Enhanced granular medium-based tube press hardening

Active and passive control strategies of internal pressure for hot forming of tubes and profiles with granular media are described. Force transmission and plastic deformation of granular medium is experimentally investigated. Friction between tube, granular medium and die as also the external stress field are shown to be essential for the process understanding. Wrinkling, thinning and insufficient forming of the tube establishes the process window for the active pressure process. By improving the punch geometry and controlling tribological conditions, the process limits are extended. Examples for the passive pressure process reveal new opportunities for hot forming of tubes and profiles.Comment: 4 pages, 11 figure

Physical Adversarial Examples for Multi-Camera Systems

Neural networks build the foundation of several intelligent systems, which, however, are known to be easily fooled by adversarial examples. Recent advances made these attacks possible even in air-gapped scenarios, where the autonomous system observes its surroundings by, e.g., a camera. We extend these ideas in our research and evaluate the robustness of multi-camera setups against such physical adversarial examples. This scenario becomes ever more important with the rise in popularity of autonomous vehicles, which fuse the information of several cameras for their driving decision. While we find that multi-camera setups provide some robustness towards past attack methods, we see that this advantage reduces when optimizing on multiple perspectives at once. We propose a novel attack method that we call Transcender-MC, where we incorporate online 3D renderings and perspective projections in the training process. Moreover, we motivate that certain data augmentation techniques can facilitate the generation of successful adversarial examples even further. Transcender-MC is 11% more effective in successfully attacking multi-camera setups than state-of-the-art methods. Our findings offer valuable insights regarding the resilience of object detection in a setup with multiple cameras and motivate the need of developing adequate defense mechanisms against them

SHAPEworks: A BPMS Extension for Complex Process Management

Abstract. Complex engineering projects, such as the deployment of a railway infrastructure or the installation of an interlocking system, involve human safety and make use of heterogeneous data sources, as well as customized engineering tools. These processes are currently carried out in an ad-hoc fashion, relying on the experience of experts who need to plan, control, and monitor the execution of processes for delivering value to the customers. This setting makes an automated overarching-process a crucial step towards supporting engineers and project managers to deal with safety-critical constraints and the plethora of details entailed by the process. This paper demonstrates a tool that combines methods from automatic reasoning, ontologies and process mining, implemented on top of a real Business Process Management System (BPMS)

Development of a human mitochondrial oligonucleotide microarray (h-MitoArray) and gene expression analysis of fibroblast cell lines from 13 patients with isolated F1Fo ATP synthase deficiency

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>To strengthen research and differential diagnostics of mitochondrial disorders, we constructed and validated an oligonucleotide microarray (h-MitoArray) allowing expression analysis of 1632 human genes involved in mitochondrial biology, cell cycle regulation, signal transduction and apoptosis. Using h-MitoArray we analyzed gene expression profiles in 9 control and 13 fibroblast cell lines from patients with F₁F_oATP synthase deficiency consisting of 2 patients with mt9205ΔTA microdeletion and a genetically heterogeneous group of 11 patients with not yet characterized nuclear defects. Analysing gene expression profiles, we attempted to classify patients into expected defect specific subgroups, and subsequently reveal group specific compensatory changes, identify potential phenotype causing pathways and define candidate disease causing genes.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Molecular studies, in combination with unsupervised clustering methods, defined three subgroups of patient cell lines – M group with mtDNA mutation and N1 and N2 groups with nuclear defect. Comparison of expression profiles and functional annotation, gene enrichment and pathway analyses of differentially expressed genes revealed in the M group a transcription profile suggestive of synchronized suppression of mitochondrial biogenesis and G1/S arrest. The N1 group showed elevated expression of complex I and reduced expression of complexes III, V, and V-type ATP synthase subunit genes, reduced expression of genes involved in phosphorylation dependent signaling along MAPK, Jak-STAT, JNK, and p38 MAP kinase pathways, signs of activated apoptosis and oxidative stress resembling phenotype of premature senescent fibroblasts. No specific functionally meaningful changes, except of signs of activated apoptosis, were detected in the N2 group. Evaluation of individual gene expression profiles confirmed already known <it>ATP6/ATP8 </it>defect in patients from the M group and indicated several candidate disease causing genes for nuclear defects.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our analysis showed that deficiency in the ATP synthase protein complex amount is generally accompanied by only minor changes in expression of ATP synthase related genes. It also suggested that the site (mtDNA vs nuclear DNA) and the severity (ATP synthase content) of the underlying defect have diverse effects on cellular gene expression phenotypes, which warrants further investigation of cell cycle regulatory and signal transduction pathways in other OXPHOS disorders and related pharmacological models.</p

Alcohol consumption and liver phenotype of individuals with alpha‐1 antitrypsin deficiency

Background and Aims: Alpha‐1 antitrypsin deficiency is an inherited disorder caused by alpha‐1 antitrypsin (AAT) mutations. We analysed the association between alcohol intake and liver‐related parameters in individuals with the heterozygous/homozygous Pi*Z AAT variant (Pi*MZ/Pi*ZZ genotype) found in the United Kingdom Biobank and the European Alpha1 liver consortium. Methods: Reported alcohol consumption was evaluated in two cohorts: (i) the community‐based United Kingdom Biobank (17 145 Pi*MZ, 141 Pi*ZZ subjects, and 425 002 non‐carriers [Pi*MM]); and (ii) the European Alpha1 liver consortium (561 Pi*ZZ individuals). Cohort (ii) included measurements of carbohydrate‐deficient transferrin (CDT). Results: In both cohorts, no/low alcohol intake was reported by &gt;80% of individuals, while harmful consumption was rare (~1%). Among Pi*MM and Pi*MZ individuals from cohort (i), moderate alcohol consumption resulted in a &lt;30% increased rate of elevated transaminases and ~50% increase in elevated gamma-glutamyl transferase values, while harmful alcohol intake led to an at least twofold increase in the abnormal levels. In Pi*ZZ individuals from both cohorts, moderate alcohol consumption had no marked impact on serum transaminase levels. Among Pi*ZZ subjects from cohort (ii) who reported no/low alcohol consumption, those with increased CDT levels more often had signs of advanced liver disease.Conclusions: Pi*MZ/Pi*ZZ genotype does not seem to markedly aggravate the hepatic toxicity of moderate alcohol consumption. CDT values might be helpful to detect alcohol consumption in those with advanced fibrosis. More data are needed to evaluate the impact of harmful alcohol consumption.<br/