Transport of Gellan Gum Microbeads in Soil Columns of Various Grain Size Distributions

The transport of gellan gum microbeads as potential cell carriers was investigated in horizontal columns packed with different grain size classes of gravel (2–16 mm) and sand (0.25–2 mm). A suspension of microbeads was pulsed into each column for 6 h, followed by injection of water for 42 h. In general, the total amount of microbeads travelling across a given section of the column increased with injection time but decreased towards the column outlet, varying as a direct function of grain size. The results of this study demonstrate the feasibility of the transport of gellan gum microbeads through medium sand to medium gravel across distances up to 110 cm.     

Fluorinated acrylic polymers: Surface properties and XPS investigations

A series of polymers based on methylmethacrylate, butylacrylate, and ω‐perfluorooctylalkylacrylate were prepared by radical polymerization. By changing both the length of the hydrocarbon spacer, between the fluorinated chain and the ester function of the fluorinated monomer, and its concentration, the surface properties of the resulting terpolymers were greatly influenced. Polymers containing small amounts of fluorinated comonomer units had considerably reduced surface energies compared to the copolymer poly (methylmethacrylate‐co‐butylacrylate) taken as reference. The outermost surface composition has been investigated by the XPS technique, confirming the strong fluorine enrichment. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 99: 821–827, 2006     

Universal algorithms for solving the matrix Bellman equations over semirings

This paper is a survey on universal algorithms for solving the matrix Bellman equations over semirings and especially tropical and idempotent semirings. However, original algorithms are also presented. Some applications and software implementations are discussed.     

Laser-Printed Plasmonic Metasurface Supporting Bound States in the Continuum Enhances and Shapes Infrared Spontaneous Emission of Coupled HgTe Quantum Dots

In order to advance the development of quantum emitter-based devices, it is essential to enhance light-matter interactions through coupling between semiconductor quantum dots with high quality factor resonators. Here, efficient tuning of the emission properties of HgTe quantum dots in the infrared spectral region is demonstrated by coupling them to a plasmonic metasurface that supports bound states in the continuum. The plasmonic metasurface, composed of an array of gold nanobumps, is fabricated using single-step direct laser printing, opening up new opportunities for creating exclusive 3D plasmonic nanostructures and advanced photonic devices in the infrared region. A 12-fold enhancement of the photoluminescence in the 900–1700 nm range is observed under optimal coupling conditions. By tuning the geometry of the plasmonic arrays, controllable shaping of the emission spectra is achieved, selectively enhancing specific wavelength ranges across the emission spectrum. The observed enhancement and shaping of the emission are attributed to the Purcell effect, as corroborated by systematic measurements of radiative lifetimes and optical simulations based on the numerical solution of Maxwell's equations. Moreover, coupling of the HgTe photoluminescence to high quality factor modes of the metasurface improves emission directivity, concentrating output within an ≈20° angle.     

Occluded Video Instance Segmentation: A Benchmark

International Journal of Computer Vision - Can our video understanding systems perceive objects when a heavy occlusion exists in a scene? To answer this question, we collect a large-scale dataset...     

Principles of adjustable autonomy: a framework for resilient human–machine cooperation

Unmanned ground vehicles tend to be more and more autonomous, but both complete teleoperation and full autonomy are not efficient enough to deal with all possible situations. To be efficient, the human–robot system must be able to anticipate, react and recover from errors of different kinds, i.e., to be resilient. From this observation, this paper proposes a survey on the resilience of a human–machine system and the means to control the resilience. The resilience of a system can be defined as the ability to maintain or recover a stable state when subject to disturbance. Adjustable autonomy and human–machine cooperation are considered as means of resilience for the system. This paper then proposes three indicators to assess different meanings of resilience of the system: foresight and avoidance of events, reaction to events and recovery from occurrence of events. The third of these metrics takes into consideration the concept of affordances that allows a common representation for the opportunities of action between the automated system and its environment.     

A Proof-Planning Framework with explicit Abstractions based on Indexed Formulas

A major motivation of proof-planning is to bridge the gap between high-level, cognitively adequate reasoning for specific domains, and calculus-level reasoning to ensure soundness. For high reasoning levels the cognitive adequacy of representation and reasoning techniques is a major issue, while for lower reasoning levels the adequacy wrt. the modelled domain is important. Furthermore, proof construction is an engineering task and there is a need to support the design and application of proof-search engineering methods. To this end we present a framework to explicitly support different reasoning levels. To structure reasoning levels the framework allows for an explicit representation of abstractions and proof-search refinement techniques. In order to ensure soundness within a reasoning level, we use techniques developed in the context of matrix characterisation relying on the notion of indexed formulas. Furthermore, we introduce a uniform concept for contextual reasoning, and sketch basic tacticals for the definition of tactics to organise the overall proof-search inside and across different reasoning levels.     

The Active XML project: an overview

This paper provides an overview of the Active XML project developed at INRIA over the past five years. Active XML (AXML, for short), is a declarative framework that harnesses Web services for distributed data management, and is put to work in a peer-to-peer architecture. The model is based on AXML documents, which are XML documents that may contain embedded calls to Web services, and on AXML services, which are Web services capable of exchanging AXML documents. An AXML peer is a repository of AXML documents that acts both as a client by invoking the embedded service calls, and as a server by providing AXML services, which are generally defined as queries or updates over the persistent AXML documents. The approach gracefully combines stored information with data defined in an intensional manner as well as dynamic information. This simple, rather classical idea leads to a number of technically challenging problems, both theoretical and practical. In this paper, we describe and motivate the AXML model and language, overview the research results obtained in the course of the project, and show how all the pieces come together in our implementation. The first and third authors were partially funded by the European Project Edos. Work done when the second and third authors were at INRIA. Work done when the second and third authors were at INRIA.