Multichromic polymers based on pyrene clicked thienylpyrrole

In this study, the effect of pendant pyrene on the optical and electronic properties of poly(2,5‐dithienylpyrrole)s was studied. For this purpose a new pyrene coupled 2,5‐dithienylpyrrole derivative (SNS‐pyrene) was synthesized through click reaction. SNS‐pyrene was electrochemically polymerized and its electrochemical and optical properties were investigated by electrochemical and optical techniques. The polymer had a band gap of 3.36 eV and displayed light green to blue color variation upon oxidation in less than 2.48 s. Additionally, electrochemical copolymerization of SNS‐pyrene with 3,4‐ethylenedioxythiophene was achieved whilst a detailed investigation was performed on the effect of electrochemical polymerization conditions on the optoelectronic properties of the copolymers. Studies revealed that the copolymers exhibit multichromic reversible redox behavior with lower band gaps and shorter switching times than their parent polymer, P(SNS‐pyrene) © 2014 Society of Chemical Industry.     

Enhancing electrochromic properties of polypyrrole by silsesquioxane nanocages

A new monomer, octa(thiophenephenyl)silsesquioxane (OThiophenePS) was synthesized via click chemistry. The chemical structure of OThiophenePS was characterized by nuclear magnetic resonance (¹H NMR) and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopies. Electrochemical polymerization of pyrrole with OThiophenePS was performed resulting in polypyrrole-attached, polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (OPS–PPy). The spectroelectrochemical studies show that the electrochromic properties of (OPS–PPy) are superior to those of polypyrrole (PPy). This great improvement can be attributed to the more accessible doping sites and the facile ion movement during the redox switching brought by the loose packing of the PPy chains.     

Hydrolysis of titanium alkoxide and effects of hydrolytic polycondensation parameters

Titanium alkoxides hydrolyse vigorously with water producing polycondensates whose equivalent oxide content varies from 70% to over 90%. This variation reflects the average molecular size and the nature of the terminal bonds. Hydrolysis conditions also affect the molecular and particle morphologies modifying the crystallization and sintering behaviour of oxide materials derived from polycondensates. It is also possible to form clear polymer solutions under excess water hydrolysis with the addition of certain acids. Investigations show that there is a window in the acid concentration which provides long-term solution stability. The gels formed from these clear solutions shrink in their liquor under certain conditions and the introduction of hydrogen peroxide into the liquor (surrounding the gel) causes vigorous gel shrinkage.     

Features of a Scan and Clock Resource chip for providing access to board-level test functions

The architecture and some of the specific features of a Scan and Clock Resource (SCR) chip are described. This chip is currently being used in a high-end workstation product to provide access to the testability features of the individual chips and/or printed circuit boards. Using a board-level controller to gain access to the testability features of system components and interfacing the controller to a diagnostics processor (or external tester) is emerging as a common strategy for designing testable digital systems. Based upon experience gained from such an application, controller features that are deemed useful are discussed.This paper is an enhanced version of the author's earlier paper titled Towards a Standard Approach for Controlling Board-Level Test Functions, presented at the IEEE International Test Conference, ITC'90, Washington D.C., September 1990.     

Global structure constrained local shape prior estimation for medical image segmentation

Organ shape plays an important role in clinical diagnosis, surgical planning and treatment evaluation. Shape modeling is a critical factor affecting the performance of deformable model based segmentation methods for organ shape extraction. In most existing works, shape modeling is completed in the original shape space, with the presence of outliers. In addition, the specificity of the patient was not taken into account. This paper proposes a novel target-oriented shape prior model to deal with these two problems in a unified framework. The proposed method measures the intrinsic similarity between the target shape and the training shapes on an embedded manifold by manifold learning techniques. With this approach, shapes in the training set can be selected according to their intrinsic similarity to the target image. With more accurate shape guidance, an optimized search is performed by a deformable model to minimize an energy functional for image segmentation, which is efficiently achieved by using dynamic programming. Our method has been validated on 2D prostate localization and 3D prostate segmentation in MRI scans. Compared to other existing methods, our proposed method exhibits better performance in both studies.     

TORC: test plan optimization by requirements clustering

Acceptance testing is a time-consuming task for complex software systems that have to fulfill a large number of requirements. To reduce this effort, we have developed a widely automated method for deriving test plans from requirements that are expressed in natural language. It consists of three stages: annotation, clustering, and test plan specification. The general idea is to exploit redundancies and implicit relationships in requirements specifications. Multi-viewpoint techniques based on RM-ODP (Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing) are employed for specifying the requirements. We then use linguistic analysis techniques, requirements clustering algorithms, and pattern-based requirements collection to reduce the total effort of testing against the requirements specification. In particular, we use linguistic analysis for extracting and annotating the actor, process and object of a requirements statement. During clustering, a similarity function is computed as a measure for the overlap of requirements. In the test plan specification stage, our approach provides capabilities for semi-automatically deriving test plans and acceptance criteria from the clustered informal textual requirements. Two patterns are applied to compute a suitable order of test activities. The generated test plans consist of a sequence of test steps and asserts that are executed or checked in the given order. We also present the supporting prototype tool TORC, which is available open source. For the evaluation of the approach, we have conducted a case study in the field of acceptance testing of a national electronic identification system. In summary, we report on lessons learned how linguistic analysis and clustering techniques can help testers in understanding the relations between requirements and for improving test planning.     

Simultaneously learning actions and goals from demonstration

Our research aim is to develop interactions and algorithms for learning from naïve human teachers through demonstration. We introduce a novel approach to leverage the goal-oriented nature of human teachers by learning an action model and a goal model simultaneously from the same set of demonstrations. We use robot motion data to learn an action model for executing the skill. We use a generic set of perceptual features to learn a goal model and use it to monitor the executed action model. We evaluate our approach with data from 8 naïve teachers demonstrating two skills to the robot. We show that the goal models in the perceptual feature space are consistent across users and correctly recognize demonstrations in cross-validation tests. We additionally observe that a subset of users were not able to teach a successful action model whereas all of them were able to teach a mostly successful goal model. When the learned action models are executed on the robot, the success was on average 66.25 %. Whereas the goal models were on average 90 % correct at deciding on success/failure of the executed action, which we call monitoring.     

Sodium and ultrafiltration profiling in hemodialysis: A long-forgotten issue revisited

Sodium and ultrafiltration profiling are method of dialysis in which dialysate sodium concentration and ultrafiltration rate are altered during the course of the dialysis session. Sodium and ultrafiltration profiling have been used, commonly simultaneously, to improve hemodynamic stability during hemodialysis. Sodium profiling is particularly effective in decreasing the incidence of intradialytic hypotension, while ultrafiltration profiling is suggested to decrease subclinical repeated end organ ischemia during dialysis. However, complications such as increased interdialytic weight gain and thirst due to sodium excess have prevented widespread use of sodium profiling. Evidence suggest that different sodium profiling techniques may lead to different clinical results, and preferring sodium balance neutral sodium profiling may mitigate adverse effects related to sodium overload. However, evidence is lacking on the long-term clinical outcomes of different sodium profiling methods. Optimal method of sodium profiling as well as the utility of sodium/ultrafiltration profiling in routine practice await further clinical investigation.