Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
On an iteratively reweighted linesearch based algorithm for nonconvex composite optimization

In this paper we propose a new algorithm for solving a class of nonsmooth nonconvex problems, which is obtained by combining the iteratively reweighted scheme with a finite number of forward–backward iterations based on a linesearch procedure. The new method overcomes some limitations of linesearch forward–backward methods, since it can be applied also to minimize functions containing terms that are both nonsmooth and nonconvex. Moreover, the combined scheme can take advantage of acceleration techniques consisting in suitable selection rules for the algorithm parameters. We develop the convergence analysis of the new method within the framework of the Kurdyka–Łojasiewicz property. Finally, we present the results of a numerical experience on microscopy image super resolution, showing that the performances of our method are comparable or superior to those of other algorithms designed for this specific application.
PAVE the way towards a Circular Economy in the public space: Maintenance plan analysis tool to value the enhancement towards a Circular Economy

In 2017, the Dutch government has set the goal to achieve a 100% circular economy by 2050. A transition from the current linear economy towards a circular economy is necessary to reach this goal. In the circular economy, products at end-of-life are no longer seen as waste but will be reused as a secondary product or resource. The general aim of this research is to investigate the implementation of the circular economy concept in the public space. From this study, it became clear that Dutch municipalities are willing to implement circularity for assets released from the public space. However, the municipalities are not aware of the actions which are required to increase the circularity within its maintenance activities. A method is proposed which gives decision makers of a municipality guidelines to justify their decision for a maintenance plan of an urban area. This method includes PAVE (maintenance plan analysis tool to value enhancement of circularity in the public space): a tool which quantifies the environmental and economic impact of maintenance plans. To express the impacts four criteria were selected: the carbon footprint, financial footprint, material loss and monetary value loss. The tool follows a life cycle assessment (LCA) framework. In this research, the use of PAVE was investigated during the maintenance of a neighbourhood in Almere. It was concluded that to be able to implement PAVE in an effective manner, the asset database of the municipality needs to be updated to fill in the information gap. Part of the case area database was renewed to conduct an inventory of the assets in the selected urban area for this research. In PAVE, the impacts of the selected assets were calculated for both the circular project plan of the contractor and the traditional linear plan. PAVE indicated that using the new project plan for the case area results in approximately 1455 ton less CO2 emissions and is €4304000 cheaper compared to the traditional linear maintenance plan. Furthermore, PAVE demonstrated that the use of the new plan leads to 238 m3 and €424.000 less material and monetary value loss, respectively. In this research, it was evident that to select a maintenance plan among others, the tool should be included in the decision-making scheme of municipalities. By implementing PAVE, decision makers will be able to compare the impacts of different maintenance plans and select the most suitable plan based on environmental and economic considerations. The implementation of the tool can be ensured by making the provided budget dependent on implementation. Finally, the proposed plans of contractors should be evaluated on their circularity. Guidelines have been formulated to support the selection of the maintenance plan for urban areas in the public space.
An Integrated Dual-Band Dual-Circularly Polarized Shared-Aperture Transmit-Array Antenna for K-/Ka-Band Applications Enabled by Polarization Twisting Elements

An integrated dual-band dual-circularly polarized (dual-CP) transmit-array (TA) antenna operating at K- and Ka-bands is proposed. Antenna-filter-antenna (AFA) based polarization twisting TA cells possessing high cross-polarized and low copolarized linearly-polarized (LP) transmission characteristics are designed. These TA cells possess highly efficient circular-polarization transmission with flipped handedness without using any 180° phase shifting lines, thus bringing about benefits such as symmetrical structures, design simplification, and more consistent circularly polarized (CP) transmission magnitudes. In addition, the dual-band dual-CP transmissive beamforming characteristics are realized by arranging K- and Ka-band cells in the same aperture and employing a hybrid phase compensation strategy. For reducing the overall device profile, right-handed CP (RHCP) and left-handed CP (LHCP) planar arrays operating at K- and Ka-bands are fabricated as feeds for the TA. A dual-band dual-CP TA antenna with independently controllable beam directions is synthesized and experimentally demonstrated. The measured 2-dB gain and axial ratio (AR) bandwidths are 11.7% and 10.2% for K-band RHCP and LHCP beams, and the two CP beams own bandwidths of about 7.5% at Ka-band. The proposed dual-band dual-CP TA antenna can be a promising candidate for satellite communications and so on.
Effects of Dietary Fat and Eggshell Cuticle Removal on Egg Water Loss and Embryo Growth in Broiler Hatching Eggs 1,2

The effects of dietary fat and eggshell cuticle removal on egg water loss, embryo growth, and hatchability were determined in eggs from broiler breeder hens at different ages. Hens were fed isocaloric diets containing one of three different types and levels of added fat. In addition, eggs were either left intact or washed to remove the eggshell cuticle prior to set. Cuticle removal increased egg water loss between 43 and 62 wk. Cuticle removal increased relative wet embryo weight at Week 52 and relative dry embryo weight at 52 and 62 wk. Furthermore, at 62 wk, diet and day of incubation interacted to affect wet embryo weight, and diet variably affected dry embryo weight. No treatment differences were observed for cumulative hatchability, rate of hatch, and relative yolk sac weight at Day 19 of incubation. It was concluded that cuticle removal and the addition of fat to breeder diets may influence embryonic growth without having any subsequent effects on hatchability.
Educational tracking and the polygenic prediction of education

Although it is well known that individuals’ genetics relate to their educational attainment, our understanding of how this may vary across differing educational institutional contexts is limited. In an educational system that does not separate students into different tracks early on, individuals’ unique skills and interests may have more time to manifest, which could potentially strengthen the genetic prediction of education. We test such a hypothesis exploiting the natural experiment of the Finnish comprehensive school reform employed gradually and regionally across the country between 1972 and 1977, using genetically informed population-representative surveys linked to data from administrative registers. We observed that the genetic prediction of education was stronger after the reform by one-third among men and those coming from low-educated families. We observed no evidence for reform effects among women or those from high-educated families. The increase in genetic prediction was particularly pronounced among the first cohort experiencing the new system. From the perspective of genetic prediction, the reform to a more universalist curriculum was successful in promoting equality of opportunity. The results also highlight the potential of various turbulent circumstances – such as puberty or ongoing restructuring of institutional practices – in magnifying genetic effects.
Citizens’ Satisfaction with Air Quality and Key Factors in China—Using the Anchoring Vignettes Method

This study uses the anchoring vignettes method to accurately measure citizens’ perceptions of air quality by correcting for the measurement errors which often exist in subjective satisfaction indexes. Our study shows that there is significant variation in satisfaction with air quality before and after using the anchoring vignettes method, especially when calculating and comparing satisfaction levels with the city-level air quality index. In addition, we found that the actual air pollution does indeed decrease citizens’ satisfaction with it, but that the relationship between the two is non-linear. However, among the relevant pollution indicators, citizens are more easily influenced by PM2.5 rather than by SO2 and dust emission concentrations. Finally, our research also found evidence to support the idea that public expectations of air quality in China affect satisfaction levels. Our findings therefore challenge the idea that the relationship between actual and perceived air quality is straightforward, and also confirm that expectation theory holds true for levels of satisfaction with air quality.
Optical gain and photo-bleaching of organic dyes, quantum dots, perovskite nanoplatelets and nanodiamonds

ABSTRACT Optical gain and resistance against photo-bleaching are key material parameters for practical applications in microlasers and microphotonics. Here, we present studies of optical amplification and photo-bleaching in a wide range of optical gain materials, including fluorescent dyes, quantum dots and rods, organic and inorganic room temperature polaritons, and nanodiamonds with emission range from 430 to 680 nm. We used amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) for each material to measure the optical gain. Robustness against photo-bleaching was determined by measuring the intensity of spontaneous emission of the material as a function of the number of excitation femtosecond pulses (106–1010) at various excitation energy densities. We show that pyrromethene laser dyes are the best organic emitters in terms of low excitation energy and good optical gain, whereas solid-state polariton materials are better in terms of high optical gain and stability. We found that all organic and inorganic optical gain materials bleach completely after 106–109 illumination pulses with typical 0.1–0.6 GW/cm2 peak power density, with an exception of nanodiamonds. We show that nanodiamonds are the only optical gain material that shows no photo-bleaching beyond the 1010 excitation pulses of 300 fs pulse duration and with 0.16 GW/cm2 peak power density. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT
Chaos in solitary VCSELs: asymmetry and noise

We discuss the impact of asymmetries and noise on the nonlinear dynamics of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL). We focus in particular on the effects of these features on the chaotic dynamics that can be generated by a free-running VCSEL due to the intrinsic competition between polarization modes taking place in these devices. Experimentally, we observe significant asymmetries especially in the statistics of the chaotic dynamics. We show that these behaviour can be explained theoretically by a combined effect of the system asymmetries and the noise. This work therefore brings new light on the interplay between deterministic and stochastic processes taking place in VCSELs.
A discriminative parser of the LR family for phrase structure parsing (Un analyseur discriminant de la famille LR pour l’analyse en constituants) [in French]

We provide a new weighted parsing algorithm for deterministic context free grammar parsing inspired by LR (Knuth, 1965). The parser is weighted by a discriminative model that allows determinism (Collins, 2002). We show that the discriminative model allows to take advantage of morphological information available in the data, hence allowing to achieve state of the art results both in time and in accurracy for parsing French.
Wages and Income in the United Kingdom Since 1860.

Originally published in 1937, this book was written by the pioneering British statistician and economist Arthur Lyon Bowley (1869â€“1957). The text provides a statistical analysis of wages and income in the United Kingdom from 1860 onwards, attempting 'to bring into a coherent whole' the work carried out in this area by Bowley during the preceding 40 years. A bibliography is included and notes are incorporated throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in wages, statistics and British economic history.
Phenotypic Traits and Probiotic Functions of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum Y42 in Planktonic and Biofilm Forms

Bacteria in planktonic and biofilm forms exhibit different phenotypic properties. In this study, the phenotypic traits and probiotic functions of Lactiplantibacillus plantarum Y42 in planktonic and biofilm forms were assessed. After 36 h of static culture, scanning electron microscopy and confocal laser scanning microscopy showed that the L. plantarum Y42 bacterial cells contained interconnected adhesive matter on the surface, forming a ~18 μm layer of dense biofilms. The surface properties of L. plantarum Y42 in biofilm form, including autoaggregation ability, hydrophobicity, acid-base charge, and adhesiveness, were all higher than those in the planktonic form. Biofilm L. plantarum Y42 showed a higher tolerance to adverse environmental conditions and a higher survival rate, enzymatic activity, and integrity after vacuum lyophilization. And biofilm L. plantarum Y42 had higher adhesion to human enterocyte HT-29 cell monolayers, inhibited the expressions of proinflammatory factors IL-6 and TNF-α, and promoted the expressions of the anti-inflammatory factor IL-10 and barrier proteins Claudin-1 and Occludin. In addition, L. plantarum Y42 in biofilm form can inhibit the adhesion and invasion of Listeria monocytogenes ATCC 19115 to HT-29 cell monolayers and is more effective in relieving the inflammatory reactions and injuries of HT-29 cells caused by L. monocytogenes ATCC 19115. In conclusion, L. plantarum Y42 in biofilm form exhibited better probiotic functions compared to that in planktonic form. This indicated that L. plantarum Y42 can form biofilms to enhance its probiotic functions, which provided a theoretical basis for better development and utilization of L. plantarum Y42.
Thermoelectric and Structural Properties of Transparent Sb-Doped ZnO Thin Films Sputtered in a Confocal Geometry

This study focuses on understanding the influence of low Sb doping on ZnO’s electrical, optical, and thermoelectrical properties, while also studying its structural and morphological parameters. For this, several ZnO films with varying Sb target current densities, in the range of 0–0.27 mA/cm2, were produced by DC magnetron sputtering in a confocal geometry. As a result, thin ZnO:Sb films with an average transparency in the visible region greater than 80% are obtained, revealing for optimized conditions an absolute Seebeck coefficient of 100 μV/K and a respective power factor of 1.1 mW∙m−1∙K−2 at 300 K, effectively modifying the electrical, optical, and thermoelectrical properties of the material and ensuring its suitability for heat harvesting applications. From atom probe tomography experiments, a larger Zn content is registered at triple junctions of the grain boundary, which matches the approximately 25 nm crystallite grain size derived from the X-ray diffraction analysis.
Disease Identification in Crop Plants based on Convolutional Neural Networks

—The identification, classification and treatment of crop plant diseases are essential for agricultural production. Some of the most common diseases include root rot, powdery mildew, mosaic, leaf spot and fruit rot. Machine learning (ML) technology and convolutional neural networks (CNN) have proven to be very useful in this field. This work aims to identify and classify diseases in crop plants, from the data set obtained from Plant Village, with images of diseased plant leaves and their corresponding Tags, using CNN with transfer learning. For processing, the dataset composing of more than 87 thousand images, divided into 38 classes and 26 disease types, was used. Three CNN models (DenseNet-201, ResNet-50 and Inception-v3) were used to identify and classify the images. The results showed that the DenseNet-201 and Inception-v3 models achieved an accuracy of 98% in plant disease identification and classification, slightly higher than the ResNet-50 model, which achieved an accuracy of 97%, thus demonstrating an effective and promising approach, being able to learn relevant features from the images and classify them accurately. Overall, ML in conjunction with CNNs proved to be an effective tool for identifying and classifying diseases in crop plants. The CNN models used in this work are a very good choice for this type of tasks, since they proved to have a very high performance in classification tasks. In terms of accuracy, all three models are very accurate in image classification, with an accuracy of over 96% with large data sets.
A topological-based spatial data clustering

An approach is presented that automatically discovers different cluster shapes that are hard to discover by traditional clustering methods (e.g., non-spherical shapes). This allows discover useful knowledge by dividing the datasets into sub clusters; in which each one have similar objects. The approach does not compute the distance between objects but instead the similarity information between objects is computed as needed while using the topological relations as a new similarity measure. An efficient tool was developed to support the approach and is applied to a multiple synthetic and real datasets. The results are evaluated and compared against different clustering methods using different comparison measures such as accuracy, number of parameters, and time complexity. The tool performs better than error-prone distance clustering methods in both the time complexity and the accuracy of the results.
Clinical Evaluation of Sleep Disorders in Parkinson’s Disease

The paradigm of the framing of Parkinson’s disease (PD) has undergone significant revision in recent years, making this neurodegenerative disease a multi-behavioral disorder rather than a purely motor disease. PD affects not only the “classic” substantia nigra at the subthalamic nuclei level but also the nerve nuclei, which are responsible for sleep regulation. Sleep disturbances are the clinical manifestations of Parkinson’s disease that most negatively affect the quality of life of patients and their caregivers. First-choice treatments for Parkinson’s disease determine amazing effects on improving motor functions. However, it is still little known whether they can affect the quantity and quality of sleep in these patients. In this perspective article, we will analyze the treatments available for this specific clinical setting, hypothesizing a therapeutic approach in relation to neurodegenerative disease state.
Tendon-Driven Gripper with Variable Stiffness Joint and Water-Cooled SMA Springs

In recent years, there has been an increase in the development of medical robots to enhance interventional MRI-guided therapies and operations. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) surgical robots are particularly attractive due to their ability to provide excellent soft-tissue contrast during these procedures. This paper describes a novel design for a tendon-driven gripper that utilizes four shape memory alloy (SMA) spring actuators and variable stiffness joints controlled by SMA coils for use in MRI surgical robot applications. The contact force of the gripper link is determined by the mechanical properties of the SMA spring actuators (SSA) and the angle of each linkage, and the joint stiffness can be adjusted by varying the electrical current applied to the SMA coil. To enhance the efficiency of the SSAs, a new cooling system using water has been proposed and implemented. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed gripper, we conducted three types of experiments, namely, a single SSA experiment, a single SMA coil experiment, and a whole gripper experiment. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed water-cooling system can effectively solve temperature issues of SMA, and the joint stiffness in the austenite state is higher than that in the martensite state. Moreover, our experiments show that the presented gripper is capable of grasping and holding objects of various shapes and weights.
Shrinkage Variable Regularization Matrix NSAF

The normalized subband adaptive filter (NSAF) has a faster convergence rate than the normalized least mean square (NLMS) algorithm for correlated inputs, and its computational complexity is close to that of the NLMS. However, the NSAF suffers from a tradeoff between fast convergence rate and low steady-state misalignment. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a shrinkage variable regularization matrix NSAF (SVRM-NSAF). Its computational complexity almost does not increase compared to the NSAF. The proposed algorithm is derived by minimizing the powers of the noise-free a posterior subband errors. In order to estimate the required noise-free a posterior subband errors, an l1-l2 minimization method is used. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain both fast convergence rate and low steady-state misalignment.
CMOS-compatible polarization rotator design based on asymmetrical periodic loaded waveguide structure

Silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology has been a promising platform for photonic applications. However, the high index-contrast between silicon and the top cladding (SiO2 or air) of the SOI waveguides makes the modal birefringence hard to control. Consequently, SOI based photonics integrated circuits (PICs) are in general highly polarization-sensitive, making polarization management important. In this paper, a polarization rotator (PR) design on the 220 nm SOI platform is demonstrated through numerical simulations and experiments. The demonstrated PR design is based on asymmetrical periodic loaded waveguide structures. The demonstrated design features compact device footprint and can be fabricated by CMOS compatible process. In addition, no special cladding is required to break the vertical symmetry of the waveguide. The design has shown promising performance over the C-band wavelengths (1530 nm-1565 nm) by simulations. However, the fabrication requirements are stringent for the design, thus the performance of the fabricated devices are limited by the current fabrication technology.