Ancient Coin Classification Using Graph Transduction Games

Recognizing the type of an ancient coin requires theoretical expertise and years of experience in the field of numismatics. Our goal in this work is automatizing this time consuming and demanding task by a visual classification framework. Specifically, we propose to model ancient coin image classification using Graph Transduction Games (GTG). GTG casts the classification problem as a non-cooperative game where the players (the coin images) decide their strategies (class labels) according to the choices made by the others, which results with a global consensus at the final labeling. Experiments are conducted on the only publicly available dataset which is composed of 180 images of 60 types of Roman coins. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms the literature work on the same dataset with the classification accuracy of 73.6% and 87.3% when there are one and two images per class in the training set, respectively

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Graph Transduction Games

Unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) amounts to assigning class labels to the unlabeled instances of a dataset from a target domain, using labeled instances of a dataset from a related source domain. In this paper, we propose to cast this problem in a game-theoretic setting as a non-cooperative game and introduce a fully automatized iterative algorithm for UDA based on graph transduction games (GTG). The main advantages of this approach are its principled foundation, guaranteed termination of the iterative algorithms to a Nash equilibrium (which corresponds to a consistent labeling condition) and soft labels quantifying the uncertainty of the label assignment process. We also investigate the beneficial effect of using pseudo-labels from linear classifiers to initialize the iterative process. The performance of the resulting methods is assessed on publicly available object recognition benchmark datasets involving both shallow and deep features. Results of experiments demonstrate the suitability of the proposed game-theoretic approach for solving UDA tasks.Comment: Oral IJCNN 201

Evidence for moving breathers in a layered crystal insulator at 300K

We report the ejection of atoms at a crystal surface caused by energetic breathers which have travelled more than 10^7 unit cells in atomic chain directions. The breathers were created by bombardment of a crystal face with heavy ions. This effect was observed at 300K in the layered crystal muscovite, which has linear chains of atoms for which the surrounding lattice has C_2 symmetry. The experimental techniques described could be used to study breathers in other materials and configurations.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Molecular plating of thin lanthanide layers with improved material properties for nuclear applications

In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden Experimente beschrieben, die zu einem vertieften Verständnis fundamentaler Prozesse bei der elektrochemischen Herstellung von Dünnschichten, sog. Targets, für kernphysikalische und -chemische Studien führten. Targets wurden mittels 'Molecular Plating' (MP) hergestellt, indem eine Elektrodeposition aus organischem Medium in der Regel bei konstantem Strom in Zwei-Elektroden-Zellen. Die Resultate erlaubten, optimierte Herstellungs-bedingungen zu ermitteln, welche die Produktion deutlich verbesserter Targets erlaubten. MP bei konstantem Strom ist ein massentransportkontrollierter Prozess. Der angelegte Strom wird durch einen konstanten Fluss elektroaktiver Spezies zur Kathode â auf der die Schicht wächst â und Anode aufrechterhalten. Die Untersuchungen zeigten, dass das Zellenpotential des Elektrodepositionsystems immer durch den Ohm'schen Spannungsabfall auf Grund des Widerstandes der verwendeten Lösung dominiert wurde. Dies erlaubte die Herleitung einer Beziehung zwischen dem Zellenpotential und der Konzentration der elektroaktiven Spezies. Die Beziehung erlaubt die Erklärung des gemessenen zeitlichen Verlaufs des Zellenpotentials während der Abscheidung als Funktion der Elektrolytkonzentration. Dies dient als Basis, auf der nun ein umfassenderes Bild der Prozesse, die für die charakteristischen Minima im Potentialverlauf einer Abscheidung verantwortlich sind, gewonnen werden kann. Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass die Minima mit der fast vollständigen Entfernung (durch Abscheidung) der aus einem gelösten Salz erzeugten Nd-Ionen korrespondieren. Die abgeschiedene Spezies wurde als Nd3+ identifiziert, vermutlich als Carboxylat, Oxid oder Hydroxid, was auf Grund der hohen negative Werte des Standardredoxpotentials der Lanthanide verständlich erscheint. Von den vorliegenden elektroaktiven Spezies tragen die Nd3+ Ionen nur zu knapp 20% zum Gesamtstrom bei. Durch Elektrolyse tragen auch die Lösungsmittelkomponenten zu diese Strom bei. Die Gegenwart von elektrolysiertem Lösungsmittel wurde in Analysen der Dünnschichten bestätigt. Diese waren immer mit chemi- und physisorbierten Lösungsmittelmolekülen bedeckt. Die Analyse der Dünnschichten zeigte, dass die Oberflächen von einem furchenartiges Netz durchzogen waren, und dass diese während des Trocknen der Schichten nach dem MP entstanden. Ob die Schichten an Luft oder in inerter Atmosphäre trockneten, hatte keinen Einfluss. Es wurden Experimente mit mehreren Lösungsmitteln durchgeführt, die sich deutlich in ihren physikalischen Eigenschaften, v.a. dem Siedepunkt, unterschieden. Furchenfreie Dünnschichten konnten insbesondere bei MP in N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF) erzeugt werden. Die Verwendung von DMF in Kombination mit einer Abscheidung auf sehr glatten Substraten erlaubte die Produktion von sehr homogenen, glatten und defektfreien Schichten. Diese waren vermutlich geringeren inneren Spannungen während des Trocknens ausgesetzt, als Schichten auf raueren Substraten oder solche, die aus flüchtigeren Lösungsmitteln hergestellt wurden. Die Oberflächenrauigkeit des Substrats und das gewählte Lösungsmittel wurden so als Schlüsselfaktoren für die Produktion hochqualitativer Schichten identifiziert. Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass mit MP eine sehr effiziente Methode zur Herstellung homogener Schichten mit exzellenter Ausbeute ist. In weiteren Experimenten mit dem primordialen Alpha-Emitter 147Sm als Modellisotop wurde die Eignung solcher Schichten als Alpha-Quelle untersucht. Sowohl die Energieauflösung als auch der Anteil der Alpha-Teilchen, die den Detektor erreichten, waren von den Quelleneigenschaften abhängig. Die Effekte wurden verschiedenen Variablen der Dünnschicht zugeordnet, welche die Alpha-Spektren beeinflussten. Dominant war die Wahl des Lösungsmittels und die Rauigkeit des Substrats. Dies beeinflusste Schichtdicke und -morphologie sowie die Art des Schichtwachstums und veränderte die Detektionseffizienz in Alpha-Messungen bis zu 15%. Nur homogene, ebene Schichten, die aus DMF auf glatten Substraten abgeschieden wurden, eignen sich optimal als Alpha-Quelle. Die gewonnenen Ergebnisse erlauben die optimierte Herstellung nuklearer Targets durch MP. Künftige Anwendungen beinhalten insbesondere die Herstellung von Targets für neutroneninduzierte Spaltexperimente und untergrundarmeï ¡Alpha-Messungen sehr kleiner Aktivitäten.This work describes experiments to gain an improved understanding of the processes associated with the electrochemical production of thin lanthanide layers for nuclear science investigations, i.e., nuclear targets. Nd, Sm, and Gd layers were prepared by means of the so-called molecular plating (MP) technique, where electrodeposition from an organic medium is usually performed in the constant current mode using two-electrode cells. The obtained results allowed the identification of optimized production conditions, which led to a significantly improved layer quality. Constant current density MP is a mass-transport controlled process. The applied current is maintained constant by constant fluxes of electroactive species towards the cathode â where the layer is grown â and the anode. The investigations showed the cell potentials of the electrodeposition systems to be always dominated by the ohmic drop produced by the resistance of the solutions used for the studies. This allowed to derive an expression relating cell potential with concentration of the electroactive species. This expression is able to explain the trends recorded with different electrolyte concentrations and it serves as a basis to get towards a full understanding of the reasons leading to the characteristic minima observed in the evolution of the cell potential curves with time. The minima were found to correspond to an almost complete depletion of the Nd ions obtained by dissolution of the model salt used for the investigations. Nd was confirmed to be deposited at the cathode as derivatives of Nd3+ â possibly as carboxylate, oxide or hydroxide. This fact was interpreted on the basis of the highly negative values of the standard redox potentials typical for lanthanide cations. Among the different electroactive species present in the complex MP solutions, the Nd3+ ions were found to contribute to less than 20% to the total current. Because of electrolysis, also the mixed solvent contributed to the applied costant current as an electroactive species. The presence of electrolyzed solvent was confirmed by the analysis of the produced deposits, which were always covered by both chemisorbed and physisorbed solvent molecules. Target characterizations showed the surfaces of the layers to present severe cracks, which were found to form during the drying time after completion of the MP. Different drying environments, i.e., air or Ar, did not affect the deposits. The drying-related nature of cracking and the solvent composition of the produced layers suggested to perform constant current density MPs using solvents with significantly different physical properties, most notably the boiling point. N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF), i.e., the highest boiling point solvent, proved to be very effective for the production of crack-free surfaces. DMF, in combination with the use of very smooth deposition substrates, allowed the growth of smooth, defectless layers, which likely underwent smaller stress during drying than the deposits produced by using rougher substrates and more volatile solvents. The roughness of the deposition substrate and the solvent used for the platings proved then to be core factors for the preparation of high quality layers. MP thus showed to be very effective for the production of uniform and homogeneous targets with excellent yield. Tests of the performance of layers produced by MP as α-particle sources were also carried out. 147Sm was used as model isotope for the α spectroscopy investigations. Both peak resolution and the fraction of α particles reaching the detector were found to be influenced by source effects. These effects were categorized according to different â layer variablesâ , i.e., variables influencing the α spectra by means of â layer effectsâ , and were found to be promoted by the plating solvent and the roughness of the deposition substrate used to perform the MPs. These parameters likely affected thickness, morphology, and growth mode of the layers. The layer variables proved to alter the relative detection efficiencies of the α measurements by as much as 15%. Only the uniform and homogeneous layers produced by MP from DMF using the smoothest deposition substrate available turned out to be optimum α-particle sources. The results obtained from this work open the way to an improved production of nuclear targets by means of molecular plating. Future applications include in particular the preparation of targets to be used in neutron-induced fission experiments and in low-background, low-activity α measurements.178 S

Studio di fenomeni dinamici di rilevanza in catalisi attraverso l'utilizzo del sistema modello FE/TiOx/Pt(111)

This thesis is about the study of the SMSI effect on model catalysts such as Fe/TiOx/Pt (111). The study has involved the use of techniques such as TPD (Thermal Programmed Desorption), XPS (Xray Photoelectron Spectroscopy), LEED (Low Energy Electron Diffraction) and STM (Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy).openTESI.3644La copia a stampa della tesi e' disponibile presso la biblioteca con la collocazione indicat

L'AMBIENTE NELLA COSTITUZIONE ITALIANA: DALLE DISPOSIZIONI ALLE NORME, SECONDO LA GIURISPRUDENZA COSTITUZIONALE

openT.DOR.15/16.5C

Transductive Visual Verb Sense Disambiguation

Verb Sense Disambiguation is a well-known task in NLP, the aim is to find the correct sense of a verb in a sentence. Recently, this problem has been extended in a multimodal scenario, by exploiting both textual and visual features of ambiguous verbs leading to a new problem, the Visual Verb Sense Disambiguation (VVSD). Here, the sense of a verb is assigned considering the content of an image paired with it rather than a sentence in which the verb appears. Annotating a dataset for this task is more complex than textual disambiguation, because assigning the correct sense to a pair of requires both non-trivial linguistic and visual skills. In this work, differently from the literature, the VVSD task will be performed in a transductive semi-supervised learning (SSL) setting, in which only a small amount of labeled information is required, reducing tremendously the need for annotated data. The disambiguation process is based on a graph-based label propagation method which takes into account mono or multimodal representations for pairs. Experiments have been carried out on the recently published dataset VerSe, the only available dataset for this task. The achieved results outperform the current state-of-the-art by a large margin while using only a small fraction of labeled samples per sens

Semantic Motif Segmentation of Archaeological Fresco Fragments

Archaeological fragment processing is crucial to support the analysis of pictorial contents of broken artifacts. In this paper, we focus on the unexplored task of semantic segmentation of fresco fragments. This task enables the extraction of semantic information from a fragment, facilitating subsequent tasks like fragment classification or reassembly. We introduce a semantic segmentation dataset of fresco fragments acquired at the Pompeii Archeological Site, accompanied by baseline models. Additionally, we introduce a supplementary task of fragment cleaning, providing a dataset with the detection of manual annotations of archaeological marks that require restoration before further analysis. Our experiments, using standard metrics and state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrate that semantic segmentation of fresco fragments is feasible, paving the way toward more complex activities that require a semantic understanding of fragmented artifacts

A gradient-boosted tree framework to model the ice thickness of the world's glaciers (IceBoost v1.1)

Knowledge of glacier ice volumes is crucial for constraining future sea level potential, evaluating freshwater resources, and assessing impacts on societies, from regional to global. Motivated by the disparity in existing ice volume estimates, we present IceBoost, a global machine learning framework trained to predict ice thickness at arbitrary coordinates, thereby enabling the generation of spatially distributed thickness maps for individual glaciers. IceBoost is an ensemble of two gradient-boosted trees trained with 3.7 million globally available ice thickness measurements and an array of 39 numerical features. The model error is similar to those of existing models outside polar regions and is up to 30 %-40 % lower at high latitudes. Providing supervision by exposing the model to available glacier thickness measurements reduces the error by a factor of up to 2 to 3. A feature-ranking analysis reveals that geodetic data are the most informative variables, while ice velocity can improve the model performance by 6 % at high latitudes. A major feature of IceBoost is a capability to generalize outside the training domain, i.e. producing meaningful ice thickness maps in all regions of the world, including on the ice sheet peripheries