Fully automatic multi-language translation with a catalogue of phrases: successful employment for the Swiss avalanche bulletin

The Swiss avalanche bulletin is produced twice a day in four languages. Due to the lack of time available for manual translation, a fully automated translation system is employed, based on a catalogue of predefined phrases and predetermined rules of how these phrases can be combined to produce sentences. Because this catalogue of phrases is limited to a small sublanguage, the system is able to automatically translate such sentences from German into the target languages French, Italian and English without subsequent proofreading or correction. Having been operational for two winter seasons, we assess here the quality of the produced texts based on two different surveys where participants rated texts from real avalanche bulletins from both origins, the catalogue of phrases versus manually written and translated texts. With a mean recognition rate of 55 %, users can hardly distinguish between the two types of texts, and give very similar ratings with respect to their language quality. Overall, the output from the catalogue system can be considered virtually equivalent to a text written by avalanche forecasters and then manually translated by professional translators. Furthermore, forecasters declared that all relevant situations were captured by the system with sufficient accuracy. Forecaster’s working load did not change with the introduction of the catalogue: the extra time to find matching sentences is compensated by the fact that they no longer need to double-check manually translated texts. The reduction of daily translation costs is expected to offset the initial development costs within a few years.     

Monoid-labeled transition systems

Given a -complete (semi)lattice , we consider -labeled transition systems as coalgebras of a functor ⁽⁻⁾, associating with a set X the set ^X of all -fuzzy subsets. We describe simulations and bisimulations of -coalgebras to show that L⁽⁻⁾ weakly preserves nonempty kernel pairs iff it weakly preserves nonempty pullbacks iff L is join infinitely distributive (JID).Exchanging for a commutative monoid , we consider the functor ⁽⁻⁾_ω which associates with a set X all finite multisets containing elements of X with multiplicities m M. The corresponding functor weakly preserves nonempty pullbacks along injectives iff 0 is the only invertible element of , and it preserves nonempty kernel pairs iff is refinable, in the sense that two sum representations of the same value, r₁ + … + r_m = c₁ + … + c_n, have a common refinement matrix (m_{(i, j)}) whose k-th row sums to r_k and whose l-th column sums to c_l for any 1≤ k ≤ m and 1 ≤ l ≤ n.     

Coatings of indium tin oxide nanoparticles on various flexible polymer substrates: Influence of surface topography and oscillatory bending on electrical properties

Abstract— Coatings of indium tin oxide (ITO) nanoparticles on different flexible polymer substrates were investigated with respect to the achievable sheet resistance and their electrical behavior under oscillatory bending. As substrate materials, polyethyleneterephthalate (PET), polyethylenenaphthalate (PEN), polyetheretherketone (PEEK), and polyimide (PI) were chosen, the surface resistances on the different polymer substrates were compared as a function of annealing temperature and surface topography. The surface topography, which has a strong influence on the surface resistance, was characterized by means of a white‐light confocal (WL‐CF) microscope. On the PET substrate, which exhibits the smoothest surface, the coating of ITO nanoparticles shows the lowest sheet resistance of 2 kΩ/□ for a layer thickness of 3 μm and an annealing temperature of 200°C. Furthermore, the electrical behavior of coatings of ITO nanoparticles under oscillatory bending was investigated using a special device. These coatings show a cyclic change of the conductivity which can be explained by an alternating compression and extension of crack flanks under the applied stress. Due to the growing number of cracks with increasing number of cycles, a decrease of the conductivity is observed in the bent state as well as in the balanced state. For a small bending radii, the decrease of the conductivity is stronger due to more cracks caused by the higher tensile stresses in the layer. The electrical behavior of the coatings of the annealed ITO nanoparticles on PET films under oscillatory bending was compared with commercially available sputtered ITO coatings. The annealed coatings of ITO nanoparticles demonstrate better electrical properties under oscillatory bending than coatings of sputtered ITO. The different electrical behavior under oscillatory bending can be related to differences in crack formation.     

PIN OLEDs — Improved structures and materials to enhance device lifetime

Abstract— Currently, three issues are identified that decide upon the commercial success of organic light‐emitting diodes (OLEDs), both in display and lighting applications: power efficiency, lifetime, and price competitiveness. PIN OLEDs are widely seen as the preferred way to maximize power efficiency. Here, it is reported that this concept also delivers the world longest lifetimes. For a highly efficient deep‐red PIN OLED, a half‐lifetime of 25,000 hours for a starting brightness of 10,000 cd/m² and a minimal voltage increase over lifetime is reported. This value corresponds to more than 1 × 10⁶ hours at 1000 cd/m² using an exponent of n = 1.7, which was measured by driving the OLEDs at different starting luminances. Because there is no initial luminance drop, these PIN OLEDs also exhibit a very high 80% lifetime (>300,000 hours at 1000 cd/m²). New record lifetime values for blue and green will be reported as well. Additionally, further topics that have impact on the production yield and cost such as the newly developed air‐stable organic n‐doping material NDN‐26 and top‐emitting structures will be discussed.     

On the impact of objective function transformations on evolutionary and black-box algorithms

Different objective functions characterize different problems. However, certain fitness transformations can lead to easier problems although they are still a model of the considered problem. In this article, the class of not worsening transformations for a simple population-based evolutionary algorithm (EA) is described completely. That is the class of functions that transfers easy problems in easy ones and difficult problems in difficult ones. Surprisingly, this class for the rank-based EA equals that for all black-box algorithms. The importance of the black-box algorithms' knowledge of the transformation is also pointed out. Hence, a comparison with the class of not worsening transformations for a similar EA which applies fitness-proportional selection, shows that is a proper superset of . Moreover, is a proper subset of the corresponding class for random search. Finally, the minimal and maximal classes of not worsening transformations are described completely, too.     

Streamline predicates

Predicates are functions that return Boolean values. They are an essential tool in computer science. A close look at flow feature definitions reveals that they can be seen as point predicates that tell if a specific feature exists at a certain point. Besides the information about features, scientists and engineers like to know the overall behavior of all streamlines in the flow, typically in the connection with the important features in their application domain. We call this a structure definition for the flow. A successful example for a structure definition is flow topology. In this paper, we present streamline predicates as functions that tell the user about the connection between streamlines and features selected by the user. This means answers to questions like: Which streamlines flow through a given vortex, separation bubble, or shock wave? It can be shown that streamline predicates may refine flow topology so that it also reveals questions about vortices in 3D.     

Microstructure Development of Oxycarbide Composites during Active-Filler-Controlled Polymer Pyrolysis

The microstructure development of a ceramic composite material fabricated by active-filler-controlled polymer pyrolysis (AFCOP) was investigated. During heating of a polysiloxane precursor mixed with titanium powder in argon atmosphere up to 1400°C, thermally induced decomposition of the polymer phase is combined with simultaneous carburization of the transition metal filler. Precipitation of nanocrystalline titanium carbide at the filler particle surface starts above 400°C, and larger, faceted carbide particles have growth above 800°C. A skeleton of turbostratic carbon is formed above 800°C in the polymer-derived silicon oxycarbide matrix from which b-silicon carbide and cristobalite crystallize above 1000°C. A pronounced reduction in linear shrinkage involved in polymer–ceramic conversion is observed. The shrinkage reduction ranges from more than 25% for the filler-free precursor to less than 10% in the presence of 30 vol% of the titanium filler. Thus, active-filler-controlled pyrolysis offers the possibility of controlling shrinkage and porosity formation during polymer–ceramic conversion in order to fabricate bulk components from organometallic polymer precursor systems.     

Spherical sample holders to improve the susceptibility measurement of superparamagnetic materials

The design of two custom sample holders with a spherical cavity for commercial vibrating sample magnetometer systems is described. For such cavities, the magnetization M[over ->] and the internal magnetic field H(i)[over ->] of a sample are both homogeneous. Consequently, the material parameter M(H(i)) of a sample can be determined even for liquids and powders with a high magnetic susceptibility.     

Pre‐convolved Radiance Caching

The incident indirect light over a range of image pixels is often coherent. Two common approaches to exploit this inter‐pixel coherence to improve rendering performance are Irradiance Caching and Radiance Caching. Both compute incident indirect light only for a small subset of pixels (the cache), and later interpolate between pixels. Irradiance Caching uses scalar values that can be interpolated efficiently, but cannot account for shading variations caused by normal and reflectance variation between cache items. Radiance Caching maintains directional information, e.g., to allow highlights between cache items, but at the cost of storing and evaluating a Spherical Harmonics (SH) function per pixel. The arithmetic and bandwidth cost for this evaluation is linear in the number of coefficients and can be substantial. In this paper, we propose a method to replace it by an efficient per‐cache item pre‐filtering based on MIP maps — such as previously done for environment maps — leading to a single constant‐time lookup per pixel. Additionally, per‐cache item geometry statistics stored in distance‐MIP maps are used to improve the quality of each pixel's lookup. Our approximate interactive global illumination approach is an order of magnitude faster than Radiance Caching with Phong BRDFs and can be combined with Monte Carlo‐raytracing, Point‐based Global Illumination or Instant Radiosity.