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Mesoscale convection covers an intermediate scale range between small-scale turbulence and the global organization of the convection flow. It is often characterized by an order of the convection patterns despite very high Rayleigh numbers and strong turbulent fluctuations. In this review, we discuss several aspects of mesoscale convection, which have been investigated by three-dimensional direct numerical simulations. The numerical studies are performed in a characteristic configuration of a plane layer that is heated from below and cooled from above or subject to constant heat flux at the top and bottom boundaries. We discuss the role of the thermal and mechanical boundary conditions for structure formation and study the impact of the domain shape as well as the Prandtl number. With respect to the latter, we focus on low values that arise in astrophysical convection and are partly not anymore accessible in laboratory experiments with liquid metals. Beside these experiments in the Boussinesq approximation, we report studies of non-Boussinesq mesoscale convection. This is done by investigating effects of compressibility and temperature dependence of material properties. The kinetic energy dissipation rate turns out to remain a central quantity for the turbulent mixing in compressible convection. Their different components, statistics, relation to the turbulent viscosity, and the multifractal properties are discussed., Comment: 26 pages, 16 figures (some in reduced quality)

Artificial Intelligence models encoding biology and chemistry are opening new routes to high-throughput and high-quality in-silico drug development. However, their training increasingly relies on computational scale, with recent protein language models (pLM) training on hundreds of graphical processing units (GPUs). We introduce the BioNeMo Framework to facilitate the training of computational biology and chemistry AI models across hundreds of GPUs. Its modular design allows the integration of individual components, such as data loaders, into existing workflows and is open to community contributions. We detail technical features of the BioNeMo Framework through use cases such as pLM pre-training and fine-tuning. On 256 NVIDIA A100s, BioNeMo Framework trains a three billion parameter BERT-based pLM on over one trillion tokens in 4.2 days. The BioNeMo Framework is open-source and free for everyone to use.

Future electronics require aggressive scaling of channel material thickness while maintaining device performance. Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors are promising candidates, but despite over two decades of research, experimental performance still lags theoretical expectations. Here, we develop an oxygen-free approach to push the electrical transport of 2D field-effect transistors toward the theoretical phonon-limited intrinsic mobility. We achieve record carrier mobilities of 91 (132) cm2V-1s-1 for mono- (bi-) layer MoS2 transistors on SiO2 substrate. Statistics from over 60 devices confirm that oxygen-free fabrication enhances key figures of merit by more than an order of magnitude. While previous studies suggest that 2D transition metal dichalcogenides such as MoS2 and WS2 are stable in air, we show that short-term ambient exposure can degrade their device performance through irreversible oxygen chemisorption. This study emphasizes the criticality of avoiding oxygen exposure, offering guidance for device manufacturing for fundamental research and practical applications of 2D materials.

The impact of variable material properties, such as temperature-dependent thermal conductivity and dynamical viscosity, on the dynamics of a fully compressible turbulent convection flow beyond the anelastic limit are studied in the present work by two series of three-dimensional direct numerical simulations in a layer of aspect ratio 4 with periodic boundary conditions in both horizontal directions. One simulation series is for a weakly stratified adiabatic background, one for a strongly stratified one. The Rayleigh number is $10^5$ and the Prandtl number is 0.7 throughout this study. The temperature dependence of material parameters is imposed as a power law with an exponent $\beta$. It generates a superadiabaticity $\varepsilon(z)$ that varies across the convection layer. Central statistical quantities of the flow, such as the mean superadiabatic temperature, temperature and density fluctuations, or turbulent Mach numbers are compared in the form of horizontal plane-time averaged profiles. It is found that the additional material parameter dependence causes systematic quantitative changes of all these quantities, but no qualitative ones. A growing temperature power law exponent $\beta$ also enhances the turbulent momentum transfer in the weak stratification case by 40\%, it reduces the turbulent heat transfer by up to 50\% in the strong stratification case.

Assembling two-dimensional van der Waals layered materials into heterostructures is an exciting development that sparked the discovery of rich correlated electronic phenomena and offers possibilities for designer device applications. However, resist residue from fabrication processes is a major limitation. Resulting disordered interfaces degrade device performance and mask underlying transport physics. Conventional cleaning processes are inefficient and can cause material and device damage. Here, we show that thermal scanning probe based cleaning can effectively eliminate resist residue to recover pristine material surfaces. Our technique is compatible at both the material- and device-level, and we demonstrate the significant improvement in the electrical performance of 2D WS2 transistors. We also demonstrate the cleaning of van der Waals heterostructures to achieve interfaces with low disorder. This enables the electrical formation and control of quantum dots that can be tuned from macroscopic current flow to the single-electron tunnelling regime. Such material processing advances are crucial for constructing high-quality vdW heterostructures that are important platforms for fundamental studies and building blocks for quantum and nano-electronics applications., Comment: 4 Figures

Buoyancy-driven turbulent convection leads to a fully compressible flow with a strong top-down asymmetry of first- and second-order statistics when the adiabatic equilibrium profiles of temperature, density and pressure decay very strongly across the convection layer. The growth of this asymmetry and the formation of an increasingly thicker stabilized sublayer with a negative mean convective heat flux at the top of the convection zone is reported here by a series highly resolved three-dimensional direct numerical simulations beyond the Oberbeck-Boussinesq and anelastic limits for dimensionless dissipation numbers $0.1 \le D\le 0.8$ at fixed Rayleigh number $Ra=10^6$ and superadiabaticity. The highly stratified compressible convection regime appears for $D > D_{\rm crit}\approx 0.65$, when density fluctuations collapse to those of pressure; it is characterized by an up to nearly 50\% reduced global turbulent heat transfer and a sparse network of focused thin thermal plumes falling through the top sublayer deep into the bulk.

Fully compressible turbulent convection beyond the Oberbeck-Boussinesq limit and anelastic regime is studied in three-dimensional numerical simulations. Superadiabaticity $\epsilon$ and dissipation number $D$, which measures the strength of stratification of adiabatic equilibria, cause two limits of compressible convection -- nearly top-down-symmetric, strongly superadiabatic and highly top-down-asymmetric, strongly stratified convection. Highest turbulent Mach numbers $M_t$ follow for a symmetric blend of these two limits which we term the fully compressible case. Particularly, the strongly stratified convection case leads to a fluctuation-reduced top layer in the convection zone, a strongly reduced global heat transfer, and differing boundary layer dynamics between top and bottom. We detect this asymmetry for growing dissipation number $D$ also in the phase plane which is spanned by the turbulent Mach number $M_t$ and the dilatation parameter $\delta$ which relates the dilatational velocity fluctuations to the solenoidal ones. A detailed analysis of the different transport currents in the fully compressible energy budget relates the low-$D$ convection cases to the standard definition of the dimensionless Nusselt number in the Oberbeck-Boussinesq limit.

Here I present a small update to the bias-correction term in the Adam optimizer that has the advantage of making smaller gradient updates in the first several steps of training. With the default bias-correction, Adam may actually make larger than requested gradient updates early in training. By only including the well-justified bias-correction of the second moment gradient estimate, $v_t$, and excluding the bias-correction on the first-order estimate, $m_t$, we attain these more desirable gradient update properties in the first series of steps. The default implementation of Adam may be as sensitive as it is to the hyperparameters $\beta_1, \beta_2$ partially due to the originally proposed bias correction procedure, and its behavior in early steps., Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure

Inspection of available data on the decay exponent for the kinetic energy of homogeneous and isotropic turbulence (HIT) shows that it varies by as much as 100\%. Measurements and simulations often show no correspondence with theoretical arguments, which are themselves varied. This situation is unsatisfactory given that HIT is a building block of turbulence theory and modeling. We take recourse to a large base of direct numerical simulations and study decaying HIT for a variety of initial conditions. We show that the Kolmogorov decay exponent and the Birkhoff-Saffman decay are both readily observed, albeit approximately, for long periods of time if the initial conditions are appropriately arranged. We also present, for both cases, other turbulent statistics such as the velocity derivative skewness, energy spectra and dissipation, and show that the decay and growth laws are approximately as expected theoretically, though the wavenumber spectrum near the origin begins to change relatively quickly, suggesting that the invariants do not strictly exist. We comment briefly on why the decay exponent has varied so widely in past experiments and simulations., Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures

Mixing of passive scalars in compressible turbulence does not obey the same classical Reynolds number scaling as its incompressible counterpart. We first show from a large database of direct numerical simulations that even the solenoidal part of the velocity field fails to follow the classical incompressible scaling when the forcing includes a substantial dilatational component. Though the dilatational effects on the flow remain significant, our main results are that both the solenoidal energy spectrum and the passive scalar spectrum scale assume incompressible forms, and that the scalar gradient aligns with the most compressive eigenvalue of the solenoidal part, provided that only the solenoidal components are used for scaling in a consistent manner. Minor modifications to this statement are also pointed out., Comment: 6 pages and 7 figures

Turbulent flows, ubiquitous in nature and engineering, comprise fluctuations over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. While flows with fluctuations in thermodynamic variables are much more common, much less is known about these flows than their incompressible counterparts in which thermodynamics is decoupled from hydrodynamics. A critical element in the study of the latter has been the concept of universal scaling laws which provides fundamental as well as practical information about the spatio-temporal behavior of these complex systems. Part of this success is due to the dependence on a single non-dimensional parameter, that is the Reynolds number. Universality in compressible flows, on the other hand, have proven to be more elusive as no unifying set of parameters were found to yield universal scaling laws. This severely limits our understanding of these flows and the successful development of theoretically sound models. Using results in specific asymptotic limits of the governing equations we show that universal scaling is indeed observed when the set of governing parameters is expanded to include internally generated dilatational scales which are the result of the driving mechanisms that produce the turbulence. The analysis demonstrate why previous scaling laws fail in the general case, and opens up new venues to identify physical processes of interest and create turbulence models needed for simulations of turbulent flows at realistic conditions. We support our results with a new massive database of highly-resolved direct numerical simulations along with all data available in the literature. In search of universal features, we suggest classes which bundle the evolution of flows in the new parameter space. An ultimate asymptotic regime predicted independently by renormalization group theories and statistical mechanics is also assssed with available data.

There is a growing interest in social robots to be considered in the therapy of children with autism due to their effectiveness in improving the outcomes. However, children on the spectrum exhibit challenging behaviors that need to be considered when designing robots for them. A child could involuntarily throw a small social robot during meltdown and that could hit another person's head and cause harm (e.g. concussion). In this paper, the application of soft materials is investigated for its potential in attenuating head's linear acceleration upon impact. The thickness and storage modulus of three different soft materials were considered as the control factors while the noise factor was the impact velocity. The design of experiments was based on Taguchi method. A total of 27 experiments were conducted on a developed dummy head setup that reports the linear acceleration of the head. ANOVA tests were performed to analyze the data. The findings showed that the control factors are not statistically significant in attenuating the response. The optimal values of the control factors were identified using the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio optimization technique. Confirmation runs at the optimal parameters (i.e. thickness of 3 mm and 5 mm) showed a better response as compared to other conditions. Designers of social robots should consider the application of soft materials to their designs as it help in reducing the potential harm to the head.

This paper aims to investigate the effect of acceleration on the discomfort of standing passengers. The acceleration levels from different public rail transport lines such as the mass rapid transits (MRTs) and light rail transits (LRTs) of Singapore, as well as the associated qualitative data indicating the discomfort of standing passengers were collected and analyzed. Based on a logistic regression model to analyze the data, a discomfort index was introduced, which can be used to compare various rail lines based on ride comfort. A method for predicting the discomfort of passengers based on the acceleration values was proposed for any given train line., Comment: Document prepared for IEEE International Conference on Control and Automation (ICCA), 2013, 5 pages, 8 figures

To touch and be touched are vital to human development, well being, and relationships. However, to those who have lost their arms and hands due to accident or war, touching becomes a serious concern that often leads to psychosocial issues and social stigma. In this paper, we demonstrate that the touch from a warm and soft rubber hand can be perceived by another person as if the touch were coming from a human hand. We describe a three step process toward this goal. First, we made participants select artificial skin samples according to their preferred warmth and softness characteristics. At room temperature, the preferred warmth was found to be 28.4 deg C at the skin surface of a soft silicone rubber material that has a Shore durometer value of 30 at the OO scale. Second, we developed a process to create a rubber hand replica of a human hand. To compare the skin softness of a human hand and artificial hands, a robotic indenter was employed to produce a softness map by recording the displacement data when constant indentation force of 1 N was applied to 780 data points on the palmar side of the hand. Results showed that an artificial hand with skeletal structure is as soft as a human hand. Lastly, the participants arms were touched with human and artificial hands, but they were prevented to see the hand that touched them. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis suggests that a warm and soft artificial hand can create an illusion that the touch is from a human hand. These findings open the possibilities for prosthetic and robotic hands that are lifelike and are more socially acceptable., Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, supplementary video at: http://youtu.be/lATSgG7CuQU; contact info at: http://www.johncabibihan.com, IEEE Trans on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 2015

The primary interface of contact between a robotic or prosthetic hand and the external world is through the artificial skin. To make sense of that contact, tactile sensors are needed. These sensors are normally embedded in soft, synthetic materials for protecting the subsurface sensor from damage or for better hand-to-object contact. It is important to understand how the mechanical signals transmit from the artificial skin to the embedded tactile sensors. In this paper, we made use of a finite element model of an artificial fingertip with viscoelastic and hyperelastic behaviors to investigate the subsurface pressure profiles when flat, curved, and Braille surfaces were indented on the surface of the model. Furthermore, we investigated the effects of 1, 3 and 5 mm thickness of the skin on the subsurface pressure profiles. The simulation results were experimentally validated using a 25.4 {\mu}m thin pressure detecting film that was able to follow the contours of a non-planar surface, which is analogous to an artificial bone. Results show that the thickness of the artificial skin has an effect on the peak pressure, on the span of the pressure distribution, and on the overall shape of the pressure profile that was encoded on a curved subsurface structure. Furthermore, the flat, curved, and Braille surfaces can be discriminated from one another with the 1 and 3 mm artificial skin layers, but not with the 5 mm thick skin., Comment: 20 pages, 13 figures

This paper reviews the use of socially interactive robots to assist in the therapy of children with autism. The extent to which the robots were successful in helping the children in their social, emotional, and communication deficits was investigated. Child-robot interactions were scrutinized with respect to the different target behaviors that are to be elicited from a child during therapy. These behaviors were thoroughly examined with respect to a childs development needs. Most importantly, experimental data from the surveyed works were extracted and analyzed in terms of the target behaviors and how each robot was used during a therapy session to achieve these behaviors. The study concludes by categorizing the different therapeutic roles that these robots were observed to play, and highlights the important design features that enable them to achieve high levels of effectiveness in autism therapy.

For robots to be accommodated in human spaces and in humans daily activities, robots should be able to understand messages from the human conversation partner. In the same light, humans must also understand the messages that are being communicated by robots, including the non-verbal ones. We conducted a web-based video study wherein participants gave interpretations on the iconic gestures and emblems that were produced by an anthropomorphic robot. Out of the 15 gestures presented, we found 6 robotic gestures that can be accurately recognized by the human observer. These were nodding, clapping, hugging, expressing anger, walking, and flying. We reviewed these gestures for their meaning from literatures in human and animal behavior. We conclude by discussing the possible implications of these gestures for the design of social robots that are aimed to have engaging interactions with humans., Comment: 21 pages, 5 figures

This paper aimed to explore whether human beings can understand gestures produced by telepresence robots. If it were the case, they can derive meaning conveyed in telerobotic gestures when processing spatial information. We conducted two experiments over Skype in the present study. Participants were presented with a robotic interface that had arms, which were teleoperated by an experimenter. The robot could point to virtual locations that represented certain entities. In Experiment 1, the experimenter described spatial locations of fictitious objects sequentially in two conditions: speech condition (SO, verbal descriptions clearly indicated the spatial layout) and speech and gesture condition (SR, verbal descriptions were ambiguous but accompanied by robotic pointing gestures). Participants were then asked to recall the objects' spatial locations. We found that the number of spatial locations recalled in the SR condition was on par with that in the SO condition, suggesting that telerobotic pointing gestures compensated ambiguous speech during the process of spatial information. In Experiment 2, the experimenter described spatial locations non-sequentially in the SR and SO conditions. Surprisingly, the number of spatial locations recalled in the SR condition was even higher than that in the SO condition, suggesting that telerobotic pointing gestures were more powerful than speech in conveying spatial information when information was presented in an unpredictable order. The findings provide evidence that human beings are able to comprehend telerobotic gestures, and importantly, integrate these gestures with co-occurring speech. This work promotes engaging remote collaboration among humans through a robot intermediary., Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures

One of the fundamental requirements for an artificial hand to successfully grasp and manipulate an object is to be able to distinguish different objects' shapes and, more specifically, the objects' surface curvatures. In this study, we investigate the possibility of enhancing the curvature detection of embedded tactile sensors by proposing a ridged fingertip structure, simulating human fingerprints. In addition, a curvature detection approach based on machine learning methods is proposed to provide the embedded sensors with the ability to discriminate the surface curvature of different objects. For this purpose, a set of experiments were carried out to collect tactile signals from a 2 \times 2 tactile sensor array, then the signals were processed and used for learning algorithms. To achieve the best possible performance for our machine learning approach, three different learning algorithms of Na\"ive Bayes (NB), Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), and Support Vector Machines (SVM) were implemented and compared for various parameters. Finally, the most accurate method was selected to evaluate the proposed skin structure in recognition of three different curvatures. The results showed an accuracy rate of 97.5% in surface curvature discrimination., Comment: 10 figures

The concealment of amputation through prosthesis usage can shield an amputee from social stigma and help improve the emotional healing process especially at the early stages of hand or finger loss. However, the traditional techniques in prosthesis fabrication defy this as the patients need numerous visits to the clinics for measurements, fitting and follow-ups. This paper presents a method for constructing a prosthetic finger through online collaboration with the designer. The main input from the amputee comes from the Computer Tomography (CT) data in the region of the affected and the non-affected fingers. These data are sent over the internet and the prosthesis is constructed using visualization, computer-aided design and manufacturing tools. The finished product is then shipped to the patient. A case study with a single patient having an amputated ring finger at the proximal interphalangeal joint shows that the proposed method has a potential to address the patient's psychosocial concerns and minimize the exposure of the finger loss to the public., Comment: Open Access article

Prosthetic arms and hands that can be controlled by the user's electromyography (EMG) signals are emerging. Eventually, these advanced prosthetic devices will be expected to touch and be touched by other people. As realistic as they may look, the currently available prosthetic hands have physical properties that are still far from the characteristics of human skins because they are much stiffer. In this paper, different configurations of synthetic finger phalanges have been investigated for their skin compliance behaviour and have been compared with the phalanges of the human fingers and a phalanx from a commercially available prosthetic hand. Handshake tests were performed to identify which areas on the human hand experience high contact forces. After these areas were determined, experiments were done on selected areas using an indenting probe to obtain the force-displacement curves. Finite element simulations were used to compare the force-displacement results of the synthetic finger phalanx designs with that of the experimental results from the human and prosthetic finger phalanges. The simulation models were used to investigate the effects of (i) varying the internal topology of the finger phalanx and (ii) varying different materials for the internal and external layers.

The artificial hands for sociable robotics and prosthetics are expected to be touched by other people. Because the skin is the main interface during the contact, a need arises to duplicate humanlike characteristics for artificial skins for safety and social acceptance. Towards the goal of replicating humanlike social touch, this paper compares the skin compliance, conformance and hysteresis of typical robotic and prosthetic skin materials, such as silicone and polyurethane, with the published biomechanical behaviour of the human fingertip. The objective was achieved through materials characterization, finite element (FE) modeling and validation experiments. Our initial attempt showed that the selected types of silicone and polyurethane materials did not exhibit the same qualities as the human fingertip skin. However, the methodologies described herein can be used to evaluate other materials, their possible combinations or other fingertip design configurations