The next generation of gas separation membranes requires from novel membrane materials with superior performance, sufficient mechanical stability, and long-term stability under harsh operation conditions. Two-dimensional (2D) offer several advantages over conventionally used polymeric materials. However, containing 2D have not reached commercialization yet, despite having been discovered almost...

Segmentation has several strategic and tactical implications in marketing products and services. Despite hard clustering methods having several weaknesses, they remain widely applied in marketing studies. Alternative segmentation methods such as fuzzy methods are rarely used to understand consumer behaviour. In this study, we propose a strategy of analysis, by combining the Bagged Clustering (B...

The implementation of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms on stand-alone small-scale devices allows the incorporation of new services and advanced functionalities without the need of resorting to remote computing systems. Despite having undeniable advantages with respect to conventional general-purpose devices, e.g. in terms of cost/performance ratios, small-scale systems suffer of issues related ...

Few sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas Lam.) cultivars with erect plant type are available despite their advantages over spreading type, such as simplicity of cultivation and ability to adapt to limited space. One of the reasons is insufficiency of their agronomic characteristics for table use. So, it is important to overcome these drawbacks of ER-type lines. We attempted to breed new erect plant typ...

Privacy issues are a major burden for the acceptance of pervasive applications. They may ultimately result in the rejection of new services despite their functional benefits. Especially excessive data collection scares the potential user away. Privacy Negotiations restore respect for the user’s privacy preferences because the kind and amount of personal data to be disclosed is settled individua...

Investigations into families with a large number of individuals with epilepsy have led to the discovery of epilepsy-causing (or epilepsy associated) gene mutations. These discoveries offer advantages and insights for the patient, family, healthcare professionals and biomedical scientists. Despite these benefits, there is little evidence about the impact of participation in genetic research for ...

The process by which senior hospital doctors are disciplined within the National Health Service is analysed. The mechanisms used are discussed and a number of faults are identified. Many of these faults give an unfair advantage to management and are contrary to the rules of 'Natural Justice'. These faults lead to an excessive number of doctors being wrongfully suspended for an unnecessarily lon...

A number of mammalian genomes having been sequenced, an important next step is to catalog the expression patterns of all transcription units in health and disease by use of microarrays. Such discovery programs are crucial to our understanding of the gene networks that control developmental, physiological, and pathological processes. However, despite the excitement, the full promise of microarra...

Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) [4, 13, 3, 17] are semi-generative (despite often being classified as discriminative models) in the sense that it estimates the conditional probabilityD(y|x) (given any observation x) of any label y, which is generated from D(y|x). Estimating D(y|x) is usually more efficient than estimating D(x|y) when there aren’t sufficient observation x per class or there are...

Despite having been quite popular during the 1990s because of their important advantages, linked cache coherence protocols have gone completely unnoticed in the multicore wave. In this work we bring them in the spotlight, demonstrating that they are a good alternative to other solutions being proposed nowadays. In particular, we consider in this work the case for a simply-linked list-based cach...