The Early California Cultural Atlas

The Early California Cultural Atlas (ECCA) is envisioned as an interactive website that will integrate and manage historical resources, enable analysis of historical data related to the colonization and settlement of California, display research results in the form of maps and other visualizations, and educate students from elementary school to the university. This project is interdisciplinary and collaborative; it will draw upon the expertise of librarians, archivists, research scholars, software engineers, technical experts, California Indians, and primary school teachers. The ECCA represents a new partnership between existing programs, innovative scholars, and accomplished educators

The Double Path of Expansive Learning in Complex Socio-Technical Change Processes

The purpose of this article is to describe how expansive learning in organisations can become a resource for learning in a wider community of practice (CoP). The “developmental work research” approach (DWR) based on cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) is beneficial for analysing and interpreting the requirements in a field of action. Engeström’s specific form of “action research” focuses on expansive learning in activity systems. However, complex socio-technical change processes cannot be initiated and managed by the local community of practise alone. In order to establish the use of new tools, new methodologies or organisational solutions in a field of work, a double path of expansive learning is needed: Findings from the participative analysis and interpretation of contradictions in the local activity system have to be transferred to wider communities of practice. This paper illustrates a double path of expansive learning by presenting the experiences of research and development in machine and plant engineering companies in Germany. In the AQUIMO project, a project team has developed an adaptable software tool for multidisciplinary mechatronical engineering and created a related qualification program. The support from external social researchers has helped to initiate, disseminate and establish new ways to organise the division of labour in teams of engineers.</p

Deep Projective 3D Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation of 3D point clouds is a challenging problem with numerous real-world applications. While deep learning has revolutionized the field of image semantic segmentation, its impact on point cloud data has been limited so far. Recent attempts, based on 3D deep learning approaches (3D-CNNs), have achieved below-expected results. Such methods require voxelizations of the underlying point cloud data, leading to decreased spatial resolution and increased memory consumption. Additionally, 3D-CNNs greatly suffer from the limited availability of annotated datasets. In this paper, we propose an alternative framework that avoids the limitations of 3D-CNNs. Instead of directly solving the problem in 3D, we first project the point cloud onto a set of synthetic 2D-images. These images are then used as input to a 2D-CNN, designed for semantic segmentation. Finally, the obtained prediction scores are re-projected to the point cloud to obtain the segmentation results. We further investigate the impact of multiple modalities, such as color, depth and surface normals, in a multi-stream network architecture. Experiments are performed on the recent Semantic3D dataset. Our approach sets a new state-of-the-art by achieving a relative gain of 7.9 %, compared to the previous best approach.Comment: Submitted to CAIP 201

The Early California Cultural Atlas

European settlement in North America and the establishment of missions to Indians initiated dramatic demographic, environmental, religious, and social change. The Early California Cultural Atlas (ECCA) is a digital history project that seeks to further explore and illuminate these historical developments in colonial California between 1769 and 1850. The ECCA is an emerging interactive website that integrates and manages historical resources, enables analysis of data related to the colonization and settlement of California, displays research results in the form of maps and other visualizations, and educates students from elementary school to the university. This project draws upon the expertise of librarians, archivists, historians, anthropologists, geographers, software engineers, technical experts, California Indians, and primary school teachers

Effects of Different R ratios on Fatigue Crack Growth in Laser Peened Friction Stir Welds

The influence of laser peening on the fatigue crack growth behavior of friction stir welded (FSW) Aluminum Alloy (AA) 7075-T7351 sheets was investigated. The surface modification resulting from the peening process on the fatigue crack growth of FSW was assessed for two different R ratios. The investigation indicated a significant decrease in fatigue crack growth rates resulting from using laser shock peening compared with unpeened, welded and unwelded specimens. The slower fatigue crack growth rate was attributed to the compressive residual stresses induced by the peening

Feasibility Of Ceramic Ultra- And Nanofiltration Membranes For Removal Of Endotoxins

The removal of endotoxins, a potential contaminant of dialysis water and dialysate, is a very difficult task. The endotoxin removal capacity of commercial ceramic membranes with a nominal molecular weight cut-off of < 1,000 and adsorber membranes was investigated. The dead-end filtration results showed that all investigated ceramic membranes produce water meeting the European standards when challenged with low endotoxin concentrations, but only one membrane type succeeded at high endotoxin concentrations. In addition, we present preliminary analysis of the factors determining bacterial fragment removal from water of different ceramic and polymeric adsorptive membranes

Quantum Electronics

Contains research objectives and summary of research for eight research projects split into three sections and a report on one research project.U. S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Contract F44620-71-C-0051)Joint Services Electronics Program (Contract DAAB07-75-C-1346

Epidermal growth factor receptor downregulation by small heterodimeric binding proteins

No single engineered protein has been shown previously to robustly downregulate epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a validated cancer target. A panel of fibronectin-based domains was engineered to bind with picomolar to nanomolar affinity to multiple epitopes of EGFR. Monovalent and homo- and hetero-bivalent dimers of these domains were tested for EGFR downregulation. Selected orientations of non-competitive heterodimers decrease EGFR levels by up to 80% in multiple cell types, without activating receptor signaling. These heterodimers inhibit autophosphorylation, proliferation and migration, and are synergistic with the monoclonal antibody cetuximab in these activities. These small (25 kDa) heterodimers represent a novel modality for modulating surface receptor levels.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH grant CA96504)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH grant CA118705)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Graduate Research Fellowship Program

Potential of global SAR positioning for geodetic applications - Lessons learned from TerraSAR-X and Sentinel-1

With our implementation of geodetic techniques for data processing and data corrections, spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has attained the possibility of fixing global positions of dedicated radar points at the low centimeter accuracy level. Such points can be created by passive radar corner reflectors, and the positioning method relies on the inherent ranging capabilities of SAR sensors. Thus, we may refer to the method as SAR imaging geodesy or geodetic SAR. Determining accurate long-term global positions of objects on the Earth’s surface is typically associated with Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) and one of the core elements of modern space geodesy. In order to do so, high-grade geodetic equipment with constant power supply, as well as the possibility for data transfer are required, limiting dense application on a large scale and poses difficulties for very remote areas with little or no infrastructure. Whereas certain regions like Japan or the San Andreas Fault are densely covered by GNSS such coverage may not be achievable everywhere on the globe. To improve the situation, we present a concept of jointly using SAR and GNSS for expanding geodetic positioning to applications requiring long-term coordinate monitoring. In future, the use of cost-effective passive reflectors in X-band SAR or low-cost battery-powered active transponders, which are currently in development for C-band SAR, could provide global coordinates anywhere where SAR imagery is acquired under multiple incidence angles. The main requirements are precise orbit determination, processing of the SAR imagery omitting geometric approximations, as well as the rigorous correction of perturbations caused by atmospheric path delay and signals of the dynamic Earth. If a reflector or transponder already has known reference coordinates, e.g. from co-location with GNSS, the perturbing signals can be mitigated for the surrounding radar points by applying differential SAR positioning techniques similar to differential GNSS, provided that all the points are included in the same radar image. In this contribution we discuss the geodetic SAR methods with respect to our experiences gained with the TerraSAR-X mission, and present first results of experiments carried out with Sentinel-1 data