Evaluation of Digitally Encoded Layer‐by‐layer Coated Microparticles as Cell Carriers

To obtain more biologically relevant data there is a growing interest in the use of living cells for assaying the biological activity of unknown chemical compounds. Density ‘multiplex’ cell‐based assays, where different cell types are mixed in one well and simultaneously investigated upon exposure to a certain compound are beginning to emerge. To be able to identify the cells they should be attached to microscopic carriers that are encoded. This paper investigates how digitally encoded microparticles can be loaded with cells while keeping the digital code in the microcarriers readable. It turns out that coating the surface of the encoded microcarriers with polyelectrolytes using the layer‐by‐layer (LbL) approach provides the microcarriers with a ‘highly functional’ surface. The polyelectrolyte layer allows the growth of the cells, allows the orientation of the cell loaded microcarriers in a magnetic field, and does not hamper the reading of the code. It has further been shown that the cells growing on the polyelectrolyte layer can become transduced by adenoviral particles hosted by the polyelectrolyte layer. It is concluded that the digitally encoded microparticles are promising materials for use in biomedical and pharmaceutical in‐vitro research where cells are used as tools.     

Porosity distribution in highly compressible cake: Experimental and theoretical verification of the dense skin

The rate of filtration and the water content of cake are influenced by the existence of a dense skin in a highly compressible cake. The phenomenon of the dense skin has been rarely studied, and its existence has not been verified experimentally. In this study, the porosity variation in a very compressible cake is measured by using a new experimental apparatus, and with this the existence of dense skin has been established experimentally. ‘Unified theory on solid-liquid separation’, a recently developed theory, is utilized for calculating the porosity variation in a very compressible cake.     

Fourth International Conference on Durability of Building Materials and Components

RILEM Bulletin

Fourth International Conference on Durability of Building Materials and Components     

Optimal control and energy storage for DC electric train systems using evolutionary algorithms

Railway Engineering Science - Electrified railways are becoming a popular transport medium and these consume a large amount of electrical energy. Environmental concerns demand reduction in energy...     

A saliency-driven robotic head with bio-inspired saccadic behaviors for social robotics

This paper presents a robotic head for social robots to attend to scene saliency with bio-inspired saccadic behaviors. Scene saliency is determined by measuring low-level static scene information, motion, and object prior knowledge. Towards the extracted saliency spots, the designed robotic head is able to turn gazes in a saccadic manner while obeying eye–head coordination laws with the proposed control scheme. The results of the simulation study and actual applications show the effectiveness of the proposed method in discovering of scene saliency and human-like head motion. The proposed techniques could possibly be applied to social robots to improve social sense and user experience in human–robot interaction.     

Guided architecture trade space exploration: fusing model-based engineering and design by shopping

Software and Systems Modeling - Advances in model-based system engineering have greatly increased the predictive power of models and the analyses that can be run on them. At the same time, designs...     

A modular designed bolt tightening shaft based on adaptive fuzzy backstepping control

This paper presents a modular designed autonomous bolt tightening shaft system with an adaptive fuzzy backstepping control approach developed for it. The bolt tightening shaft is designed for the autonomous bolt tightening operation, which has huge potential for industry application. Due to the inherent nonlinear and uncertain properties, the bolt tightening shaft and the bolt tightening process are mathematically modeled as an uncertain strict feedback system. With the adaptive backstepping and approximation property of fuzzy logic system, the controller is recursively designed. Based on the Lyapunov stability theorem, all signals in the closed-loop system are proved to be uniformly ultimately bounded and the torque tracking error exponentially converges to a small residue. And the effectiveness and performance of the proposed autonomous system are verified by the simulation and experiment results on the bolt tightening shaft system.     

The minimum information about failures for solving non-local tasks in message-passing systems

We first define the basic notions of local and non-local tasks for distributed systems. Intuitively, a task is local if, in a system with no failures, each process can compute its output value locally by applying some local function on its own input value (so the output value of each process depends only on the process’ own input value, not on the input values of the other processes); a task is nonlocal otherwise. All the interesting distributed tasks, including all those that have been investigated in the literature (e.g., consensus, set agreement, renaming, atomic commit, etc.) are non-local. In this paper we consider non-local tasks and determine the minimum information about failures that is necessary to solve such tasks in message-passing distributed systems. As part of this work, we also introduces weak set agreement—a natural weakening of set agreement—and show that, in some precise sense, it is the weakest nonlocal task in message-passing systems.     

钓鱼冠军赛

钓鱼,是一项非常休闲的户外活动,大家对此一定不会陌生。笔者就是一个钓鱼迷,而且笔者相信绝大多数人也都有钓鱼的经历。但是你有没有试过在电脑中钓鱼呢？那些不曾钓过鱼的朋友也不用心急,先玩玩这个游戏体验一下钓鱼的感觉吧。     

Operation, system architectures, and physical Layer design considerations of distributed MAC protocols for UWB

Impulse-based ultra wideband (I-UWB) is an attractive radio technology for large ad hoc and sensor networks due to its robustness to harmful multipath effects, sub-centimeter ranging ability, simple hardware, and low radiated power. To scale to large sizes, networks often implement distributed medium access control (MAC) protocols. However, most MAC protocols for I-UWB are centralized, and they target small wireless personal area networks and cellular networks. We propose three distributed MAC protocols suitable for I-UWB. Two multichannel protocols, called multichannel pulse sense multiple access (M-PSMA) and multichannel ALOHA achieve high aggregate throughput. A busy-signal protocol, called busy-signal multiple access (BSMA), reduces the energy wasted from re-transmitted packets. This paper describes the three protocols in terms of the protocol's operation, the supporting system architecture, and the I-UWB physical layer. Physical layer simulations confirm the feasibility of implementing the proposed systems and also provide parameters for network simulations. Network simulations show that the throughput of M-PSMA exceeds that of a centralized time-division multiple-access protocol and that the energy efficiency of BSMA far surpasses that of other distributed protocols.