COAD: Contrastive Pre-training with Adversarial Fine-tuning for Zero-shot Expert Linking

Expert finding, a popular service provided by many online websites such as Expertise Finder, LinkedIn, and AMiner, benefits seeking consultants, collaborators, and candidate qualifications. However, its quality is suffered from a single source of support information for experts. This paper employs AMiner, a free online academic search and mining system, having collected more than over 100 million researcher profiles together with 200 million papers from multiple publication databases, as the basis for investigating the problem of expert linking, which aims at linking any external information of persons to experts in AMiner. A critical challenge is how to perform zero shot expert linking without any labeled linkages from the external information to AMiner experts, as it is infeasible to acquire sufficient labels for arbitrary external sources. Inspired by the success of self supervised learning in computer vision and natural language processing, we propose to train a self supervised expert linking model, which is first pretrained by contrastive learning on AMiner data to capture the common representation and matching patterns of experts across AMiner and external sources, and is then fine-tuned by adversarial learning on AMiner and the unlabeled external sources to improve the model transferability. Experimental results demonstrate that COAD significantly outperforms various baselines without contrastive learning of experts on two widely studied downstream tasks: author identification (improving up to 32.1% in HitRatio@1) and paper clustering (improving up to 14.8% in Pairwise-F1). Expert linking on two genres of external sources also indicates the superiority of the proposed adversarial fine-tuning method compared with other domain adaptation ways (improving up to 2.3% in HitRatio@1).Comment: TKDE under revie

Unloading-Induced Crack Propagation of Two Collinear Unequal Length Flaws in Brittle Rocks

The propagation and coalescence of numerous discontinuous joints significantly contribute to landslide instability during excavation unloading. The tip expression of stress intensity factors of two collinear unequal length cracks in a typical rock mass under unloading conditions was calculated based on the superposition principle and fracture mechanics to determine the meso-influence law of intermittent joint interaction in the slope under the action of excavation. The effects of many factors on this interaction were also analyzed theoretically. Unloading tests were conducted on rock-like specimens with two collinear unequal length cracks in addition to numerical simulation and theoretical analysis. The results show decreased interaction between the two cracks with increased crack distance, increased influence of the main crack on a secondary crack with increased length of the main crack, and decreased influence of the secondary crack on the main crack with decreased length of the secondary crack. Wing tensile cracks first appear at the tip of flaws, and the propagation of these cracks occurs with the generation of secondary tensile cracks and shear cracks during unloading. Propagation and coalescence between cracks lead to tension and shear mixed failure of a rock bridge, and tensile cracks appear near the unloading surface. The axial initiation and peak stress of a crack increase with increased flaw distance, and the theoretical calculations were confirmed by lateral unloading test results

Catastrophic analysis of roof cut-off disasters in proximity to coal seam beneath a room mining goaf

Aiming at the support crushing disasters in proximity to coal seam beneath a room mining goaf caused by the different pressure time of the roof above pillars and the immediate roof，according to the nonlinear variation of the pillars'instability failure under the influence of the overlying load，a system mechanics model composed of roof-pillars-gangue was established.In addition，by using the cusp catastrophe theory，the instability mechanisms of the system under the linear loads were studied，the necessary sufficient condition for instability failure of the system and the formula of the jump value and the releasing energy of displacement of pillars were gained，and the main factors for instability failure of the system were analyzed.The results show that the unstable failure of pillars leads to the support crushing disasters.By using the energy method，the attacking dynamic factor and the working resistance of support were calculated.The rationality of the theoretical derivation has been verified by an engineering example

Experimental and Theoretical Study of Madder-Associated Dyestuffs on Silk: Adsorption of Kinetics, Thermodynamics and Molecular Docking

ABSTRACTIn this work, dyed samples were self-prepared from two methods including madder dyeing and mordant dyeing by madder combined with Al3+ at different temperatures, and their kinetics and isothermal adsorption were both discussed. Weber–Morris diffusion model and Freundlich model were found to be more suitable in dyeing for kinetics and thermodynamics. Through SEM, FTIR and fastness tests, the dyeing performances were displayed and the possible structure between madder dyes and the complex with Al3+ were illustrated. By molecular docking, madder dyes showed combination with glutamic acid predominantly. After introducing metal ion, the shortage of hydrogen bonds length was observed. It was initially employed to elucidate the potential binding modes between dyes and proteinaceous fibers. Overall, through experimental dyeing and curve fitting, this study provided insights into the dyeing mechanism of madder-associated dyestuffs on silk. Moreover, molecular docking elucidated the dyeing mechanism further, highlighting that the presence of metal ion enhances the firmness of the staining. The elucidation of dyeing mechanism not only provided valuable theoretical support for color restoration but also shed light on the practically modify of methods in obtaining ideal color. These results could serve as inspiration for conservators to maintain the vibrancy and longevity of dyed silks

Landscape Pattern and Succession of Chinese Fir Plantations in Jiangle County, China

Since the early 1980s, in southern China, evergreen broad-leaved forests have been replaced by Chinese fir plantations on a large scale. By analyzing the dynamic change characteristics of the landscape pattern of Chinese fir plantations in the case study, the paper explored the current status and development trend of the landscape pattern of Chinese fir plantations after 40 years of manual intervention and natural succession. The paper, based on the three-period survey data on forest resources in 2010, 2015, and 2020, analyzed the dynamic changes of the landscape pattern of Chinese fir plantations from 2010 to 2020 and, by using a transition matrix and landscape index, simulated and predicted the landscape pattern of Chinese fir plantations in Jiangle County in 2025 by constructing a CA–Markov model with Jiangle County, Fujian Province, China, as the study area. The results showed that the landscape of Chinese fir plantations is the main component of the forest landscape in southern China, accounting for 12%. The landscape quality of Chinese fir plantations degraded, mainly shown in the facts that the Chinese fir plantations were juvenile from 2010 to 2020, and that the young and middle-aged forests became the main part of the landscape of Chinese fir plantations, accounting for 54.8%. The landscape area of Chinese fir plantations showed an increasing trend, which mainly came from other coniferous forests, other woodlands, non-woodlands and non-wood forests, and the replaced Chinese fir plantations were mainly eroded by bamboo forests. The evergreen broad-leaved forests, a kind of zonal vegetation, have been effectively protected in the past 10 years. In the future, the total area of Chinese fir plantations will continue to expand, and a small part of them will continue to be eroded by bamboo forests. In order to improve the landscape quality of Chinese fir plantations, it is necessary to adjust the age group structure of Chinese fir plantations, expand the proportion of mature forests, and, meanwhile, continue to protect evergreen broad-leaved forests and curb the expansion of bamboo forests

Detection of Fatigue Microcrack Using Eddy Current Pulsed Thermography

Microcracks are a common metallic defect, resulting in degradation of material properties. In this paper, specimens with different fatigue microcracks were detected by eddy current pulsed thermography (ECPT). Signal processing algorithms were investigated to improve the detectability and sensitivity; principal component analysis (PCA) and Tucker decomposition were used to compare the performance of microcrack detection. It was found that both algorithms were highly adaptable. A thermal quotient was used to assess the temperature variation trend. Furthermore, the potential correspondence between crack closure and temperature change was investigated

Depletion of internal peptides by site-selective blocking, phosphate labeling, and TiO2 adsorption for in-depth analysis of C-terminome

The analysis of protein C-termini is of great importance, because it not only provides valuable information about protein function, but also facilitates the elucidation of proteolytic processing. However, even with the recent methods for the global profiling of protein C-termini, the identification of C-termini is still far behind that of N-termini due to the lack of basic residue and low reactive carboxyl group. Therefore, an unbiased and complementary method for C-termini profiling is imperative. In this work, we developed a negative enrichment strategy to achieve the in-depth analysis of C-terminome. Proteins were firstly amidated to block carboxyl groups, followed by lysyl endoproteinase (LysC) digestion to generate C-terminal peptides with alpha-amines and internal peptides bearing both alpha- and epsilon-amines. After the alpha-amines were blocked by site-selective dimethylation or succinylation, the remaining epsilon-amines on internal peptides were labeled with phosphate groups. Finally, internal peptides were depleted by TiO2, leaving exclusively the fraction of C-terminal peptides for LC-MS/MS analysis. With Escherichia coli (E. coli) digests as the sample, the efficiency of amidation, dimethylation/succinylation, phosphate labeling and TiO2 depletion was proved high. With the combination of dimethyl and succinic blocking strategy, our method enabled the identification of 477 unique C-terminal peptides in E. coli. In comparison with the C-terminal amine-based isotope labeling of substrates (C-TAILS) method, 83 C-termini were identified by both methods, whereas 369 C-termini were unique to C-TAILS and 394 to our dataset. The method proposed is therefore efficient and possibly promotes the comprehensive profiling of C-termini

Amorphization and Nano-Crystallization of Ni-Nb Coating on GH3039 Alloys by High Current Pulsed Electron Beam

In this paper, the Ni-Nb coatings were successfully prepared onto the GH3039 alloys by High current pulsed electron beam (HCPEB). The transmission electron microscopy (TEM) results confirmed that the Ni-Nb layer of 10-pulsed samples exhibited partial amorphization, which was consisted of γ-Ni particles, rod-like Ni3Nb particles and nano Ni3Nb with 30 nm in size. After 20-pulsed irradiation, the results show that only Ni3Nb clusters with around 3 nm in size were dispersed in fully amorphization layer. With increased pulse number to 30, the nano-particles embedded into the amorphous layer were grown up, the size of which was about 8 nm. The microstructure evolution during HCPEB irradiation was from the partial amorphous to fully amorphous and then to nano-crystallization. The 20-pulsed samples possessed the best hardness and corrosion resistance. The ultrafine clusters uniformly embedded into amorphous layer were main reason for improving properties

Hydrophobic Tagging-Assisted N‑Termini Enrichment for In-Depth N‑Terminome Analysis

The analysis of protein N-termini is of great importance for understanding the protein function and elucidating the proteolytic processing. Herein, we develop a negative enrichment strategy, termed as hydrophobic tagging-assisted N-termini enrichment (HYTANE) to achieve a global N-terminome analysis. The HYTANE strategy showed a high efficiency in hydrophobic tagging and C18 material-assisted depletion using bovine serum albumin (BSA) as the sample. This strategy was applied to N-termini profiling from <i>S. cerevisiae</i> cell lysates and enabled the identification of 1096 protein N-termini, representing the largest N-terminome data set of <i>S. cerevisiae</i>. The identified N-terminal peptides accounted for 99% of all identified peptides, and no deficiency in acidic, histidine (His)-containing, and His-free N-terminal peptides was observed. The presented HYTANE strategy is therefore a highly selective, efficient, and unbiased strategy for the large scale N-terminome analysis. Furthermore, using the HYTANE strategy, we identified 329 cleavage sites and 291 substrates of caspases in Jurkat cells, demonstrating the great promise of HYTANE strategy for protease research. Data are available via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD004690