Out-of-plane seismic response of stone masonry walls: experimental and analytical study of real piers

This paper presents the application of an existing simplified displacement-based procedure to the characterization of the nonlinear force-displacement relationship for the out-of-plane behaviour of unreinforced traditional masonry walls. According to this procedure, tri-linear models based on three different energy based criteria were constructed and confronted with three experimental tests on existing stone masonry constructions. Moreover, a brief introduction is presented regarding the main characteristics of the in situ cyclic testing recently carried out using distributed loads, as well as results obtained during the experimental campaigns performed. The comparison between the experimental and the analytical results are presented and discussed

Discontinuous Transition in a Boundary Driven Contact Process

The contact process is a stochastic process which exhibits a continuous, absorbing-state phase transition in the Directed Percolation (DP) universality class. In this work, we consider a contact process with a bias in conjunction with an active wall. This model exhibits waves of activity emanating from the active wall and, when the system is supercritical, propagating indefinitely as travelling (Fisher) waves. In the subcritical phase the activity is localised near the wall. We study the phase transition numerically and show that certain properties of the system, notably the wave velocity, are discontinuous across the transition. Using a modified Fisher equation to model the system we elucidate the mechanism by which the the discontinuity arises. Furthermore we establish relations between properties of the travelling wave and DP critical exponents.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figure

Chinese–Spanish neural machine translation enhanced with character and word bitmap fonts

Recently, machine translation systems based on neural networks have reached state-of-the-art results for some pairs of languages (e.g., German–English). In this paper, we are investigating the performance of neural machine translation in Chinese–Spanish, which is a challenging language pair. Given that the meaning of a Chinese word can be related to its graphical representation, this work aims to enhance neural machine translation by using as input a combination of: words or characters and their corresponding bitmap fonts. The fact of performing the interpretation of every word or character as a bitmap font generates more informed vectorial representations. Best results are obtained when using words plus their bitmap fonts obtaining an improvement (over a competitive neural MT baseline system) of almost six BLEU, five METEOR points and ranked coherently better in the human evaluation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version