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Now showing 1 - 10 of 20
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    The SPectrometer for Ice Nuclei (SPIN): An instrument to investigate ice nucleation
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2016) Garimella, Sarvesh; Kristensen, Thomas Bjerring; Ignatius, Karolina; Welti, Andre; Voigtländer, Jens; Kulkarni, Gourihar R.; Sagan, Frank; Kok, Gregory Lee; Dorsey, James; Nichman, Leonid; Rothenberg, Daniel Alexander; Rösch, Michael; Kirchgäßner, Amélie Catharina Ruth; Ladkin, Russell; Wex, Heike; Wilson, Theodore W.; Ladino, Luis Antonio; Abbatt, Jon P.D.; Stetzer, Olaf; Lohmann, Ulrike; Stratmann, Frank; Cziczo, Daniel James
    The SPectrometer for Ice Nuclei (SPIN) is a commercially available ice nucleating particle (INP) counter manufactured by Droplet Measurement Technologies in Boulder, CO. The SPIN is a continuous flow diffusion chamber with parallel plate geometry based on the Zurich Ice Nucleation Chamber and the Portable Ice Nucleation Chamber. This study presents a standard description for using the SPIN instrument and also highlights methods to analyze measurements in more advanced ways. It characterizes and describes the behavior of the SPIN chamber, reports data from laboratory measurements, and quantifies uncertainties associated with the measurements. Experiments with ammonium sulfate are used to investigate homogeneous freezing of deliquesced haze droplets and droplet breakthrough. Experiments with kaolinite, NX illite, and silver iodide are used to investigate heterogeneous ice nucleation. SPIN nucleation results are compared to those from the literature. A machine learning approach for analyzing depolarization data from the SPIN optical particle counter is also presented (as an advanced use). Overall, we report that the SPIN is able to reproduce previous INP counter measurements.
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    OER Recommendations to Support Career Development
    (Piscataway, NJ : IEEE, 2020) Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Faraji, Ali; Mol, Stefan T.; Kismihók, Gábor
    This Work in Progress Research paper departs from the recent, turbulent changes in global societies, forcing many citizens to re-skill themselves to (re)gain employment. Learners therefore need to be equipped with skills to be autonomous and strategic about their own skill development. Subsequently, high-quality, on-line, personalized educational content and services are also essential to serve this high demand for learning content. Open Educational Resources (OERs) have high potential to contribute to the mitigation of these problems, as they are available in a wide range of learning and occupational contexts globally. However, their applicability has been limited, due to low metadata quality and complex quality control. These issues resulted in a lack of personalised OER functions, like recommendation and search. Therefore, we suggest a novel, personalised OER recommendation method to match skill development targets with open learning content. This is done by: 1) using an OER quality prediction model based on metadata, OER properties, and content; 2) supporting learners to set individual skill targets based on actual labour market information, and 3) building a personalized OER recommender to help learners to master their skill targets. Accordingly, we built a prototype focusing on Data Science related jobs, and evaluated this prototype with 23 data scientists in different expertise levels. Pilot participants used our prototype for at least 30 minutes and commented on each of the recommended OERs. As a result, more than 400 recommendations were generated and 80.9% of the recommendations were reported as useful.
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    Earth system data cubes unravel global multivariate dynamics
    (Göttingen : Copernicus Publ., 2020) Mahecha, Miguel D.; Gans, Fabian; Brandt, Gunnar; Christiansen, Rune; Cornell, Sarah E.; Fomferra, Normann; Kraemer, Guido; Peters, Jonas; Bodesheim, Paul; Camps-Valls, Gustau; Donges, Jonathan F.; Dorigo, Wouter; Estupinan-Suarez, Lina M.; Gutierrez-Velez, Victor H.; Gutwin, Martin; Jung, Martin; Londoño, Maria C.; Miralles, Diego G.; Papastefanou, Phillip; Reichstein, Markus
    Understanding Earth system dynamics in light of ongoing human intervention and dependency remains a major scientific challenge. The unprecedented availability of data streams describing different facets of the Earth now offers fundamentally new avenues to address this quest. However, several practical hurdles, especially the lack of data interoperability, limit the joint potential of these data streams. Today, many initiatives within and beyond the Earth system sciences are exploring new approaches to overcome these hurdles and meet the growing interdisciplinary need for data-intensive research; using data cubes is one promising avenue. Here, we introduce the concept of Earth system data cubes and how to operate on them in a formal way. The idea is that treating multiple data dimensions, such as spatial, temporal, variable, frequency, and other grids alike, allows effective application of user-defined functions to co-interpret Earth observations and/or model-data integration. An implementation of this concept combines analysis-ready data cubes with a suitable analytic interface. In three case studies, we demonstrate how the concept and its implementation facilitate the execution of complex workflows for research across multiple variables, and spatial and temporal scales: (1) summary statistics for ecosystem and climate dynamics; (2) intrinsic dimensionality analysis on multiple timescales; and (3) model-data integration. We discuss the emerging perspectives for investigating global interacting and coupled phenomena in observed or simulated data. In particular, we see many emerging perspectives of this approach for interpreting large-scale model ensembles. The latest developments in machine learning, causal inference, and model-data integration can be seamlessly implemented in the proposed framework, supporting rapid progress in data-intensive research across disciplinary boundaries. © 2020 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.. All rights reserved.
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    A Review on Data Fusion of Multidimensional Medical and Biomedical Data
    (Basel : MDPI, 2022) Azam, Kazi Sultana Farhana; Ryabchykov, Oleg; Bocklitz, Thomas
    Data fusion aims to provide a more accurate description of a sample than any one source of data alone. At the same time, data fusion minimizes the uncertainty of the results by combining data from multiple sources. Both aim to improve the characterization of samples and might improve clinical diagnosis and prognosis. In this paper, we present an overview of the advances achieved over the last decades in data fusion approaches in the context of the medical and biomedical fields. We collected approaches for interpreting multiple sources of data in different combinations: image to image, image to biomarker, spectra to image, spectra to spectra, spectra to biomarker, and others. We found that the most prevalent combination is the image-to-image fusion and that most data fusion approaches were applied together with deep learning or machine learning methods.
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    FLIM data analysis based on Laguerre polynomial decomposition and machine-learning
    (Bellingham, Wash. : SPIE, 2021) Guo, Shuxia; Silge, Anja; Bae, Hyeonsoo; Tolstik, Tatiana; Meyer, Tobias; Matziolis, Georg; Schmitt, Michael; Popp, Jürgen; Bocklitz, Thomas
    Significance: The potential of fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM) is recently being recognized, especially in biological studies. However, FLIM does not directly measure the lifetimes, rather it records the fluorescence decay traces. The lifetimes and/or abundances have to be estimated from these traces during the phase of data processing. To precisely estimate these parameters is challenging and requires a well-designed computer program. Conventionally employed methods, which are based on curve fitting, are computationally expensive and limited in performance especially for highly noisy FLIM data. The graphical analysis, while free of fit, requires calibration samples for a quantitative analysis. Aim: We propose to extract the lifetimes and abundances directly from the decay traces through machine learning (ML). Approach: The ML-based approach was verified with simulated testing data in which the lifetimes and abundances were known exactly. Thereafter, we compared its performance with the commercial software SPCImage based on datasets measured from biological samples on a time-correlated single photon counting system. We reconstructed the decay traces using the lifetime and abundance values estimated by ML and SPCImage methods and utilized the root-mean-squared-error (RMSE) as marker. Results: The RMSE, which represents the difference between the reconstructed and measured decay traces, was observed to be lower for ML than for SPCImage. In addition, we could demonstrate with a three-component analysis the high potential and flexibility of the ML method to deal with more than two lifetime components.
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    A Recommender System For Open Educational Videos Based On Skill Requirements
    (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University, 2020) Tavakoli, Mohammadreza; Hakimov, Sherzod; Ewerth, Ralph; Kismihók, Gábor
    In this paper, we suggest a novel method to help learners find relevant open educational videos to master skills demanded on the labour market. We have built a prototype, which 1) applies text classification and text mining methods on job vacancy announcements to match jobs and their required skills; 2) predicts the quality of videos; and 3) creates an open educational video recommender system to suggest personalized learning content to learners. For the first evaluation of this prototype we focused on the area of data science related jobs. Our prototype was evaluated by in-depth, semi-structured interviews. 15 subject matter experts provided feedback to assess how our recommender prototype performs in terms of its objectives, logic, and contribution to learning. More than 250 videos were recommended, and 82.8% of these recommendations were treated as useful by the interviewees. Moreover, interviews revealed that our personalized video recommender system, has the potential to improve the learning experience.
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    A data-driven approach to identify controls on global fire activity from satellite and climate observations (SOFIA V1)
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2017) Forkel, Matthias; Dorigo, Wouter; Lasslop, Gitta; Teubner, Irene; Chuvieco, Emilio; Thonicke, Kirsten
    Vegetation fires affect human infrastructures, ecosystems, global vegetation distribution, and atmospheric composition. However, the climatic, environmental, and socioeconomic factors that control global fire activity in vegetation are only poorly understood, and in various complexities and formulations are represented in global process-oriented vegetation-fire models. Data-driven model approaches such as machine learning algorithms have successfully been used to identify and better understand controlling factors for fire activity. However, such machine learning models cannot be easily adapted or even implemented within process-oriented global vegetation-fire models. To overcome this gap between machine learning-based approaches and process-oriented global fire models, we introduce a new flexible data-driven fire modelling approach here (Satellite Observations to predict FIre Activity, SOFIA approach version 1). SOFIA models can use several predictor variables and functional relationships to estimate burned area that can be easily adapted with more complex process-oriented vegetation-fire models. We created an ensemble of SOFIA models to test the importance of several predictor variables. SOFIA models result in the highest performance in predicting burned area if they account for a direct restriction of fire activity under wet conditions and if they include a land cover-dependent restriction or allowance of fire activity by vegetation density and biomass. The use of vegetation optical depth data from microwave satellite observations, a proxy for vegetation biomass and water content, reaches higher model performance than commonly used vegetation variables from optical sensors. We further analyse spatial patterns of the sensitivity between anthropogenic, climate, and vegetation predictor variables and burned area. We finally discuss how multiple observational datasets on climate, hydrological, vegetation, and socioeconomic variables together with data-driven modelling and model–data integration approaches can guide the future development of global process-oriented vegetation-fire models.
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    Understanding image-text relations and news values for multimodal news analysis
    (Lausanne : Frontiers Media, 2023) Cheema, Gullal S.; Hakimov, Sherzod; Müller-Budack, Eric; Otto, Christian; Bateman, John A.; Ewerth, Ralph
    The analysis of news dissemination is of utmost importance since the credibility of information and the identification of disinformation and misinformation affect society as a whole. Given the large amounts of news data published daily on the Web, the empirical analysis of news with regard to research questions and the detection of problematic news content on the Web require computational methods that work at scale. Today's online news are typically disseminated in a multimodal form, including various presentation modalities such as text, image, audio, and video. Recent developments in multimodal machine learning now make it possible to capture basic “descriptive” relations between modalities–such as correspondences between words and phrases, on the one hand, and corresponding visual depictions of the verbally expressed information on the other. Although such advances have enabled tremendous progress in tasks like image captioning, text-to-image generation and visual question answering, in domains such as news dissemination, there is a need to go further. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for the computational analysis of multimodal news. We motivate a set of more complex image-text relations as well as multimodal news values based on real examples of news reports and consider their realization by computational approaches. To this end, we provide (a) an overview of existing literature from semiotics where detailed proposals have been made for taxonomies covering diverse image-text relations generalisable to any domain; (b) an overview of computational work that derives models of image-text relations from data; and (c) an overview of a particular class of news-centric attributes developed in journalism studies called news values. The result is a novel framework for multimodal news analysis that closes existing gaps in previous work while maintaining and combining the strengths of those accounts. We assess and discuss the elements of the framework with real-world examples and use cases, setting out research directions at the intersection of multimodal learning, multimodal analytics and computational social sciences that can benefit from our approach.
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    Computational tissue staining of non-linear multimodal imaging using supervised and unsupervised deep learning
    (Washington, DC : OSA, 2021) Pradhan, Pranita; Meyer, Tobias; Vieth, Michael; Stallmach, Andreas; Waldner, Maximilian; Schmitt, Michael; Popp, Juergen; Bocklitz, Thomas
    Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining is the 'gold-standard' method in histopathology. However, standard H&E staining of high-quality tissue sections requires long sample preparation times including sample embedding, which restricts its application for 'real-time' disease diagnosis. Due to this reason, a label-free alternative technique like non-linear multimodal (NLM) imaging, which is the combination of three non-linear optical modalities including coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering, two-photon excitation fluorescence and second-harmonic generation, is proposed in this work. To correlate the information of the NLM images with H&E images, this work proposes computational staining of NLM images using deep learning models in a supervised and an unsupervised approach. In the supervised and the unsupervised approach, conditional generative adversarial networks (CGANs) and cycle conditional generative adversarial networks (cycle CGANs) are used, respectively. Both CGAN and cycle CGAN models generate pseudo H&E images, which are quantitatively analyzed based on mean squared error, structure similarity index and color shading similarity index. The mean of the three metrics calculated for the computationally generated H&E images indicate significant performance. Thus, utilizing CGAN and cycle CGAN models for computational staining is beneficial for diagnostic applications without performing a laboratory-based staining procedure. To the author's best knowledge, it is the first time that NLM images are computationally stained to H&E images using GANs in an unsupervised manner.
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    Potential for Early Forecast of Moroccan Wheat Yields Based on Climatic Drivers
    (Hoboken, NJ [u.a.] : Wiley, 2020) Lehmann, J.; Kretschmer, M.; Schauberger, B.; Wechsung, F.
    Wheat production plays an important role in Morocco. Current wheat forecast systems use weather and vegetation data during the crop growing phase, thus limiting the earliest possible release date to early spring. However, Morocco's wheat production is mostly rainfed and thus strongly tied to fluctuations in rainfall, which in turn depend on slowly evolving climate dynamics. This offers a source of predictability at longer time scales. Using physically guided causal discovery algorithms, we extract climate precursors for wheat yield variability from gridded fields of geopotential height and sea surface temperatures which show potential for accurate yield forecasts already in December, with around 50% explained variance in an out-of-sample cross validation. The detected interactions are physically meaningful and consistent with documented ocean-atmosphere feedbacks. Reliable yield forecasts at such long lead times could provide farmers and policy makers with necessary information for early action and strategic adaptation measurements to support food security. ©2020. The Authors.