Selective extraction,structural characterisation and antifungal activity assessment of napins from an industrial rapeseed meal

This article reports an extraction–purification of napins from an industrial rapeseed meal and the assessment of their antimicrobial activity against Fusarium langsethiae. The best extraction conditions are observed at pH 2, 12% (w/w) of rapeseed meal after 15 min of extraction in water at room temperature. Under these conditions the extraction is highly selective, allowing a simple purification process (ammonium sulfate precipitation followed by desalting size exclusion chromatography) to get purified napins. These napins possessed significant anti-Fusarium activity (IC₅₀ = 70 μM) and a compact secondary structure rich in α-helix, which may explain this bioactivity.     

Algorithms for computing triangular decomposition of polynomial systems

We discuss algorithmic advances which have extended the pioneer work of Wu on triangular decompositions. We start with an overview of the key ideas which have led to either better implementation techniques or a better understanding of the underlying theory. We then present new techniques that we regard as essential to the recent success and for future research directions in the development of triangular decomposition methods.     

Improving the Design of Greek Hollow Clay Bricks

The hollow clay brick is the typical building unit that is employed not only over the whole Greece but also in many other Mediterranean countries. Nevertheless, its design is completely empirical. In this study, the design of the hollow clay brick is analyzed by employing a finite element package. To carry out this analysis, the thermal conductivity of the solid clay is measured by the transient hot-wire technique. As a consequence of the analysis, an improvement of 24 % in the design of the hollow clay brick is proposed.     

The structure solution of the F-type i-ZnMgHf from the X-ray diffraction

ABSTRACT

We report a successful growth of the ZnMgHf F-type icosahedral quasicrystal in the form of faceted single grains. By varying the heat treatment parameters we were able to obtain single crystals with a quality suitable for a single crystal X-ray diffraction which was conducted in a synchrotron facility. Ab initio structure solution by a charge flipping algorithm manifests the existence of two types of Bergman clusters. Clusters are differentiated by the preferential occupation of the high-symmetry positions by hafnium in a rhombic triacontahedron, being the outer shell of the atomic cluster.

This paper is part of a Thematic Issue on The Crystallographic Aspects of Metallic Alloys.     

Good edit similarity learning by loss minimization

Similarity functions are a fundamental component of many learning algorithms. When dealing with string or tree-structured data, measures based on the edit distance are widely used, and there exist a few methods for learning them from data. However, these methods offer no theoretical guarantee as to the generalization ability and discriminative power of the learned similarities. In this paper, we propose an approach to edit similarity learning based on loss minimization, called GESL. It is driven by the notion of (?,??,??)-goodness, a theory that bridges the gap between the properties of a similarity function and its performance in classification. Using the notion of uniform stability, we derive generalization guarantees that hold for a large class of loss functions. We also provide experimental results on two real-world datasets which show that edit similarities learned with GESL induce more accurate and sparser classifiers than other (standard or learned) edit similarities.     

Towards the automatic detection of spontaneous agreement and disagreement based on nonverbal behaviour: A survey of related cues,databases, and tools

While detecting and interpreting temporal patterns of nonverbal behavioural cues in a given context is a natural and often unconscious process for humans, it remains a rather difficult task for computer systems. Nevertheless, it is an important one to achieve if the goal is to realise a naturalistic communication between humans and machines. Machines that are able to sense social attitudes like agreement and disagreement and respond to them in a meaningful way are likely to be welcomed by users due to the more natural, efficient and human‐centred interaction they are bound to experience. This paper surveys the nonverbal behavioural cues that could be present during displays of agreement and disagreement; discusses a number of methods that could be used or adapted to detect these suggested cues; lists some publicly available databases these tools could be trained on for the analysis of spontaneous, audiovisual instances of agreement and disagreement, it examines the few existing attempts at agreement and disagreement classification, and finally discusses the challenges in automatically detecting agreement and disagreement.     

Implementations of Sorted-QR Decomposition for MIMO Receivers: Complexity,Reusability and Efficiency Analysis

Matrix decomposition of the channel matrix in the form of QR decomposition (QRD) is needed for advanced multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) demapping algorithms like sphere decoder. Due to the computation-intensive nature of the QRD, its implementation has to be highly efficient. Flexibility in several forms, e.g. support for different algorithms, reusability of wireless implementations, portability, etc. is highly sought in wireless devices. The contradictory nature of flexibility and efficiency requires tradeoffs to be made between them in system development. In this paper, we have analyzed such tradeoffs by implementing two minimum mean squared error-sorted QRD algorithms. The algorithms have been implemented in four different methods with varying degree of reusability and in five different forms of portability. The performance of the implementations is evaluated by using the real-time constraints from the LTE standard. For all the implementations, modular equations for accurately estimating the execution time are derived.     

Experiences in building a Grid-based platform to serve Earth observation training activities

Earth observation data processing and storing can be done nowadays only using distributed systems. Experiments dealing with a large amount of data are possible within the timeframe of a lesson and can give trainees the freedom to innovate. Following these trends and ideas, we have built a proof-of-the-concept platform, named GiSHEO, for Earth observation educational tasks. It uses Grid computing technologies to analyze and store remote sensing data, and combines them with eLearning facilities. This paper provides an overview of the GiSHEO's platform architecture and of its technical and innovative solutions.     

Reconstructing experiences with iScale

We present iScale, a survey tool for the retrospective elicitation of longitudinal user experience data. iScale aims to minimize retrospection bias and employs graphing to impose a process during the reconstruction of one's experiences. Two versions, the constructive and the value-account iScale, were motivated by two distinct theories on how people reconstruct emotional experiences from memory. These two versions were tested in two separate studies. Study 1 aimed at providing qualitative insight into the use of iScale and compared its performance to that of free-hand graphing. Study 2 compared the two versions of iScale to free recall, a control condition that does not impose structure on the reconstruction process. Overall, iScale resulted in an increase in the amount, the richness, and the test–retest consistency of recalled information as compared to free recall. These results provide support for the viability of retrospective techniques as a cost-effective alternative to longitudinal studies.