, band, clusters, honey-comb structures, etc.). We will focus on a discrete model first introduced in Aceves-Sanchez P et al. (2020, Bull. Math. Biol. 82, 125 (doi:10.1007/s11538-020-00805-z)), and derived into a continuum PDE model. As a first major novelty, we perform an in-depth investigation of pattern formation of the discrete and continuum models in two dimensions: we provide phase-diagrams and determine the key mechanisms for bifurcations to happen using linear stability analysis. As a result, we discover that the agent-agent repulsion, the agent-obstacle repulsion and the obstacle’s spring stiffness are the key forces in the appearance of patterns, while alignment forces between the particles play a secondary role. The second major novelty lies in the development of an innovative methodology to compare discrete and continuum models that we apply here to perform an in-depth analysis of the agreement between the discrete and continuum models.
Multi-colour competition with reinforcement

We study a system of interacting urns where balls of different colour/type compete for their survival, and annihilate upon contact. For competition between two types, the underlying graph (finite and connected), determining the interaction between the urns, is known to be irrelevant for the possibility of coexistence, whereas for K ≥ 3 types the structure of the graph does affect the possibility of coexistence. We show that when the underlying graph is a cycle, competition between K ≥ 3 types almost surely has a single survivor, thus establishing a conjecture of Griffiths, Janson, Morris and the first author. Along the way, we give a detailed description of an auto-annihilative process on the cycle, which can be perceived as an expression of the geometry of a Möbius strip in a discrete setting.
Communication-efficient distributed eigenspace estimation with arbitrary node failures

We develop an eigenspace estimation algorithm for distributed environments with arbitrary node failures, where a subset of computing nodes can return structurally valid but otherwise arbitrarily chosen responses. Notably, this setting encompasses several important scenarios that arise in distributed computing and data-collection environments such as silent/soft errors, outliers or corrupted data at certain nodes, and adversarial responses. Our estimator builds upon and matches the performance of a recently proposed non-robust estimator up to an additive $\tilde{O}(\sigma \sqrt{\alpha})$ error, where $\sigma^2$ is the variance of the existing estimator and $\alpha$ is the fraction of corrupted nodes.
Antigen Receptor Signaling to NF- k B via CARMA1, BCL10, and MALT1

The signaling pathway controlling antigen receptor-induced regulation of the transcription factor NF- k B plays a key role in lymphocyte activation and development and the generation of lymphomas. Work of the past decade has led to dramatic progress in the identiﬁcation and characterization of new players in the pathway. Moreover, novel enzymatic activities relevant for this pathway have been discovered, which represent interesting drug targets for immuno-suppression or lymphoma treatment. Here, we summarize these ﬁndingsandgiveanoutlookoninterestingopenissuesthatneedtobeaddressedinthefuture. L ymphocytes play a major role in the defense against and
Design and Fabrication of Unequal Power Divider using Impedance Limitation Method

Objectives: In this letter, the achievability of an unequal power divider utilizing a microstrip innovation as a part of the P/UHF band is designed. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Unequal power divider with 3-alternatives/approaches is composed in this research work, these are traditional microstrip configuration, power divider with input transformer and discretionary outline impedance (A-arbitary) is acquainted with control high impedance values and Power divider with general outline comparisons (Determination of Z1 or Z2 with required Impedances). Findings: At long last Power divider with general outline comparisons is figured it out. In this case the impedance of any one of the quarter wave impedance transmission line chosen is 30/35Ω which is most appropriate for impedance confinement of 10-60 ohm with a large power partitioning proportion radar applications where the side projection levels are most negative required. The unequal amplitudes of the 8-way power divider is designed utilizing Taylors 1-parameter method to get the side projections levels – 17 dB down from the fundamental beam. Application/Improvements: The 2-way and 8-way power divider was simulated using Method of Moments based Zealand IE3D software (MOM) an aggregate bandwidth of 40MHz was accomplished at an resonant frequency 0.43GHz. The simulated 2-way and 8-way unequal power divider is simulated and results are given. A prototype of 2-way unequal power divider with power levels P1 and P2 are 0.79622 and 0.89352 with power ratio of 1.1222 is fabricated to verify our proposed design. Measured results are given good agreement with simulated results to confirm our proposed design.
in Rats and Dogs

When N-(3•L, 5•L-dichlorophenyl) succinimide (DSI)-carbonyl-14C and -phenyl-3H were each orally administered to rats, regardless of the label site, most of the dose was readily eliminated. There was no difference in the excretion rate between male and female rats. No radioactive residues were detected in tissues and organs 24hr after dosing. Urinary metabolites consisted of N-(3•L, 5•L-dichlorophenyl) succinamic acid (DSA), N-(3•L, 5•L-dichlorophe nyl) malonamic acid (DMA), N-(3•L, 5•L-dichlorophenyl)-2-hydroxysuccinamic acid (2-OH-DSA) and 2-OH-DSA derivatives. In dogs, most of the administered dose was excreted in equal amounts in urine and feces. 2-OH-DSA derivatives were main urinary metabolites and most of fecal radiocarbon was due to intact DSI. The results of this study indicate that DSI is a biodegradable compound which is unlikely to leave any persistent residues in animals. The degradation of DSI to DSA was mediated by an arylamidase-type hydrolase, which was present in the microsomal fraction of rabbit liver. The enzyme activity was found in livers and kidneys of four animal species tested. Depending on the animal species, the enzyme appears to be important for the metabolism of DSI.
UDConcord: A Concordancer for Universal Dependencies Treebanks

This paper presents UDConcord, a concordancer web application. The tool is designed to be visual and easy-to-use, working with treebanks that were annotated using the Universal Dependencies international model. It allows users to upload a treebank in the CoNLL-U format. After the upload, users can search for terms and linguistic categories of interest in the treebank. Because the tool is a concordancer, the search results are composed of sentences with occurrences of the searched elements displayed in a concordance list. That means that each sentence with a matching term will be displayed in a row, with the found term centralized and highlighted, accompanied with other information selected by the user to be visualized. UDConcord also allows users to easily modify sentence annotation. Finally, UDConcord makes it possible for users to download the treebank’s updated version, with every change made up until that point.
How I Teach It: Endoscopic Evaluation of Hiatal Hernia

Hiatal herniation, migration of the gastric cardia from the abdomen cephalad into the chest are commonly present in patients with esophageal symptoms in particular gastroesophageal reflux disease. Three of the four hernia types (sliding type 1 and type 2 or 3 paraesophageal) can be diagnosed by upper endoscopy. Though hernias can also be diagnosed by barium esophagram, computed tomography, and high-resolution manometry, upper endoscopy offers the best opportunity for the foregut physician to carefully assess the patient for hernia size and type, the presence of Cameron lesions in patients with occult anemia and to evaluate the hiatus (flap valve) fully by assessment of the Hill grade in retroflexion. Accurate description of the hiatus in the endoscopy report is invaluable in communication between gastroenterologist and surgeon managing patients with esophageal disease. This “How I teach it” (and video) offers an approach to assessment of the esophageal hiatus during the endoscopic examination.
Triterpene Tetraglycosides From Stichopus Herrmanni Semper, 1868

Using various column chromatographic methods, 5 triterpene tetraglycosides (1−5), including one new compound, namely holothurin A6 (1), were obtained from the water soluble part of the methanol extract of the sea cucumber Stichopus herrmanni. Their structures were confirmed by careful analysis of the 1D and 2D NMR, and HR ESI QTOF mass spectra. Noteworthily, 24-dehydroechinoside A (3) showed potent cytotoxicity to 5 human cancer cell lines {HepG2 (hepatoma cancer), KB (epidermoid carcinoma), LNCaP (prostate cancer), MCF7 (breast cancer), and SK-Mel2 (melanoma)} with IC50 values ranging from 0.19 ± 0.03 to 1.17 ± 0.18 µM.
The Pathogenesis of Hiatal Hernia

Hiatal hernia is a common malady and an important contributor to the pathophysiology of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). Hiatal herniation is thought to result from any of several causes including transdiaphragmatic pressure gradients; congenital or acquired abnormalities in the cellular structure, biochemical composition, or geometry of the hiatus; or esophageal shortening due to fibrosis. Since no single theory explains the development of a hiatal hernia in all cases, or the reasons behind progression of some and not others, the pathogenesis of hiatal herniation likely is multifactorial and varies between individuals. A comprehension of the factors leading to hiatal hernia formation is important to their prevention and correction as well as to an understanding of the pathogenesis of GERD.
An integrated digital PFM DC-DC boost converter for a power management application: a RGB backlight LED system driver

In this paper is presented a system that has been designed in the frame of a co-operation between the ON Semiconductor Microelectronics Company, at its Toulouse (France) Design Centre and the Electronics Department of the University of Barcelona (SIC Group). The system that has been designed is a high efficiency boost converter to supply and drive multicolour LEDs (light emitting diodes). The paper presents the switching power DC/DC boost converter performances, based on a current peak PFM (pulse frequency modulation) system, with the objective to design this system for in low-voltage portable applications. The DC/DC converter is able to source an output current up to 300 mA, and it presents good performances for very low load conditions (100 /spl mu/A), for an input battery of 3.6 V (nominal value). It needs an external inductor of 10 /spl mu/H. From an external micro-controller the output voltage value can be programmed to either two values of 4 V or 5 V. LED's brightness is controlled by a digital pulse width modulation (PWM) procedure.
Visual-Enhanced End-to-End Neural Diarization

Speaker diarization, which targets capturing “who spoke when” labels, has long been treated as the fundamental structure to support audio-related intelligent services. Recently end-to-end neural diarization (EEND) has been proposed and it outperforms the traditional clustering-based approaches in some scenarios. However, EEND treats each block of the recording independently, so it faces the inter-block permutation problem, i.e., an ambiguity of the speaker label assignments between blocks. To deal with the challenge, we propose a novel visual-enhanced end-to-end speaker diarization solution, named AV-EEND. Specifically, as encoders for both audio and visual embedding are integrated, joint speech activity with ambiguous or predetermined speaker orders could be all available. In this way, visual cues will benefit in guiding audio information from the ambiguous speaker order to the predetermined speaker orders, thus solving the inter-block permutation problem. To better accomplish the goal, an audio-visual classifier with visual augmentation, cross-attention, and the self-attention mechanism is employed to further enhance the correlation between vision and audio information. Extensive validations on the public AMI dataset demonstrate that AV-EEND outperforms EEND and the state-of-the-art audio-visual system.