Effects of High Strength Concrete on Progressive Collapse Resistance of Reinforced Concrete Frame

Increasing terrorist activities in the past decade brought requirements in design buildings, especially government or commercial buildings, under extreme loading conditions. One of the devastating consequences due to extreme loading is the possibility of progressive collapse. Although extensive studies had been carried out in the past decade on load resistance mechanism of reinforced concrete (RC) frames in preventing progressive collapse, the effects of high-strength-concrete (HSC) on progressive collapse resistance capacity is still unclear. Therefore, in this paper six tests of reinforced concrete frames with different span-to-depth ratio and concrete strength were conducted in the present study. Among them, three are HSC frames and the remaining are normal strength concrete frames. It was found that the use of HSC could further enhance the compressive arch action (CAA) capacity, especially for those with low span-to-depth ratio. On the other hand, HSC can reduce the tensile catenary action (TCA) capacity at large deformation stage, primarily because of higher bond stress between concrete and rebar,leading to earlier fracture of the rebar.The analytical results from the model were compared with the test results. It is found that the existing CAA model could accurately predict the CAA capacity of HSC frames as well as NSC frames.However, existing model is hard to predict the CAA capacity of the frames with relatively small span-to-depth ratio (less than 7) accurately

Semantic Role Labeling as Dependency Parsing: Exploring Latent Tree Structures Inside Arguments

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is a fundamental yet challenging task in the NLP community. Recent works of SRL mainly fall into two lines: 1) BIO-based; 2) span-based. Despite ubiquity, they share some intrinsic drawbacks of not considering internal argument structures, potentially hindering the model's expressiveness. The key challenge is arguments are flat structures, and there are no determined subtree realizations for words inside arguments. To remedy this, in this paper, we propose to regard flat argument spans as latent subtrees, accordingly reducing SRL to a tree parsing task. In particular, we equip our formulation with a novel span-constrained TreeCRF to make tree structures span-aware and further extend it to the second-order case. We conduct extensive experiments on CoNLL05 and CoNLL12 benchmarks. Results reveal that our methods perform favorably better than all previous syntax-agnostic works, achieving new state-of-the-art under both end-to-end and w/ gold predicates settings.Comment: COLING 202

Experimental Demonstration of 503.61-Gbit/s DMT over 10-km 7-Core Fiber with 1.5-\mu m SM-VCSEL for Optical Interconnects

We experimentally demonstrate a net-rate 503.61-Gbit/s discrete multitone (DMT) transmission over 10-km 7-core fiber with 1.5-\mu m single mode VCSEL, where low-complexity kernelrecursive-least-squares algorithm is employed for nonlinear channel equalization.Comment: 3 pages, 44th European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC 2018), Rome, Italy, 201

Phenotypic and functional alteration of CD45+ immune cells in the decidua of preeclampsia patients analyzed by mass cytometry (CyTOF)

Preeclampsia (PE) is a severe placenta-related pregnancy disease that has been associated with maternal systemic inflammation and immune system disorders. However, the distribution and functional changes in immune cells of the maternal–placental interface have not been well characterized. Herein, cytometry by time-of-flight mass spectrometry (CyTOF) was used to investigate the immune atlas at the decidua, which was obtained from four PE patients and four healthy controls. Six superclusters were identified, namely, T cells, B cells, natural killer (NK) cells, monocytes, granulocytes, and others. B cells were significantly decreased in the PE group, among which the reduction in CD27+CD38+ regulatory B cell (Breg)-like cells may stimulate immune activation in PE. The significantly increased migration of B cells could be linked to the significantly overexpressed chemokine C-X-C receptor 5 (CXCR5) in the PE group, which may result in the production of excessive autoantibodies and the pathogenesis of PE. A subset of T cells, CD11c+CD8+ T cells, was significantly decreased in PE and might lead to sustained immune activation in PE patients. NK cells were ultimately separated into four subsets. The significant reduction in a novel subset of NK cells (CD56-CD49a-CD38+) in PE might have led to the failure to suppress inflammation at the maternal–fetal interface during PE progression. Moreover, the expression levels of functional markers were significantly altered in the PE group, which also inferred that shifts in the decidual immune state contributed to the development of PE and might serve as potential treatment targets. This is a worthy attempt to elaborate the differences in the phenotype and function of CD45+ immune cells in the decidua between PE and healthy pregnancies by CyTOF, which contributes to understand the pathogenesis of PE, and the altered cell subsets and markers may inspire the immune modulatory therapy for PE

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Prediction of electrophoretic mobilities in capilllary zone electrophoresis

Bibliography: p. 154-15