A low-power readout circuit for nanowire based hydrogen sensor

This paper presents a fully integrated lock-in amplifier intended for nanowire gas sensing. The nanowire will change its conductivity according to the concentration of an absorbing gas. To ensure an accurate nanowire impedance measurement, a lock-in technique is implemented to attenuate the low frequency noise and offset by synchronous demodulation or phase-sensitive detection (PSD). The dual-channel lock-in amplifier also provides both resistive and capacitive information of the nanowire in separate channels. Measurement results of test resistors and capacitors show a 2% resolution in the resistance range 10-40 kΩ and a 3% resolution in the capacitance range 0.5-1.8 nF. Moreover, a 28.7-32.1 kΩ impedance variation was measured through the lock-in amplifier for a single palladium nanowire that was exposed to a decreasing hydrogen concentration (10% H₂ in N₂ to air). The chip has been implemented with UMC 0.18 μm CMOS technology and occupies an area of 2 mm². The power consumption of the readout circuit is 2 mW from a 1.8 V supply.     

Hydrogen Generation from CO2 Reforming of Biomass-Derived Methanol on Ni/SiO2 Catalyst

Topics in Catalysis - CO2 reforming of methanol for producing hydrogen was experimentally carried out in a fixed-bed reactor on 10%Ni/SiO2. The 10%Ni/SiO2 was completely reduced during H2...     

Efficient two-port antenna system for GSM=DCS=UMTS multimode mobile phones

The design of several two-port antenna systems for mobile phones is presented. All these structures are made up of two planar inverted-F antennas closely positioned on a small ground plane and radiating in the GSM900/DCS1800 and UMTS frequency bands. First, the antennas are simply associated at the top edge of the same printed circuit board. Thus, to improve their isolation and their total efficiency, a neutralisation effect is created by means of an optimised suspended line, which links the feeding strips of the radiators. The performance of these systems is measured and compared with theoretical results     

Preface to the Special Issue on “Heterogeneous Photocatalysts: From Fundamentals to Innovative Applications”

Topics in Catalysis -     

A semi-interactive panorama based 3D reconstruction framework for indoor scenes

We present a semi-interactive method for 3D reconstruction specialized for indoor scenes which combines computer vision techniques with efficient interaction. We use panoramas, popularly used for visualization of indoor scenes, but clearly not able to show depth, for their great field of view, as the starting point. Exploiting user defined knowledge, in term of a rough sketch of orthogonality and parallelism in scenes, we design smart interaction techniques to semi-automatically reconstruct a scene from coarse to fine level. The framework is flexible and efficient. Users can build a coarse walls-and-floor textured model in five mouse clicks, or a detailed model showing all furniture in a couple of minutes interaction. We show results of reconstruction on four different scenes. The accuracy of the reconstructed models is quite high, around 1% error at full room scale. Thus, our framework is a good choice for applications requiring accuracy as well as application requiring a 3D impression of the scene.     

Perspectives on crowdsourcing annotations for natural language processing

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a new method for obtaining annotations for training models for machine learning. While many variants of this process exist, they largely differ in their methods of motivating subjects to contribute and the scale of their applications. To date, there has yet to be a study that helps the practitioner to decide what form an annotation application should take to best reach its objectives within the constraints of a project. To fill this gap, we provide a faceted analysis of crowdsourcing from a practitioner’s perspective, and show how our facets apply to existing published crowdsourced annotation applications. We then summarize how the major crowdsourcing genres fill different parts of this multi-dimensional space, which leads to our recommendations on the potential opportunities crowdsourcing offers to future annotation efforts.     

Learning Motion of Dexterous Manipulation For A Pair of Multi‐DOF Fingers With Soft‐TIPS

This paper shows that a pair of dual multi‐DOF fingers with soft‐tips can learn iteratively a desired periodic motion of manipulation of an object if sensory feedback signals are designed adequately. It is shown that dynamics of the overall fingers and object system satisfy passivity but residual error dynamics for a given periodic posture of the object and a fixed value of contact force satisfy output‐dissipativity only in an approximate sense. Numerical simulation results are presented which show that the pair of fingers manipulating an object is capable of learning iteratively a variety of dexterous motions with a good performance.