Influence of the matrix properties on the performances of Er-doped Si nanoclusters light emitting devices

We investigated the properties of light emitting devices whose active layer consists of Er-doped Si nanoclusters (nc) generated by thermal annealing of Er-doped SiOx layers prepared by magnetron cosputtering. Differently from a widely used technique such as plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition, sputtering allows to synthesize Er-doped Si nc embedded in an almost stoichiometric oxide matrix, so as to deeply influence the electroluminescence properties of the devices. Relevant results include the need for an unexpected low Si excess for optimizing the device efficiency and, above all, the strong reduction of the influence of Auger de-excitation, which represents the main nonradiative path which limits the performances of such devices and their application in silicon nanophotonics. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.

A Hierarchical Model for Ordinal Matrix Factorization

This paper proposes a hierarchical probabilistic model for ordinal matrix factorization. Unlike previous approaches, we model the ordinal nature of the data and take a principled approach to incorporating priors for the hidden variables. Two algorithms are presented for inference, one based on Gibbs sampling and one based on variational Bayes. Importantly, these algorithms may be implemented in the factorization of very large matrices with missing entries. The model is evaluated on a collaborative filtering task, where users have rated a collection of movies and the system is asked to predict their ratings for other movies. The Netflix data set is used for evaluation, which consists of around 100 million ratings. Using root mean-squared error (RMSE) as an evaluation metric, results show that the suggested model outperforms alternative factorization techniques. Results also show how Gibbs sampling outperforms variational Bayes on this task, despite the large number of ratings and model parameters. Matlab implementations of the proposed algorithms are available from cogsys.imm.dtu.dk/ordinalmatrixfactorization.

N-gram posterior probability confidence measures for statistical machine translation: An empirical study

We report an empirical study of n-gram posterior probability confidence measures for statistical machine translation (SMT). We first describe an efficient and practical algorithm for rapidly computing n-gram posterior probabilities from large translation word lattices. These probabilities are shown to be a good predictor of whether or not the n-gram is found in human reference translations, motivating their use as a confidence measure for SMT. Comprehensive n-gram precision and word coverage measurements are presented for a variety of different language pairs, domains and conditions. We analyze the effect on reference precision of using single or multiple references, and compare the precision of posteriors computed from k-best lists to those computed over the full evidence space of the lattice. We also demonstrate improved confidence by combining multiple lattices in a multi-source translation framework. © 2012 The Author(s).

Low-rank optimization for distance matrix completion

This paper addresses the problem of low-rank distance matrix completion. This problem amounts to recover the missing entries of a distance matrix when the dimension of the data embedding space is possibly unknown but small compared to the number of considered data points. The focus is on high-dimensional problems. We recast the considered problem into an optimization problem over the set of low-rank positive semidefinite matrices and propose two efficient algorithms for low-rank distance matrix completion. In addition, we propose a strategy to determine the dimension of the embedding space. The resulting algorithms scale to high-dimensional problems and monotonically converge to a global solution of the problem. Finally, numerical experiments illustrate the good performance of the proposed algorithms on benchmarks. © 2011 IEEE.

Optimization Algorithms on Matrix Manifolds

This book shows how to exploit the special structure of such problems to develop efficient numerical algorithms.

Determination of the rheological parameters of self-compacting concrete matrix using slump flow test

The classification of a concrete mixture as self-compacting (SCC) is performed by a series of empirical characterization tests that have been designed to assess not only the flowability of the mixture but also its segregation resistance and filling ability. The objective of the present work is to correlate the rheological parameters of SCC matrix, yield stress and plastic viscosity, to slump flow measurements. The focus of the slump flow test investigation was centered on the fully yielded flow regime and an empirical model relating the yield stress to material and flow parameters is proposed. Our experimental data revealed that the time for a spread of 500 mm which is used in engineering practice as reference for measurement parameters, is an arbitrary choice. Our findings indicate that the non-dimensional final spread is linearly related to the non-dimensional yield-stress. Finally, there are strong indications that the non-dimensional viscosity of the mixture is associated with the non-dimensional final spread as well as the stopping time of the slump flow; this experimental data set suggests an exponential decay of the final spread and stopping time with viscosity. © Appl. Rheol.

Antimicrobial activity-specific to Gram-negative bacteria and immune modulation-mediated NF-kappa B and Sp1 of a medaka beta-defensin

Defensins are a group of cationic antimicrobial peptides which play an important role in the innate immune system by exerting their antimicrobial activity against pathogens. In this study, we cloned a novel beta-defensin cDNA from medaka (Oryzias latipes) by rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) technique. The full-length cDNA consists of 480 bp, and the open reading frame (CRF) of 189 bp encodes a polypeptide of 63 amino acids (aa) with a predicted molecular weight of 7.44 kDa. Its genomic organization was analyzed, and Southern blot detection confirmed that only one copy of beta-defensin exists in the medaka HNI strain. RT-PCR, Western blot and immunohistochemistry detections showed that the beta-defensin transcript and protein could be detected in eyes, liver, kidney, blood, spleen and gill, and obviously prevalent expression was found in eyes. Antimicrobial activity of the medaka beta-defensin was evaluated, and the antibacterial activity-specific to Gram-negative bacteria was revealed. Furthermore, the lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a major component of the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria, was demonstrated to be able to induce about 13-fol up-regulation of the beta-defensin within first 12 h. In addition, promoter and promoter mutagenesis analysis were performed in the medaka beta-defensin. A proximal 100 base pair(bp) sequence (+26 to -73)and the next 1700 bp sequence (-73 to -1755) were demonstrated to be responsible for the basal promoter activity and for the transcription regulation. Three nuclear factor kappa B (NF-kappa B) cis-elements and a Sp1 cis-element were revealed by mutagenesis analysis to exist in the 5' flanking sequence, and they were confirmed to be responsible for the up-regulation of medaka beta-defensin stimulated by LPS. And, the Sp1 cis-element was further revealed to be related to the basal promoter activity, and transcriptional factor II D (TFIID) was found to be in charge of the gene transcription initiation. All the obtained data suggested that the novel medaka beta-defensin should have antimicrobial activity-specific to Gram-negative bacteria, and the antibacterial immune function should be modulated by NF-kappa B and Sp1. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Dynamics of filopodium-like protrusion and endothelial cellular motility on onedimensional extracellular matrix fibrils

Endothelial filopodia play key roles in guiding the tubular sprouting during angiogenesis. However, their dynamic morphological characteristics, with the associated implications in cell motility, have been subjected to limited investigations. In this work, the interaction between endothelial cells and extracellular matrix fibrils was recapitulated in vitro, where a specific focus was paid to derive the key morphological parameters to define the dynamics of filopodium-like protrusion during cell motility. Based on one-dimensional gelatin fibrils patterned by near-field electrospinning (NFES), we study the response of endothelial cells (EA.hy926) under normal culture or ROCK inhibition. It is shown that the behaviour of temporal protrusion length versus cell motility can be divided into distinct modes. Persistent migration was found to be one of the modes which permitted cell displacement for over 300 μm at a speed of approximately 1 μm min-1. ROCK inhibition resulted in abnormally long protrusions and diminished the persistent migration, but dramatically increased the speeds of protrusion extension and retraction. Finally, we also report the breakage of protrusion during cell motility, and examine its phenotypic behaviours. © 2014 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.