Research on gas-surface interactions, 1966-1967. Part 1 - Project summary final report, 11 Aug. 1966 - 11 Oct. 1967

High intensity shock tube driven molecular beam for gas-surface interaction

Evidence of polariton induced transparency in a single organic quantum wire

The resonant interaction between quasi-one dimensional excitons and photons is investigated. For a single isolated organic quantum wire, embedded in its single crystal monomer matrix, the strong exciton-photon coupling regime is reached. This is evidenced by the suppression of the resonant excitonic absorption arising when the system eigenstate is a polariton. These observations demonstrate that the resonant excitonic absorption in a semiconductor can be understood in terms of a balance between the exciton coherence time and the Rabi period between exciton-like and photon-like states of the polariton.Comment: 9 pages and 4 figure

Proximal business intelligence on the semantic web

This is the post-print version of this article. The official version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 Springer.Ubiquitous information systems (UBIS) extend current Information System thinking to explicitly differentiate technology between devices and software components with relation to people and process. Adapting business data and management information to support specific user actions in context is an ongoing topic of research. Approaches typically focus on providing mechanisms to improve specific information access and transcoding but not on how the information can be accessed in a mobile, dynamic and ad-hoc manner. Although web ontology has been used to facilitate the loading of data warehouses, less research has been carried out on ontology based mobile reporting. This paper explores how business data can be modeled and accessed using the web ontology language and then re-used to provide the invisibility of pervasive access; uncovering more effective architectural models for adaptive information system strategies of this type. This exploratory work is guided in part by a vision of business intelligence that is highly distributed, mobile and fluid, adapting to sensory understanding of the underlying environment in which it operates. A proof-of concept mobile and ambient data access architecture is developed in order to further test the viability of such an approach. The paper concludes with an ontology engineering framework for systems of this type – named UBIS-ONTO

Atomic correlations in itinerant ferromagnets: quasi-particle bands of nickel

We measure the band structure of nickel along various high-symmetry lines of the bulk Brillouin zone with angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy. The Gutzwiller theory for a nine-band Hubbard model whose tight-binding parameters are obtained from non-magnetic density-functional theory resolves most of the long-standing discrepancies between experiment and theory on nickel. Thereby we support the view of itinerant ferromagnetism as induced by atomic correlations.Comment: 4 page REVTeX 4.0, one figure, one tabl

Making GDPR Usable: A Model to Support Usability Evaluations of Privacy

We introduce a new model for evaluating privacy that builds on the criteria proposed by the EuroPriSe certification scheme by adding usability criteria. Our model is visually represented through a cube, called Usable Privacy Cube (or UP Cube), where each of its three axes of variability captures, respectively: rights of the data subjects, privacy principles, and usable privacy criteria. We slightly reorganize the criteria of EuroPriSe to fit with the UP Cube model, i.e., we show how EuroPriSe can be viewed as a combination of only rights and principles, forming the two axes at the basis of our UP Cube. In this way we also want to bring out two perspectives on privacy: that of the data subjects and, respectively, that of the controllers/processors. We define usable privacy criteria based on usability goals that we have extracted from the whole text of the General Data Protection Regulation. The criteria are designed to produce measurements of the level of usability with which the goals are reached. Precisely, we measure effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction, considering both the objective and the perceived usability outcomes, producing measures of accuracy and completeness, of resource utilization (e.g., time, effort, financial), and measures resulting from satisfaction scales. In the long run, the UP Cube is meant to be the model behind a new certification methodology capable of evaluating the usability of privacy, to the benefit of common users. For industries, considering also the usability of privacy would allow for greater business differentiation, beyond GDPR compliance.Comment: 41 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, and appendixe

Hybrid Elastic ARM&Cloud HPC Collaborative Platform for generic tasks

Compute-heavy workloads are currently run on Hybrid HPC structures using x86 CPUs and GPUs from Intel, AMD, or NVidia, which have extremely high energy and financial costs. However, thanks to the incredible progress made on CPUs and GPUs based on the ARM architecture and their ubiquity in today’s mobile devices, it’s possible to conceive of a low-cost solution for our world’s data processing needs. Every year ARM-based mobile devices become more powerful, efficient, and come in ever smaller packages with ever growing storage. At the same time, smartphones waste these capabilities at night while they’re charging. This represents billions of idle devices whose processing power is not being utilized. For that reason, the objective of this paper is to evaluate and develop a hybrid, distributed, scalable, and redundant platform that allows for the utilization of these idle devices through a cloud-based administration service. The system would allow for massive improvements in terms of efficiency and cost for com-pute-heavy workload. During the evaluation phase, we were able to establish savings in power and cost significant enough to justify exploring it as a serious alternative to traditional computing architectures.Instituto de Investigación en Informátic

Morphological Abnormalities in Vitamin B6 Deficient Tarsometatarsal Chick Cartilage

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that deficiency of vitamin B6 would produce morphological characteristics of osteochondral lathyrism. To accomplish this goal, morphological characteristics of chick cartilage in which lathyrism was produced by two separate dietary regimens was compared to morphological changes encountered in vitamin B6 deficiency. Vitamin B6 deficiency should reduce activity of lysyloxidase needed for producing intermolecular cross-links. The question to be addressed was: would this latter deficiency impair collagen morphological features and secondarily other structures indirectly by reducing collagen molecular assembly? Failure of cross-linking of collagen in the positive controls was related to a lack of functional aldehyde cross-link intermediates which are blocked by homocysteine and aminoacetonitrile. Day-old-male Lohmann chicks were fed adequate (6 mg/kg) or vitamin B6-deficient diets. Cross-link defects were induced by homocysteine-rich diets (0.6% w/w) or a diet containing aminoacetonitrile (0.1% w/w). Animals were sacrificed at 6 weeks of age and Ossa tarsalia articular cartilage specimens, as well as the proximal end of tarsometatarsus were dissected from the tibial metatarsal joint, a major weight-bearing site. Light microscopic observations revealed reduction of subarticular trabecular bone formation, concurrent with overexpansion of the hypertrophic cell zone. Ultrastructural electron microscopy observations of articular fibro-cartilage indicated significant thickening of collagen fibers in vitamin B6 deficient birds, as well as the positive controls in comparison to that of cage-matched control birds. It was concluded that vitamin B6 deficient cross-linking may be responsible for the observed delay in bone development and aforementioned cartilage histological alterations