ChoreoVis: Planning and Assessing Formations in Dance Choreographies

Sports visualization has developed into an active research field over the last decades. Many approaches focus on analyzing movement data recorded from unstructured situations, such as soccer. For the analysis of choreographed activities like formation dancing, however, the goal differs, as dancers follow specific formations in coordinated movement trajectories. To date, little work exists on how visual analytics methods can support such choreographed performances. To fill this gap, we introduce a new visual approach for planning and assessing dance choreographies. In terms of planning choreographies, we contribute a web application with interactive authoring tools and views for the dancers' positions and orientations, movement trajectories, poses, dance floor utilization, and movement distances. For assessing dancers' real-world movement trajectories, extracted by manual bounding box annotations, we developed a timeline showing aggregated trajectory deviations and a dance floor view for detailed trajectory comparison. Our approach was developed and evaluated in collaboration with dance instructors, showing that introducing visual analytics into this domain promises improvements in training efficiency for the future

The Role of Chain Molecular Weight and Hofmeister Series Ions in Thermal Aggregation of Poly(2-Isopropyl-2-Oxazoline) Grafted Nanoparticles

Thermoresponsive nanoparticles are promising smart materials for many applications. However, a rational design for applications requires a deeper understanding and experimental verification of the various parameters that influence the thermoresponsiveness of the spherical polymer brushes that define most of such nanomaterials. Therefore, we investigate superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPION) grafted with poly(2-isopropyl-2-oxazoline) (6–33 kg mol−1) by temperature-cycled dynamic light scattering and differential scanning calorimetry. The grafting of dense spherical polymer brushes leads to lower aggregation temperatures and transition enthalpies when compared with the free polymer. The transition enthalpy and temperature depend on the polymer shell size and structure. The addition of kosmotropic salts decreases the aggregation temperature following the Hofmeister series

Triggered release from thermoresponsive polymersomes with superparamagnetic membranes

Magnetic polymersomes were prepared by self-assembly of the amphiphilic block copolymer poly(isoprene-b-N-isopropylacrylamide) with monodisperse hydrophobic superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles (SPION). The specifically designed thermoresponsive block copolymer allowed for efficient incorporation of the hydrophobic nanoparticles in the membrane core and encapsulation of the water soluble dye calcein in the lumen of the vesicles. Magnetic heating of the embedded SPIONs led to increased bilayer permeability through dehydration of the thermoresponsive PNIPAM block. The entrapped calcein could therefore be released in controlled doses solely through exposure to pulses of an alternating magnetic field. This hybrid SPION-polymersome system demonstrates a possible direction for release applications that merges rational polymersome design with addressed external magnetic field-triggered release through embedded nanomaterials.Published versio

Monitoring ROMP Crossover Chemistry via ESI-TOF MS

We report on the ESI-TOF MS investigation of oligomerization and co-oligomerization reactions via ring-opening metathesis polymerization of noncharged monomers. Thus, the monomers <b>1</b>–<b>4</b> ((±)<i>endo</i>,<i>exo</i>-bicyclo­[2,2,1]­hept-5-ene-2,3-dicarboxylic acid-bis-<i>O</i>-methyl ester (<b>1</b>), <i>exo</i>-<i>N</i>-(4,4,5,5,6,6,7,7,7-nonafluoroheptyl)-10-oxa-4-azatricyclodec-8-ene-3,5-dione (<b>2</b>), 3-methyl-3-phenylcyclopropene (<b>3</b>), and (±)<i>endo</i>,<i>exo</i>-bicyclo­[2,2,1]­hept-5-ene-2,3-dicarboxylic acid-bis-<i>O</i>-2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidinoxyl ester (<b>4</b>)) were investigated with the catalysts <b>5</b>–<b>8</b> (Grubbs catalyst first generation (<b>5</b>), Grubbs catalyst third generation (<b>6</b>), Umicore M1 (<b>7</b>), and Umicore M3 (<b>8</b>)) with respect to their crossover chemistries. Monomers <b>1</b>–<b>4</b> differ in ring size and substitution patterns and allow to study the monomer reactivities in the order of increasing reactivity for monomer <b>3</b> < <b>4</b> ≈ <b>1</b> < <b>2</b>. The measured spectra display a significant difference between the reactions conducted with first- and third-generation catalysts with the main fraction being unreacted catalyst species for the first-generation catalysts <b>5</b> and <b>7</b>, while just a small fraction is composed of oligomer and co-oligomer species. A significant reduction of the amount of the catalyst species and an increase in the fractions of oligomer and co-oligomer species are observed for the third-generation catalysts <b>6</b> and <b>8</b>, in accordance with their higher reactivity as compared to the first-generation catalysts. The highest fraction of co-oligomer species is observed for the crossover reactions <b>1/3</b> and <b>1</b>/<b>4</b>. Propagation of the second monomer, however, is only observed in the combinations <b>1</b>/<b>2</b> and <b>1</b>/<b>4</b> indicative of the higher reactivity of the norbornenes <b>2</b> and <b>4</b> when compared to the cyclopropene <b>3</b>, the latter requiring the addition of hydrochloric acid

AnnoXplorer: A Scalable, Integrated Approach for the Visual Analysis of Text Annotations

Text annotation data in terms of a series of tagged text segments can pose scalability challenges within the dimensions of quantity (long texts bearing many annotations), configuration (overlapping annotations or annotations with multiple tags), or source (annotations by multiple annotators). Accordingly, exploration tasks such as navigating within a long annotated text, recognizing patterns in the annotation data or assessing differences between annotators can be demanding. Our approach of an annotation browser deals with all of these data and task challenges simultaneously by providing a continuous range of views on large amounts of complex annotation data from multiple sources. We achieve this by using a combined geometric/semantic zooming mechanism that operates on an abstract representation of the sequence of a text’s tokens and the annotations thereupon, which is interlinked with a view on the text itself. The approach was developed in the context of a joint project with researc hers from fields concerned with textual sources. We derive our approach’s requirements from a series of tasks that are typical in natural language processing and digital humanities, show how it supports these tasks, and discuss it in the light of the feedback we got from our domain experts

Electrochemical Diffusion Study in Poly(Ethylene Glycol) Dimethacrylate-Based Hydrogels

Hydrogels are of great importance for functionalizing sensors and microfluidics, and poly(ethylene glycol) dimethacrylate (PEG-DMA) is often used as a viscosifier for printable hydrogel precursor inks. In this study, 1–10 kDa PEG-DMA based hydrogels were characterized by gravimetric and electrochemical methods to investigate the diffusivity of small molecules and proteins. Swelling ratios (SRs) of 14.43–9.24, as well as mesh sizes ξ of 3.58–6.91 nm were calculated, and it was found that the SR correlates with the molar concentration of PEG-DMA in the ink (MCI) (SR = 0.1127 × MCI + 8.3256, R2 = 0.9692) and ξ correlates with the molecular weight (Mw) (ξ = 0.3382 × Mw + 3.638, R2 = 0.9451). To investigate the sensing properties, methylene blue (MB) and MB-conjugated proteins were measured on electrochemical sensors with and without hydrogel coating. It was found that on sensors with 10 kDa PEG-DMA hydrogel modification, the DPV peak currents were reduced to 92 % for MB, 73 % for MB-BSA, and 23 % for MB-IgG. To investigate the diffusion properties of MB(-conjugates) in hydrogels with 1–10 kDa PEG-DMA, diffusivity was calculated from the current equation. It was found that diffusivity increases with increasing ξ. Finally, the release of MB-BSA was detected after drying the MB-BSA-containing hydrogel, which is a promising result for the development of hydrogel-based reagent reservoirs for biosensing. This work received funding from the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) under the HydroChip2 (grant no. 883914) and the Predict project (grant no. 870027) as well as from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 761000 (GREENSENSE)</p

Influence of Grafted Block Copolymer Structure on Thermoresponsiveness of Superparamagnetic Core–Shell Nanoparticles

The morphology and topology of thermoresponsive polymers have a strong impact on their responsive properties. Grafting onto spherical particles has been shown to reduce responsiveness and transition temperatures; grafting of block copolymers has shown that switchable or retained wettability of a surface or particle during desolvation of one block can take place. Here, doubly thermoresponsive block copolymers were grafted onto spherical, monodisperse, and superparamagnetic iron oxide nanoparticles to investigate the effect of thermal desolvation on spherical brushes of block copolymers. By inverting the block order, the influence of core proximity on the responsive properties of the individual blocks could be studied as well as their relative influence on the nanoparticle colloidal stability. The inner block was shown to experience a stronger reduction in transition temperature and transition enthalpy compared to the outer block. Still, the outer block also experiences a significant reduction in responsiveness due to the restricted environment in the nanoparticle shell compared to that of the free polymer state. The demonstrated pronounced distance dependence importantly implies the possibility, but also the necessity, to radially tailor polymer hydration transitions for applications such as drug delivery, hyperthermia, and biotechnological separation for which thermally responsive nanoparticles are being developed