Accelerating network applications by distributed interfaces on heterogeneous multiprocessor architectures

Hosts with several, possibly heterogeneous and/or multicore, processors provide new challenges and opportunities to accelerate applications with high communications bandwidth requirements. Many opportunities to scale these network applications with the increase in the link bandwidths are related to the exploitation of the available parallelism provided by the presence of several processing cores in the servers, not only for computing the workload of the user application but also for decreasing the overhead associated to the network interface and the system software.     

Ontological reasoning for improving the treatment of emotions in text

With the advent of affective computing, the task of adequately identifying, representing and processing the emotional connotations of text has acquired importance. Two problems facing this task are addressed in this paper: the composition of sentence emotion from word emotion, and a representation of emotion that allows easy conversion between existing computational representations. The emotion of a sentence of text should be derived by composition of the emotions of the words in the sentence, but no method has been proposed so far to model this compositionality. Of the various existing approaches for representing emotions, some are better suited for some problems and some for others, but there is no easy way of converting from one to another. This paper presents a system that addresses these two problems by reasoning with two ontologies implemented with Semantic Web technologies: one designed to represent word dependency relations within a sentence, and one designed to represent emotions. The ontology of word dependency relies on roles to represent the way emotional contributions project over word dependencies. By applying automated classification of mark-up results in terms of the emotion ontology the system can interpret unrestricted input in terms of a restricted set of concepts for which particular rules are provided. The rules applied at the end of the process provide configuration parameters for a system for emotional voice synthesis.     

Ficolin-2 Plasma Level Assesses Liver Fibrosis in Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

Fibrosis is the strongest predictor for disease-specific mortality in non-alcoholic fatty liver diseases (NAFLD), but the need for liver biopsy limits its diagnosis. We assessed the performance of plasma ficolin-2 (FCN-2) as a biomarker of fibrosis identified by an in silico discovery strategy. Two hundred and thirty-five morbidly obese (MO) subjects with biopsy-proven NAFLD stratified by fibrosis stage (F0, n = 44; F1, n = 134; F2, n = 46; F3/F4, n = 11) and 40 cirrhotic patients were enrolled. The cohort was subdivided into discovery (n = 76) and validation groups (n = 159). The plasma level of FCN-2 and other candidate markers was determined. FCN-2 was inversely correlated with the stage of liver fibrosis (ρ = −0.49, p < 0.001) independently of steatosis (p = 0.90), inflammation (p = 0.57), and ballooning (p = 0.59). In the global cohort, FCN-2 level decreased significantly in a stepwise fashion from F0/F1 (median 4753 ng/mL) to F2–F3–F4 (2760 ng/mL) and in cirrhotic subjects (1418 ng/mL). The diagnostic performance of FCN-2 in detecting F ≥ 2 was higher than other indexes (APRI, FIB-4) (AUROC 0.82, 0.68, and 0.6, respectively). The accuracy improved when combined with APRI score and HDL values (FCNscore, AUROC 0.85). Overall, the FCN-2 plasma level can accurately discriminate liver fibrosis status (minimal vs. moderate/advanced) significantly improving the fibrosis diagnostic algorithms.     

The effect of different porous media on moisture loss and oil absorption profiles during frying using glass micromodels

Microstructure plays a key role in oil absorption during frying. The aim of this work was to improve our understanding of the relationship between microstructure and oil absorption, through the use of glass micromodels to obtain evidence of transport phenomena in three porous networks. Micromodels were saturated with water and partially immersed in oil at 190°C. Moisture and oil profiles were imaged to get water and oil saturation maps. Image and fractal analyses were performed to describe the morphology of the evaporation and oil fronts. Results showed that higher porosity facilitated the moisture removal and promoted greater oil absorption during cooling. The fractal dimension showed that microstructures with a relatively high number of fine capillaries were less stable and propitiated fingering during the advance of the evaporation front. In all matrices, the disruption of the surface oil film due to air penetration was a critical factor to stop oil imbibition. © 2015 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 62: 629–638, 2016     

Catalysts to improve the abatement of sulfamethoxazole and the resulting organic carbon in water during ozonation

Sulfamethoxazole (SMX), one pharmaceutical compound, has been treated in aqueous solutions with catalysts (copper and cobalt type perovskites and cobalt–alumina) and promoters (activated carbons). Hydrogen peroxide and saturated carboxylic acids were identified as intermediates. The effects of adsorption and pH have been investigated. Removal of the starting SMX accomplished with ozone alone is a fast process but catalytic or promoted ozonation is needed to significantly reduce the resulting organic carbon. SMX is, thus, mainly removed through direct ozone reaction while hydroxyl radical oxidation is the mechanism of removal the remaining TOC. The kinetics of the process has also been investigated. Perovskite catalytic ozonation resulted to be a chemical control process and apparent rate constants for homogeneous and heterogeneous ozonation were determined. For activated carbon ozonation, external diffusion of ozone to solid particles controlled the process rate.     

Current Trends in Pretreatment and Fractionation of Lignocellulose as Reflected in Industrial Patent Activities

The pretreatment process to disintegrate lignocellulose and to fractionate its three main components hemicellulose, cellulose, and lignin, is a crucial step to enable sustainable and economic value chains based on biomass feedstock. This review provides an overview of the recent patenting activities on pretreatment. Most of these activities focus on optimization of different known processes to improve economics, such as increased catalyst efficiency, effluents recirculation, or lignin valorization. However, also a number of patents and demonstration activities based on emerging concepts for pretreatments are observed.     

Phenomenon of phase inversion in high impact polystyrene: Physico‐chemical,rheological and morphological study in the presence of chain transfer agent and using different tapered block copolymers as the precursor rubber

Different high impact polystyrenes were synthesized using styrene/butadiene copolymers (SB) with PS/PB composition: 30/70 and 20/80 as the precursor rubber, benzoyl peroxide (BPO) as the initiator, and ter‐dodecyl mercaptane (TDM) as the chain transfer agent. During the polymerization, several samples were taken and analyzed under different techniques to evaluate the phase inversion (PI) phenomenon. The PI was determined through transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and through dynamic oscillatory behavior, where the PI takes places when the relaxation process presents the lower value of activation energy. Finally, the Choi and Schowalter emulsion model was employed to elucidate the PI, and relevant information was revealed about the interfacial tension in the PI. POLYM. ENG. SCI., 2009. © 2009 Society of Plastics Engineers     

CO2 separation by carbon molecular sieve monoliths prepared from nitrated coal tar pitch

The objective of the present work is to develop a simple procedure, which avoids the need of a binder, to obtain activated carbon monoliths from a waste precursor (coal tar pitch) suitable for CO₂ capture and/or separation. The main task of this process consists of a nitration process of the coal tar pitch. This nitration step over the coal tar pitch is characterised by different techniques, such as infrared spectroscopy and thermogravimetric analysis. The nitration treatment produces the oxidation of the pitch molecules, leading to hydrogen consumption and generating oxygenated and nitrogenated surface complexes. As a consequence of this oxidation, nitrated coal tar pitch is an infusible material, which allows the carbonization of monolithic pieces avoiding their fusion. Decomposition of these surface complexes during the carbonization of monoliths generates narrow microporosity, which is suitable for CO₂ capture from gas streams at room temperature. The molecular sieving properties of these materials are studied by CH₄ and CO₂ adsorption kinetics.