A comparative study of delayed stroke handling approaches in online handwriting

International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR) - Delayed strokes, such as i-dots and t-crosses, cause a challenge in online handwriting recognition by introducing an extra...     

Uridine as additive in antisolvent for improving performance and reproducibility of perovskite solar cells

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - Today, with their high efficiency of up to 25%, perovskite solar cells are the best alternative to silicon solar panels, which have...     

Hierarchical cross-training in work-in-process-constrained systems

We study Work-In-Process (WIP)-constrained flowlines staffed by partially cross-trained workers with hierarchical skill sets. We characterize the optimal worker-to-task assignment policy for CONWIP systems with two workers and general stochastic processing times. This leads us to the “fixed-before-shared” principle, which states that a flexible worker should process a task he/she is uniquely qualified for before helping other workers with shared tasks. To provide insights on the performance opportunity of hierarchical cross-training in systems with limited WIP, we provide a complete characterization of the optimal policy and closed-form expressions of the resulting throughput for the case of exponential processing times. We extend our results to the more general case of floater workers, and illustrate their applicability to various real-world systems. Our analysis shows that hierarchical cross-training can provide significant benefits, but should be implemented with care in WIP-constrained environments such as those making use of pull systems.     

Diesel steam reforming with a nickel-alumina spinel catalyst for solid oxide fuel cell application

Liquid hydrocarbons (LC) are considered as fuel cells feed and, more particularly, as solid oxide fuel cell feed. Cost-effective LC-reforming catalysts are critically needed for the successful commercialization of such technologies. An alternative to noble metal catalysts, proposed by the authors in a previous publication, has been proven efficient for diesel steam reforming (SR). Nickel, less expensive and more readily available than noble metals, was used in a form that prevents deactivation. The catalyst formulation is a Ni-alumina spinel (NiAl₂O₄) supported on alumina (Al₂O₃) and yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ).SR of commercial diesel was undertaken for more than 15 h at high gas hourly space velocities and steam-to-carbon ratios lower than 2. Constant diesel conversion and high hydrogen concentrations were obtained. Ni catalyst characterization revealed no detectable amounts of carbon on the spinel catalyst surface Ni. The effect of catalyst composition (Ni concentration and YSZ presence) was studied to understand and optimize the developed catalyst. Two phenomena were found to be influenced by relative catalyst composition: water-gas-shift vs reforming reaction extent, and concentration of light hydrocarbons in products.     

Sentence entailment in compositional distributional semantics

Distributional semantic models provide vector representations for words by gathering co-occurrence frequencies from corpora of text. Compositional distributional models extend these from words to phrases and sentences. In categorical compositional distributional semantics, phrase and sentence representations are functions of their grammatical structure and representations of the words therein. In this setting, grammatical structures are formalised by morphisms of a compact closed category and meanings of words are formalised by objects of the same category. These can be instantiated in the form of vectors or density matrices. This paper concerns the applications of this model to phrase and sentence level entailment. We argue that entropy-based distances of vectors and density matrices provide a good candidate to measure word-level entailment, show the advantage of density matrices over vectors for word level entailments, and prove that these distances extend compositionally from words to phrases and sentences. We exemplify our theoretical constructions on real data and a toy entailment dataset and provide preliminary experimental evidence.