3,045 research outputs found

    Functional Nanomaterials and Polymer Nanocomposites: Current Uses and Potential Applications

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    This book covers a broad range of subjects, from smart nanoparticles and polymer nanocomposite synthesis and the study of their fundamental properties to the fabrication and characterization of devices and emerging technologies with smart nanoparticles and polymer integration

    Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion. Collected Works, Volume 5

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    This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered. First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes. Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification. Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well

    Transition 2.0: Re-establishing Constitutional Democracy in EU Member States

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    The central question of Transition 2.0 is this: what (and how) may a new government do to re-establish constitutional democracy, as well as repair membership within the European Union, without breaching the European rule of law? This volume demonstrates that EU law and international commitments impose constraints but also offer tools and assistance for facilitating the way back after rule of law and democratic backsliding. The various contributions explore the constitutional, legal, and social framework of 'Transition 2.0'.Dieser Band zeigt, dass das EU-Recht und die internationalen Verpflichtungen zwar Zwänge auferlegen, aber auch Instrumente und Hilfestellungen bieten, um den Weg zurück in die Europäische Union nach Rechtsstaatlichkeitsdefiziten und demokratischen Rückschritten zu erleichtern. Die verschiedenen Beiträge untersuchen den verfassungsrechtlichen, rechtlichen und sozialen Rahmen des "Übergangs 2.0"

    Advances in automatic terminology processing: methodology and applications in focus

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    A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.The information and knowledge era, in which we are living, creates challenges in many fields, and terminology is not an exception. The challenges include an exponential growth in the number of specialised documents that are available, in which terms are presented, and the number of newly introduced concepts and terms, which are already beyond our (manual) capacity. A promising solution to this ‘information overload’ would be to employ automatic or semi-automatic procedures to enable individuals and/or small groups to efficiently build high quality terminologies from their own resources which closely reflect their individual objectives and viewpoints. Automatic terminology processing (ATP) techniques have already proved to be quite reliable, and can save human time in terminology processing. However, they are not without weaknesses, one of which is that these techniques often consider terms to be independent lexical units satisfying some criteria, when terms are, in fact, integral parts of a coherent system (a terminology). This observation is supported by the discussion of the notion of terms and terminology and the review of existing approaches in ATP presented in this thesis. In order to overcome the aforementioned weakness, we propose a novel methodology in ATP which is able to extract a terminology as a whole. The proposed methodology is based on knowledge patterns automatically extracted from glossaries, which we considered to be valuable, but overlooked resources. These automatically identified knowledge patterns are used to extract terms, their relations and descriptions from corpora. The extracted information can facilitate the construction of a terminology as a coherent system. The study also aims to discuss applications of ATP, and describes an experiment in which ATP is integrated into a new NLP application: multiplechoice test item generation. The successful integration of the system shows that ATP is a viable technology, and should be exploited more by other NLP applications

    Radio frequency communication and fault detection for railway signalling

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    The continuous and swift progression of both wireless and wired communication technologies in today's world owes its success to the foundational systems established earlier. These systems serve as the building blocks that enable the enhancement of services to cater to evolving requirements. Studying the vulnerabilities of previously designed systems and their current usage leads to the development of new communication technologies replacing the old ones such as GSM-R in the railway field. The current industrial research has a specific focus on finding an appropriate telecommunication solution for railway communications that will replace the GSM-R standard which will be switched off in the next years. Various standardization organizations are currently exploring and designing a radiofrequency technology based standard solution to serve railway communications in the form of FRMCS (Future Railway Mobile Communication System) to substitute the current GSM-R. Bearing on this topic, the primary strategic objective of the research is to assess the feasibility to leverage on the current public network technologies such as LTE to cater to mission and safety critical communication for low density lines. The research aims to identify the constraints, define a service level agreement with telecom operators, and establish the necessary implementations to make the system as reliable as possible over an open and public network, while considering safety and cybersecurity aspects. The LTE infrastructure would be utilized to transmit the vital data for the communication of a railway system and to gather and transmit all the field measurements to the control room for maintenance purposes. Given the significance of maintenance activities in the railway sector, the ongoing research includes the implementation of a machine learning algorithm to detect railway equipment faults, reducing time and human analysis errors due to the large volume of measurements from the field

    Sensitivity analysis of polar orbiter motion to lunar viscoelastic tidal deformation

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    We investigate the impact of viscoelastic tidal deformation of the Moon on the motion of a polar orbiter. The dissipative effects in the Moon’s interior, i.e., tidal phase lags, are modeled as Fourier series sampled at given frequencies associated with linear combinations of Delaunay arguments, the fundamental parameters describing the lunar motion around the Earth and the Sun. We implement the tidal model to evaluate the temporal lunar gravity field and the induced perturbation on the orbiter. We validate the numerical scheme via a frequency analysis of the perturbed orbital motion. We show that, in the case of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at a low altitude of less than 200 km, the main lunar tides and hence the potential Love numbers around the monthly and some multiple frequencies are dynamically separable. The omission of those effects in practice introduces a position error at the level of a few decimeters within 10 days

    In-vivo corneal confocal microscopy in chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy

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    Chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN) is a debilitating condition affecting up to 80% of treated patients with severe impact on their quality of life. While some patients experience improvement in signs and symptoms after dose reduction or cessation of treatment, many develop chronic neuropathy which can last for years leading to high economic and disease burden. Assessment of CIPN currently relies on crude severity grading by clinicians, subjective patient questionnaires and nerve conduction studies limited to large nerve fibre assessment. Unfortunately, there is still an absence of reliable and efficient methods which can provide sensitive endpoint measures particularly with small nerve fibre assessments. While ocular surface neural changes have been well established as potential diagnostic and prognostic markers in other aetiologies of peripheral neuropathy particularly diabetes, there have been limited studies in CIPN. Hence, the overall aim of this thesis was to investigate whether neural changes on the ocular surface occurred with neurotoxic chemotherapy along with CIPN development. This was explored across several studies primarily with in-vivo corneal confocal microscopy (CCM). The first series, comprised of five cross-sectional studies, assessed patients who have already completed neurotoxic chemotherapy treatment for cancer and may have persistent CIPN. Neurotoxic chemotherapeutic drugs including taxanes or platinum compounds were the focus as these were the most commonly associated with CIPN. Chapter 2 analysed the reproducibility of corneal nerve image selection and analysis outcomes from the central cornea and inferior whorl region, a distinct landmark of the sub-basal nerve plexus. Analysis of both regions produced reliable and reproducible findings, although the inferior whorl region had slightly higher variability compared to the central cornea. This study also demonstrated that complex inferior whorl patterns, more commonly found in patients with CIPN compared to healthy individuals, may reduce reproducibility of image selection and analysis. Chapter 3 assessed whether corneal nerve damage occurred in patients who have already completed treatment with neurotoxic chemotherapy prior to assessment. This study established that there was corneal nerve reduction particularly in patients treated with paclitaxel who still had peripheral neuropathy post-treatment cessation, and this reduction was associated with worse fine hand dexterity. Chapter 4 then investigated whether the loss of nerves described in the previous study contributed to ocular surface discomfort associated with dry eye disease, which is a widespread and overlooked condition severely impacting quality of life analogous to CIPN. In this study, paclitaxel-treated patients with CIPN who had more severe corneal nerve fibre reduction, also had higher risk of suffering from ocular surface discomfort and worse visual function compared to patients without neuropathy and healthy controls. The study highlighted the need for eye care clinicians and medical oncologists to be aware of such ocular surface symptoms even in those who have completed neurotoxic chemotherapy treatment. Chapter 5 investigated corneal dendritic cells which are antigen-presenting cells and potent initiators of inflammatory responses residing in the sub-basal corneal nerve plexus. This study was conducted as these immune cells can also be observed with CCM, and neuroinflammation and immune cell infiltration have been implicated in the pathophysiology of CIPN. The findings indicated that there was an elevated presence of immature dendritic cell density in oxaliplatin-treated patients well after treatment cessation, but not in paclitaxel-treated patients. Chapter 6 evaluated the concentration of substance P, a sensory neuropeptide primarily expressed by small nerve fibres in the cornea and essential for maintenance of ocular surface health, in the tears. While the previous study demonstrated elevated dendritic cell density in oxaliplatin-treated patients, this study showed reduced substance P concentration in paclitaxel-treated patients instead. These two studies further emphasise potential differences in pathophysiological mechanisms underlying CIPN associated with these two drugs. Chapter 7 involved a longitudinal study which observed ocular surface and peripheral neuropathic changes during the treatment period, and monitoring patients up to twelve months post-treatment cessation. The study found a progressive loss in corneal nerve parameters with increasing cumulative dose from baseline to end of treatment particularly with taxane treatment, while other ocular surface measures including corneal dendritic cells and tear film substance P levels did not have significant changes. The findings indicated a potential mixed pattern of small and large nerve fibre involvement with taxane treatment, while oxaliplatin affects predominantly large nerve fibres. Corneal nerve fibre length measured during the treatment period was also lower in patients who continued to have persistent CIPN after treatment cessation compared to patients who did not, indicating the potential for early detection of corneal nerve fibre loss as an indicator of CIPN progression. Future studies investigating corneal nerve changes at multiple timepoints in larger studies involving taxane-treated patients may provide greater insight into the diagnostic and predictive utility of CCM in CIPN. Improvements in CCM instrumentation and methodology may also contribute to better assessment of the state of the sub-basal corneal nerve plexus. The discussion section further explores these issues in relation to the clinical applicability or scalability of CCM and potential solutions to improve imaging capabilities in the future
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