Design and Implementation of a Deterministic and Nondeterministic Finite Automaton Simulator

The purpose of this project is to assist students in visualizing and understanding the structure and operation of deterministic and nondeterministic finite automata. This software achieves this purpose by providing students with the ability to build, modify, and test automata in an intuitive environment. This enables a simple and efficient avenue for experimentation, which upholds the Cal Poly ideal of Learning by Doing. Readers of this report should be familiar with basic concepts in the theory of finite state machines; a general understanding of object-oriented programming is also necessary

Uncertain Future, Unsettled Present? Everyday Geographies of Precarious Immigration Status in Toronto, Canada

Increasing processing times for immigration applications and increasing numbers of people admitted on temporary visas mean that more newcomers spend longer periods of time living in Canada with restricted rights and uncertain if they will be able to remain. This has contributed to an increase in precarious immigration status, which refers to a sense of insecurity caused by ones formal immigration status. The purpose of the dissertation is to examine how people are affected by living for prolonged periods of time with uncertainty about future residence and how these effects vary across space and time. The study, based on qualitative research with migrants in Toronto and people who work on migration issues, investigates how immigration status is performed in everyday life and how immigration status intersects with other social relations to produce distinctive affective textures of life in Toronto. The research shows that formal immigration status affects people differently depending on their migration motivations, capacities, and community support networks. Lack of reliable information about the time required to become eligible for permanent residence and application processing times make it more difficult for people to make decisions about how to orient themselves towards the future, the present, and the passage of time in ways that meet their needs. It identifies two salient temporal orientationssuspending or embracing engagement with everyday lifeeach of which comes with benefits and risks. Finally, the research suggests that contemporary practices of immigration control can lead to an internalization of discourses that construct people with precarious immigration status as unworthy of membership in Canadian society. Participants sought to undermine these discourses through narrative redefinition of themselves as people who have something to contribute but are stopped from doing so. I find that this resistance is necessary to peoples ability to persist, yet it has a limited effect on the harm done. The research findings contribute to scholarly understandings of formal immigration status and the slow violence of living with precarious immigration status

Use of indocyanine green near-infrared lymphography to detect sentinel lymph nodes in a dog with a malignant insulinoma: a case report

Malignant insulinoma is the most common type of neuroendocrine tumor found in the pancreas of dogs. Canine insulinoma displays malignant behavior with a high rate of metastasis. The most common sites of metastases are the draining lymph nodes, which are also the primary location sites for the recurrence of functional disease. However, identifying metastatic nodes can often be complicated, as the pancreas is drained by numerous lymphatic centers, and clinical enlargement or structural changes may not always be present in metastatic nodes. Additionally, unaltered nodes are frequently small (a few millimeters) and can be hard to distinguish from the surrounding tissues. Therefore, lymphadenectomy is generally recommended for affected dogs. Unlike in human medicine, there are currently no established strategies for lymph node resection in dogs with malignant insulinoma. This report presents a technique for identifying and removing sentinel nodes using indocyanine green and near-infrared lymphography (NIRFL) during surgery. A total of six sentinel nodes were detected and resected with this method. This technique could provide a more structured approach for lymph node resection in affected dogs and potentially in humans in the future. However, its therapeutic benefits must be evaluated in a larger cohort of cases

Rapid Recognition of Olfactory Scenes with a Portable MOx Sensor System using Hotplate Modulation

© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. This is the accepted manuscript version of a conference paper which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1109/ISOEN54820.2022.9789654A café, the metro, a supermarket, a book store - many locations of everyday life have a specific smell. Recognising such olfactory scenes could inform personal activity tracking, environmental monitoring, and assist robotic navigation. Yet it is unclear if current Metal-oxide (MOx) sensor technology is sensitive and specific enough to achieve this. Factors like sensor drift, and sensitivity to ambient humidity and temperature further complicate the recognition of olfactory scenes. Hotplate temperature modulation has been suggested as a method to counter these drawbacks. We present an electronic nose based on MEMS-MOx sensors that support rapid hotplate temperature modulation with a 150 ms period. We recorded different natural olfactory scenes in an urban context. A linear SVM was able to recognise four olfactory scenes in single hotplate cycles with near-perfect performance when trained and tested on the same day, and 73% accuracy when tested in the same locations on the next day. Gas sensor responses yielded higher recognition accuracy than humidity, temperature, and pressure, which were also partly-location specific. Our results indicate that hotplate modulation enables recognition of natural odor scenes across extended timespans. These findings encourage the use of MOx-sensors as rapid sensing devices in natural, uncontrolled environments

Negative capacitance in organic semiconductor devices: bipolar injection and charge recombination mechanism

We report negative capacitance at low frequencies in organic semiconductor based diodes and show that it appears only under bipolar injection conditions. We account quantitatively for this phenomenon by the recombination current due to electron-hole annihilation. Simple addition of the recombination current to the well established model of space charge limited current in the presence of traps, yields excellent fits to the experimentally measured admittance data. The dependence of the extracted characteristic recombination time on the bias voltage is indicative of a recombination process which is mediated by localized traps.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Applied Physics Letter

Caractérisation en modules fonctionnels de la famille de protéines ADAMTS / ADAMTSL

International audienc

Pressure-Induced Rotational Symmetry Breaking in URu2_2Si2_2

Phase transitions and symmetry are intimately linked. Melting of ice, for example, restores translation invariance. The mysterious hidden order (HO) phase of URu$_2$Si$_2$ has, despite relentless research efforts, kept its symmetry breaking element intangible. Here we present a high-resolution x-ray diffraction study of the URu$_2$Si$_2$ crystal structure as a function of hydrostatic pressure. Below a critical pressure threshold $p_c\approx3$ kbar, no tetragonal lattice symmetry breaking is observed even below the HO transition $T_{HO}=17.5$ K. For $p>p_c$, however, a pressure-induced rotational symmetry breaking is identified with an onset temperatures $T_{OR}\sim 100$ K. The emergence of an orthorhombic phase is found and discussed in terms of an electronic nematic order that appears unrelated to the HO, but with possible relevance for the pressure-induced antiferromagnetic (AF) phase. Existing theories describe the HO and AF phases through an adiabatic continuity of a complex order parameter. Since none of these theories predicts a pressure-induced nematic order, our finding adds an additional symmetry breaking element to this long-standing problem.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures and supplemental material