We developed two-step solution-phase reactions to form hybrid materials of Mn3O4 nanoparticles on reduced graphene oxide (RGO) sheets for lithium ion battery applications. Mn3O4 nanoparticles grown selectively on RGO sheets over free particle growth in solution allowed for the electrically insulating Mn3O4 nanoparticles wired up to a current collector through the underlying conducting graphene network. The Mn3O4 nanoparticles formed on RGO show a high specific capacity up to ~900mAh/g near its theoretical capacity with good rate capability and cycling stability, owing to the intimate interactions between the graphene substrates and the Mn3O4 nanoparticles grown atop. The Mn3O4/RGO hybrid could be a promising candidate material for high-capacity, low-cost, and environmentally friendly anode for lithium ion batteries. Our growth-on-graphene approach should offer a new technique for design and synthesis of battery electrodes based on highly insulating materials.

Mn3O4-Graphene Hybrid as a High Capacity Anode Material for Lithium Ion Batteries

Techniques to support user interaction in a browser environment, “capture” certain user actions, and perform appropriate defined actions. In a first scheme, “setup” pages are used to detect user actions. Each setup page is associated with a respective script that is executed when the page is activated (e.g., via a Back or Forward button). The script performs the defined actions to obtain the proper behavior for dependent pages. The scripts for the setup pages keep track of the state of these pages, and further maintain a local history stack for the URLs of the dependent pages. In a second scheme, each dependent page includes a hidden history frame having a script that performs a set of defined actions for the page. The script further keeps track of whether or not the dependent page has been loaded previously.

Method and system for supporting user navigation in a browser environment

An intelligent gateway device provided at a premise (home or business) for providing and managing application services associated with use and support of a plurality of digital endpoint devices associated with the premises. The device includes a communications and processing infrastructure integrated with a peer and presence messaging based communications protocol for enabling communications between the device and an external support network and between the device and connected digital endpoint devices. A services framework at the gateway device implements the communications and processing infrastructure for enabling service management, service configuration, and authentication of user of services at the intelligent gateway. The framework provides a storage and execution environment for supporting and executing received service logic modules relating to use, management, and support of the digital endpoint devices. Thus, the gateway device provides a network-based services point of presence for a plurality of digital endpoint devices at the premises.

Multi-services application gateway and system employing the same

Process Mining is a technique for extracting process models from executionlogs. This is particularly useful in situations where people have an idealizedview of reality. Real-life processes turn out to be less structured than peopletend to believe. Unfortunately, traditional process mining approaches haveproblems dealing with unstructured processes. The discovered models are often"spaghetti-like", showing all details without distinguishing what is important andwhat is not. This paper proposes a new process mining approach to overcome thisproblem. The approach is configurable and allows for different faithfully simplifiedviews of a particular process. To do this, the concept of a roadmap is used asa metaphor. Just like different roadmaps provide suitable abstractions of reality,process models should provide meaningful abstractions of operational processesencountered in domains ranging from healthcare and logistics to web servicesand public administration.

/pdf/fuzzy-mining-adaptive-process-simplification-based-on-multi-286zemsn7q.pdf

Fuzzy mining: adaptive process simplification based on multi-perspective metrics

Fogging occurs when moisture condensation takes the form of accumulated droplets with diameters larger than 190 nm or half of the shortest wavelength (380 nm) of visible light. This problem may be effectively addressed by changing the affinity of a material’s surface for water, which can be accomplished via two approaches: i) the superhydrophilic approach, with a water contact angle (CA) less than 5°, and ii) the superhydrophobic approach, with a water CA greater than 150°, and extremely low CA hysteresis. To date, all techniques reported belong to the former category, as they are intended for applications in optical transparent coatings. A well-known example is the use of photocatalytic TiO2 nanoparticle coatings that become superhydrophilic under UV irradiation. Very recently, a capillary effect was skillfully adopted to achieve superhydrophilic properties by constructing 3D nanoporous structures from layer-by-layer assembled nanoparticles. The key to these two “wet”-style antifogging strategies is for micrometer-sized fog drops to rapidly spread into a uniform thin film, which can prevent light scattering and reflection from nucleated droplets. Optical transparency is not an intrinsic property of antifogging coatings even though recently developed antifogging coatings are almost transparent, and the transparency could be achieved by further tuning the nanoparticle size and film thickness. To our knowledge, the antifogging coatings may also be applied to many fields that do not require optical transparency, including, for example, paints for inhibiting swelling and peeling issues and metal surfaces for preventing corrosion. These types of issues, which are caused by adsorption of moisture, are hard to solve by the superhydrophilic approach because of its inherently “wet” nature. Thus, a “dry”-style antifogging strategy, which consists of a novel superhydrophobic technique that can prevent moisture or microscale fog drops from nucleating on a surface, is desired. Recent bionic researches have revealed that the self-cleaning ability of lotus leaves and the striking ability of a water-strider’s legs to walk on water can be attributed to the ideal superhydrophobicity of their surfaces, induced by special microand nanostructures. To date, the biomimetic fabrication of superhydrophobic microand/or nanostructures has attracted considerable interest, and these types of materials can be used for such applications as self-cleaning coatings and stain-resistant textiles. Although a superhydrophobic technique inspired by lotus leaves is expected to be able to solve such fogging problems because the water droplets can not remain on the surface, there are no reports of such antifogging coatings. Very recently, researchers from General Motors have reported that the surfaces of lotus leaves become wet with moisture because the size of the fog drops are at the microscale—so small that they can be easily trapped in the interspaces among micropapillae. Thus, lotuslike surface microstructures are unsuitable for superhydrophobic antifogging coatings, and a new inspiration from nature is desired for solving this problem. In this communication, we report a novel, biological, superhydrophobic antifogging strategy. It was found that the compound eyes of the mosquito C. pipiens possess ideal superhydrophobic properties that provide an effective protective mechanism for maintaining clear vision in a humid habitat. Our research indicates that this unique property is attributed to the smart design of elaborate microand nanostructures: hexagonally non-close-packed (ncp) nipples at the nanoscale prevent microscale fog drops from condensing on the ommatidia surface, and hexagonally close-packed (hcp) ommatidia at the microscale could efficiently prevent fog drops from being trapped in the voids between the ommatidia. We also fabricated artificial compound eyes by using soft lithography and investigated the effects of microand nanostructures on the surface hydrophobicity. These findings could be used to develop novel superhydrophobic antifogging coatings in the near future. It is known that mosquitoes possess excellent vision, which they exploit to locate various resources such as mates, hosts, and resting sites in a watery and dim habitat. To better understand such remarkable abilities, we first investigated the interaction between moisture and the eye surface. An ultrasonic humidifier was used to regulate the relative humidity of the atmosphere and mimic a mist composed of numerous tiny water droplets with diameters less than 10 lm. As the fog was C O M M U N IC A IO N

The dry-style antifogging properties of mosquito compound eyes and artificial analogues prepared by soft lithography: a superhydrophobic state with high adhesive force

A preloader works in conjunction with a web/app server and optionally a profile server to cache web page content elements or components for faster on-demand and anticipatory dynamic web page delivery. The preloader uses a cache manager to manage requests for retrievals, insertions, and removal of web page components in a component cache. The preloader uses a cache replacement manager to manage the replacement of components in the cache. While the cache replacement manager may utilize any cache replacement policy, a particularly effective replacement policy utilizes predictive information to make replacement decisions. Such a policy uses a profile server, which predicts a user's next content request. The components that can be cached are identified by tagging them within the dynamic scripts that generate them. The preloader caches components that are likely to be accessed next, thus improving a web site's scalability.

Dynamic page generation acceleration using component-level caching

Managers and researchers alike have long recognized the importance of corporate textual risk disclosures. Yet it is a nontrivial task to discover and quantify variables of interest from unstructured text. In this paper, we develop a variation of the latent Dirichlet allocation topic model and its learning algorithm for simultaneously discovering and quantifying risk types from textual risk disclosures. We conduct comprehensive evaluations in terms of both conventional statistical fit and substantive fit with respect to the quality of discovered information. Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms all competing methods, and could find more meaningful topics risk types. By taking advantage of our proposed method for measuring risk types from textual data, we study how risk disclosures in 10-K forms affect the risk perceptions of investors. Different from prior studies, our results provide support for all three competing arguments regarding whether and how risk disclosures affect the risk perceptions of investors, depending on the specific risk types disclosed. We find that around two-thirds of risk types lack informativeness and have no significant influence. Moreover, we find that the informative risk types do not necessarily increase the risk perceptions of investors---the disclosure of three types of systematic and liquidity risks will increase the risk perceptions of investors, whereas the other five types of unsystematic risks will decrease them.

Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1930 .

This paper was accepted by Alok Gupta, special issue on business analytics.

Simultaneously Discovering and Quantifying Risk Types from Textual Risk Disclosures

Data warehousing and On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) are two of the most significant new technologies in the business data processing arena. A data warehouse can be defined as a “very large” repository of historical data pertaining to an organization. OLAP refers to the technique of performing complex analysis over the information stored in a data warehouse. The complexity of queries required to support OLAP applications makes it difficult to implement using standard relational database technology. Moreover, there is currently no standard conceptual model for OLAP. There is clearly a need for such a model and an algebra as evidenced by the numerous SQL extensions offered by many vendors of OLAP products. In this paper, we address this issue by proposing a model of a data cube and an algebra to support OLAP operations on this cube. The model we present is simple and intuitive, and the algebra provides a means to concisely express complex OLAP queries.

The cube data model: a conceptual model and algebra for on-line analytical processing in data warehouses

In the current corporate environment, business organizations have to reengineer their processes to ensure that process performance efficiencies are increased. This goal has lead to a recent surge o...

Automating the Discovery of As-Is Business Process Models: Probabilistic and Algorithmic Approaches

A system and method for delivering a web page can include receiving a web page request corresponding to a web page having cacheable content. In response to the web page request, a script can be executed to produce a template of the web page at run-time. The script can include a code block corresponding to a cacheable content fragment of the web page. A key identifying the cacheable content fragment can be inserted into the template. The template can be sent to a dynamic proxy cache. The dynamic proxy cache can insert the cacheable content fragment identified by the key into the web page. The web page including the cacheable content fragment can then be delivered to a user.

Anindya Datta

Papers

Dynamic page generation acceleration using component-level caching

Simultaneously Discovering and Quantifying Risk Types from Textual Risk Disclosures

The cube data model: a conceptual model and algebra for on-line analytical processing in data warehouses

Automating the Discovery of As-Is Business Process Models: Probabilistic and Algorithmic Approaches

Proxy-based acceleration of dynamically generated content