Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Analysis of goal-directed human actions using optimal control models

In this thesis, we address the problem of analyzing goal-directed human actions using the optimal control framework to model these actions. In an optimal control framework, the goals of the action are specified as a cost function whose terms represent the different, often competing, objectives that need to be realized in the course of the action. The relative weight given to the different terms will determine how these objectives are traded off when the human sensorimotor system minimizes the cost function. The cost functions corresponding to different actions are the basic building blocks in our representation. We view the human motor system as a hybrid nonlinear system that switches between different cost functions in response to changing goals and preferences. In the context of this model, we address two problems. The first problem is the estimation of the unknown weighting parameters of a cost function from a segmented and labeled data set for an action. We show that the estimation of these parameters can be cast as a least squares optimization problem and present results for arm motions such as reaching and punching using motion capture data collected from different subjects. The second problem is that of action recognition in which a stream of data is segmented into different actions, where the set of actions to be identified is pre-determined. We show that the problem of action recognition is similar to that of mode estimation in a hybrid system and can be solved using a particle filter if a receding horizon formulation of the optimal controller is adopted. We use the proposed approach to recognize different reaching actions from the 3D hand trajectory of subjects.
A Review of Laminar Single-Phase Flow in Microchannels

Microfluidics plays a major role in the development of many innovative research activities aimed at the development of miniaturized devices and systems, and new applications related to microscale handling of fluids. As the field of microfluidics continues to grow, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the mechanisms and fundamental differences involved in microscale fluid flow. This paper presents a summary of the experimental research efforts in the area of microscale single-phase internal fluid flow and discusses issues associated with investigating microscale flows. While the currently available experimental data indicate the presence of microscale phenomena, they do not unequivocally identify the effects. There is a clear need for additional experimental investigations.
Aspects of Nonlinearity in Conceptual Design

Systematic Design methods present a sequential model of conceptual design, whereby function structures are established, solution principles sought, and then combined to form the product concept. We argue that in reality, design is seldom such a linear process, and that linear design process models may hinder creativity and innovation. Two main aspects of conceptual design are used to support this argument: high-level functional reasoning and emergence of new concepts during - not just at the outset - of the conceptual design stage. A simple model that captures the nonlinearity and is therefore more suitable for describing the thought process of conceptual design is the Parameter Analysis methodology. We review it briefly and apply it to a case study of designing small aerodynamic decelerators. Several innovative concepts generated by Parameter Analysis are shown to be an unlikely result of a Systematic Design process.
Effect of Deliberate Strategy in Organizational Entrepreneurship: An Exploratory Study in Iraqi Medium Business Companies (Solidarity)

This scientific effort aims to determine the statistical significant effect of the deliberate strategy in entrepreneurship of business organizations after sufficient studying the research variables and their goals in the strategic behavior, and it's responsible for achieving organizational entrepreneurship by adding a new competitive advantage. The study population identified from solidarity private sector companies with limited liability, (60) managers at (20) of these companies were selected as a sample distributed over the business sectors (tourism and travel, legal and financial, spear part trading, and foodstuffs trading) which operating in the governorate of Baghdad. Data questionnaire and appropriate statistical tools were used within (Statistical Program for Social Studies - SPSS), the result of statistical analysis showed a good level of awareness for study variables and confirmation with scientific hypotheses that assumed a significant statistical relationship and effect of deliberate strategy to achieving entrepreneurship in varying degrees according to the nature of the companies' work and their practical competencies, finally, this study provided recommendations to confirm with needs to more and new entrepreneurship by stable and maintain the competitive advantage within the market and the specialization of the organization with suitable strategic behavior.
Multiple Benefits Derived from the Installation of Permeable Pavement System

The pervious pavement system (PPS) has the potential to offer additional benefit in the areas of rainwater harvesting and storage. Recycling rainwater using the PPS would reduce over dependence on high quality mains water for low grade uses such as flushing of toilet, car washing, irrigation, etc. This paper focused on diverse but complimentary UK research projects that have brought together water quantity, quality and resource use considerations to provide a solution within a single permeable pavement system. A selection of case studies was used in this study to demonstrate how these projects have run alongside the installation of schemes that have put the theories outlined above into practice and how these schemes fulfill UK legislative targets on Environmental Impact.
Multiband planar antenna for LTE/GSM/UMTS and WLAN/WiMAX handsets

A multiband planar antenna is proposed for mobile handsets. The multiband antenna covers four frequency bands: 696-970 MHz for Long Term Evolution (LTE) 700, Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) 850/900; 1683-2700 MHz for GSM 1800/1900, Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) 2100, LTE 2300/2600, WLAN 2.4 GHz, WiMAX 2.5 GHz; 3070-3755 MHz for WiMAX 3.5 GHz; and 4590-7604 MHz for WLAN/WiMAX 5.2/5.8 GHz and WiMAX 5.5 GHz. The planar antenna consists of a U-shaped monopole coupling with an S-shaped strip, a clip-shaped monopole with a meander line coupling with an inverted-C strip, an X-shaped monopole, and an F-shaped monopole. The multiband antenna has a low profile and is printed on a thin substrate, suitable for ultra-slim smartphone applications.
Framing sustainable development challenges: accounting for SDG-15 in the UK

© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969160X.2022. 2028738
RedPacketBike: A Graph-Based Demand Modeling and Crowd-Driven Station Rebalancing Framework for Bike Sharing Systems

Bike-sharing systems have been deployed globally. One of the key issues for high-quality bike-sharing systems is to rebalance city-wide stations to maintain bike availability. Traditional strategies, such as repositioning bikes by trucks and volunteers based on historical riding records, usually operate in fixed paths and limited capacities, lacking the flexibility to cope with the highly dynamic and context dependent riding demands, and usually suffer from high costs and long delays. In this work, we propose RedPacketBike, an incentive-driven, crowd-based station rebalancing framework to effectively recruit participants from hybrid fleets (e.g., volunteer riders and hired trucks) based on the accurate forecast of bike demand leveraging deep learning techniques. First, we propose a spatiotemporal clustering method to extract bike demand hotspots from fluctuating bike usage data. Then, we build a context-aware deep neural network named BikeNet to forecast the trends of bike demand hotspots, simultaneously modeling the spatial correlations by graph convolution networks (GCN), the temporal dependencies by long short-term memory networks (RNN), and the contextual factors by autoencoders (AE). Finally, we propose a reinforcement-learning-based method to find optimal station rebalancing schemes by generating station rebalancing tasks with an integer linear programming (ILP) algorithm and allocating tasks to participants from hybrid fleets with dynamic incentive designs and reward expectations. Experiments using real-world bike-sharing system data collected from Citi Bike in New York City and Mobike in Xiamen City validate the performance of our framework, achieving a demand forecast error below 4.171 measured in MAE, and a 17.2% improvement of station availability by simulations with real-world parameter settings, outperforming the state-of-the-art baselines.
Prophylactic Central Neck Lymph Node Dissection in Low-risk Thyroid Carcinoma Patients Does Not Decrease the Incidence of Locoregional Recurrence

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of T + prophylactic CND (T+CND) compared to T alone on locoregional recurrence in patients with PTC. Summary background data: Few RCTs have assessed the risks and benefits of prophylactic CND in patients with PTC. Most recommendations are still based on meta-analyses that include observational studies, which are prone to selection bias. Methods: We included RCTs involving adult patients with clinically negative neck (cN0) PTC that compared T versus T+CND. The main outcomes assessed were structural and biochemical recurrence and complications. For methodological quality assessment, we used the Revised Cochrane risk-of-bias tool for randomized trials instrument, and for robustness, we used the fragility index. Results: Five RCTs with 763 patients were included (354 in the T group and 409 in the T+CND group). Most studies were classified as having a low risk of bias. Publication bias was not found. Structural recurrence occurred in 11/409 (2.7%) patients in the T+CND group and 9/354 (2.5%) patients in the T group, with a risk difference (RD) =0% [95% confidence interval (CI) –2% to 2%]. For biochemical recurrence, the RD was 0% (95% CI –5% to 4%). The number needed to treat was 500. The rate of permanent hypoparathyroidism was higher in the T+CND group than in the T group [RD 3% (95% CI 0%–6%)]. Conclusions: We did not find a beneficial effect of prophylactic CND associated with T on locoregional or biochemical recurrence but did confirm a higher risk of permanent hypoparathyroidism associated with this procedure.
Ex Vivo Evaluation of Mucosal Responses to Vaccination with ALVAC and AIDSVAX of Non-Human Primates

Non-human primates (NHPs) remain the most relevant challenge model for the evaluation of HIV vaccine candidates; however, discrepancies with clinical trial results have emphasized the need to further refine the NHP model. Furthermore, classical evaluation of vaccine candidates is based on endpoints measured systemically. We assessed the mucosal responses elicited upon vaccination with ALVAC and AIDSVAX using ex vivo Rhesus macaque mucosal tissue explant models. Following booster immunization with ALVAC/AIDSVAX, anti-gp120 HIV-1CM244-specific IgG and IgA were detected in culture supernatant cervicovaginal and colorectal tissue explants, as well as systemically. Despite protection from ex vivo viral challenge, no neutralization was observed with tissue explant culture supernatants. Priming with ALVAC induced distinct cytokine profiles in cervical and rectal tissue. However, ALVAC/AIDSVAX boosts resulted in similar modulations in both mucosal tissues with a statistically significant decrease in cytokines linked to inflammatory responses and lymphocyte differentiation. With ALVAC/AIDSVAX boosts, significant correlations were observed between cytokine levels and specific IgA in cervical explants and specific IgG and IgA in rectal tissue. The cytokine secretome revealed differences between vaccination with ALVAC and ALVAC/AIDSVAX not previously observed in mucosal tissues and distinct from the systemic response, which could represent a biosignature of the vaccine combination.
A Path Planning Method with Perception Optimization Based on Sky Scanning for UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are frequently adopted in disaster management. The vision they provide is extremely valuable for rescuers. However, they face severe problems in their stability in actual disaster scenarios, as the images captured by the on-board sensors cannot consistently give enough information for deep learning models to make accurate decisions. In many cases, UAVs have to capture multiple images from different views to output final recognition results. In this paper, we desire to formulate the fly path task for UAVs, considering the actual perception needs. A convolutional neural networks (CNNs) model is proposed to detect and localize the objects, such as the buildings, as well as an optimization method to find the optimal flying path to accurately recognize as many objects as possible with a minimum time cost. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective and efficient, and can address the actual scene understanding and path planning problems for UAVs in the real world well.
Park facility development and design planning facilities that respect the spirit of place

As the political, economic and cultural fabric of all regions of the British Columbia landscape grows more sophisticated, legislative remedies to environmental issues will become more difficult to execute. If our society's values towards resources are to change, the resource protection field may need to evolve from legislated protection to cultural protection based on appreciation and peer pressure. In this regard, natural park sites have the potential to influence the values which will be carried beyond that particular site. Protective attitudes towards the environment often grow out of a feeling of connection to, and an understanding of, particular places. The act of conferring park status on a natural place acknowledges that we consider it to be special and hence worthy of protection. The way in which this environment is planned, designed and managed has the potential to demonstrate environmental protection values while educating people about the natural world and our impact upon it. Retaining the true "spirit of place" in a natural area park is a worthy goal but often difficult to achieve. In British Columbia's Provincial Park System, a dual mandate to provide for recreational pursuits while protecting the environment creates problems for staff who must fulfill what is often a conflicting prescription. A detailed policy framework for facilities, based on explicitly examined values, would provide direction for decision making about park facilities. This thesis looks at the topic of retaining a "sense of place" in natural area parks, examines the issue of values and tradeoffs in park management, and offers a planning framework to operationalize the B.C. Parks mandate to protect and present provincial parks.
The Young Parenting Inventory (YPI-R3), and the Baumrind, Maccoby and Martin Parenting Model: Finding Common Ground

The parenting typology of Baumrind, Maccoby and Martin is based on variations in warmth and control and consists of three negative parenting styles labelled authoritarian, neglectful, and permissive. This parenting typology is based on normal variations of parenting but did not include dimensions arising from deviant parenting (e.g., abuse and neglect). A parenting typology has emerged based on the schema therapy model through the development of the Young Parent Inventory (YPI-R3), which represents a fuller range of maladaptive parenting spanning the deviant to normal range of the parenting continuum. Using six international, community, nonclinical samples with separate ratings for mothers and fathers from the USA, n = 259, 281; South Africa, n = 318, 372; Nigeria, n = 328, 344; India, n = 277, 289; Singapore, n = 592, 628; and Malaysia, n = 222, 229, results showed that the best second order higher factor solution of the ten YPI-R3 subscales was a three factor solution that runs parallel to, and resembles, the three negative parenting styles of Baumrind, Macobby and Martin. This factor structure was also shown to be a consistent and cross-culturally acceptable model among the countries from which the samples were drawn. The resemblance and implications of both parenting models were discussed.
An contextualized enamel growth rate and thickness data set collected from British populations spanning the past 2000 years.

This article represents an open repository of human enamel data collected/reconstructed from seven populations covering a 2000 year time period in Britain via five temporally distinct periods. In total data was collected from 285 permanent teeth, including maxillary and mandibular first molars, and maxillary canines and first incisors. Data was gathered through thin histological methods using standard procedures for sectioning human dental material. In regards to enamel growth, data is collected for daily secretion rates (DSRs) for the inner, mid, and outer areas of lateral and cuspal enamel. For enamel thickness average (AET) and relative (RET) enamel thickness, cuspal linear thickness (CT), and lateral linear thickness (LT) was collected. Alongside the data presented this article also provides clear and transparent explanations for all the methods involved in its production, in order to ensure understanding of the rigorous protocol and consistency associated with the data provided. The novel data is also contextualised with a compilation of equivalent data published in past articles.
Optimal downlink power allocation schemes for OFDM-NOMA-based Internet of things

With the continuous development of fifth-generation technology, the number of mobile terminal Internet of Things devices has increased exponentially. How to effectively improve the throughput of fifth-generation systems has become a challenge. In the Internet of Things networks, ultra-dense networks and non-orthogonal multiple access technology have drawn extensive attention in recent years, because they can achieve multiplexing from the space domain and power domain. To improve the throughput of the system, this article combines non-orthogonal multiple access with ultra-dense networks technology and considers the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing non-orthogonal multiple access–based ultra-dense networks with multiple base stations and multiple Internet of Things devices. In particular, first, we build the network model and channel model. Second, we construct the downlink transmission rate maximizing problem subject to the total power. Then, to solve this problem, we divide it into three sub-problems: device grouping, inter-sub-band power allocation, and intra-sub-band power allocation problems. Solving these sub-problems, we obtain the optimal power allocation schemes by jointly employing channel-state sorting–pairing algorithm, water-filling algorithm, and convex optimization theory. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to validate the performance of our proposed optimal downlink power allocation scheme. Experimental results show that the total throughput of the system has been significantly improved.
The Effect of Under-Drilling and Osseodensification Drilling on Low-Density Bone: A Comparative Ex Vivo Study

The aim of this study is to identify a method that can maximize implant primary stability (IPS) and bone density under the controlled drilling conditions of the same diameter and length in low-density bones through an ex vivo study. A total of 87 dental implants were placed with standard drilling, under-drilling, and osseodensification drilling in 13 fresh porcine sternums. The Periotest value and the implant stability quotient were measured to evaluate the primary stability. The difference in the Hounsfield unit (HU) between the hole and peripheral bone up to a distance of 1 mm was measured. Osseodensification and under-drilling technique increased the IPS, compared with conventional drilling technique with statistical significance under the drilling conditions of the same diameter and length. Osseodensification technique with the counter-clockwise direction had higher HU gaps than the standard drilling and osseodensification technique with clockwise direction. Due to the effect of bone densification, the gap of HU was increased by a minimum of 43 HU and a maximum of 180 HU. Within the limitations of this ex vivo study, it was found that the osseodensification technique with counter-clockwise direction is effective to increase IPS and bone mineral density in low-density bone.
Laser-induced activation of Mg-doped GaN: quantitative characterization and analysis

We investigate the effectiveness of laser-induced treatment as compared to rapid-thermal annealing (RTA) for the activation of p-type dopant in Mg-doped GaN layers. The study is based on a wide set of analytical techniques, including resistivity measurements, atomic force microscopy (AFM), scanning emission microscopy, dynamic secondary ion mass spectroscopy (SIMS), time-of-flight (TOF) SIMS and energy dispersive x-ray (EDX) spectroscopy in combination with scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM). Samples are treated at different energy densities and in different atmospheres, to provide a comprehensive overview of the topic. The analysis is carried out on GaN-on-Si samples, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the treatment even in presence of high threading dislocation densities. The original results presented in this paper indicate that: (a) laser treatment is an effective process for activating the p-type dopant in Mg-doped GaN layers; even at low irradiation energy densities (400 mJ cm−2) the laser treatment can effectively activate the Mg doping, with the best resistivity results obtained (around 1.5 Ωcm) comparable with those obtained by optimized RTA; (b) resistivity varies with temperature with activation energy E a = 0.14 eV, which is compatible with the MgGa acceptor in GaN; (c) TOF-SIMS, AFM, EDX-STEM analysis indicates that the laser treatment does not modify the concentration profile of magnesium and surface roughness for low and moderate laser energy densities; changes are detected only for energy densities above 600 mJ cm−2, for which a significant degradation of the surface is revealed. The experimental evidence collected within this paper provide an accurate assessment of the process conditions for effective laser activation of Mg-doped GaN, thus allowing the fine-tuning required for selective activation and for industrial applications.
Zero-Voltage Switching in Full-Bridge Converter

Abstract This paper presents a comparison study of circuit topology of the voltage source type zero-voltage soft-switching (ZVS) full-bridge DC-DC power converter with an isolated high-frequency transformer employing phase-shift control. The switching power losses and voltage stress on the active devices are considerably reduced. A prototype operating at 10 kHz, rated at 100/50 V, 200 W is developed for the two topologies and experimental results obtained.