Reversible Fragmentation and Self‐Assembling of Nematic Liquid Crystal Droplets on Functionalized Pyroelectric Substrates

Investigation on the behavior of nematic liquid crystals on functionalized polar dielectric crystal substrates is accomplished. Very interesting effects can be observed in maneuvering liquid crystal droplets on the substrate surface, driven by electric fields generated by pyroelectric effect. Reversible drops fragmentation and self‐assembling in different configurations can be achieved. The dynamics of the observed phenomena is studied and the repeatability of the process is full assessed.     

The role of mechanical forces in the planar-to-bulk transition in growing Escherichia coli microcolonies

Mechanical forces are obviously important in the assembly of three-dimensional multicellular structures, but their detailed role is often unclear. We have used growing microcolonies of the bacterium Escherichia coli to investigate the role of mechanical forces in the transition from two-dimensional growth (on the interface between a hard surface and a soft agarose pad) to three-dimensional growth (invasion of the agarose). We measure the position within the colony where the invasion transition happens, the cell density within the colony and the colony size at the transition as functions of the concentration of the agarose. We use a phenomenological theory, combined with individual-based computer simulations, to show how mechanical forces acting between the bacterial cells, and between the bacteria and the surrounding matrix, lead to the complex phenomena observed in our experiments—in particular the observation that agarose concentration non-trivially affects the colony size at transition. Matching these approaches leads to a prediction for how the friction between the bacteria and the agarose should vary with agarose concentration. Our experimental conditions mimic numerous clinical and environmental scenarios in which bacteria invade soft matrices, as well as shedding more general light on the transition between two- and three-dimensional growth in multicellular assemblies.     

An Innovative Science Gateway for the Cherenkov Telescope Array

The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is currently building the next generation, ground-based, very high-energy gamma-ray instrumentation. CTA is expected to collect very large datasets (in the order of petabytes) which will have to be stored, managed and processed. This paper presents a graphical user interface built inside a science gateway aiming at providing CTA-users with a common working framework. The gateway is WS-PGRADE/gUSE workflow-oriented and is equipped with a flexible SSO (based on SAML) to control user access for authentication and authorization. An interactive desktop environment is provided, called Astronomical & Physics Cloud Interactive Desktop (ACID). Users are able to exploit the graphical interface as provided natively by the tools included in ACID. A cloud data service shares and synchronizes data files and output results between the user desktop and the science gateway. Our solution is a first attempt towards an ecosystem of new technologies with a high level of flexibility to suit present and future requirements of the CTA community.     

Migration cost optimization for service provider legacy network migration to software-defined IPv6 network

This paper studies a problem for seamless migration of legacy networks of Internet service providers to a software-defined networking (SDN)-based architecture along with the transition to the full adoption of the Internet protocol version 6 (IPv6) connectivity. Migration of currently running legacy IPv4 networks into such new approaches requires either upgrades or replacement of existing networking devices and technologies that are actively operating. The joint migration to SDN and IPv6 network is considered to be vital in terms of migration cost optimization, skilled human resource management, and other critical factors. In this work, we first present the approaches of SDN and IPv6 migration in service providers' networks. Then, we present the common concerns of IPv6 and SDN migration with joint transition strategies so that the cost associated with joint migration is minimized to lower than that of the individual migration. For the incremental adoption of software-defined IPv6 (SoDIP6) network with optimum migration cost, a greedy algorithm is proposed based on optimal path and the customer priority. Simulation and empirical analysis show that a unified transition planning to SoDIP6 network results in lower migration cost.     

Packet loss detection in networked control systems

One of the main issues related to the reliable operation of network control systems concerns the design of mechanisms able to detect anomalies in the functioning of the communication network through which the control loops are closed. In this article, we address the problem of detecting the occurrence of packet losses and design a mechanism that can detect the occurrence of packet losses directly from process sensor data. Specifically, we propose a moving‐horizon estimation scheme that permits to detect if the packet‐loss rate exceeds prescribed thresholds, which are representative of stability and performance of the control system. We discuss theoretical properties of the proposed solution along with an approximation scheme with reduced computational burden. A numerical example is discussed to substantiate the analysis.     

Dependency solving: A separate concern in component evolution management

Maintenance of component-based software platforms often has to face rapid evolution of software components. Component dependencies, conflicts, and package managers with dependency solving capabilities are the key ingredients of prevalent software maintenance technologies that have been proposed to keep software installations synchronized with evolving component repositories. We review state-of-the-art package managers and their ability to keep up with evolution at the current growth rate of popular component-based platforms, and conclude that their dependency solving abilities are not up to the task.We show that the complexity of the underlying upgrade planning problem is NP-complete even for seemingly simple component models, and argue that the principal source of complexity lies in multiple available versions of components. We then discuss the need of expressive languages for user preferences, which makes the problem even more challenging.We propose to establish dependency solving as a separate concern from other upgrade aspects, and present CUDF as a formalism to describe upgrade scenarios. By analyzing the result of an international dependency solving competition, we provide evidence that the proposed approach is viable.     

An intermittent control model of flexible human gait using a stable manifold of saddle-type unstable limit cycle dynamics

Stability of human gait is the ability to maintain upright posture during walking against external perturbations. It is a complex process determined by a number of cross-related factors, including gait trajectory, joint impedance and neural control strategies. Here, we consider a control strategy that can achieve stable steady-state periodic gait while maintaining joint flexibility with the lowest possible joint impedance. To this end, we carried out a simulation study of a heel-toe footed biped model with hip, knee and ankle joints and a heavy head-arms-trunk element, working in the sagittal plane. For simplicity, the model assumes a periodic desired joint angle trajectory and joint torques generated by a set of feed-forward and proportional-derivative feedback controllers, whereby the joint impedance is parametrized by the feedback gains. We could show that a desired steady-state gait accompanied by the desired joint angle trajectory can be established as a stable limit cycle (LC) for the feedback controller with an appropriate set of large feedback gains. Moreover, as the feedback gains are decreased for lowering the joint stiffness, stability of the LC is lost only in a few dimensions, while leaving the remaining large number of dimensions quite stable: this means that the LC becomes saddle-type, with a low-dimensional unstable manifold and a high-dimensional stable manifold. Remarkably, the unstable manifold remains of low dimensionality even when the feedback gains are decreased far below the instability point. We then developed an intermittent neural feedback controller that is activated only for short periods of time at an optimal phase of each gait stride. We characterized the robustness of this design by showing that it can better stabilize the unstable LC with small feedback gains, leading to a flexible gait, and in particular we demonstrated that such an intermittent controller performs better if it drives the state point to the stable manifold, rather than directly to the LC. The proposed intermittent control strategy might have a high affinity for the inverted pendulum analogy of biped gait, providing a dynamic view of how the step-to-step transition from one pendular stance to the next can be achieved stably in a robust manner by a well-timed neural intervention that exploits the stable modes embedded in the unstable dynamics.     

Residual behavior of steel rebars and R/C sections after a fire

The mechanical properties of various steel bars exposed to high temperature (“residual” properties) are experimentally investigated up to 850 °C, with reference to a number of steel and bar types (carbon and stainless steel; quenched and self-tempered bars; hot-rolled and cold-worked bars; smooth and deformed bars). The aim is to clarify to what extent the thermal sensitivity of the different bars affects the ultimate capacity of a typical R/C section subjected to an eccentric axial force, past a fire (“residual” capacity). As usual in the design of R/C sections under combined bending and axial loading, the ultimate behavior is represented through the “M–N envelopes”, where the materials strength decay due to high temperature is taken into account. The results show that quenched and self-tempered bars (QST), very popular in Europe, are more temperature-sensitive above 600 °C than the carbon-steel bars extensively used in the States and nowadays rarely used in Europe. Furthermore, the best response is exhibited by the stainless-steel bars, provided that they are hot rolled, as it is generally the case for medium- and large-diameter bars. Similar conclusions can be drawn for the sections reinforced with the different bar types.