Dual-rod Yb:YAG laser for high-power and high-brightness applications

The authors describe a diode-pumped Yb:YAG laser producing 1,080 W cw with 27.5% optical-optical efficiency and 532 W Q-switched with M{sup 2} = 2.2 and 17% optical-optical efficiency. The laser uses two composite Yb:YAG rods separated by a 90 degree quartz rotator for bifocusing compensation. A microlensed diode array end-pumps each rod using a hollow lens duct for pump delivery. By changing resonator parameters, they can adjust the fundamental mode size and the output beam quality. Using a flattened gaussian intensity profile to calculate the mode fill efficiency and clipping losses, the authors compare experimental data to modeled output power vs beam quality

Visual analytics for text-based railway incident reports

The GB railways collect about 150,000 text-based records each year on potentially dangerous events and the numbers are on the increase in the Close Call System. The huge volume of text requires considerable human effort to its interpretation. This work focuses on visual text analysis techniques of Close Call records to extract safety lessons more quickly and efficiently. This paper treats basic steps for visual text analysis based on an evaluation test using a pre-constructed test set of 150 Close Call records for "Trespass", "Slip/Trip hazards on site" and "Level crossing". The results demonstrate that visual text analysis can be used to identify the risks in a small-scale test set but differences in language use by different cohorts of people interferes with straightforward risk identification in larger sets. This work paves the way to machine-assisted interpretation of text-based safety records which can speed up risk identification in a large corpus of text. It also demonstrates how new possibilities open up to develop interactive visualisations tools that allow data analysts to use text analysis techniques for risk analysis

glossaLAB: Co-Creating Interdisciplinary Knowledge

The paper describes the glossaLAB international project as a contribution to confront the urgent need of knowledge integration frameworks, as required to face global challenges that overwhelm disciplinary knowledge capacity. Under this scope, glossaLAB is devised to make contributions in three main aspects of such endeavor: (i) development of a sound theoretical framework for the unification of knowledge, (ii) establishment of broadly accepted methodologies and tools to facilitate the integration of knowledge, (iii) development of assessment criteria for the qualification of interdisciplinarity undertakings. The paper discusses the main components of the project and the solutions adopted to achieve the intended objectives at three different levels: at the technical level, glossaLAB aims at developing a platform for knowledge integration based on the elucidation of concepts, metaphors, theories and problems, including a semantically- operative recompilation of valuable scattered encyclopedic contents devoted to two entangled transdisciplinary fields: the sciences of systems and information. At the theoretical level, the goal is reducing the redundancy of the conceptual system (defined in terms of “intensional performance” of the contents recompiled), and the elucidation of new concepts. Finally, at the meta-theoretical level, the project aims at assessing the knowledge integration achieved through the co-creation process based on (a) the diversity of the disciplines involved and (b) the integration properties of the conceptual network stablished through the elucidation process.2019-2