A formal representation for context-aware business processes

A business process is a set of activities performed in a coordinated manner within an organizational and technical environment that is aimed toward a business goal. The flexibility of a process is related to an understanding of the unexpected events that occur when people, systems and resources interact and require adjustments. Thus, business processes must be designed to respond to information about different events and their specificity. This information defines what the literature calls “context”. To broaden the perception of context in the case of a business process, this work proposes an approach to characterize the context of a business process activity in a given domain through conceptual models structured in layers. A case study was conducted to evaluate the proposal, which provided evidence of the applicability of the model.     

A web-based platform for biosignal visualization and annotation

With the advent of wearable sensing and mobile technologies, biosignals have seen an increasingly growing number of application areas, leading to the collection of large volumes of data. One of the difficulties in dealing with these data sets, and in the development of automated machine learning systems which use them as input, is the lack of reliable ground truth information. In this paper we present a new web-based platform for visualization, retrieval and annotation of biosignals by non-technical users, aimed at improving the process of ground truth collection for biomedical applications. Moreover, a novel extendable and scalable data representation model and persistency framework is presented. The results of the experimental evaluation with possible users has further confirmed the potential of the presented framework.     

Combustion of methane over palladium ZSM-5 and mordenite catalysts

The effect of Pd-loading on Pd-NaZSM-5 and Pd-NaMordenite catalysts prepared by ion exchange was studied for methane combustion with excess oxygen (1% CH₄, 18% O₂, balance N₂) in the temperature range 40–500°C. Fresh and calcined samples (3 h, 450°C) showed methane conversions proportional to Pd-loading on Pd-NaZSM-5 catalysts, while conversions decreased with Pd-loading on calcined Pd-NaMordenite catalysts. TOF (number of methane molecules converted per second per Pd²⁺ ion) for over exchanged Pd-NaZSM5-116 was low as compared to under exchanged Pd-NaZSM5-80 and Pd-NaZSM5-58 samples. Close TOF's were found for the last two samples at 330°C. TOF differences in Pd-NaMordenite catalysts demonstrate the heterogeneity of Pd⁺² sites due to structurally nonidentical locations of cations. TOF's appear to be related to Na/Pd ratios in both catalyst types. Apparent activation energies for Pd-NaZSM-5 materials are higher than those for Pd-NaMordenite catalysts.     

Variability for oil and fatty acid composition in castorbean varieties

Thirty-six castorbean varieties were surveyed for oil and fatty acid composition, in order to determine variability of these seed compounds. A large variability of seed oil percentage was observed, ranging from 39.6 to 59.5%. Concerning the fatty acids, little variability was observed for ricinoleic acid, which was the most abundant in the oil, ranging from 83.65 to 90.00%. The other fatty acids appeared in small concentrations and showed a small range: 0.87 to 2.35, 0.68 to 1.84, 2.96 to 5.64, 3.19 to 5.98, and 0.34 to 0.91%, for palmitic, stearic, oleic, linoleic, and linolenic acid, respectively. Non-significant correlations were observed between fatty acids and seed oil percentage. However, significant correlations were observed among fatty acid concentrations: positive and negative ones. These significant correlations could be associated with the biosynthetic pathways of the fatty acids, which are not fully elucidated. They suggest, however, that selection for a particular fatty acid will tend to increase those positively correlated, and decrease those negative ones. Selection and plant breeding techniques could then be applied to modify the oil content of the castorbean seeds, considering the variability observed. For the fatty acid composition, however, the variability was not large enough to make substantial changes in their concentrations by selection procedures. More varieties should be surveyed to find out if such variability is available.     

The Influence of the Acid Sites on the Methylamines Synthesis with Cu-HZSM-5 Zeolite

There is a high industrial demand for MMA and DMA, however, the production of TMA is favored with the commercial catalysts. This work tested the methanol amination reaction with HZSM-5 and Cu/HZSM-5 zeolites (%Cu = 1.2, 3.7 and 6.0). Regarding the MMA selectivity, light differences were observed among Cu/HZSM-5 catalysts and pure zeolite, although the catalysts containing 3.7% copper was slightly more selective to MMA than the other metallic catalysts studied. From these results it is suggested that the metal loading present in the catalysts leads to a modification in the nature of the acidic sites, in particular, the selectivity depends on ratio Brönsted/Lewis acid sites. This modifications would facilitate the amines desorption during the reaction.     

Twin-image suppression in digital in-line holography based on wave-front filtering

Pattern Analysis and Applications - Digital holography is an imaging process able to recreate three-dimensional representations of objects from recording pattern interference among distinct waves....     

Sense representations for Portuguese: experiments with sense embeddings and deep neural language models

Sense representations have gone beyond word representations like Word2Vec, GloVe and FastText and achieved innovative performance on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Although very useful in many applications, the traditional approaches for generating word embeddings have a strict drawback: they produce a single vector representation for a given word ignoring the fact that ambiguous words can assume different meanings. In this paper, we explore unsupervised sense representations which, different from traditional word embeddings, are able to induce different senses of a word by analyzing its contextual semantics in a text. The unsupervised sense representations investigated in this paper are: sense embeddings and deep neural language models. We present the first experiments carried out for generating sense embeddings for Portuguese. Our experiments show that the sense embedding model (Sense2vec) outperformed traditional word embeddings in syntactic and semantic analogies task, proving that the language resource generated here can improve the performance of NLP tasks in Portuguese. We also evaluated the performance of pre-trained deep neural language models (ELMo and BERT) in two transfer learning approaches: feature based and fine-tuning, in the semantic textual similarity task. Our experiments indicate that the fine tuned Multilingual and Portuguese BERT language models were able to achieve better accuracy than the ELMo model and baselines.

     

An International Collaborative Study on Trypsin Inhibitor Assay for Legumes,Cereals, and Related Products

For determining trypsin inhibitor activity (TIA) in soy products, the American Oil Chemists' Society (AOCS) Method Ba 12-75 has been used. It measures differences in absorbance at 410 nm of bovine trypsin activity toward a synthetic substrate (Nα-benzoyl-DL-arginine-p-nitroanilide) in the absence and presence of an inhibitor. Recently, a significantly improved method was developed (JAOCS, 2019, 96:635–645), featuring 5 mL of total assay volume, enzyme-last sequence, and single inhibitor level in duplicate. It is proposed as the AOCS Method Ba 12a-2020. As a part of the AOCS method approval process, a collaborative study involving 12 international laboratories was conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The study involved measuring TIA in 10 selected test samples plus a blind duplicate. They included soybeans, pulses, cereals, and their processed products (flours, concentrates, and isolates). After rigorous statistical treatment of the data, only three outliers were removed from the data of two samples. Repeatability relative standard deviations (RSDr) for the 11 samples ranged from 0.99% to 5.52%. Reproducibility RSD (RSD_R) ranged from 7.07% to 22.92%, with seven samples having RSD_R around 10% or less. The remaining four samples had very low TIA, and their RSD_R values ranged from 13.34% to 22.92%. The study has demonstrated reliable performance of the proposed AOCS method. Several collaborators carried out additional experiments addressing some aspects of the method, leading to further refinements. The proposed method is undergoing evaluation by the AOCS Uniform Methods Committee for adoption as an Official Method for measuring TIA in various legume and grain products.     

Simple approach for the plasma treatment of polymeric membranes and investigation of the aging effect

The modification of the surface characteristics after treatment with plasma in polymeric materials, such as the aging phenomenon, calls the attention of research in the area of nonthermal plasma technology. In this work, a direct treatment with dielectric-barrier discharge plasma was used on the surfaces of ultrafiltration membranes. The measurements of the contact angle with water, attenuated total reflectance accessory, zeta potential, atomic force microscopy and scanning electron microscopy-MEV were performed on the surfaces to verify changes after plasma treatment and to understand the occurrence and timing of the plasma aging effect. In the analysis of the membrane performance, hydraulic permeation and protein retention tests were performed. The results showed an improvement in wettability and hydrophilic properties in the post-treated membranes. The study of reversibility/aging of the post-plasma surface is important for research that deals with the modification of polymeric membranes. Changes in surface morphology, topography and wettability of the membranes were observed up to seven days after treatment, with a tendency to return to the initial characteristics of the membranes.     

Long-term effect of diesel degradation on polyoxymethylene at different temperatures

Diesel is an important fuel, partly because of the longevity and cleanliness of diesel engines. Often, polymers are in direct contact with diesel and understanding compatibility is critical. Polyoxymethylene (POM) is a thermoplastic used to manufacture automotive fuel pump gears and rotors due to its low coefficient of friction and thermal and dimensional stability. In this study, tensile tests were performed on plain and glass fiber reinforced (POM and POMGF) after immersion in diesel at different temperatures (−10°C, 23°C, and 60°C) for 1000, 2000, 3000, 5000, and 10 000 hour. A mathematical model was developed using data from just three tensile stress-strain curves obtained at two different fluid temperatures and three different immersion times. Model and experimental results show good agreement with one another for all conditions tested.