ColdRoute: effective routing of cold questions in stack exchange sites

Routing questions in Community Question Answer services such as Stack Exchange sites is a well-studied problem. Yet, cold-start—a phenomena observed when a new question is posted is not well addressed by existing approaches. Additionally, cold questions posted by new askers present significant challenges to state-of-the-art approaches. We propose ColdRoute to address these challenges. ColdRoute is able to handle the task of routing cold questions posted by new or existing askers to matching experts. Specifically, we use Factorization Machines on the one-hot encoding of critical features such as question tags and compare our approach to well-studied techniques such as CQARank and semantic matching (LDA, BoW, and Doc2Vec). Using data from eight stack exchange sites, we are able to improve upon the routing metrics (Precision@1, Accuracy, MRR) over the state-of-the-art models such as semantic matching by 159.5, 31.84, and 40.36% for cold questions posted by existing askers, and 123.1, 27.03, and 34.81% for cold questions posted by new askers respectively.     

Cyclic voltammetric studies of nickel hydroxide and cobalt hydroxide thin films in alkali and alkaline earth metal hydroxides

Cyclic voltammetric studies of thin films of electrosynthesized (ES)-Ni(OH)₂ and Co(OH)₂ in different alkaline electrolytes suggest that the mechanism of oxidation is different from the mechanism of reduction. While the metal ion (alkali or alkaline earth metal) intercalation-deintercalation from the electrolyte into the film provides the driving force, the reduction reaction takes place heterogeneously independent of the electrolyte concentration, whereas oxidation takes place homogeneously across a nebulously defined electrode-electrolyte interphase. ES-Ni(OH)₂ permits facile intercalationdeintercalation of alkali metal ions Li⁺, Na⁺ and K⁺, irrespective of their ionic size, while the reactions of ES-Co(OH)₂ are sensitive to ionic size, requiring larger potentials in KOH compared to LiOH. In the alkaline earth metal hydroxides, both Ni(OH)₂ and Co(OH)₂ films show greater reversible characteristics in the order Ba(OH)₂ > Sr(OH)₂ > Ca(OH)₂. This may be trivially related to the order of the solubilities of the three hydroxides.     

Electrochemical impedance studies of capacity fading of electrodeposited ZnO conversion anodes in Li-ion battery

Electrodeposited ZnO coatings suffer severe capacity fading when used as conversion anodes in sealed Li cells. Capacity fading is attributed to (i) the large charge transfer resistance, \(R_{\mathrm{ct}}\) (300–700 \(\Omega \)) and (ii) the low \(\hbox {Li}^{+}\) ion diffusion coefficient, \(D_{\mathrm{Li}}^{+}\ (10^{-15}\) to \(10^{-13}\hbox { cm}^{2}\hbox { s}^{-1})\). The measured value of \(R_{\mathrm{ct}}\) is nearly 10 times higher and \(D_{\mathrm{Li}}^{+}\) 10–100 times lower than the corresponding values for \(\hbox {Cu}_{2}\hbox {O}\), which delivers a stable reversible capacity.     

Low temperature synthesis,dielectric and electrical characteristics of Bi2/3Cu3−xNixTi4O12(where x = 0.05, 0.1, and 0.2) ceramics for the dielectric and electrical properties

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - We have investigated a low-temperature chemical route of the synthesis and measured the dielectric, electrical and morphological...     

Performance analysis of data intensive cloud systems based on data management and replication: a survey

As we delve deeper into the ‘Digital Age’, we witness an explosive growth in the volume, velocity, and variety of the data available on the Internet. For example, in 2012 about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data was created on a daily basis that originated from myriad of sources and applications including mobile devices, sensors, individual archives, social networks, Internet of Things, enterprises, cameras, software logs, etc. Such ‘Data Explosions’ has led to one of the most challenging research issues of the current Information and Communication Technology era: how to optimally manage (e.g., store, replicated, filter, and the like) such large amount of data and identify new ways to analyze large amounts of data for unlocking information. It is clear that such large data streams cannot be managed by setting up on-premises enterprise database systems as it leads to a large up-front cost in buying and administering the hardware and software systems. Therefore, next generation data management systems must be deployed on cloud. The cloud computing paradigm provides scalable and elastic resources, such as data and services accessible over the Internet Every Cloud Service Provider must assure that data is efficiently processed and distributed in a way that does not compromise end-users’ Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of data availability, data search delay, data analysis delay, and the like. In the aforementioned perspective, data replication is used in the cloud for improving the performance (e.g., read and write delay) of applications that access data. Through replication a data intensive application or system can achieve high availability, better fault tolerance, and data recovery. In this paper, we survey data management and replication approaches (from 2007 to 2011) that are developed by both industrial and research communities. The focus of the survey is to discuss and characterize the existing approaches of data replication and management that tackle the resource usage and QoS provisioning with different levels of efficiencies. Moreover, the breakdown of both influential expressions (data replication and management) to provide different QoS attributes is deliberated. Furthermore, the performance advantages and disadvantages of data replication and management approaches in the cloud computing environments are analyzed. Open issues and future challenges related to data consistency, scalability, load balancing, processing and placement are also reported.     

Melt compounded polylactic acid-hexagonal boron nitride-aluminum oxide hybrid composites for electronic applications: impact of hybrid fillers on thermophysical,dielectric, optical,and hardness properties

ABSTRACT

The dielectric, thermophysical, optical, and hardness of pure polylactic acid (PLA) and hBN micropowder and Al₂O₃ nanopowder (1% to 30%) reinforced PLA hybrid composites were investigated. Hybrid composites exhibit improved thermal conductivity (k – 0.54 W/mK), permittivity (?? – 4.6720 @ 1 MHz to 1 GHz) with very low loss tangent (tan δ < 0.02). High absorption in UV region was observed for all hybrid composites. Overall, the prepared hybrid composites can be used as a bio-based dielectric substrates, enclosures, thermal interface material for low temperature applications and UV-absorbable coating materials for fabric, packaging, and storage applications.     

Modified Mean and Variance Normalization: Transforming to Utterance-Specific Estimates

Cepstral mean and variance normalization (CMVN) is an efficient noise compensation technique popularly used in many speech applications. CMVN eliminates the mismatch between training and test utterances by transforming them to zero mean and unit variance. In this work, we argue that some amount of useful information is lost during normalization as every utterance is forced to have the same first- and second-order statistics, i.e., zero mean and unit variance. We propose to modify CMVN methodology to retain the useful information and yet compensate for noise. The proposed normalization approach transforms every test utterance to utterance-specific clean mean (i.e., utterance mean if the noise was absent) and clean variance, instead of zero mean and unit variance. We derive expressions to estimate the clean mean and variance from a noisy utterance. The proposed normalization is effective in the recognizing voice commands that are typically short (single words or short phrases), where more advanced methods [such as histogram equalization (HEQ)] are not effective. Recognition results show a relative improvement (RI) of \(21\,\%\) in word error rate over conventional CMVN on the Aurora-2 database and a RI of 20 and \(11\,\%\) over CMVN and HEQ on short utterances of the Aurora-2 database.     

2D-VPC: An Efficient Coverage Algorithm for Multiple Autonomous Vehicles

International Journal of Control, Automation and Systems - In this paper, we address a problem of multi-robotic coverage, where an area of interest is covered by multiple sensors, each mounted on...     

Nanorefrigerants for energy efficient refrigeration systems

Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology - Nanorefrigerants, which are a new class of nanofluids, are mixtures of nanoparticles and refrigerants. They have several potential applications in...