Development of a low cost robot system for autonomous measuring of spatial field distributions

A new kind of a modular multi-purpose robot system is developed to measure the spatial field distributions of very large as well as of small and crowded areas. The probe is automatically placed at a number of pre-defined positions where measurements are carried out. The advantages of this system are its very low influence on the measured field as well as its wide area of possible applications. In addition, the initial costs are quite low. In this paper the theory underlying the measurement principle is explained. The accuracy is analyzed and sample measurements are presented

Simplified modeling of EM field coupling to complex cable bundles

In this contribution, the procedure "Equivalent Cable Bundle Method" is used for the simplification of large cable bundles, and it is extended to the application on differential signal lines. The main focus is on the reduction of twisted-pair cables. Furthermore, the process presented here allows to take into account cables with wires that are situated quite close to each other. The procedure is based on a new approach to calculate the geometry of the simplified cable and uses the fact that the line parameters do not uniquely correspond to a certain geometry. For this reason, an optimization algorithm is applied

Combining gemcitabine, oxaliplatin and capecitabine (GEMOXEL) for patients with advanced pancreatic carcinoma (APC): a phase I/II trial

Background: Gemcitabine remains the mainstay of palliative treatment of advanced pancreatic carcinoma (APC). Adding capecitabine or a platinum derivative each significantly prolonged survival in recent meta-analyses. The purpose of this study was to determine dose, safety and preliminary efficacy of a first-line regimen combining all three classes of active cytotoxic drugs in APC. Patients and methods: Chemotherapy-naive patients with locally advanced or metastatic, histologically proven adenocarcinoma of the pancreas were treated with a 21-day regimen of gemcitabine [1000 mg/m2 day (d) 1, d8], escalating doses of oxaliplatin (80-130 mg/m2 d1) and capecitabine (650-800 mg/m2 b.i.d. d1-d14). The recommended dose (RD), determined in the phase I part of the study by interpatient dose escalation in cohorts of three to six patients, was further studied in a two-stage phase II part with the primary end point of response rate by RECIST criteria. Results: Forty-five patients were treated with a total of 203 treatment cycles. Thrombocytopenia and diarrhea were the toxic effects limiting the dose to an RD of gemcitabine 1000 mg/m2 d1, d8; oxaliplatin 130 mg/m2 d1 and capecitabine 650 mg/m2 b.i.d. d1-14. Central independent radiological review showed partial remissions in 41% [95% confidence interval (CI) 26% to 56%] of patients and disease stabilization in 37% (95% CI 22% to 52%) of patients. Conclusion: This triple combination is feasible and, by far, met the predefined efficacy criteria warranting further investigation

Geometric representations for minimalist grammars

We reformulate minimalist grammars as partial functions on term algebras for strings and trees. Using filler/role bindings and tensor product representations, we construct homomorphisms for these data structures into geometric vector spaces. We prove that the structure-building functions as well as simple processors for minimalist languages can be realized by piecewise linear operators in representation space. We also propose harmony, i.e. the distance of an intermediate processing step from the final well-formed state in representation space, as a measure of processing complexity. Finally, we illustrate our findings by means of two particular arithmetic and fractal representations.Comment: 43 pages, 4 figure

Wikipedia vandalism detection: combining natural language, metadata, and reputation features

Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia which anyone can edit. While most edits are constructive, about 7% are acts of vandalism. Such behavior is characterized by modifications made in bad faith; introducing spam and other inappropriate content. In this work, we present the results of an effort to integrate three of the leading approaches to Wikipedia vandalism detection: a spatio-temporal analysis of metadata (STiki), a reputation-based system (WikiTrust), and natural language processing features. The performance of the resulting joint system improves the state-of-the-art from all previous methods and establishes a new baseline for Wikipedia vandalism detection. We examine in detail the contribution of the three approaches, both for the task of discovering fresh vandalism, and for the task of locating vandalism in the complete set of Wikipedia revisions.The authors from Universitat Politècnica de València thank also the MICINN research project TEXT-ENTERPRISE 2.0 TIN2009-13391-C04-03 (Plan I+D+i). UPenn contributions were supported in part by ONR MURI N00014-07-1-0907. This research was partially supported by award 1R01GM089820-01A1 from the National Institute Of General Medical Sciences, and by ISSDM, a UCSC-LANL educational collaboration.Adler, BT.; Alfaro, LD.; Mola Velasco, SM.; Rosso, P.; West, AG. (2011). Wikipedia vandalism detection: combining natural language, metadata, and reputation features. En Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Springer Verlag (Germany). 6609:277-288. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-19437-5_23S2772886609Wikimedia Foundation: Wikipedia (2010) [Online; accessed December 29, 2010]Wikimedia Foundation: Wikistats (2010) [Online; accessed December 29, 2010]Potthast, M.: Crowdsourcing a Wikipedia Vandalism Corpus. In: Proc. of the 33rd Intl. ACM SIGIR Conf. (SIGIR 2010). ACM Press, New York (July 2010)Gralla, P.: U.S. senator: It’s time to ban Wikipedia in schools, libraries, http://blogs.computerworld.com/4598/u_s_senator_its_time_to_ban_wikipedia_in_schools_libraries [Online; accessed November 15, 2010]Olanoff, L.: School officials unite in banning Wikipedia. Seattle Times (November 2007)Mola-Velasco, S.M.: Wikipedia Vandalism Detection Through Machine Learning: Feature Review and New Proposals. In: Braschler, M., Harman, D. (eds.) Notebook Papers of CLEF 2010 LABs and Workshops, Padua, Italy, September 22-23 (2010)Adler, B., de Alfaro, L., Pye, I.: Detecting Wikipedia Vandalism using WikiTrust. In: Braschler, M., Harman, D. (eds.) Notebook Papers of CLEF 2010 LABs and Workshops, Padua, Italy, September 22-23 (2010)West, A.G., Kannan, S., Lee, I.: Detecting Wikipedia Vandalism via Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Revision Metadata. In: EUROSEC 2010: Proceedings of the Third European Workshop on System Security, pp. 22–28 (2010)West, A.G.: STiki: A Vandalism Detection Tool for Wikipedia (2010), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:STikiWikipedia: User: AntiVandalBot – Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:AntiVandalBot (2010) [Online; accessed November 2, 2010]Wikipedia: User:MartinBot – Wikipedia (2010), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:MartinBot [Online; accessed November 2, 2010]Wikipedia: User:ClueBot – Wikipedia (2010), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot [Online; accessed November 2, 2010]Carter, J.: ClueBot and Vandalism on Wikipedia (2008), http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/~carter11/ClueBot.pdf [Online; accessed November 2, 2010]Rodríguez Posada, E.J.: AVBOT: detección y corrección de vandalismos en Wikipedia. NovATIca (203), 51–53 (2010)Potthast, M., Stein, B., Gerling, R.: Automatic Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia. In: Macdonald, C., Ounis, I., Plachouras, V., Ruthven, I., White, R.W. (eds.) ECIR 2008. LNCS, vol. 4956, pp. 663–668. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Smets, K., Goethals, B., Verdonk, B.: Automatic Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia: Towards a Machine Learning Approach. In: WikiAI 2008: Proceedings of the Workshop on Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy, pp. 43–48. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2008)Druck, G., Miklau, G., McCallum, A.: Learning to Predict the Quality of Contributions to Wikipedia. In: WikiAI 2008: Proceedings of the Workshop on Wikipedia and Artificial Intelligence: An Evolving Synergy, pp. 7–12. AAAI Press, Menlo Park (2008)Itakura, K.Y., Clarke, C.L.: Using Dynamic Markov Compression to Detect Vandalism in the Wikipedia. In: SIGIR 2009: Proc. of the 32nd Intl. ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 822–823 (2009)Chin, S.C., Street, W.N., Srinivasan, P., Eichmann, D.: Detecting Wikipedia Vandalism with Active Learning and Statistical Language Models. In: WICOW 2010: Proc. of the 4th Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web (April 2010)Zeng, H., Alhoussaini, M., Ding, L., Fikes, R., McGuinness, D.: Computing Trust from Revision History. In: Intl. Conf. on Privacy, Security and Trust (2006)McGuinness, D., Zeng, H., da Silva, P., Ding, L., Narayanan, D., Bhaowal, M.: Investigation into Trust for Collaborative Information Repositories: A Wikipedia Case Study. In: Proc. of the Workshop on Models of Trust for the Web (2006)Adler, B., de Alfaro, L.: A Content-Driven Reputation System for the Wikipedia. In: WWW 2007: Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference. ACM Press, New York (2007)Belani, A.: Vandalism Detection in Wikipedia: a Bag-of-Words Classifier Approach. Computing Research Repository (CoRR) abs/1001.0700 (2010)Potthast, M., Stein, B., Holfeld, T.: Overview of the 1st International Competition on Wikipedia Vandalism Detection. In: Braschler, M., Harman, D. (eds.) 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Demand-Orientated Power Production from Biogas: Modeling and Simulations under Swedish Conditions

The total share of intermittent renewable electricity is increasing, intensifying the need for power balancing in future electricity systems. Demand-orientated combined heat and power (CHP) production from biogas has potential for this purpose. An agricultural biogas plant, using cattle manure and sugar beet for biogas and CHP production, was analyzed here. The model Dynamic Biogas plant Model (DyBiM) was developed and connected to the Anaerobic Digestion Model No. 1 (ADM1). Flexible scenarios were simulated and compared against a reference scenario with continuous production, to evaluate the technical requirements and economic implications of demand-orientated production. The study was set in Swedish conditions regarding electricity and heat price, and the flexibility approaches assessed were increased CHP and gas storage capacity and feeding management. The results showed that larger gas storage capacity was needed for demand-orientated CHP production but that feeding management reduced the storage requirement because of fast biogas production response to feeding. Income from electricity increased by 10%, applying simple electricity production strategies to a doubled CHP capacity. However, as a result of the currently low Swedish diurnal electricity price variation and lack of subsidies for demand-orientated electricity production, the increase in income was too low to cover the investment costs. Nevertheless, DyBiM proved to be a useful modeling tool for assessing the economic outcome of different flexibility scenarios for demand-orientated CHP production

A Decade of Shared Tasks in Digital Text Forensics at PAN

[EN] Digital text forensics aims at examining the originality and credibility of information in electronic documents and, in this regard, to extract and analyze information about the authors of these documents. The research field has been substantially developed during the last decade. PAN is a series of shared tasks that started in 2009 and significantly contributed to attract the attention of the research community in well-defined digital text forensics tasks. Several benchmark datasets have been developed to assess the state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of tasks. In this paper, we present the evolution of both the examined tasks and the developed datasets during the last decade. We also briefly introduce the upcoming PAN 2019 shared tasks.We are indebted to many colleagues and friends who contributed greatly to PAN's tasks: Maik Anderka, Shlomo Argamon, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Fabio Celli, Fabio Crestani, Walter Daelemans, Andreas Eiselt, Tim Gollub, Parth Gupta, Matthias Hagen, Teresa Holfeld, Patrick Juola, Giacomo Inches, Mike Kestemont, Moshe Koppel, Manuel Montes-y-Gómez, Aurelio Lopez-Lopez, Francisco Rangel, Miguel Angel Sánchez-Pérez, Günther Specht, Michael Tschuggnall, and Ben Verhoeven. Our special thanks go to PAN¿s sponsors throughout the years and not least to the hundreds of participants.Potthast, M.; Rosso, P.; Stamatatos, E.; Stein, B. (2019). A Decade of Shared Tasks in Digital Text Forensics at PAN. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 11438:291-300. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15719-7_39S2913001143

Reporting of Adverse Events in Published and Unpublished Studies of Health Care Interventions : A Systematic Review

BACKGROUND: We performed a systematic review to assess whether we can quantify the underreporting of adverse events (AEs) in the published medical literature documenting the results of clinical trials as compared with other nonpublished sources, and whether we can measure the impact this underreporting has on systematic reviews of adverse events. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Studies were identified from 15 databases (including MEDLINE and Embase) and by handsearching, reference checking, internet searches, and contacting experts. The last database searches were conducted in July 2016. There were 28 methodological evaluations that met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 9 studies compared the proportion of trials reporting adverse events by publication status. The median percentage of published documents with adverse events information was 46% compared to 95% in the corresponding unpublished documents. There was a similar pattern with unmatched studies, for which 43% of published studies contained adverse events information compared to 83% of unpublished studies. A total of 11 studies compared the numbers of adverse events in matched published and unpublished documents. The percentage of adverse events that would have been missed had each analysis relied only on the published versions varied between 43% and 100%, with a median of 64%. Within these 11 studies, 24 comparisons of named adverse events such as death, suicide, or respiratory adverse events were undertaken. In 18 of the 24 comparisons, the number of named adverse events was higher in unpublished than published documents. Additionally, 2 other studies demonstrated that there are substantially more types of adverse events reported in matched unpublished than published documents. There were 20 meta-analyses that reported the odds ratios (ORs) and/or risk ratios (RRs) for adverse events with and without unpublished data. Inclusion of unpublished data increased the precision of the pooled estimates (narrower 95% confidence intervals) in 15 of the 20 pooled analyses, but did not markedly change the direction or statistical significance of the risk in most cases. The main limitations of this review are that the included case examples represent only a small number amongst thousands of meta-analyses of harms and that the included studies may suffer from publication bias, whereby substantial differences between published and unpublished data are more likely to be published. CONCLUSIONS: There is strong evidence that much of the information on adverse events remains unpublished and that the number and range of adverse events is higher in unpublished than in published versions of the same study. The inclusion of unpublished data can also reduce the imprecision of pooled effect estimates during meta-analysis of adverse events