bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Routing Driverless Transport Vehicles in Car Assembly with Answer Set Programming
Authors: GEBSER MARTIN , OBERMEIER PHILIPP , SCHAUB TORSTEN , RATSCH-HEITMANN MICHEL , RUNGE MARIO 
Published: August 2018

AbstractAutomated storage and retrieval systems are principal components of modern production and warehouse facilities. In particular, automated guided vehicles nowadays substitute human-operated pallet trucks in transporting production materials between storage locations and assembly stations. While low-level control systems take care of navigating such driverless vehicles along programmed routes and avoid collisions even under unforeseen circumstances, in the common case of multiple vehicles sharing the same operation area, the problem remains how to set up routes such that a collection of transport tasks is accomplished most effectively. We address this prevalent problem in the context of car assembly at Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde GmbH, a large-scale producer of commercial vehicles, where routes for automated guided vehicles used in the production process have traditionally been hand-coded by human engineers. Such ad-hoc methods may suffice as long as a running production process remains in place, while any change in the factory layout or production targets necessitates tedious manual reconfiguration, not to mention the missing portability between different production plants. Unlike this, we propose a declarative approach based on Answer Set Programming to optimize the routes taken by automated guided vehicles for accomplishing transport tasks. The advantages include a transparent and executable problem formalization, provable optimality of routes relative to objective criteria, as well as elaboration tolerance towards particular factory layouts and production targets. Moreover, we demonstrate that our approach is efficient enough to deal with the transport tasks evolving in realistic production processes at the car factory of Mercedes-Benz Ludwigsfelde GmbH.
Phylotastic: An Experiment in Creating, Manipulating, and Evolving Phylogenetic Biology Workflows Using Logic Programming
Authors: HAI NGUYEN THANH , PONTELLI ENRICO , CAO SON TRAN 
Published: August 2018

AbstractEvolutionary Biologists have long struggled with the challenge of developing analysis workflows in a flexible manner, thus facilitating the reuse of phylogenetic knowledge. An evolutionary biology workflow can be viewed as a plan which composes web services that can retrieve, manipulate, and produce phylogenetic trees. The Phylotastic project was launched two years ago as a collaboration between evolutionary biologists and computer scientists, with the goal of developing an open architecture to facilitate the creation of such analysis workflows. While composition of web services is a problem that has been extensively explored in the literature, including within the logic programming domain, the incarnation of the problem in Phylotastic provides a number of additional challenges. Along with the need to integrate preferences and formal ontologies in the description of the desired workflow, evolutionary biologists tend to construct workflows in an incremental manner, by successively refining the workflow, by indicating desired changes (e.g., exclusion of certain services, modifications of the desired output). This leads to the need of successive iterations of incremental replanning, to develop a new workflow that integrates the requested changes while minimizing the changes to the original workflow. This paper illustrates how Phylotastic has addressed the challenges of creating and refining phylogenetic analysis workflows using logic programming technology and how such solutions have been used within the general framework of the Phylotastic project.
Incremental and Iterative Learning of Answer Set Programs from Mutually Distinct Examples
Authors: MITRA ARINDAM , BARAL CHITTA 
Published: August 2018

AbstractOver the years the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has produced several datasets which have given the machine learning algorithms the opportunity to learn various skills across various domains. However, a subclass of these machine learning algorithms that aimed at learning logic programs, namely the Inductive Logic Programming algorithms, have often failed at the task due to the vastness of these datasets. This has impacted the usability of knowledge representation and reasoning techniques in the development of AI systems. In this research, we try to address this scalability issue for the algorithms that learn answer set programs. We present a sound and complete algorithm which takes the input in a slightly different manner and performs an efficient and more user controlled search for a solution. We show via experiments that our algorithm can learn from two popular datasets from machine learning community, namely bAbl (a question answering dataset) and MNIST (a dataset for handwritten digit recognition), which to the best of our knowledge was not previously possible. The system is publicly available athttps://goo.gl/KdWAcV.
Exploiting Answer Set Programming with External Sources for Meta-Interpretive Learning
Authors: KAMINSKI TOBIAS , EITER THOMAS , INOUE KATSUMI 
Published: August 2018

AbstractMeta-Interpretive Learning (MIL) learns logic programs from examples by instantiating meta-rules, which is implemented by the Metagol system based on Prolog. Viewing MIL-problems as combinatorial search problems, they can alternatively be solved by employing Answer Set Programming (ASP), which may result in performance gains as a result of efficient conflict propagation. However, a straightforward ASP-encoding of MIL results in a huge search space due to a lack of procedural bias and the need for grounding. To address these challenging issues, we encode MIL in the HEX-formalism, which is an extension of ASP that allows us to outsource the background knowledge, and we restrict the search space to compensate for a procedural bias in ASP. This way, the import of constants from the background knowledge can for a given type of meta-rules be limited to relevant ones. Moreover, by abstracting from term manipulations in the encoding and by exploiting the HEX interface mechanism, the import of such constants can be entirely avoided in order to mitigate the grounding bottleneck. An experimental evaluation shows promising results.
Specifying and Verbalising Answer Set Programs in Controlled Natural Language
Authors: SCHWITTER ROLF 
Published: August 2018

AbstractWe show how a bi-directional grammar can be used to specify and verbalise answer set programs in controlled natural language. We start from a program specification in controlled natural language and translate this specification automatically into an executable answer set program. The resulting answer set program can be modified following certain naming conventions and the revised version of the program can then be verbalised in the same subset of natural language that was used as specification language. The bi-directional grammar is parametrised for processing and generation, deals with referring expressions, and exploits symmetries in the data structure of the grammar rules whenever these grammar rules need to be duplicated. We demonstrate that verbalisation requires sentence planning in order to aggregate similar structures with the aim to improve the readability of the generated specification. Without modifications, the generated specification is always semantically equivalent to the original one; our bi-directional grammar is the first one that allows for semantic round-tripping in the context of controlled natural language processing.
Disciplinary nature of astrobiology and astrobioethic’s epistemic foundations
Authors: Chon-Torres Octavio A. 
Published: August 2018

AbstractAstrobioethics is an emerging discipline that studies, evaluates and analyses the moral, legal and social issues of the search for life in the Universe. As a new field of study, it requires an epistemological foundation to be able to be recognized as an academic discipline. In order to achieve this, it is important to understand the disciplinary nature of astrobiology as a transdisciplinary form of research, above the multi and interdisciplinary levels, although this does not necessarily mean discarding them. In addition, the questions and topics of each subdivision of astrobioethics studies are specified and explained in this paper.
Beauty: ALingua Francafor Environmental Law?
Authors: Richardson Benjamin J. , Barritt Emily , Bowman Megan 
Published: August 2018

AbstractThis article investigates whether beauty in nature can provide a global language to inform environmental governance, such as by providing shared values and collaborative approaches across and within different cultures. Because art mediates how many people experience environmental aesthetics, such as through photography and music, this enquiry extends to the arts. As is the case for other aesthetic values, beauty is ultimately about relationships and ways of knowing our environment, and the law can best engage with such values through interpretive guidance and processes for participatory decision making. Prescriptive codification of beauty ‘standards’ is generally not a realistic goal for lawmakers. The article enriches our understanding of how aesthetics can contribute to human beings’ emotional empathy and ethical commitment to environmental stewardship, and identifies some conceptual and methodological difficulties that militate against beauty being alingua francafor environmental law.
Surface Rupture Morphology and Vertical Slip Distribution of the 1959Mw7.2 Hebgen Lake (Montana) Earthquake From Airborne Lidar Topography
Authors: Johnson Kendra L. , Nissen Edwin , Lajoie Lia 
Published: August 2018

AbstractThe 1959Mw∼7.2 Hebgen Lake earthquake is among the largest continental normal faulting events recorded, as well as one of the earliest associated with a multifault rupture. Multimeter vertical slip was observed on three main, morphologically distinct strands: the Hebgen fault and southeastern section of the Red Canyon fault, which both follow sharp topographic rangefronts, and the Red Canyon fault Kirkwood Ridge section, which cuts steep topography in the footwall of the Hebgen fault. We augment early field, seismological, and geodetic studies by investigating the modern surface rupture using newly acquired airborne lidar topography. By estimating throw from scarp profiling of the ∼36.5 km primary surface rupture, we show both that peak 1959 slip occurred at a structurally mature part of the fault and that many 1959 slip minima are associated with clear structural complexities. Vertical slip often substantially exceeds throw measured at the fault free face immediately after the earthquake; the scarps do not conclusively express beveled forms characteristic of repeated slip and degredation, yet must in places capture both the 1959 earthquake (for which we estimate an average throw of 2.64 m) and one or two preceding latest Pleistocene–Holocene events known from trenching. This has wider, cautionary implications for interpreting paleo‐earthquake chronologies and deriving magnitudes from morphologically simple scarps. By comparing 1959‐only and multievent vertical displacement populations, and considering preliminary paleoseismic data, we suggest that large surface‐rupturing earthquakes on the Hebgen and Red Canyon faults involve highly variable slip distributions.
Simulation and Quasi‐linear Theory of Magnetospheric Bernstein Mode Instability
Authors: Lee Junggi , Yoon Peter H. , Seough Jungjoon , López Rodrigo A. , Hwang Junga , Lee Jaejin , Choe G. S. 
Published: August 2018

AbstractMultiple‐harmonic electron cyclotron emissions, often known in the literature as the (n + 1/2)fce emissions, are a common occurrence in the magnetosphere. These emissions are often interpreted in terms of the Bernstein mode instability driven by the electron loss cone velocity distribution function. Alternatively, they can be interpreted as quasi‐thermal emission of electrostatic fluctuations in magnetized plasmas. The present paper carries out a one‐dimensional relativistic electromagnetic particle‐in‐cell simulation and also employs a reduced quasi‐linear kinetic theoretical analysis in order to compare against the simulation. It is found that the Bernstein mode instability is indeed excited by the loss cone distribution of electrons, but the saturation level of the electrostatic mode is quite low, and that the effects of instability on the electrons is rather minimal. This supports the interpretation of multiple‐harmonic emission in the context of the spontaneous emission and reabsorption in quasi‐thermal magnetized plasma in the magnetosphere.
Defining the Effect of Stratification in Coastal Aquifers Using a New Parameter
Authors: Rathore Saubhagya Singh , Zhao Yue , Lu Chunhui , Luo Jian 
Published: August 2018

AbstractThis study, building on the comprehensive discharge potential theory presented by Strack and Ausk (2015) https://doi.org/10.1002/2015WR016887, discovered that the effects of layer arrangements on steady state seawater intrusion and groundwater discharge in stratified confined coastal aquifers can be approximated via transmissivity centroid elevation (TCE), defined as the summation of the product of the transmissivity and elevation (above the aquifer base) of each layer divided by the total aquifer transmissivity. Specifically, a higher TCE in aquifers with high transmissivity layers at high elevations results in a more landward interface‐toe position in both flux‐ and head‐controlled coastal aquifer systems, as well as a higher freshwater discharge rate in head‐controlled systems. Furthermore, the toe position in head‐controlled stratified systems is only a function of the TCE and independent of the total transmissivity. Therefore, we can estimate the upper limit of seawater intrusion, that is, the furthest inland toe position, in stratified aquifers by letting the TCE equal to the elevation of the aquifer top. Another important implication of our results is that the interface toe position in coastal aquifers containing a preferential flow layer is controlled by the elevation of the preferential flow layer. Additionally, effective parameters and homogenization of the interface flow in stratified aquifers were developed to approximate the toe position and discharge rate. The results developed in this study provide significant advances in understanding the effect of aquifer stratification on groundwater flow and seawater intrusion in coastal aquifers.
Heterogeneous integration of contact-printed semiconductor nanowires for high-performance devices on large areas
Authors: García Núñez Carlos , Liu Fengyuan , Navaraj William Taube , Christou Adamos , Shakthivel Dhayalan , Dahiya Ravinder 
Published: August 2018

AbstractIn this work, we have developed a contact-printing system to efficiently transfer the bottom-up and top-down semiconductor nanowires (NWs), preserving their as-grown features with a good control over their electronic properties. In the close-loop configuration, the printing system is controlled with parameters such as contact pressure and sliding speed/stroke. Combined with the dry pre-treatment of the receiver substrate, the system prints electronic layers with high NW density (7 NWs/μm for bottom-up ZnO and 3 NWs/μm for top-down Si NWs), NW transfer yield and reproducibility. We observed compactly packed (~115 nm average diameters of NWs, with NW-to-NW spacing ~165 nm) and well-aligned NWs (90% with respect to the printing direction). We have theoretically and experimentally analysed the role of contact force on NW print dynamics to investigate the heterogeneous integration of ZnO and Si NWs over pre-selected areas. Moreover, the contact-printing system was used to fabricate ZnO and Si NW-based ultraviolet (UV) photodetectors (PDs) with Wheatstone bridge (WB) configuration on rigid and flexible substrates. The UV PDs based on the printed ensemble of NWs demonstrate high efficiency, a high photocurrent to dark current ratio (>104) and reduced thermal variations as a result of inherent self-compensation of WB arrangement. Due to statistically lesser dimensional variations in the ensemble of NWs, the UV PDs made from them have exhibited uniform response.
Discovery of cationic nonribosomal peptides as Gram-negative antibiotics through global genome mining
Authors: Li Yong-Xin , Zhong Zheng , Zhang Wei-Peng , Qian Pei-Yuan 
Published: August 2018

AbstractThe worldwide prevalence of infections caused by antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative bacteria poses a serious threat to public health due to the limited therapeutic alternatives. Cationic peptides represent a large family of antibiotics and have attracted interest due to their diverse chemical structures and potential for combating drug-resistant Gram-negative pathogens. Here, we analyze 7395 bacterial genomes to investigate their capacity for biosynthesis of cationic nonribosomal peptides with activity against Gram-negative bacteria. Applying this approach, we identify two novel compounds (brevicidine and laterocidine) showing bactericidal activities against antibiotic-resistant Gram-negative pathogens, such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa and colistin-resistant Escherichia coli, and an apparently low risk of resistance. The two peptides show efficacy against E. coli in a mouse thigh infection model. These findings may contribute to the discovery and development of Gram-negative antibiotics.
Two different STAT1 gain-of-function mutations lead to diverse IFN-γ-mediated gene expression
Authors: Ovadia Adi , Sharfe Nigel , Hawkins Cynthia , Laughlin Suzanne , Roifman Chaim M. 
Published: August 2018

AbstractSignal transducer and activator of transcription 1 (STAT1) regulates multiple biological processes downstream of a variety of cytokine receptors in many cell types. Heterozygous gain-of-function (GOF) mutations in STAT1 have been associated with a diverse phenotype encompassing chronic mucocutaneous candidiasis (CMCC) and declining immunity. There is no clear correlation between STAT1 domain-specific mutations and phenotype, and it remains unclear why GOF mutations in STAT1 result in such a wide spectrum of clinical presentations. To begin exploring this dilemma, we have studied the patterns of gene expression mediated by two different GOF mutations. Analysis of IFN-γ response elements using RNA microarrays in cells transfected with the rare H629Y mutant or the common R274G mutant showed distinct patterns of gene expression. We show here that the impact of GOF mutations in STAT1 is variant-specific. This difference in gene expression may explain the diversity in clinical manifestations experienced by these patients.
Differential expression of serum biomarkers in hemodialysis patients with mild cognitive decline: A prospective single-center cohort study
Authors: Zhu Bin , Jin Li-Na , Shen Jian-Qin , Liu Jin-Feng , Jiang Ri-Yue , Yang Ling , Zhang Jie , Luo Ai-Lin , Miao Li-Ying , Yang Chun 
Published: August 2018

AbstractStudies suggest that hemodialysis patients are at a higher risk for cognitive decline than healthy individuals; however, underlying mechanisms have not been fully elucidated. We aimed to investigate the roles of serum biomarkers, such as brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), inflammatory cytokines, fibroblast growth factor (FGF)-23 and its co-receptor α-klotho and platelet (PLT) count in mild cognitive decline (MCD) of patients undergoing hemodialysis in this prospective cohort study. Serum levels of BDNF, tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α, interleukin (IL)-6 and the number of PLT were significantly altered in the MCD group compared with those in healthy controls (HCs) or those with normal cognitive function (NCF). Although serum α-klotho and FGF-23 levels were significantly altered in the MCD group, there were no statistical differences between the MCD and NCF groups. Serum BDNF levels and PLT counts were significantly correlated with cognitive test scores. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves demonstrated that BDNF and PLT were potential biomarkers for improved MCD diagnosis in patients with hemodialysis. These findings suggest that hemodialysis-related MCD is associated with altered BDNF, TNF-α and IL-6 levels as well as PLT counts and that serum BDNF levels and PLT counts are potential biomarkers for hemodialysis-related MCD diagnosis.
Colicin FY inhibits pathogenic Yersinia enterocolitica in mice
Authors: Bosák Juraj , Micenková Lenka , Hrala Matěj , Pomorská Katarína , Kunova Bosakova Michaela , Krejci Pavel , Göpfert Eduard , Faldyna Martin , Šmajs David 
Published: August 2018

AbstractYersiniosis belongs to the common foodborne diseases around the world, and frequently manifests as diarrhea that can be treated with probiotics. Colicin FY is an antibacterial agent produced by bacteria and it is capable of specific growth inhibition of Yersinia enterocolitica, the causative agent of gastrointestinal yersiniosis. In this study, recombinant E. coli producing colicin FY were constructed, using both known probiotic strains EcH22 and EcColinfant, and the newly isolated murine strains Ec1127 and Ec1145. All E. coli strains producing colicin FY inhibited growth of pathogenic Y. enterocolitica during co-cultivation in vitro. In dysbiotic mice treated with streptomycin, E. coli strains producing colicin FY inhibited progression of Y. enterocolitica infections. This growth inhibition was not observed in mice with normal gut microflora, likely due to insufficient colonization capacity of E. coli strains and/or due to spatial differences in intestinal niches. Isogenic Y. enterocolitica producing colicin FY was constructed and shown to inhibit pathogenic Y. enterocolitica in mice with normal microflora. Evidence of in vivo antimicrobial activity of colicin FY may have utility in the treatment of Y. enterocolitica infections.
The human iron-proteome†
Authors: Andreini Claudia , Putignano Valeria , Rosato Antonio , Banci Lucia 
Published: August 2018

Abstract
Organisms from all kingdoms of life use iron-proteins in a multitude of functional processes. We applied a bioinformatics approach to investigate the human portfolio of iron-proteins. We separated iron-proteins based on the chemical nature of their metal-containing cofactors: individual iron ions, heme cofactors and iron–sulfur clusters. We found that about 2% of human genes encode an iron-protein. Of these, 35% are proteins binding individual iron ions, 48% are heme-binding proteins and 17% are iron–sulfur proteins. More than half of the human iron-proteins have a catalytic function. Indeed, we predict that 6.5% of all human enzymes are iron-dependent. This percentage is quite different for the various enzyme classes. Human oxidoreductases feature the largest fraction of iron-dependent family members (about 37%). The distribution of iron proteins in the various cellular compartments is uneven. In particular, the mitochondrion and the endoplasmic reticulum are enriched in iron-proteins with respect to the average content of the cell. Finally, we observed that genes encoding iron-proteins are more frequently associated to pathologies than the all other human genes on average. The present research provides an extensive overview of iron usage by the human proteome, and highlights several specific features of the physiological role of iron ions in human cells.