A method of generating translations of unseen n‐grams by using proportional analogy

In recent years, statistical machine translation has gained much attention. The phrase‐based statistical machine translation model has made significant advancement in translation quality over the word‐based model. In this paper, we attempt to apply the technique of proportional analogy to statistical machine translation systems. We propose a novel approach to apply proportional analogy to generate translations of unseen n‐grams from the phrase table for phrase‐based statistical machine translation. Experiments are conducted with two datasets of different sizes. We also investigate two methods to integrate n‐grams translations produced by proportional analogy into the state‐of‐the‐art statistical machine translation system, Moses.¹ The experimental results show that unseen n‐grams translations generated using the technique of proportional analogy are rewarding for statistical machine translation systems with small datasets. © 2016 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

High niobium oxide content in germanate glasses: Thermal,structural, and optical properties

Niobium alkali germanate glasses were synthesized by the melt‐quenching technique. The ternary system (90‐x)GeO₂–xNb₂O₅–10K₂O forms homogeneous glasses with x ranging from 0 to 20 mol%. Samples were investigated by DSC and XRD analysis, FTIR and Raman spectroscopy, and optical absorption. Structural and physical features are discussed in terms of Nb₂O₅ content. The niobium content increase in the glass network strongly modifies the thermal, structural and optical properties of alkali germanate glasses. DSC, Raman and FTIR analysis suggest niobium addition promotes NbO₆ groups insertion close to GeO₄ units of the glass network. XRD analysis also pointed out that samples containing high niobium oxide contents exhibit preferential niobium oxide‐rich phase after crystallization after heat treatment, which is similar to orthorhombic Nb₂O₅. Absorption spectra revealed high transmission range between 400 nm to 6.2 μm, added to a considerably decreased hydroxyl group content as the addition of niobium in the alkali germanate network. The niobium oxide‐rich phase crystallization process was studied and activation energy was determined, as well as nucleation and crystal growth temperatures and time for obtaining transparent glass‐ceramics.     

Dretske and Informational Closure

Minds and Machines - Christoph Jäger (Erkenntnis 61:187–201, 2004) has argued that Dretske’s (Knowledge and the flow of Information, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1981) information-based...     

Time‐Series Plots Integrated in Parallel‐Coordinates Displays

We present a natural extension of two‐dimensional parallel‐coordinates plots for revealing relationships in time‐dependent multi‐attribute data by building on the idea that time can be considered as the third dimension. A time slice through the visualization represents a certain point in time and can be viewed as a regular parallel‐coordinates display. A vertical slice through one of the axes of the parallel‐coordinates display would show a time‐series plot. For a focus‐and‐context Integration of both views, we embed time‐series plots between two adjacent axes of the parallel‐coordinates plot. Both time‐series plots are drawn using a pseudo three‐dimensional perspective with a single vanishing point. An independent parallel‐coordinates panel that connects the two perspectively displayed time‐series plots can move forward and backward in time to reveal changes in the relationship between the time‐dependent attributes. The visualization of time‐series plots in the context of the parallel‐coordinates plot facilitates the exploration of time‐related aspects of the data without the need to switch to a separate display. We provide a consistent set of tools for selecting and contrasting subsets of the data, which are important for various application domains.     

Unified model for assessing checkpointing protocols at extreme‐scale

In this paper, we present a unified model for several well‐known checkpoint/restart protocols. The proposed model is generic enough to encompass both extremes of the checkpoint/restart space, from coordinated approaches to a variety of uncoordinated checkpoint strategies (with message logging). We identify a set of crucial parameters, instantiate them, and compare the expected efficiency of the fault tolerant protocols, for a given application/platform pair. We then propose a detailed analysis of several scenarios, including some of the most powerful currently available high performance computing platforms, as well as anticipated Exascale designs. The results of this analytical comparison are corroborated by a comprehensive set of simulations. Altogether, they outline comparative behaviors of checkpoint strategies at very large scale, thereby providing insight that is hardly accessible to direct experimentation. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Digital microfluidic design and optimization of classic and new fluidic functions for lab on a chip systems

This paper deals with microfluidic studies for lab-on-a-chip development. The first goal was to develop microsystems immediately usable by biologists for complex protocol integrations. All fluid operations are performed on nano-liter droplet independently handled solely by electrowetting on dielectric (EWOD) actuation. A bottom-up architecture was used for chip design due to the development and validation of elementary fluidic designs, which are then assembled. This approach speeds up development and industrialization while minimizing the effort in designing and simplifying chip-fluidic programming. Dispensing reproducibility for 64 nl droplets obtained a CV below 3% and mixing time was only a few seconds. Ease of the integration was demonstrated by performing on chip serial dilutions of 2.8-folds, four times. The second part of this paper concerns the development of new innovative fluidic functions in order to extend EWOD-actuated digital fluidics’ capabilities. Experiments of particle dispensing by EWOD droplet handling are reported. Finally, work is shown concerning the coupling of EWOD actuation and magnetic fields for magnetic bead manipulation.     

Weighted Multipass Methods for Global Illumination

In multipass rendering, care has to be taken to include all light transport only once in the final solution. Therefore the different methods in current multipass configurations handle a perfectly disjunct part of the light transport. In this paper a Monte Carlo variance reduction technique is presented that probabilistically weights overlapping transport between different methods. A good heuristic for the weights is derived so that strengths of the respective methods are retained. The technique is applied to a combination of radiosity and bidirectional path tracing and significant improvement is obtained over the non-weighted combination. This method promises to be a very useful extension to other multipass algorithms as well.     

Applications of power series in computational geometry

A number of algorithms are presented for obtaining power series expansions of curves and surfaces at a point. Some results on the radius of convergence are given. Two applications of series are given:

1. • for curve tracing algorithms, where a truncated series is used to approximate the curve of intersection of two surfaces

2. • to define nth degree geometric continuity, for arbitrary