Evaluation of a modified spray-applied interfacial polymerization method for preparation of nanofiltration membranes

Nanofiltration (NF) membranes were fabricated by using piperazine (PIP) and trimesoyl chloride (TMC) by conventional and spray-applied interfacial polymerization methods, studying the effect of the application method for both phases, the number of applied layers, and the displacement speed for the spray application. A polysulfone ultrafiltration membrane was used as support. NF membranes were characterized by different spectroscopic, microscopic, and physicochemical techniques. Rejection capacity was evaluated for sodium chloride (NaCl), sodium sulfate (Na₂SO₄), and magnesium sulfate (MgSO₄) salts; the decreasing rejection order was Na₂SO₄ > MgSO₄ > NaCl for each NF membrane. NF membrane prepared with one layer of the sprayed out TMC solution and conventional application of PIP solution exhibited the highest salt rejection (99% for 1000 ppm Na₂SO₄) and a permeated flux of 10.28 L m⁻² h⁻¹ at 0.55 MPa. The modified method is a facile-reproducible preparation methodology that reduces the consumption of time, effort, and reagents leading to a scalable manufacturing process for separation technology. © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 2019 , 136, 48129.     

Development of an Automatic Pipeline for Participation in the CELPP Challenge

The prediction of how a ligand binds to its target is an essential step for Structure-Based Drug Design (SBDD) methods. Molecular docking is a standard tool to predict the binding mode of a ligand to its macromolecular receptor and to quantify their mutual complementarity, with multiple applications in drug design. However, docking programs do not always find correct solutions, either because they are not sampled or due to inaccuracies in the scoring functions. Quantifying the docking performance in real scenarios is essential to understanding their limitations, managing expectations and guiding future developments. Here, we present a fully automated pipeline for pose prediction validated by participating in the Continuous Evaluation of Ligand Pose Prediction (CELPP) Challenge. Acknowledging the intrinsic limitations of the docking method, we devised a strategy to automatically mine and exploit pre-existing data, defining—whenever possible—empirical restraints to guide the docking process. We prove that the pipeline is able to generate predictions for most of the proposed targets as well as obtain poses with low RMSD values when compared to the crystal structure. All things considered, our pipeline highlights some major challenges in the automatic prediction of protein–ligand complexes, which will be addressed in future versions of the pipeline.     

Computational personality recognition in social media

A variety of approaches have been recently proposed to automatically infer users’ personality from their user generated content in social media. Approaches differ in terms of the machine learning algorithms and the feature sets used, type of utilized footprint, and the social media environment used to collect the data. In this paper, we perform a comparative analysis of state-of-the-art computational personality recognition methods on a varied set of social media ground truth data from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We answer three questions: (1) Should personality prediction be treated as a multi-label prediction task (i.e., all personality traits of a given user are predicted at once), or should each trait be identified separately? (2) Which predictive features work well across different on-line environments? and (3) What is the decay in accuracy when porting models trained in one social media environment to another?     

Globilization and regional scenarios: EU and mediterranean from marginalization to co-development

Despite globalization a progressively increasing economic and financial concentration in the cores of the world economy (e.g. EU) as well as the rise of new socioeconomic marginalization of peripheries (e.g. Maghreb and Mashraq) has been observed since the early 1980s. Marginalization has produced its own models of specialization in production which reflect in various countries and regions the needs of the cores economy forces. A regional strategy for regional co-operation, so called co-development, is advanced to overcome the current economic and social problems faced by marginalized regions in relation to world economic trends.     

Geometry of the Icosikaidigon in Orvieto Cathedral

The rose window on the main façade of Orvieto cathedral is unique because its design is based on a 22-sided polygon. It is well known that the icosikaidigon cannot be constructed using only a compass and a straightedge. Therefore, using a geometric/statistical approach, we intend to unveil which approximate construction method was used by the sculptor to draw this unique rose window.     

Counting pedestrians with a zenithal arrangement of depth cameras

Counting people is a basic operation in applications that include surveillance, marketing, services, and others. Recently, computer vision techniques have emerged as a non-intrusive, cost-effective, and reliable solution to the problem of counting pedestrians. In this article, we introduce a system capable of counting people using a cooperating network of depth cameras placed in zenithal position. In our method, we first detect people in each camera of the array separately. Then, we construct and consolidate tracklets based on their closeness and time stamp. Our experimental results show that the method permits to extend the narrow range of a single sensor to wider scenarios.     

Thermoviscoelastic models for polyethylene thin films

This paper presents a constitutive thermoviscoelastic model for thin films of linear low-density polyethylene subject to strains up to yielding. The model is based on the free volume theory of nonlinear thermoviscoelasticity, extended to orthotropic membranes. An ingredient of the present approach is that the experimentally inaccessible out-of-plane material properties are determined by fitting the model predictions to the measured nonlinear behavior of the film. Creep tests, uniaxial tension tests, and biaxial bubble tests are used to determine the material parameters. The model has been validated experimentally, against data obtained from uniaxial tension tests and biaxial cylindrical tests at a wide range of temperatures and strain rates spanning two orders of magnitude.