94 research outputs found
Utilization of non-conventional systems for conversion of biomass to food components: Potential for utilization of algae in engineered foods
The major nutritional components of the green algae (Scenedesmus obliquus) grown in a Constant Cell density Apparatus were determined. Suitable methodology to prepare proteins from which three major undesirable components of these cells (i.e., cell walls, nucleic acids, and pigments) were either removed or substantially reduced was developed. Results showed that processing of green algae to protein isolate enhances its potential nutritional and organoleptic acceptability as a diet component in a Controlled Ecological Life Support System
Potential for utilization of algal biomass for components of the diet in CELSS
The major nutritional components of the green algae (Scenedesmus obliquus) grown in a Constant Cell Density Apparatus were determined. Suitable methodology to prepare proteins from which three major undesirable components of these cells (i.e., cell walls, nucleic acids, and pigments) were either removed or substantially reduced was developed. Results showed that processing of green algae to protein isolate enhances is potential nutritional and organoleptic acceptability as a diet component in controlled Ecological Life Support System
Non-conventional approaches to food processing in CELSS, 1. Algal proteins: Characterization and process optimization
Protein isolate obtained from green algae cultivated under controlled conditions was characterized. Molecular weight determination of fractionated algal proteins using SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis revealed a wide spectrum of molecular weights ranging from 15,000 to 220,000. Isoelectric points of dissociated proteins were in the range of 3.95 to 6.20. Amino acid composition of protein isolate compared favorably with FAO standards. High content of essential amino acids leucine, valine, phenylalanine and lysine make algal protein isolate a high quality component of closed ecological life support system diets. To optimize the removal of algal lipids and pigments supercritical carbon dioxide extraction (with and without ethanol as a co-solvent) was used. Addition of ethanol to supercritical carbon dioxide resulted in more efficient removal of algal lipids and produced protein isolate with a good yield and protein recovery. The protein isolate extracted by the above mixture had an improved water solubility
Autonomous Traffic Engineering using Deep Reinforcement Learning
The evolution of communication technologies in the past few decades, has led to a huge
increase in the complexity and the overall size of telecommunication networks. This
phenomenon has increased the need for innovation in the field of Traffic Engineering (TE),
as the already existing solutions are not flexible enough to adapt to these changes. With
the appearance of 5G technologies, the urgency to revolutionize the field is higher than
ever and the softwarization and virtualization of the infrastructure bring new possibilities
for TE optimization, namely the possible use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) based methods
for Traffic Management.
The recent advances in AI have provided model-free optimization methods with algorithms
like Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) that can be used to optimize traffic
distributions in complex and hard to model Network scenarios.
This thesis aims to provide a DRL-based solution for TE where an agent is capable
of making routing decisions based on the current state of the network, with the goal of
balancing the load between the network paths. A DRL agent is developed and trained in
two different scenarios where the traffic that already exists in the network is generated
randomly or according to a systematic pattern. A simulation environment was developed
to train and evaluate the DRL agent.A evolução das tecnologias de comunicação nas útlimas décadas, tem dado origem a um
grande aumento na complexidade e no tamanho das redes de telecomunicações. Este
fenómeno tem aumentado a necessidade de inovação na área de Traffic Engineering (TE),
visto que as soluções já existentes não são flexíveis o suficiente para se adaptarem a
estas mudanças. Com a aproximação das tecnologias 5G, a urgência para revolucionar
a área está cada vez maior e a softwarização e a virtualização das infraestruturas trazem
novas possibilidades para otimizações de TE, nomeadamente o possível uso de métodos
baseados em Inteligência Artificial (IA) para gerir o tráfego da rede.
Os avanços recentes de IA têm criado métodos de otimização independentes de modelos
(model-free), como Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) que pode ser usado para
otimizar a distribuição de tráfego em cenários de redes complexas e difíceis de modelar.
Esta dissertação tem como objetivo implementar uma solução à base de DRL, em que é
desenhado um agente que é capaz de tomar decisões de encaminhamento, com o objetivo
de gerir o tráfego pelos caminhos da rede. Um agente DRL é treinado em dois cenários
diferentes onde o tráfego já existente na rede é gerado aleatóriamente ou de acordo com
um padrão pré-definido. Foi criado um ambiente para treinar e para avaliar o agente
DRL
Utilization of non-conventional systems for conversion of biomass to food components: Recovery optimization and characterizations of algal proteins and lipids
Protein isolate obtained from green algae (Scenedesmus obliquus) cultivated under controlled conditions was characterized. Molecular weight determination of fractionated algal proteins using SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis revealed a wide spectrum of molecular weights ranging from 15,000 to 220,000. Isoelectric points of dissociated proteins were in the range of 3.95 to 6.20. Amino acid composition of protein isolate compared favorably with FAO standards. High content of essential amino acids leucine, valine, phenylalanine and lysine makes algal protein isolate a high quality component of closed environment life support system (CELSS) diets. To optimize the removal of algal lipids and pigments supercritical carbon dioxide extraction (with and without ethanol as a co-solvent) was used. Addition of ethanol to supercritical CO2 resulted in more efficient removal of algal lipids and produced protein isolate with a good yield and protein recovery. The protein isolate extracted by the above mixture had an improved water solubility
Utilization of non-conventional systems for conversion of biomass to food components
Described here is work accomplished in investigating the potential use of micro-algae in yielding useful macronutrients for closed ecological life support systems in space habitats. Analysis of the chemical composition of the blue-green alga Synechoccus 6311 was done in the present work, and was compared to values found in previous work on the green algae Scenedesmus obliquus. Similar values were obtained for proteins, and lower values for nucleic acids and lipids. A second part of the work involved fabrication of food products containing various levels of incorporated algae (S. obliquus) proteins and/or lipids. Protein isolate was incorporated into a variety of food products such as bran muffins, fettuccine (spinach noodle imitation), and chocolate chip cookies. In the sensory analysis, the greenish color of the bran muffins and cookies was not found to be objectionable. The mild spinachy flavor was less detectable in chocolate chip cookies than in bran muffins. The color and taste of the algae noodles were found to be pleasant and compared well with commercially available spinach noodles
SQL-PaLM: Improved Large Language ModelAdaptation for Text-to-SQL
One impressive emergent capability of large language models (LLMs) is
generation of code, including Structured Query Language (SQL) for databases.
For the task of converting natural language text to SQL queries, Text-to-SQL,
adaptation of LLMs is of paramount importance, both in in-context learning and
fine-tuning settings, depending on the amount of adaptation data used. In this
paper, we propose an LLM-based Text-to-SQL model SQL-PaLM, leveraging on
PaLM-2, that pushes the state-of-the-art in both settings. Few-shot SQL-PaLM is
based on an execution-based self-consistency prompting approach designed for
Text-to-SQL, and achieves 77.3% in test-suite accuracy on Spider, which to our
best knowledge is the first to outperform previous state-of-the-art with
fine-tuning by a significant margin, 4%. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the
fine-tuned SQL-PALM outperforms it further by another 1%. Towards applying
SQL-PaLM to real-world scenarios we further evaluate its robustness on other
challenging variants of Spider and demonstrate the superior generalization
capability of SQL-PaLM. In addition, via extensive case studies, we demonstrate
the impressive intelligent capabilities and various success enablers of
LLM-based Text-to-SQL.Comment: 16 page
Universal Self-adaptive Prompting
A hallmark of modern large language models (LLMs) is their impressive general
zero-shot and few-shot abilities, often elicited through prompt-based and/or
in-context learning. However, while highly coveted and being the most general,
zero-shot performances in LLMs are still typically weaker due to the lack of
guidance and the difficulty of applying existing automatic prompt design
methods in general tasks when ground-truth labels are unavailable. In this
study, we address this by presenting Universal Self-adaptive Prompting (USP),
an automatic prompt design approach specifically tailored for zero-shot
learning (while compatible with few-shot). Requiring only a small amount of
unlabeled data & an inference-only LLM, USP is highly versatile: to achieve
universal prompting, USP categorizes a possible NLP task into one of the three
possible task types, and then uses a corresponding selector to select the most
suitable queries & zero-shot model-generated responses as
pseudo-demonstrations, thereby generalizing ICL to the zero-shot setup in a
fully automated way. We evaluate zero-shot USP with two PaLM models, and
demonstrate performances that are considerably stronger than standard zero-shot
baselines and are comparable to or even superior than few-shot baselines across
more than 20 natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language
generation (NLG) tasks.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 4 tables (19 pages, 5 figures and 9 tables
including references and appendices
Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes
Deploying large language models (LLMs) is challenging because they are memory
inefficient and compute-intensive for practical applications. In reaction,
researchers train smaller task-specific models by either finetuning with human
labels or distilling using LLM-generated labels. However, finetuning and
distillation require large amounts of training data to achieve comparable
performance to LLMs. We introduce Distilling step-by-step, a new mechanism that
(a) trains smaller models that outperform LLMs, and (b) achieves so by
leveraging less training data needed by finetuning or distillation. Our method
extracts LLM rationales as additional supervision for training small models
within a multi-task framework. We present three findings across 4 NLP
benchmarks: First, compared to both finetuning and distillation, our mechanism
achieves better performance with much fewer labeled/unlabeled training
examples. Second, compared to few-shot prompted LLMs, we achieve better
performance using substantially smaller model sizes. Third, we reduce both the
model size and the amount of data required to outperform LLMs; our finetuned
770M T5 model outperforms the few-shot prompted 540B PaLM model using only 80%
of available data on a benchmark, whereas standard finetuning the same T5 model
struggles to match even by using 100% of the dataset. We release the code at:
https://github.com/google-research/distilling-step-by-step .Comment: Accepted to Findings of ACL 202
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