Pragmatic Ontology Evolution: Reconciling User Requirements and Application Performance

Increasingly, organizations are adopting ontologies to describe their large catalogues of items. These ontologies need to evolve regularly in response to changes in the domain and the emergence of new requirements. An important step of this process is the selection of candidate concepts to include in the new version of the ontology. This operation needs to take into account a variety of factors and in particular reconcile user requirements and application performance. Current ontology evolution methods focus either on ranking concepts according to their relevance or on preserving compatibility with existing applications. However, they do not take in consideration the impact of the ontology evolution process on the performance of computational tasks – e.g., in this work we focus on instance tagging, similarity computation, generation of recommendations, and data clustering. In this paper, we propose the Pragmatic Ontology Evolution (POE) framework, a novel approach for selecting from a group of candidates a set of concepts able to produce a new version of a given ontology that i) is consistent with the a set of user requirements (e.g., max number of concepts in the ontology), ii) is parametrised with respect to a number of dimensions (e.g., topological considerations), and iii) effectively supports relevant computational tasks. Our approach also supports users in navigating the space of possible solutions by showing how certain choices, such as limiting the number of concepts or privileging trendy concepts rather than historical ones, would reflect on the application performance. An evaluation of POE on the real-world scenario of the evolving Springer Nature taxonomy for editorial classification yielded excellent results, demonstrating a significant improvement over alternative approaches

TechMiner: Extracting Technologies from Academic Publications

In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture ‘standard’ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision

Locked oscillator phase modulator, appendix d final report

Design parameters for linear phase modulation of locked oscillato

A study of the immunity of FM discriminators to 2 pi frequency impulses

Frequency impulse response of selected FM discriminator

Improving Editorial Workflow and Metadata Quality at Springer Nature

Identifying the research topics that best describe the scope of a scientific publication is a crucial task for editors, in particular because the quality of these annotations determine how effectively users are able to discover the right content in online libraries. For this reason, Springer Nature, the world's largest academic book publisher, has traditionally entrusted this task to their most expert editors. These editors manually analyse all new books, possibly including hundreds of chapters, and produce a list of the most relevant topics. Hence, this process has traditionally been very expensive, time-consuming, and confined to a few senior editors. For these reasons, back in 2016 we developed Smart Topic Miner (STM), an ontology-driven application that assists the Springer Nature editorial team in annotating the volumes of all books covering conference proceedings in Computer Science. Since then STM has been regularly used by editors in Germany, China, Brazil, India, and Japan, for a total of about 800 volumes per year. Over the past three years the initial prototype has iteratively evolved in response to feedback from the users and evolving requirements. In this paper we present the most recent version of the tool and describe the evolution of the system over the years, the key lessons learnt, and the impact on the Springer Nature workflow. In particular, our solution has drastically reduced the time needed to annotate proceedings and significantly improved their discoverability, resulting in 9.3 million additional downloads. We also present a user study involving 9 editors, which yielded excellent results in term of usability, and report an evaluation of the new topic classifier used by STM, which outperforms previous versions in recall and F-measure

Specific configuration of dendritic degeneration in pyramidal neurons of the medial prefrontal cortex induced by differing corticosteroid regimens

We previously demonstrated that hypercorticalism induces pronounced volumetric reductions in the rat medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and that these structural changes correlate with deficits in executive function. By applying 3-dimensional analysis of Golgi- Cox--stained material, we now demonstrate that corticosteroids can exert differential effects on dendritic arborizations of pyramidal neurons in lamina II/III of the mPFC. Treatment with the glucocorticoid receptor--selective agonist dexamethasone and with the natural adrenosteroid, corticosterone (CORT), results in significant reductions in the total length of apical dendrites in the pyramidal neurons in lamina II/III of the anterior cingulate/prelimbic and infralimbic cortices. Interestingly, although these treatments do not affect the number of dendritic branches, they are associated with impoverished arborizations in their distal portions and, in CORTtreated animals, with increased branching in the middle portions of the apical dendritic tree. Deprivation of corticosteroids by adrenalectomy leads to decreases in total apical dendritic length and spine number, but in this case, dendritic impoverishment was restricted to the middle/proximal segments of the dendritic trees. None of the treatments influenced the architecture of the basal dendrites. These results add to our knowledge of the morphological substrates through which corticosteroids may disrupt mPFC-dependent behaviors

The SSS phase of RS Ophiuchi observed with Chandra and XMM-Newton I.: Data and preliminary Modeling

The phase of Super-Soft-Source (SSS) emission of the sixth recorded outburst of the recurrent nova RS Oph was observed twice with Chandra and once with XMM-Newton. The observations were taken on days 39.7, 54.0, and 66.9 after outburst. We confirm a 35-sec period on day 54.0 and found that it originates from the SSS emission and not from the shock. We discus the bound-free absorption by neutral elements in the line of sight, resonance absorption lines plus self-absorbed emission line components, collisionally excited emission lines from the shock, He-like intersystem lines, and spectral changes during an episode of high-amplitude variability. We find a decrease of the oxygen K-shell absorption edge that can be explained by photoionization of oxygen. The absorption component has average velocities of -1286+-267 km/s on day 39.7 and of -771+-65 km/s on day 66.9. The wavelengths of the emission line components are consistent with their rest wavelengths as confirmed by measurements of non-self absorbed He-like intersystem lines. We have evidence that these lines originate from the shock rather than the outer layers of the outflow and may be photoexcited in addition to collisional excitations. We found collisionally excited emission lines that are fading at wavelengths shorter than 15A that originate from the radiatively cooling shock. On day 39.5 we find a systematic blue shift of -526+-114 km/s from these lines. We found anomalous He-like f/i ratios which indicates either high densities or significant UV radiation near the plasma where the emission lines are formed. During the phase of strong variability the spectral hardness light curve overlies the total light curve when shifted by 1000sec. This can be explained by photoionization of neutral oxygen in the line of sight if the densities of order 10^{10}-10^{11} cm^{-3}.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables. Accepted by ApJ; v2: Co-author Woodward adde

TLEP: A High-Performance Circular e+e- Collider to Study the Higgs Boson

The recent discovery of a light Higgs boson has opened up considerable interest in circular e+e- Higgs factories around the world. We report on the progress of the TLEP concept since last year. TLEP is an e+e- circular collider capable of very high luminosities in a wide centre-of-mass (ECM) spectrum from 90 to 350 GeV. TLEP could be housed in a new 80 to 100 km tunnel in the Geneva region. The design can be adapted to different ring circumference (e.g. LEP3 in the 27 km LHC tunnel). TLEP is an ideal complementary machine to the LHC thanks to high luminosity, exquisite determination of ECM and the possibility of four interaction points, both for precision measurements of the Higgs boson properties and for precision tests of the closure of the Standard Model from the Z pole to the top threshold.Comment: Contribution to IPAC13, 12-17 May 2013, Shanghai, Chin

Purification of recombinant hepatitis delta antigen expressed in E. coli cells

AbstractRecombinant DNA technology enables the massive production of recombinant hepatitis delta antigen (recHDAg) retaining immunological properties and transport functions. However, purification procedures of the recombinant delta antigen have, to date, not been described in the literature. We present a purification procedure allowing one to obtain highly purified recHDAg from bacterial cells expressing the hepatitis delta antigen

Speed and entropy of an interacting continuous time quantum walk

We present some dynamic and entropic considerations about the evolution of a continuous time quantum walk implementing the clock of an autonomous machine. On a simple model, we study in quite explicit terms the Lindblad evolution of the clocked subsystem, relating the evolution of its entropy to the spreading of the wave packet of the clock. We explore possible ways of reducing the generation of entropy in the clocked subsystem, as it amounts to a deficit in the probability of finding the target state of the computation. We are thus lead to examine the benefits of abandoning some classical prejudice about how a clocking mechanism should operate.Comment: 25 pages, 14 figure