30 research outputs found
Image-based Text Classification using 2D Convolutional Neural Networks
We propose a new approach to text classification
in which we consider the input text as an image and apply
2D Convolutional Neural Networks to learn the local and
global semantics of the sentences from the variations of the
visual patterns of words. Our approach demonstrates that
it is possible to get semantically meaningful features from
images with text without using optical character recognition
and sequential processing pipelines, techniques that traditional
natural language processing algorithms require. To validate
our approach, we present results for two applications: text
classification and dialog modeling. Using a 2D Convolutional
Neural Network, we were able to outperform the state-ofart
accuracy results for a Chinese text classification task and
achieved promising results for seven English text classification
tasks. Furthermore, our approach outperformed the memory
networks without match types when using out of vocabulary
entities from Task 4 of the bAbI dialog dataset
Hydrogel Microparticles as Sensors for Specific Adhesion: Case Studies on Antibody Detection and Soil Release Polymers
Adhesive processes in aqueous media play a crucial role in nature and are important for
many technological processes. However, direct quantification of adhesion still requires expensive
instrumentation while their sample throughput is rather small. Here we present a fast, and
easily applicable method on quantifying adhesion energy in water based on interferometric
measurement of polymer microgel contact areas with functionalized glass slides and evaluation via
the JohnsonâKendallâRoberts (JKR) model. The advantage of the method is that the microgel matrix
can be easily adapted to reconstruct various biological or technological adhesion processes. Here we
study the suitability of the new adhesion method with two relevant examples: (1) antibody detection
and (2) soil release polymers. The measurement of adhesion energy provides direct insights on the
presence of antibodies showing that the method can be generally used for biomolecule detection. As a
relevant example of adhesion in technology, the antiadhesive properties of soil release polymers used
in todayâs laundry products are investigated. Here the measurement of adhesion energy provides
direct insights into the relation between polymer composition and soil release activity. Overall, the
work shows that polymer hydrogel particles can be used as versatile adhesion sensors to investigate
a broad range of adhesion processes in aqueous media
Smart environments and context-awareness for lifestyle management in a healthy active ageing framework
Health trends of elderly in Europe motivate the need for technological solutions aimed at preventing the main causes of morbidity and premature mortality. In this framework, the DOREMI project addresses three important causes of morbidity and mortality in the elderly by devising an ICT-based home care services for aging people to contrast cognitive decline, sedentariness and unhealthy dietary habits. In this paper, we present the general architecture of DOREMI, focusing on its aspects of human activity recognition and reasoning
Description of an aerodynamic levitation apparatus with applications in Earth sciences
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In aerodynamic levitation, solids and liquids are floated in a vertical gas stream. In combination with CO<sub>2</sub>-laser heating, containerless melting at high temperature of oxides and silicates is possible. We apply aerodynamic levitation to bulk rocks in preparation for microchemical analyses, and for evaporation and reduction experiments.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Liquid silicate droplets (~2 mm) were maintained stable in levitation using a nozzle with a 0.8 mm bore and an opening angle of 60°. The gas flow was ~250 ml min<sup>-1</sup>. Rock powders were melted and homogenized for microchemcial analyses. Laser melting produced chemically homogeneous glass spheres. Only highly (e.g. H<sub>2</sub>O) and moderately volatile components (Na, K) were partially lost. The composition of evaporated materials was determined by directly combining levitation and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. It is shown that the evaporated material is composed of Na > K >> Si. Levitation of metal oxide-rich material in a mixture of H<sub>2 </sub>and Ar resulted in the exsolution of liquid metal.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Levitation melting is a rapid technique or for the preparation of bulk rock powders for major, minor and trace element analysis. With exception of moderately volatile elements Na and K, bulk rock analyses can be performed with an uncertainty of ± 5% relative. The technique has great potential for the quantitative determination of evaporated materials from silicate melts. Reduction of oxides to metal is a means for the extraction and analysis of siderophile elements from silicates and can be used to better understand the origin of chondritic metal.</p
Multiscale blood flow modelling and simulation
Zsfassung in dt. SpracheSimulation des arteriellen Blutkreislaufs hat eine lange Tradition. WĂ€hrend des letzten Jahrhunderts wurde eine Vielzahl von Modellen zur Simulation des Blutflusses und der Pulswellenausbreitung in den GefĂ€Ăen entwickelt. Seit dem ersten Kompartment Modell von Stephen Hales aus dem Jahr 1733 entstanden die verschiedensten Modelle, die Teile des arteriellen Systemkreislaufs abbildeten, bis hin zu ganzheitlichen Modellen fĂŒr den gesamten Blutkreislauf und 3-dimensionalen Strömungsmodellen der Arterien. So verschieden die Modelle sind, so sind es auch die Lösungsmethoden. All diese verschiedenen AnsĂ€tze haben ihre Vor- und Nachteile, abhĂ€ngig vom verfolgten Ziel der Simulation. Die einfachsten Modelle haben zu wenig Aussagekraft da sie zu wenige physiologische PhĂ€nomene abbilden, zu komplexe Modelle sind aufgrund der groĂen Anzahl an unbekannten Parametern nicht identifizierbar.Diese Arbeit versucht einen optimalen Mittelweg zu finden um ein globales dynamisches geregeltes und identifizierbares Modell fĂŒr den menschlichen Herzkreislauf zu entwickeln und die GĂŒltigkeit des Modells anhand von Messdaten zu verifizieren. Um das zu bewerkstelligen wurden verschiedene ModellansĂ€tze untersucht und miteinander gekoppelt.Im Speziellen wird in dieser Arbeit ein 1-dimensionalen Strömungsmodells auf Basis der Navier-Stokes Gleichungen mit einem 6-Kompartmentmodell fĂŒr den Regelkreislauf gekoppelt. Die beiden Modelle arbeiten auf verschiedenen Zeitskalen die synchronisiert werden mĂŒssen. WĂ€hrend das Kompartmentmodell mittels einfacher Quadratur gelöst werden kann sind zur Lösung der partiellen Navier-Stokes Differentialgleichungen komplexere Methoden erforderlich, wobei hier ein Finite Volumen Verfahren verwendet wurde.Der Hauptteil der Arbeit beschĂ€ftigt sich mit der Identifizierung des gekoppelten multiskalen Modells auf Grund von Messdaten. Dazu wurden eine Reihe von so genannten Ersatzmodellen untersucht um von der beschrĂ€nkten Anzahl an verfĂŒgbaren Daten auf die fehlenden Daten rĂŒckzurechnen. Prinzipell sind aus den Messdaten zweierlei Parameter zu bestimmen; zum einen muss die Struktur des Arteriennetzwerks angepasst werden, zum anderen die Parameter der Randbedingungen die durch die verwendeten Methoden auftreten, bestimmt werden. Viele dieser Parameter sind nicht direkt messbar und mĂŒssen indirekt durch andere Modelle bestimmt werden. Da die Randbedingungen von den zu berechnenden GröĂen abhĂ€ngen mĂŒssen diese in jedem Zeitschritt neu bestimmt werden.Im Speziellen werden Modelle zur ElasitizitĂ€tsbestimmung und zur Bestimmung der Windkesseldaten an den Endsegmenten des modellierten Arteriennetzwerkes diskutiert.Im Rahmen der Dissertation konnte auch eine Studie mit freiwilligen Probanden durchgefĂŒhrt werden wobei kardiovaskulĂ€re Parameter erhoben wurden. Diese Daten dienen dann am Ende dieser Arbeit zum einen als Grundlage der Identifizierung des dynamischen geregelten Kreislaufmodells und zum anderen zur Verifizierung der errechneten Daten wie Pulsdruckkurve oder FluĂgeschwindigkeiten.Modelling and simulation of the cardiovascular system have a long tradition and a huge amout of different approaches were discussed.From very simply lumped parameter models without consideration of control mechanism to very complex 3-dimensional models for the blood flow in systemic arteries the reader can find a lot of scientific works in the literature. All this models have its advantages as well as its disadvantages, depending on the aim of the simulation. The simple models may not map the physiological properties properly and the complex models are too hard to handle or they consider only a small part of the whole cardiovascular circle.This work tries to find the happy medium and a dynamic controlled and identifiable multiscale model for the whole cardiovascular cycle is developed. The validity of the model is verified by measured data. Doing this, several different types of models have been chosen to be connected to the final overall model. In detail this work covers the implementation of an 1-dimensional dynamic model for the big systemic arteries based on the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and its connection with a lumped parameter model. Additionally a model for the small arteries is used for determination of boundary values for the termination segments of the modelled vascular bed. Within the compartment model two physiological control mechanisms are considered. While the solution of the controlled compartment model is straight forward by quadrature, solving the dynamic Navier-Stokes model is more sophisticated. Here we used a finite volume method.A fundamental part of this work deals with the identification of the coupled dynamic multiscale model based on measured data. To do this, several so-called alternative models are tested to be able to compute as much as possible unknown parameters from a usually quite fragmentary set of data. Basically, two classes of parameters have to be computed. One the one hand the geometrical and physical structure of the vascular bed (i.e. vessel diameters, lengths and elasticity), on the other hand by reason of the used computational methods terminal conditions have to be fulfilled. For instance, we use Windkessel models on termination segments of the arterial tree whose parameters have to be known.From ultrasound measurement we are able to achieve physical data of the vascular bed of several positions. By help of other datasets from literature the missing data between are interpolated. Due the usage of an additional electrocardiogram (ECG) the pulse wave velocity can be measured as well what is used for determining the vessel wall elasticity.The Windkessel data are computed through a linearised model for the cardiovascular tree each time step in the scale of the compartment model. Doing this, a model for the small arteries based on the linearised Navier-Stokes equations is used.12
Human Annotated Dialogues Dataset for Natural Conversational Agents
International audienceConversational agents are gaining huge popularity in industrial applications such as digital assistants, chatbots, and particularly systems for natural language understanding (NLU). However, a major drawback is the unavailability of a common metric to evaluate the replies against human judgement for conversational agents. In this paper, we develop a benchmark dataset with human annotations and diverse replies that can be used to develop such metric for conversational agents. The paper introduces a high-quality human annotated movie dialogue dataset, HUMOD, that is developed from the Cornell movie dialogues dataset. This new dataset comprises 28,500 human responses from 9500 multi-turn dialogue history-reply pairs. Human responses include: (i) ratings of the dialogue reply in relevance to the dialogue history; and (ii) unique dialogue replies for each dialogue history from the users. Such unique dialogue replies enable researchers in evaluating their models against six unique human responses for each given history. Detailed analysis on how dialogues are structured and human perception on dialogue score in comparison with existing models are also presented
User Requirements Analysis of an Embodied Conversational Agent for Coaching Older Adults to Choose Active and Healthy Ageing Behaviors during the Transition to Retirement: A Cross-National User Centered Design Study
Background: Retirement is recognized as a factor influencing the ageing process. Today, virtual health coaching systems can play a pivotal role in supporting older adultsâ active and healthy ageing. This study wants to answer two research questions: (1) What are the user requirements of a virtual coach (VC) based on an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) for motivating older adults in transition to retirement to adopt a healthy lifestyle? (2) How could a VC address the active and healthy ageing dimensions, even during COVID-19 times? Methods: Two-wave focus-groups with 60 end-users aged 55 and over and 27 follow-up telephone interviews were carried out in Austria, Italy and the Netherlands in 2019â2020. Qualitative data were analysed by way of framework analysis. Results: End-users suggest the VC should motivate older workers and retirees to practice physical activity, maintain social contacts and emotional well-being. The ECA should be reactive, customizable, expressive, sympathetic, not directive nor patronizing, with a pleasant and motivating language. The COVID-19 outbreak increased the usersâ need for functions boosting community relationships and promoting emotional well-being. Conclusions: the VC can address the active and healthy ageing paradigm by increasing the chances of doing low-cost healthy activities at any time and in any place