Experimental Methodology for Estimation of Local Heat Fluxes and Burning Rates in Steady Laminar Boundary Layer Diffusion Flames.

Modeling the realistic burning behavior of condensed-phase fuels has remained out of reach, in part because of an inability to resolve the complex interactions occurring at the interface between gas-phase flames and condensed-phase fuels. The current research provides a technique to explore the dynamic relationship between a combustible condensed fuel surface and gas-phase flames in laminar boundary layers. Experiments have previously been conducted in both forced and free convective environments over both solid and liquid fuels. A unique methodology, based on the Reynolds Analogy, was used to estimate local mass burning rates and flame heat fluxes for these laminar boundary layer diffusion flames utilizing local temperature gradients at the fuel surface. Local mass burning rates and convective and radiative heat feedback from the flames were measured in both the pyrolysis and plume regions by using temperature gradients mapped near the wall by a two-axis traverse system. These experiments are time-consuming and can be challenging to design as the condensed fuel surface burns steadily for only a limited period of time following ignition. The temperature profiles near the fuel surface need to be mapped during steady burning of a condensed fuel surface at a very high spatial resolution in order to capture reasonable estimates of local temperature gradients. Careful corrections for radiative heat losses from the thermocouples are also essential for accurate measurements. For these reasons, the whole experimental setup needs to be automated with a computer-controlled traverse mechanism, eliminating most errors due to positioning of a micro-thermocouple. An outline of steps to reproducibly capture near-wall temperature gradients and use them to assess local burning rates and heat fluxes is provided

Distantly Labeling Data for Large Scale Cross-Document Coreference

Cross-document coreference, the problem of resolving entity mentions across multi-document collections, is crucial to automated knowledge base construction and data mining tasks. However, the scarcity of large labeled data sets has hindered supervised machine learning research for this task. In this paper we develop and demonstrate an approach based on ``distantly-labeling'' a data set from which we can train a discriminative cross-document coreference model. In particular we build a dataset of more than a million people mentions extracted from 3.5 years of New York Times articles, leverage Wikipedia for distant labeling with a generative model (and measure the reliability of such labeling); then we train and evaluate a conditional random field coreference model that has factors on cross-document entities as well as mention-pairs. This coreference model obtains high accuracy in resolving mentions and entities that are not present in the training data, indicating applicability to non-Wikipedia data. Given the large amount of data, our work is also an exercise demonstrating the scalability of our approach.Comment: 16 pages, submitted to ECML 201

On The Dynamics of a Closed Viscous Universe

We use a dynamical systems approach based on the method of orthonormal frames to study the dynamics of a non-tilted Bianchi Type IX cosmological model with a bulk and shear viscous fluid source. We begin by completing a detailed fix-point analysis which give the local sinks, sources and saddles of the dynamical system. We then analyze the global dynamics by finding the $\alpha$-and $\omega$-limit sets which give an idea of the past and future asymptotic behavior of the system. The fixed points were found to be a flat Friedmann-LeMa\^{i}tre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) solution, Bianchi Type $II$ solution, Kasner circle, Jacobs disc, Bianchi Type $VII_{0}$ solutions, and several closed FLRW solutions in addition to the Einstein static universe solution. Each equilibrium point was described in both its expanding and contracting epochs. We conclude the paper with some numerical experiments that shed light on the global dynamics of the system along with its heteroclinic orbits. With respect to past asymptotic states, we were able to conclude that the Jacobs disc in the expanding epoch was a source of the system along with the flat FLRW solution in a contracting epoch. With respect to future asymptotic states, we were able to show that the flat FLRW solution in an expanding epoch along with the Jacobs disc in the contracting epoch were sinks of the system. We were also able to demonstrate a new result with respect to the Einstein static universe. Namely, we gave certain conditions on the parameter space such that the Einstein static universe has an associated stable subspace. We were however, not able to conclusively say anything about whether a closed FLRW model could be a past or future asymptotic state of the model