Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A comparative study on three different construction methods of stiffened plates-strength behaviour and ductility characteristics

Strength and ductility characteristics of non-continuously welded stiffened plates under in plane axial compression are the main focus of this research. A series of detailed numerical analyses of stiffened steel plates subjected to in plane compressive load is performed. Complete equilibrium paths are traced up to collapse for non-linear elastoplastic response of stiffened plates. Stiffened plates are selected from the deck structure of real sea-going ships and inland waterway vessels. Three different stiffener-to-plate welding procedures are considered: continuous, chain intermittent and staggered intermittent fillet welding. Special attention is paid to the finite element modeling of the fillet welds in either of welding practices. Some available tests are simulated applying finite element method.
Shallow , Deep and Hybrid Processing with UIMA and Heart of Gold

The Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) is a generic platform for processing text and other unstructured, human-generated data. For text, it has been proposed and is being used mainly for shallow natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, chunking, named entity recognition and shallow parsing. However, it is commonly accepted that getting interesting structure and semantics from documents requires deeper methods. Therefore, one of the future goals for UIMA will be inclusion of openly available, deep linguistic parsing technology for the generation of semantics representations from documents. Heart of Gold is a lightweight, XML-based middleware architecture that has been developed for this purpose. It supports hybrid, i.e. combined shallow and deep processing workflows of multiple NLP components to increase robustness and exploit synergy, and linguistic resources for multiple languages. The notion of explicit transformation between component input and output enables flexible interaction of existing NLP components. Heart of Gold foresees both tightly (same process) and loosely coupled (via networked services) processing modes. Assuming familarity with UIMA, we introduce Heart of Gold and propose and discuss hybrid integration scenarios in the context of UIMA. Possible applications include precision-oriented question answering, deep information extraction and opinion mining, textual entailment checking and machine translation.
TRANSMISSION ELECTRON MICROSCOPY (TEM) APPLIED TO ANCIENT POTTERY

A comparative study of ancient pottery has been carried out, which utilized X-ray diffraction, optics and scanning and transmission electron microscopy (SEM and TEM). Samples came from three prehistoric sites in northern Spain (La Rioja). Transmission electron microscope techniques, which use intact ion-milled samples, allow minerals and glass to be imaged in situ, providing data on textures, crystal structures and composition. TEM provided detailed characterization of both source-characteristic raw materials and products of the firing process, and revealed the range of intermediate phases, most of which had sizes beyond that of resolution by SEM. More importantly, TEM provided definition of the reaction processes, from starting materials through glass and new crystalline phases, providing data on both temperature and duration of firing.
Ranibizumab in retinal vein occlusion: treatment recommendations by an expert panel

Retinal vein occlusion (RVO) is a common cause of retinal vascular disease, resulting in potentially irreversible loss of vision despite the existence of several therapeutic options. The humanised monoclonal antibody fragment ranibizumab binds to and inhibits vascular endothelial growth factor, a key driver of macular oedema in RVO. In 2010, ranibizumab was approved in the USA for the treatment of macular oedema in RVO and, in 2011, ranibizumab was approved in the European Union for the treatment of visual impairment caused by macular oedema secondary to RVO in branch and central RVO. Ranibizumab provides an additional therapeutic option for this complex disease: an option that was not fully considered during the preparation of current international guidelines. An expert panel was convened to critically evaluate the evidence for treatment with ranibizumab in patients with visual impairment caused by macular oedema secondary to RVO and to develop treatment recommendations, with the aim of assisting physicians to optimise patient treatment.
The fabrication and testing of electrospun silica nanofiber membranes for the detection of proteins

In this study, we fabricated electrospun silica nanofiber membranes and investigated their use in biomolecular sensing. The diameter, porosity and surface-to-volume ratio of nanofiber membranes were investigated under different fabrication conditions. Using this type of nanofiber membrane, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) was performed, and the results were compared with those obtained with conventional ELISA using polystyrene well plates. The minimum detectable concentration was determined as 0.19 ng ml−1 (1.6 pM), which is 32 times lower than that of conventional ELISA. In addition, the detection time for all processes for the nanofiber membrane was reduced to 1 h, compared with 1 day for conventional ELISA. The increased sensitivity, faster reaction time, and affordability of the nanofiber membrane make it well suited for bio-chip use.
Comparing the Efficiency of Two Clustering Techniques

Clustering is the method of analyzing and organizing data such that data which share similar characteristics are grouped together. Clustering is used in various fields including Data Mining [19], [20], [21] and Machine Learning [28], [29], [30]. Much research has been done in the past to efficiently cluster data. Various algorithms and methods have been devised for the same. Hierarchical clustering [22], [23], partitional clustering [24], nearest neighbor clustering [26], [27], fuzzy clustering [25] are some popular techniques used for clustering [6]. This paper conducts a survey of two different methods of clustering. While both the algorithms are basically hierarchical in nature, the difference comes in their implementation. The first algorithm incorporates techniques from association rule problems [16]. On the other hand, the second one incorporates techniques from partitional clustering methods [31], [32]. This paper provides a summary of the implementation of both the algorithms and does a comparison of their behavior.
Near-synonym Lexical Choice in Latent Semantic Space

We explore the near-synonym lexical choice problem using a novel representation of near-synonyms and their contexts in the latent semantic space. In contrast to traditional latent semantic analysis (LSA), our model is built on the lexical level of co-occurrence, which has been empirically proven to be effective in providing higher dimensional information on the subtle differences among near-synonyms. By employing supervised learning on the latent features, our system achieves an accuracy of 74.5% in a "fill-in-the-blank" task. The improvement over the current state-of-the-art is statistically significant. We also formalize the notion of subtlety through its relation to semantic space dimensionality. Using this formalization and our learning models, several of our intuitions about subtlety, dimensionality, and context are quantified and empirically tested.
Photocurrent relaxations and gain in semiconductor nanowires

In this paper we study the transient and steady-state photoconductivity of semiconductor nanowires by putting forward the importance of surface recombination in the photocurrent formation. The phenomenological model based on existence of radius and time dependent surface band bending is able to explain both the dark conductivity and dynamics of photoconductivity transients in semiconductor nanowires. The dependence of the variation of surface recombination barrier height on the carrier capture by surface states leads to a non- exponential character of photoconductivity kinetics. Analytic equations are derived to calculate current-voltage and lux-ampere characteristics, photocurrent relaxation and gain under the excitation of light pulses. The analytical results are compared with the experimental data.
Change detection and uncertainty in fuzzy tree crown objects in an urban environment

Municipalities need information on the location and state of the trees in their area, to maintain and manage these resources. Trees defined and handled as objects would therefore better match this information need than raster output. In this study, we detect and compare tree crown objects from two different very high resolution images of Enschede, The Netherlands. Soft classifiers were used to calculate probabilities for each class: for the Quickbird image we used super-resolution mapping and for the aerial image support vector machines. We modelled the probability profiles of single tree crowns or groups of overlapping tree crowns with Gaussian functions, resulting in tree crown objects. By overlaying, tree crown objects extracted from two different images were compared on an object-byobject basis. Where a tree crown object in one image did not find a match in the other image, we recalculated the probabilities for all classes in the image where the tree was missing. If the probability for tree crown was above a threshold, we extracted the tree crown object, even if the probability for another class was higher. This iterative process was applied both to the earlier and to the later image, which increased the accuracy of tree crown mapping at individual dates and the accuracy of the detected changes. The procedure to extract objects based on probabilities allows using images from different spectral and spatial resolution in change detection. Changes in existence could be mapped adequately, while detection of changes in extent of tree crowns shows promising results, but needs further development. The use of probabilities for object-based change detection shows for which objects uncertainty is highest and hence where field verification would be most beneficial.
Flexible, robust and highly efficient broadband nonlinear optical materials based on graphene oxide impregnated polymer sheets

We report a simple solution-processed method for the fabrication of low-cost, flexible optical limiting materials based on graphene oxide (GO) impregnated polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) sheets. Such GO–PVA composite sheets display highly efficient broadband optical limiting activities for femtosecond laser pulses at 400, 800, and 1400 nm with very low limiting thresholds. Femtosecond pump–probe measurement results revealed that nonlinear absorption played an important role for the observed optical limiting activities. High flexibility and efficient optical limiting activities of these materials allow these composite sheets to be attached to nonplanar optical sensors in order to protect them from light-induced damage.
Mesenchymal Stromal Cells but Not Cardiac Fibroblasts Exert Beneficial Systemic Immunomodulatory Effects in Experimental Myocarditis

Systemic application of mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) in inflammatory cardiomyopathy exerts cardiobeneficial effects. The mode of action is unclear since a sufficient and long-acting cardiac homing of MSCs is unlikely. We therefore investigated the regulation of the immune response in coxsackievirus B3 (CVB3)-induced acute myocarditis after intravenous application of MSCs. Wildtype mice were infected with CVB3 and treated with either PBS, human MSCs or human cardiac fibroblasts intravenously 1 day after infection. Seven days after infection, MSCs could be detected in the spleen, heart, pancreas, liver, lung and kidney, whereby the highest presence was observed in the lung. MSCs increased significantly the myocardial expression of HGF and decreased the expression of the proinflammatory cytokines TNFα, IL1β and IL6 as well as the severity of myocarditis and ameliorated the left ventricular dysfunction measured by conductance catheter. MSCs upregulated the production of IFNγ in CD4+ and CD8+ cells, the number of IL10-producing regulatory T cells and the apoptosis rate of T cells in the spleen. An increased number of CD4+CD25+FoxP3 could be found in the spleen as well as in the circulation. In contrast, application of human cardiac fibroblasts had no effect on the severity of myocarditis and the systemic immune response observed after MSCs-administration. In conclusion, modulation of the immune response in extracardiac organs is associated with cardiobeneficial effects in experimental inflammatory cardiomyopathy after systemic application of MSCs.
An Unsupervised Method for General Named Entity Recognition and Automated Concept Discovery

Knowledge Acquisition is still the bottleneck in building many kinds of applications, such as inference engines. We describe here a procedure to automatically extend an ontology with domainspecific knowledge. The main advantage of our approach is that it is completely unsupervised, so it can be applied to different languages and domains. Our initial results have been highly successful and we believe that with some improvement in accuracy it can be applied to large ontologies.
DELiC4MT: A Tool for Diagnostic MT Evaluation over User-defined Linguistic Phenomena

DELiC4MT: A Tool for Diagnostic MT Evaluation over User-defined Linguistic Phenomena This paper demonstrates DELiC4MT, a piece of software that allows the user to perform diagnostic evaluation of machine translation systems over linguistic checkpoints, i.e., source-language lexical elements and grammatical constructions specified by the user. Our integrated tool builds upon best practices, software components and formats developed under different projects and initiatives, focusing on enabling easy adaptation to any language pair and linguistic phenomenon. We provide a description of the different modules that make up the tool, introduce a web demo and present a step-by-step case study of how it can be applied to a specific language pair and linguistic phenomenon.
Welding of die-casted magnesium alloys for production

The importance of light weight magnesium alloys, especially for the automotive industry, has grown significantly during the last years. To fully benefit from the whole designing potential of this material, joining processes have to be developed. Laser beam welding turns out to be very suitable to join magnesium parts. The results of welding magnesium alloys AZ91HP and AM50HP with a 3 kW Nd:YAG laser and a 6 kW CO2 laser with an industrial robot and a gantry robot system are shown from a production point of view. The determination of the process window by analyzing the influence of laser type, power, welding velocity, and shielding gas, as well as the influence of the base material, leads to conclusions about process stability and production tolerances. Further investigations concerning fixturing techniques as well as seam preparation and joint geometry show effects on the process flexibility and the effort to realize high quality seams under production conditions. The investigated process parameters are e.
Modelling of high-order mechanical plate vibration systems by multidimensional wave digital filters

The application of the MDWDF technique, derived from the wave digital filter (WDF) paradigm, to the modelling of a Mindlin plate vibration system is presented. Initial and boundary conditions of the plate vibration system are properly embedded in the MDWDF algorithm in terms of state output quantities, which are fully implemented in the algorithm. More specifically, different types of boundary conditions encountered in practice can be easily fulfilled in a very simple and efficient manner without remodifying the whole algorithm, which is usually proceeded by a finite elements based method with various boundary conditions. This is due to the local connectivity of the MDWDF model, in the sense that the behaviour at any point on the grid is directly influenced only by its nearest-neighbour grid points. Graphical results illustrating the plane wave propagation on a square plate are given for which free edges boundary conditions are fully considered.
ToBI - Team of Bielefeld: The Human-Robot Interaction System for RoboCup@Home 2009

The ToBI robocup team has been newly founded in Jan 2009 in order to proceed existing long-term research in the development of robot companions for domestic environments towards new challenges in more standardized benchmarking procedures, like RoboCup@Home. The main features of the ToBI system are a exibile Active Memory-based architecture that enables the fast integration of new processing modules and new system behaviors and the modeling of mixed-initiative strategies for multi-modal dialog. The overall goal is an out-of-the-box robot that is able to successfully interact with nave users. In this paper we describe the technical basis on which the ToBI system is based and give some insights on previous evaluation experiences.
KOBAS server: a web-based platform for automated annotation and pathway identification

There is an increasing need to automatically annotate a set of genes or proteins (from genome sequencing, DNA microarray analysis or protein 2D gel experiments) using controlled vocabularies and identify the pathways involved, especially the statistically enriched pathways. We have previously demonstrated the KEGG Orthology (KO) as an effective alternative controlled vocabulary and developed a standalone KO-Based Annotation System (KOBAS). Here we report a KOBAS server with a friendly web-based user interface and enhanced functionalities. The server can support input by nucleotide or amino acid sequences or by sequence identifiers in popular databases and can annotate the input with KO terms and KEGG pathways by BLAST sequence similarity or directly ID mapping to genes with known annotations. The server can then identify both frequent and statistically enriched pathways, offering the choices of four statistical tests and the option of multiple testing correction. The server also has a ‘User Space’ in which frequent users may store and manage their data and results online. We demonstrate the usability of the server by finding statistically enriched pathways in a set of upregulated genes in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) hippocampal cornu ammonis 1 (CA1). KOBAS server can be accessed at .
Analysis of influence maximization in large-scale social networks

Influence maximization is an important problem in online social networks. With the scale of social networks increasing, the requirements of solutions for influence maximization are becoming more and more strict. In this paper, we discuss two basic methods to compute the influence in general social networks, and then reveal that the computation of influence in series-parallel graph is in linear time complexity. Finally, we propose an novel method to solve influence maximization and show that it has a good performance.
PPFS: A Scale-Out Distributed File System for Post-Petascale Systems

The convergence of high-performance computing and big data, which has become known as the field of extreme big data, is problematic in that file creation in storage systems such as distributed file systems is not optimized. That is, the large workload leads to the simultaneous creation of many files by many processes when creating checkpoints. The need to improve the file creation processes prompted us to design a scale-out distributed file system for post-petascale systems named PPFS. PPFS consists of PPMDS, a scale-out distributed metadata server, and PPOSS, a scalable distributed storage server for flash storage. High file creation performance of PPMDS was achieved by using a key-value store for metadata storage and non-blocking distributed transactions to update multiple entries simultaneously. PPOSS depends on PPOST, an object storage system that manages underlying low-level storage, such as Fusion IO ioDrive, a flash device connected through PCI express supporting OpenNVM. High file creation performance was attained by implementing the PPFS prototype using file creation optimization, termed bulk creation, to reduce the amount of communication between PPMDS and PPOSS. Moreover, to enhance the I/O performance of PPOSS when the client process and PPOSS run on the same node, PPOSS accesses the local storage device directly. The prototype implementation of PPFS with file creation optimization achieves 119,000 operations per second for file creation when using five metadata servers and 128 client processes, thereby exceeding the performance of IndexFS 2.17 times. With local access optimization, PPOSS reached its limit at a block size of 16 KiB, an improvement of 1.5 times compared to before optimization. Furthermore, this evaluation indicates that PPFS has scalability on file creation and IO performance, that is required for post-petascale systems.
Disturbance observer-based saturated control for a quadrotor landing on a vessel

An autonomous vessel landing control algorithm of a quadrotor is investigated for the situation when the quadrotor hovers above the vessel with input saturation and disturbances. To facilitate the controller design, the problem of vessel landing is converted from general trajectory tracking problem of a quadrotor to a stabilization problem of relative motion. A fully actuated 4-DOF nonlinear relative altitude and attitude model with four control inputs is established. A nonlinear disturbance observer is developed to estimate the disturbances, while a compensation system is incorporated into the controller design to handle the input saturation. Then, a feedback controller is designed to synchronize the altitudes and attitudes of the quadrotor and the vessel. It is proved that the relative altitude and relative attitude converge to a small neighborhood of origin, and all states in the closed-loop system are uniformly ultimately bounded. Numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.
Risk of Chronic Kidney Disease among Patients Developing Mild Renal Impairment during Tenofovir-Containing Antiretroviral Treatment

Background Tenofovir (TDF) can cause kidney injury through tubular dysfunction, with or without drop of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR). Whether mild eGFR reductions during treatment should be considered a reason for prompt TDF discontinuation, however, remains unclear. Methods Patients with normal pre-TDF eGFR levels, who had developed mild renal impairment (i.e., two consecutive eGFR results between 89–60 ml/min) on TDF, were observed until onset of chronic kidney disease (CKD), defined as two eGFR<60 ml/min 3 to 6 months apart. Multivariable Poisson regression analysis was used to investigate whether outcome was associated with current and cumulative use of TDF (modeled as time-varying covariates). Results 2023 (29%) out of 6984 patients developed mild renal impairment on TDF. Among them, 191 progressed to CKD. The incidence of CKD did not significantly differ during TDF treatment (2.6 per 100 PYFU; 95%CI 2.2–3.2) or after its discontinuation (2.2 per 100 PYFU; 95%CI 1.8–2.6). However, the rate of CKD was significantly higher among patients continuing with TDF treatment compared to those who had discontinued it within 6 months of occurrence of mild renal impairment (aIRR 4, 95%CI 2.4–6.8). In contrast, among patients who had maintained TDF >6 months despite mild renal impairment, current TDF use was not associated with a significantly higher rate of CKD. Other significant predictors of CKD were older age, intravenous drug use, diabetes, hypertension, lower pre-TDF eGFR, higher eGFR drop since TDF introduction and longer exposure to TDF. Conclusions Prompt discontinuation of TDF among patients developing mild renal impairment may prevent further progression of renal damage.