Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Tensor-Based Joint Channel Estimation and Symbol Detection for Time-Varying mmWave Massive MIMO Systems

In this paper, a tensor-based joint channel parameter estimation and information symbol detection scheme is developed for millimeter wave (mmWave) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication systems. At the base station (BS), the information symbols are encoded according to the Khatri-Rao space-time (KRST) method and transmitted through time-varying channels. The received signals at the mobile station (MS) are constructed into a nested complex-valued parallel factor (PARAFAC) model, which contains an outer model and an inner model, respectively. With outer model, we estimate the compound channel matrix and detect the information symbols considering the sparse scattering nature of mmWave channels. With inner model, we extract physical parameters, including angles of arrival/departure (AoAs/AoDs), Doppler shifts and complex path gains from the estimated compound channel matrix. These physical parameters can be used to significantly reduce feedback overhead. A tricky way here is that we convert complex inner-submodel into a real one such that the computational complexity is reduced. Compared with existing schemes, the proposed one improves the estimation accuracy with low computational complexity, and is applicable for both uniform linear arrays (ULAs) and uniform planar arrays (UPAs). Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed joint channel estimation and information symbol detection scheme.
Efficient Tool to Characterize Photovoltaic Generating Systems Using Mine Blast Algorithm

Abstract—The article proposes an efficient tool to characterize the photovoltaic generating systems. The mine blast algorithm is coupled with the proposed tool to define the parameters for commercial real photovoltaic cells. The objective function is adapted to minimize the absolute errors between the experimental measured and calculated current values to accurately estimate the photovoltaic parameters. The experimental, performance, and technical data of the commercial photovoltaic cells of many manufacturers with different photovoltaic types are used to confirm the viability of the proposed method. Both single-diode and double-diode models of solar cells are approached to certify the performance of the proposed methodology. The calculated I-V and P-V characteristics are well matched to measured data with insignificant absolute errors. The study finds that the single-diode equivalent circuit suffices to precisely model the photovoltaic cells. Numerical comparisons to the other competitive heuristic methods consolidate the significance of the proposed mine blast algorithm based method.
Millimeter-Wave Photonics for Communications and Phased Arrays

Abstract This article presents recent developments in millimeter-wave communications architectures featuring broadband photonic signal generation, up-conversion and down-conversion, as well as true-time-delay photonic steering of millimeter-wave arrays. These developments will support future high-capacity millimeter-wave wireless communications by enabling broadband signals to be generated and converted between baseband and millimeter-wave carrier frequencies without electronic heterodyne systems and by permitting the use of true-time-delay beamsteering in millimeter-wave array apertures.
Overcoming barriers to energy efficiency for rental housing

Improving building energy efficiency is widely recognized as one of the best strategies for combating climate change and other energy problems. Energy efficiency implementation has been slow, however, due to a number of practical barriers, and few building sectors face higher hurdles to energy efficiency than rental housing. In this thesis I ask: What are the major barriers to investment in energy efficiency for rental housing? How well do existing policies and programs address these barriers? And finally, which strategies are best suited to overcome the barriers that face rental housing efficiency? I describe several barriers, from split incentives to transaction costs, that limit energy efficiency for rental housing. Existing policies and efficiency programs do not adequately address most of these barriers. While there is no silver bullet solution to facilitate energy efficiency for rental housing, I identify a variety of policy options that can be implemented at the federal, state, and local levels. One measure in particular, a "green lease," holds great promise for overcoming split incentives and other obstacles. A combination of voluntary and regulatory measures will be necessary to deeply penetrate the rental housing efficiency market. Finally, I argue that policy packages must be tailored to the conditions of local rental housing markets, and local energy initiatives hold great promise as part of the solution.
Design and characterization of millimeter-wave antenna for integrated photonic transmitter

For application to over 100-GHz millimeter-wave (mm-wave) transmitters using photonic techniques, we have designed and characterized a planar slot antenna on a Si substrate. By integrating a uni-traveling-carrier photodiode with the antenna, we have experimentally demonstrated radiation of mm-wave signals with power of >100 /spl mu/W at 120 GHz.
European Tennis: A Comparative Analysis of Talent Identification and Development (TID).

v Acknowledgements vii List of Tables x List of Figures and Images xii Abbreviations xiii Chapter 1 Comparing approaches to talent identification and development in tennis 1 Chapter 2 The World of Tennis/ Tennis in the World 15 Chapter 3 Tennis in Four European Countries 33 Chapter 4 Talent Identification and Development in sport and tennis . 67 Chapter 5 Methodology 97 Chapter 6 Tennis and TID in Four National Systems: Major Similarities and Differences 111 Chapter 7 Comparing Views of TID in European Tennis 153 Chapter 8 Discussion and Critical Analysis 181 Chapter 9 Interpretation and conclusions 195 Bibliography 207 Appendices 227
Evaluation of Protein Quality in Humans and Insights on Stable Isotope Approaches to Measure Digestibility – A Review

ABSTRACT The recent Food and Agricultural Organization/World Health Organization/United Nations University expert consultations on protein requirements and quality have emphasized the need for the new Digestible Indispensable Amino Acid Score (DIAAS), as a measure of protein quality. This requires human measurements of the true ileal digestibility of individual indispensable amino acids (IAAs) until the end of the small intestine. Digestibility is measured using standard oro-ileal balance methods, which can only be achieved by an invasive naso-ileal intubation in healthy participants or fistulation at the terminal ileum. Significant efforts have been made over the last 2 decades to develop noninvasive or minimally invasive methods to measure IAA digestibility in humans. The application of intrinsically labeled (with stable isotopes like 13C, 15N, and 2H) dietary proteins has helped in circumventing the invasive oro-ileal balance techniques and allowed the differentiation between endogenous and exogenous protein. The noninvasive indicator amino acid oxidation (IAAO) technique, which is routinely employed to measure IAA requirements, has been modified to estimate metabolic availability (a sum of digestibility and utilization) of IAA in foods, but provides an estimate for a single IAA at a time and is burdensome for participants. The recently developed minimally invasive dual isotope tracer method measures small intestinal digestibility of multiple amino acids at once and is suitable for use in vulnerable groups and disease conditions. However, it remains to be validated against standard oro-ileal balance techniques. This review critically evaluates and compares the currently available stable isotope-based protein quality evaluation methods with a focus on the digestibility and metabolic availability measurements in humans. In view of building a reliable DIAAS database of various protein sources and subsequently supporting protein content claims in food labeling, a re-evaluation and harmonization of the available methods are necessary.
Identification of Enzymatic Active Sites with Unsupervised Language Modeling

The first decade of genome sequencing saw a surge in the characterization of proteins with unknown functionality. Even still, more than 20% of proteins in well-studied model animals have yet to be identified, making the discovery of their active site one of biology's greatest puzzle. Herein, we apply a Transformer architecture to a language representation of bio-catalyzed chemical reactions to learn the signal at the base of the substrate-active site atomic interactions. The language representation comprises a reaction simplified molecular-input line-entry system (SMILES) for substrate and products, complemented with amino acid (AA) sequence information for the enzyme. We demonstrate that by creating a custom tokenizer and a score based on attention values, we can capture the substrate-active site interaction signal and utilize it to determine the active site position in unknown protein sequences, unraveling complicated 3D interactions using just 1D representations. This approach exhibits remarkable results and can recover, with no supervision, 31.51% of the active site when considering co-crystallized substrate-enzyme structures as a ground-truth, vastly outperforming approaches based on sequence similarities only. Our findings are further corroborated by docking simulations on the 3D structure of few enzymes. This work confirms the unprecedented impact of natural language processing and more specifically of the Transformer architecture on domain-specific languages, paving the way to effective solutions for protein functional characterization and bio-catalysis engineering.
Trajectory planning for unmanned vehicles using robust receding horizon control

This thesis presents several trajectory optimization algorithms for a team of cooperating unmanned vehicles operating in an uncertain and dynamic environment. The first, designed for a single vehicle, is the Robust Safe But Knowledgeable (RSBK) algorithm, which combines several previously published approaches to recover the main advantages of each. This includes a sophisticated cost-to-go function that provides a good estimate of the path beyond the planning horizon, which is extended in this thesis to account for three dimensional motion; constraint tightening to ensure robustness to disturbances, which is extended to a more general class of disturbance rejection controllers compared to the previous work, with a new off-line design procedure; and a robust invariant set which ensures the safety of the vehicle in the event of environmental changes beyond the planning horizon. The system controlled by RSBK is proven to robustly satisfy all vehicle and environmental constraint under the action of bounded external disturbances. Multi-vehicle teams could also be controlled using centralized RSBK, but to reduce computational effort, several distributed algorithms are presented in this thesis. The main challenge in distributing the planning is to capture the complex couplings between vehicles. A decentralized form of RSBK algorithm is developed by having each vehicle optimize over its own decision variables and then locally communicate the solutions to its neighbors. By integrating a grouping algorithm, this approach enables simultaneous computation by vehicles in the team while guaranteeing the robust feasibility of the entire fleet. The use of a short planning horizon within RSBK enables the use of a very simple initialization algorithm when compared to previous work, which is essential if the technique is to be used in dynamic and uncertain environments. Improving the level of cooperation between the vehicles is another challenge for decentralized planning, but this thesis presents a unique strategy by enabling each vehicle to optimize its own decision as well as a feasible perturbation of its neighboring vehicles' plans. The resulting cooperative form of the distributed RSBK is shown to result in solutions that sacrifice local performance if it benefits the overall team performance. This desirable performance improvement is achieved with only a small increase in the computation and communication requirements. These algorithms are tested and demonstrated in simulation and on two multivehicle testbeds using rovers and quadrotors. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms successfully overcome the implementation challenges, such as limited onboard computation and communication resources, as well as the various sources of real-world uncertainties arising from modeling error of the vehicle dynamics, tracking error of the low-level controller, external disturbance, and sensing noise. Thesis Supervisor: Jonathan P. How Title: Associate Professor
Deterioration Modeling of Steel Components in Support of Collapse Prediction of Steel Moment Frames under Earthquake Loading

Reliable collapse assessment of structural systems under earthquake loading requires analytical models that are able to capture component deterioration in strength and stiffness. For calibration and validation of these models, a large set of experimental data is needed. This paper discusses the development of a database of experimental data of steel components and the use of this database for quantification of important parameters that affect the cyclic moment-rotation relationship at plastic hinge regions in beams. On the basis of information deduced from the steel component database, empirical relationships for modeling of precapping plastic rotation, postcapping rotation, and cyclic deterioration for beams with reduced beam section (RBS) and other-than-RBS beams are proposed. Quantitative information is also provided for modeling of the effective yield strength, postyield strength ratio, residual strength, and ductile tearing of steel components subjected to cyclic loading.
A New Control Scheme for the Lattice Hydrodynamic Model With the Successive Flux Difference Under Honk Environment

Due to the rapid development of the Intelligent Traffic System (for short, ITS), the shared information among successive vehicles can be acquired accurately and reliably. In this paper, a control scheme utilizing the successive flux difference under honk environment (SFDHE) is investigated in the lattice hydrodynamic model. Based on the Hurwitz criteria and the $H_{\infty }$ -norm, the sufficient condition for the transfer function is derived with the control theory analysis. The Bode-plot of transfer function indicates that the stability of the traffic flow is increased significantly with the novel controller. Moreover, the numerical simulation results of the new model are compared with that of Peng’s model, which demonstrates that traffic jams can be suppressed efficiently when the SFDHE control signal is taken into account.
Fabrication of Bioactive Glass with Titanium Ion Doping via Various Reactive Environments

Bioactive glass has high biocompatibility and bioactivity. With specific ion adding, it can show different advantages. Titanium ion can improve the mechanic strength, antibacterial ability of bioactive glass, and stability. In this study, bioactive glass with titanium ion doping by the sol-gel method via various reactive environments was fabricated successfully. The morphology was observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The chemical composition was measured by energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDS). By soaking in SBF, the bioactivity of samples had also been analyzed. The formula of bioglass has been optimized to make the better bioactivity.
Calbration and evaluation of water speed indicator and compass for the small autonomous underwater vehicle navigation filter

Abstract : There are three major thrusts to this thesis. The first was to design and build a device to measure ground speed for testing the position estimating capabilities of the Small Autonomous Navigation System (SANS) filter. The ground tests consisted by placing the SANS unit on a golf cart and maneuvering it along a known track. The speed sensing device uses a bicycle wheel attached to the golf cart along with an appropriate time to speed software conversion. The next problem was to determine if the existing paddle wheel in use would be accurate enough for the SANS to conduct underway tests. To perform this, a mechanism had to be built to channel water and measure its speed while allowing the paddle wheel to be in the flow. Finally, the electronic compass was found to have heading dependent errors, thus a test was designed to determine its deviation. This was performed by swinging the compass using a transit aligned with its axis. This established a deviation table that was inserted into the SANS code, further refining its directional capabilities. As a final test for determining the effectiveness of the calibrated inputs, tests were conducted that showed that the SANS filter is capable of obtaining 3 meter accuracy with no Global Positioning Update for an excess of two minutes. This is well beyond the initial goals set for the system.
Supervisory support and organizational citizenship behavior

Purpose - – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of participation in decision making (PDM) and job satisfaction (JS) in supervisory support and the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) relationship. Design/methodology/approach - – Two models with PDM and JS as mediators were tested on the supervisory support-OCB relationship. A sample of 198 Indian business executives was collected exclusively through management development programs (MDPs). To test the hypotheses in this research, correlation and regression analysis were both used. Furthermore, to test the mediation level, Baron and Kenny’s (1986) method was deployed. Findings - – All variables in the study were found to be significantly related to each other. Both models were supported by the findings, suggesting that supervisory support promotes both PDM and JS. This, in turn, increases OCB in employees. PDM was found to be the better mediator within the relationship. Implications of these results are also discussed. Research limitations/implications - – Self-reported responses could give biased results; peers should also have been included in the data gathering. Variables in the study cannot be analyzed in isolation. Hence control variables need to be included to arrive at more accurate and informative results. Practical implications - – The findings contribute to better understanding of the supervisory support/OCB relationship, and the ways of improving this through PDM and JS. As an outcome of this research, organizations should aim to support, empower and involve their employees. Satisfying their needs will lead to them becoming more effective citizens within the organization. Businesses can harness the potential of OCB in employees by giving them a “voice” in decision making and by encouraging them to share ideas. Originality/value - – The use of PDM and JS in this relationship is unprecedented. The establishment of PDM as a better mediator of the relationship is also unique. The study draws its strength from a multi-organizational sample and the use of MDPs to provide unbiased responses. Since the study is based on an Indian sample, it also adds to the growing literature of OCB from non-western economies.
Environmental stoichiometry mediates phytoplankton diversity effects on communities' resource use efficiency and biomass

Positive biodiversity–ecosystem functioning (BEF) relationships are predicted to increase in strength when high environmental variability allows for complementarity between resource use strategies in diverse communities. This environmental variability can be represented by spatial or temporal variation in nutrient ratios, but resource use efficiency (RUE) and therefore biomass build‐up of primary producers might be restricted when nutrient ratios are highly imbalanced (i.e. limitation by one nutrient and beyond optimal ratios for growth). Although the linkages between ecosystem functioning, diversity and nutrient availability are theoretically well understood, we lack experimental evidence on how phytoplankton diversity affects resource use and biomass under variable nutrient ratios (N:P ratios). Combining a mesocosm and a microcosm experiment, we tested diversity effects on ecosystem functioning by exposing a species diversity gradient generated by the loss of rare species in a natural community to different N:P ratios (uniform vs. a gradient). The N:P supply ratio gradient also allowed us to evaluate responses across balanced and imbalanced ratios. We found that increased species diversity led to increased community RUE when supplied a gradient of N:P ratios; but restricted to the highest diversity level. However, diversity did not affect RUE under uniform nutrient ratios. The overall phytoplankton biomass and carbon:nutrient ratios responses to diversity reflected the patterns detected for RUE. Contrary to theoretical predictions, RUE was maintained under highest N:P supply ratios (extreme phosphorous limitation) suggesting that imbalanced N:P ratios do not necessarily decrease function. Thus, we showed that the nutrient context influences diversity effects on RUE and biomass. Synthesis. Overall, our results suggest that the effect of rare phytoplankton species losses on community RUE and biomass can be compensated by the persistent species when nutrient ratios are uniform, but leads to decreases in ecosystem functioning under variable nutrient ratios. This work provides a first attempt for testing interactions between the nutrient context (including concentrations and ratios) and the diversity of (natural) communities experimentally, which is conceptually understood but poorly tested for phytoplankton.
Osteopathic Evaluation and Post-Surgical Rehabilitation Approach in a Patient With Myelopathy and Tetraparesis Related to Cervical Ependymoma: A Case Report

Neck pain with associated upper limb symptomatology presents commonly in primary care, musculoskeletal specialty, and osteopathic manipulative medicine (OMM) clinics. Thorough evaluation to determine the presence of red flags prior to providing treatment is a prerequisite for OMM providers. In the present case report, a 48-year-old right-hand-dominant woman with chronic neck pain and weakness in the left arm was found to have cervical myelopathy due to intramedullary ependymoma. Urgent surgical consultation facilitated appropriate spinal decompression followed by in-patient rehabilitation. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first case reported involving the use of osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) in the sub-acute rehabilitation phase following spinal cord tumor surgical decompression.