Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Polyethylene Glycol (PEG) Coated Magnetite Nanoparticles Prepared by Sol-Gel Method for Biotechnology Applications

Polyethylene glycol (PEG) coatings are developed for magnetite nanoparticles (NPs). The magnetic properties of superparamagnetic type, magnetite Fe3O4 nanoparticles are suitable for biosensing applications. Magnetic NPs were prepared by Co-precipitation method and oven dried. Using a Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) and X-Ray Diffractometer (XRD), nanoparticles size and composition were found, including the presence of Fe3O4 peak. The magnetic properties are influenced by electron environments of the Fe3+ ions within the iron oxide structure. The magnetic properties were measured by Vibrating Sample Magnetometer (VSM), thus, the results of Fe3O4 NPs exhibited a high magnetic saturation (Ms) of 61.31 emu/g. In the case of PEG coated MNPs, confirmed by Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), a reduced Ms of 40.00 emu/g, which decreased further following surface modification with 3-aminopropyl triethoxysilane (NH2) to 36.77 emu/g. The resulting size range of NPs of pure Fe3O4 NPs was 5-50 nm. In comparison, the PEG coated NPs were larger, 10-100 nm. In the part of protein binding and separation from solutions of bovine serum albumin (BSA) where investigated. This process will be beneficial to developing low cost sensors for biomolecules and biotechnologies in the future.
FREQUENCY-MAGNITUDE RELATIONSHIP MODELS FOR ASSESSMENT OF MAXIMUM MAGNITUDES OF POTENTIAL EARTHQUAKES ON MODERATELY AND WEAKLY ACTIVE FAULTS IN EASTERN CHINA MAINLAND

In this paper,we make an effort to study the feasibility to assess magnitudes of maximum potential earthquakes in sub-areas of moderately and weakly active faults in eastern China mainland by using parameters of frequency-magnitude relationship,and develop the corresponding methodology.Data suggest that frequency-magnitude relationships of fault sub-areas in eastern China mainland accord with the characteristic earthquake model,meaning that for a fault sub-area,the ratio a/b of the constants,which is also called as the maximum intercept magnitude of the exponential portion(i.e.the G-R relationship)of the frequency-magnitude relationship,is obviously less than that of the characteristic magnitudes MC.In order to make the ratio a/b be usable in indirectly assessing the magnitudes of maximum potential earthquakes in fault sub-areas,we develop a method to establish long-duration frequency-magnitude relationships for fault sub-areas by combining data of both historical and modern seismicity.In this method,event's numbers from the two sources of data are all normalized to a duration of t=500years.We then calculate at/b values of the normalized G-R relationships for 130 fault sub-areas.Our analyses reveal that maximum magnitudes,Mmax,of earthquakes occurring and recorded in the studied fault sub-areas are positively correlative with sizes of at/b values,and with the increase of at/b values the upper-limits of the maximum magnitudes,Mmax,show the feature of monotonously rising and relatively smooth variation.Based on such feature we develop three empirical formulae of the relations between the upper-limits Mmu of the maximum magnitudes,and at/b values,for the three regions,i.e.North China,Central and East China,and South China and the southeastern coastal area,respectively,and take them as empirical models to estimate magnitudes of maximum potential earthquakes in fault sub-areas.By using the newly developed method and empirical models we estimate magnitudes of maximum potential earthquakes in several fault sub-areas.Our research also suggests that several types of the abnormal seismicity,such as the swarms of moderate and small size earthquakes,aftershocks and triggered earthquake sequences,and artificially induced seismicity,as well as the determination of minimum complete magnitudes,have influences to the calculation results of at/b values,and that severely influenced at/b values are overestimated and show deflecting to the right on Mmax-at/b diagrams.The empirical models and method developed in this study can be applied to the assessment of magnitudes of maximum potential earthquakes for sub-areas of moderately and weakly active faults in eastern China mainland.
Separate retrieval of microphysical parameters in aerosol fraction from the lidar data

A procedure is proposed for determining the aerosol microphysical characteristics, the complex refractive index m = mreal + i*mimage and the bimodal size distribution function U(r) of spherical particles, based on laser sensing data at the wavelengths within 355-1064 nm. In parallel with this, the possibilities of an additional Raman scattering channel in the IR wavelength range are considered. The main attention is paid to a separate fraction-wise retrieval of m + U(r) for weakly absorbing particles, mimage < 0.015, when mfine ≠ mcoarse holds. The algorithms are tested for a fixed value mfine = 1.50+i*0.01 and varied values of mcoarse = 1.40+i*0.0001 or 1.60+i*0.0001. In order to include the influence of the contribution from the particles of different fractions into the total concentration, 462 empirical models of U(r) are used.
INTERWEAVING GEOCHEMICAL AND GEOSPATIAL DATA TO IDENTIFY HIGH CONCENTRATIONS OF METAL CONTAMINATION FROM COPPER, LEAD, AND ZINC WITHIN UTOY CREEK, ATLANTA GA

Utilizing geochemical and geospatial data to explore the spatial variability of metals within streambed sediment of a local waterway may help to identify anthropogenic input of copper, lead, and zinc in urbanized streams. Utoy Creek is an urbanized stream located just southwest of downtown Atlanta. Baseline trace metal values and a reference site were used to determine if copper, lead, and zinc concentrations were higher or lower than baseline or reference site values. The Atlanta Metro Region had over 2,100 miles of impaired streams listed on the 2008 303(d) list. This type of study can be used as a proxy to help determine how “impaired” local urbanized streams really are and identify areas of interest for future studies. For this study, 42 sites were selected for streambed sediment collection, chemical analysis was preformed, and GIS and statistical analysis were performed. This study shows that several areas in Utoy Creek show elevated metal concentrations of copper, lead, and zinc. INDEX WORDS: Utoy Creek, Copper, Lead, Zinc, Stream Network, Atlanta INTERWEAVING GEOCHEMICAL AND GEOSPATIAL DATA TO IDENTIFY HIGH CONCENTRATIONS OF METAL CONTAMINATION FROM COPPER, LEAD, AND ZINC WITHIN UTOY CREEK, ATLANTA GA
Arctic polar vortex dynamics according to the vortex delineation method

The dynamic barrier of the polar vortex prevents the penetration of air masses into the vortex and contributes to the preservation of extremely low temperatures inside the vortex. The melting of polar stratospheric clouds in winter occurs as a result of the dynamic barrier weakening in the lower stratosphere. The dynamic barrier exists when the wind speed over the entire edge of the polar vortex is more than 20, 26 and 30 m/s respectively at the 50, 20 and 10 hPa levels. We studied the dynamics of the Arctic polar vortex in the winter-spring of 2017/2018 before and after its splitting on 10 February at the 50, 20 and 10 hPa levels by the vortex delineation method using geopotential. In the middle stratosphere, since 15 February, an irreversible breakdown of the polar vortex was observed (the dynamic barrier weakening and the vortex area decrease below 10 million km2 ), and in the lower stratosphere at the 50 hPa level, a short-term recovery of the dynamic characteristics of the polar vortex was observed from 9 to 17 March. The case of 2017/2018 is one of the exceptions, when the collapsing cyclone experienced a short-term recovery of the polar vortex characteristics in the lower stratosphere in spring after the vortex area decreased below 10 million km2 and the dynamic barrier weakened.
Uplift and the environmental disastrous effects in Qinling mountains

The Qinling mountains streches from east to west in the central part of China,and separates it into two parts:the North and the South,in geograph,geology and biology.Its large amplitude uplift has been one of the most striking geological events in eastern China since the Late Mesozoic. The uplifting problem of Qinling range has made progress,however, several aspects of the problem such as the uplifting time,the uplifting speed and the uplifting amplitude had differences of opinion among the researchers.The previous studies demostrated that the main large amplitude uplift has taken place in the Qinling mountains since the Cenozoic Era.This paper has stated several aspects of the research results about the uplift's amplitude and speed of Qinling range.According to the sedimentary response about the Cenozoic of the Weihe River basin, the author puts forward some results about the uplift of Qinling mountains.Based on the previous studies,this paper states the climatic and disatrous effects of the uplift in Qinling,the climatic effects reflect the fluctuations of air temperature and the variations of rainfall,the disatrous effects include soil erosion and water loss, earthquake and ground fissures in studied areas, also considered that the basic reason was the uplifting Qinling led to the climatic and disatrous effects.Through summing up the climatic and disatrous effects, it can provide scientific basis for the disaster control in the future.
Propagation of partially coherent vortex Bessel-Gaussian beams in a turbulent atmosphere

This paper presents the results of theoretical studies of the coherent properties of partially coherent vortex Bessel-Gaussian optical beams propagating in a turbulent atmosphere. The coherence degree of these optical beams depending on the length of the propagation path, propagation conditions and optical beam parameters: the radius of the Gaussian optical beam cofactor, the topological charge of a vortex optical beam and the transverse coherence length of the optical source field, is particularly studied. It is shown that when a partially coherent vortex Bessel-Gaussian optical beam propagates in a turbulent atmosphere, not two (one due to the influence of turbulence, and the second due to the influence of partial coherence of the optical source), but one ring dislocation of the coherence degree is formed. Moreover, the ring dislocation of coherence degree is formed only for partially coherent vortex Bessel-Gaussian beams whose the transverse coherence length of the optical source field is greater than the radius of the first Fresnel zone.
Scene-based Fourier pattern-sorting approach for compressive sensing

In defense and security applications cost-intensive high-performance imaging sensors are common assets. Modern approaches in the field of Computational Imaging promise the cost-efficient construction of high-performance imaging sensors with additional features, like multitask or hyperspectral imaging capabilities. For example, the compressive single pixel imaging method we studied benefits from a low-cost architecture and multimodal sensor capabilities. The compressive single pixel imaging approach enables the adaption of resolution and compression at the cost of operational speed. The measurement process of an imaging system based on this approach involves a spatial modulation of the scene with a spatial light modulator utilizing different modulation patterns as well as a subsequent reconstruction step to obtain an image of the scene. The computational speed of the image reconstruction is still a problem, especially for the class of iterative optimization algorithms. For real-time applications like threat detection a fast image data acquisition and reconstruction are fundamental though. The fast reconstruction of the images via a fast and efficient transformation, e.g. the fast Fourier Transformation, is advantageous when using binary transformation-based modulation patterns. Therefore, we studied binary Fourier patterns and compared scene-based evolutionary and other sorting methods for transformation based single pixel imaging in order to maximize the compression while controlling the image degradation regarding relevant features to enable real-time applicability.
Effect of diffraction on mirror reflection by crystalline particles

The report presents the results of observations of horizontally oriented crystalline particles in the clouds of the upper levels using a scanning polarization lidar. The measured dependence of the lidar signal on the lidar inclination angle is described by an exponential distribution and corresponds to the distribution of particle inclinations relative to the horizontal plane (flutter). Diffraction on the contour of the particles appears as a smoothing of the top of the measured distribution and depends on the size of the crystals. The effect of diffraction is significant for narrow distributions over tilt angles.
C2TACO: Lifting Tensor Code to TACO

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) promise a significant performance and portability advantage over traditional languages. DSLs are designed to be high-level and platform-independent, allowing an optimizing compiler significant leeway when targeting a particular device. Such languages are particularly popular with emerging tensor algebra workloads. However, DSLs present their own challenge: they require programmers to learn new programming languages and put in significant effort to migrate legacy code. We present C2TACO, a synthesis tool for synthesizing TACO, a well-known tensor DSL, from C code. We develop a smart, enumerative synthesizer that uses automatically generated IO examples and source-code analysis to efficiently generate code. C2TACO is able to synthesize 95% bench marks from a tensor benchmark suite, out-performing an alternative neural machine translation technique, and demonstrates substantially higher levels of accuracy when evaluated against two state-of-the-art existing schemes, TF-Coder and ChatGPT. Our synthesized TACO programs are, by design, portable achieving significant performance improvement when evaluated on a multi-core and GPU platform.
3D quantum ghost imaging

Quantum Ghost Imaging (QGI) is a scheme which uses the temporal correlation of entangled photon pairs (signal and idler) to identify detections belonging to actual entangled pairs and separate them from uncorrelated detections. By also exploiting the spatial correlation of the photon pair, this identification allows to extract image information of the idler photons by imaging the signal photons. This can even be done for non-degenerate photon pairs, allowing imaging at wavelengths without sophisticated cameras in this regime. Recent advances in detector technology, especially single photon avalanche diodes (SPADs), allow the design for new cameras capable of single photon detection with both high spatial and temporal resolution. These new detectors are especially useful for application in QGI, allowing to detect each photon individually and identify the correlated pairs after the measurement. It further allows to analyse the time-of-flight of photons and thus enables 3D imaging, the first realization of which will be presented here.
A11yFutures: Envisioning the Future of Accessibility Research

The future of accessibility research is a topic we take up every day as researchers; yet it is important also to step back and ask ourselves about the most important, and overlooked, areas for inquiry in our field. With the rapid pace of change in both computational capabilities and the environmental, social, and political context in which disability plays out, we believe this is a critical time for such inquiry. This is even more important given the relatively narrow set of topics that accessibility research has focused on for most of our field’s history. We invite our community to come together to define what the next generation of accessibility research should engage with.
Virtual Domain Specific Languages via Embedded Projectional Editing

Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) can be implemented as either internal DSL, i.e. essentially a library in a host general-purpose programming language (GPL), or as external DSL which is a stand-alone language unconstrained in its syntax. This choice implies an inherent trade-off between a limited syntactic and representational flexibility (internal DSLs), or an involved integration with GPLs and the need for a full stack of tools from a parser to a code generator (external DSLs). We propose a solution which addresses this problem by representing a subset of a GPL - from simple code patterns to complex API calls - as GUI widgets in a hybrid editor. Our approach relies on matching parametrized patterns against the GPL program, and displaying the matched parts as dynamically rendered widgets. Such widgets can be interpreted as components of an external DSL. Since the source code is serialized as GPL text without annotations, there is no DSL outside the editor - hence the term ‘virtual’ DSL. This solution has several advantages. The underlying GPL and the virtual DSL can be mixed in a compositional way, with zero cost of their integration. The project infrastructure does not need to be adapted. Furthermore, our approach works with mainstream GPLs like Python or JavaScript. To lower the development effort of such virtual DSLs, we also propose an approach to generate patterns and the corresponding text-only GUI widgets from pairs of examples. We evaluate our approach and its implementation on use cases from several domains. A live demo of the system can be accessed at https://puredit.korz. dev/ and the source code with examples at https://github.com/niklaskorz/puredit/.
Generating Constraint Programs for Variability Model Reasoning: A DSL and Solver-Agnostic Approach

Verifying and configuring large Software Product Lines (SPL) requires automation tools. Current state-of-the-art approaches involve translating variability models into a formalism accepted as input by a constraint solver. There are currently no standards for variability modeling languages (VML). There is also a variety of constraint solver input languages. This has resulted in a multiplication of ad-hoc architectures and tools specialized for a single pair of VML and solver, fragmenting the SPL community. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel architecture based on model-driven code generation, where the syntax and semantics of VMLs can be declaratively specified as data, and a standard, human-readable, formal pivot language is used between the VML and the solver input language. This architecture is the first to be fully generic by being agnostic to both VML and the solver paradigm. To validate the genericity of the approach, we have implemented a prototype tool together with declarative specifications for the syntax and semantics of two different VMLs and two different solver families. One VML is for classic, static SPL, and the other for run-time reconfigurable dynamic SPL with soft constraints to be optimized during configuration. The two solver families are Constraint Satisfaction Programs (CSP) and Constraint Logic Programs (CLP).
Diagnosing Compiler Performance by Comparing Optimization Decisions

Modern compilers apply a set of optimization passes aiming to speed up the generated code. The combined effect of individual optimizations is difficult to predict. Thus, changes to a compiler's code may hinder the performance of generated code as an unintended consequence. Performance regressions in compiled code are often related to misapplied optimizations. The regressions are hard to investigate, considering the vast number of compilation units and applied optimizations. A compilation unit consists of a root method and inlined methods. Thus, a method may be part of several compilation units and may be optimized differently in each. Moreover, inlining decisions are not invariant across runs of the virtual machine (VM). We propose to solve the problem of diagnosing performance regressions by capturing the compiler's optimization decisions. We do so by representing the applied optimization phases, optimization decisions, and inlining decisions in the form of trees. This paper introduces an approach utilizing tree edit distance (TED) to detect optimization differences in a semi-automated way. We present an approach to compare optimization decisions in differently inlined methods. We employ these techniques to pinpoint the causes of performance problems in various benchmarks of the Graal compiler.
Coding Non-Visually in Visual Studio Code: Collaboration Towards Accessible Development Environment for Blind Programmers

This paper delineates a fruitful collaboration between blind and sighted developers, aiming to augment the accessibility of Visual Studio Code (VSCode). Our shared journey is portrayed through examples drawn from our interaction with GitHub issues, pull requests, review processes, and insider’s releases, each contributing to an improved VSCode experience for blind developers. One key milestone of our co-design process is the establishment of an accessible terminal buffer, a significant enhancement for blind developers using VSCode. Other innovative outcomes include Git Diff audio cues, adaptable verbosity settings, intuitive help menus, and a targeted accessibility testing initiative. These tailored improvements not only uplift the accessibility standards of VSCode but also provide a valuable blueprint for open-source developers at large. Through our shared dedication to promoting inclusivity in software development, we aim for the strategies and successes shared in this paper to inspire and guide the open-source community towards crafting more accessible software environments.
Don’t Trust Your Profiler: An Empirical Study on the Precision and Accuracy of Java Profilers

To identify optimisation opportunities, Java developers often use sampling profilers that attribute a percentage of run time to the methods of a program. Even so these profilers use sampling, are probabilistic in nature, and may suffer for instance from safepoint bias, they are normally considered to be relatively reliable. However, unreliable or inaccurate profiles may misdirect developers in their quest to resolve performance issues by not correctly identifying the program parts that would benefit most from optimisations. With the wider adoption of profilers such as async-profiler and Honest Profiler, which are designed to avoid the safepoint bias, we wanted to investigate how precise and accurate Java sampling profilers are today. We investigate the precision, reliability, accuracy, and overhead of async-profiler, Honest Profiler, Java Flight Recorder, JProfiler, perf, and YourKit, which are all actively maintained. We assess them on the fully deterministic Are We Fast Yet benchmarks to have a stable foundation for the probabilistic profilers. We find that profilers are relatively reliable over 30 runs and normally report the same hottest method. Unfortunately, this is not true for all benchmarks, which suggests their reliability may be application-specific. Different profilers also report different methods as hottest and cannot reliably agree on the set of top 5 hottest methods. On the positive side, the average run time overhead is in the range of 1% to 5.4% for the different profilers. Future work should investigate how results can become more reliable, perhaps by reducing the observer effect of profilers by using optimisation decisions of unprofiled runs or by developing a principled approach of combining multiple profiles that explore different dynamic optimisations.