10,473 research outputs found
Collaborative platforms for streamlining workflows in Open Science
Despite the internet’s dynamic and collaborative nature, scientists continue to produce grant proposals, lab notebooks, data files, conclusions etc. that stay in static formats or are not published online and therefore not always easily accessible to the interested public. Because of limited adoption of tools that seamlessly integrate all aspects of a research project (conception, data generation, data evaluation, peer-reviewing and publishing of conclusions), much effort is later spent on reproducing or reformatting individual entities before they can be repurposed independently or as parts of articles.

We propose that workflows - performed both individually and collaboratively - could potentially become more efficient if all steps of the research cycle were coherently represented online and the underlying data were formatted, annotated and licensed for reuse. Such a system would accelerate the process of taking projects from conception to publication stages and allow for continuous updating of the data sets and their interpretation as well as their integration into other independent projects.

A major advantage of such workflows is the increased transparency, both with respect to the scientific process as to the contribution of each participant. The latter point is important from a perspective of motivation, as it enables the allocation of reputation, which creates incentives for scientists to contribute to projects. Such workflow platforms offering possibilities to fine-tune the accessibility of their content could gradually pave the path from the current static mode of research presentation into
a more coherent practice of open science
BSUV-Net: a fully-convolutional neural network for background subtraction of unseen videos
Background subtraction is a basic task in computer vision and video processing often applied as a pre-processing step for object tracking, people recognition, etc. Recently, a number of successful background-subtraction algorithms have been proposed, however nearly all of the top-performing ones are supervised. Crucially, their success relies upon the availability of some annotated frames of the test video during training. Consequently, their performance on completely “unseen” videos is undocumented in the literature. In this work, we propose a new, supervised, background subtraction algorithm for unseen videos (BSUV-Net) based on a fully-convolutional neural network. The input to our network consists of the current frame and two background frames captured at different time scales along with their semantic segmentation maps. In order to reduce the chance of overfitting, we also introduce a new data-augmentation technique which mitigates the impact of illumination difference between the background frames and the current frame. On the CDNet-2014 dataset, BSUV-Net outperforms stateof-the-art algorithms evaluated on unseen videos in terms of several metrics including F-measure, recall and precision.Accepted manuscrip
A two-scale Stefan problem arising in a model for tree sap exudation
The study of tree sap exudation, in which a (leafless) tree generates
elevated stem pressure in response to repeated daily freeze-thaw cycles, gives
rise to an interesting multi-scale problem involving heat and multiphase
liquid/gas transport. The pressure generation mechanism is a cellular-level
process that is governed by differential equations for sap transport through
porous cell membranes, phase change, heat transport, and generation of osmotic
pressure. By assuming a periodic cellular structure based on an appropriate
reference cell, we derive an homogenized heat equation governing the global
temperature on the scale of the tree stem, with all the remaining physics
relegated to equations defined on the reference cell. We derive a corresponding
strong formulation of the limit problem and use it to design an efficient
numerical solution algorithm. Numerical simulations are then performed to
validate the results and draw conclusions regarding the phenomenon of sap
exudation, which is of great importance in trees such as sugar maple and a few
other related species. The particular form of our homogenized temperature
equation is obtained using periodic homogenization techniques with two-scale
convergence, which we investigate theoretically in the context of a simpler
two-phase Stefan-type problem corresponding to a periodic array of melting
cylindrical ice bars with a constant thermal diffusion coefficient. For this
reduced model, we prove results on existence, uniqueness and convergence of the
two-scale limit solution in the weak form, clearly identifying the missing
pieces required to extend the proofs to the fully nonlinear sap exudation
model. Numerical simulations of the reduced equations are then compared with
results from the complete sap exudation model.Comment: 35 pages, 8 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1411.303
Maintaining Quantum Coherence in the Presence of Noise through State Monitoring
Unsharp POVM measurements allow the estimation and tracking of quantum
wavefunctions in real-time with minimal disruption of the dynamics. Here we
demonstrate that high fidelity state monitoring, and hence quantum control, is
possible even in the presence of classical dephasing and amplitude noise, by
simulating such measurements on a two-level system undergoing Rabi
oscillations. Finite estimation fidelity is found to persist indefinitely long
after the decoherence times set by the noise fields in the absence of
measurement.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Leveraging Workplace Diversity in Organizations
Research identifies several substantial barriers to the building of good working relationships among diverse cultural groups, and diversity must be managed if organizations are to attain the benefits promised by the business case for diversity. Many organizations have created diversity initiatives to address the demographic changes in the labor force and customer base, but few have achieved the goal of developing a truly multicultural organization. This article tracks best practices for managing diversity as well as future trends managers should prepare for. Managing diversity successfully requires a long-term commitment, and research suggests that employees respond well to diversity best practices and reward their organizations with better morale and improved retention
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