Jožef Stefan Institute

About: Jožef Stefan Institute is a facility organization based out in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Liquid crystal & Dielectric. The organization has 3828 authors who have published 12614 publications receiving 291025 citations.

Supervised Descriptive Rule Discovery: A Unifying Survey of Contrast Set, Emerging Pattern and Subgroup Mining

Abstract: This paper gives a survey of contrast set mining (CSM), emerging pattern mining (EPM), and subgroup discovery (SD) in a unifying framework named supervised descriptive rule discovery. While all these research areas aim at discovering patterns in the form of rules induced from labeled data, they use different terminology and task definitions, claim to have different goals, claim to use different rule learning heuristics, and use different means for selecting subsets of induced patterns. This paper contributes a novel understanding of these subareas of data mining by presenting a unified terminology, by explaining the apparent differences between the learning tasks as variants of a unique supervised descriptive rule discovery task and by exploring the apparent differences between the approaches. It also shows that various rule learning heuristics used in CSM, EPM and SD algorithms all aim at optimizing a trade off between rule coverage and precision. The commonalities (and differences) between the approaches are showcased on a selection of best known variants of CSM, EPM and SD algorithms. The paper also provides a critical survey of existing supervised descriptive rule discovery visualization methods.

Titanium nanostructures for biomedical applications

Abstract: Titanium and titanium alloys exhibit a unique combination of strength and biocompatibility, which enables their use in medical applications and accounts for their extensive use as implant materials in the last 50 years. Currently, a large amount of research is being carried out in order to determine the optimal surface topography for use in bioapplications, and thus the emphasis is on nanotechnology for biomedical applications. It was recently shown that titanium implants with rough surface topography and free energy increase osteoblast adhesion, maturation and subsequent bone formation. Furthermore, the adhesion of different cell lines to the surface of titanium implants is influenced by the surface characteristics of titanium; namely topography, charge distribution and chemistry. The present review article focuses on the specific nanotopography of titanium, i.e. titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanotubes, using a simple electrochemical anodisation method of the metallic substrate and other processes such as the hydrothermal or sol-gel template. One key advantage of using TiO2 nanotubes in cell interactions is based on the fact that TiO2 nanotube morphology is correlated with cell adhesion, spreading, growth and differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells, which were shown to be maximally induced on smaller diameter nanotubes (15 nm), but hindered on larger diameter (100 nm) tubes, leading to cell death and apoptosis. Research has supported the significance of nanotopography (TiO2 nanotube diameter) in cell adhesion and cell growth, and suggests that the mechanics of focal adhesion formation are similar among different cell types. As such, the present review will focus on perhaps the most spectacular and surprising one-dimensional structures and their unique biomedical applications for increased osseointegration, protein interaction and antibacterial properties.

Snapshots of cooperative atomic motions in the optical suppression of charge density waves

Abstract: The development of tabletop femtosecond electron diffraction sources has provided an alternative way of observing atomic motions in crystalline materials. This technique has now been applied to the charge-density-wave material 1T-TaS2, in which modulation of the electron density is accompanied by a periodic lattice distortion. Previous time-resolved studies have revealed the dynamics of the electronic charge density wave, but until now the dynamics of the lattice system has been only indirectly inferred. In this new experiment, atomic motions were observed in response to a 140 femtosecond optical pulse. Periodic lattice distortion was seen to collapse on an exceptionally fast timescale (about 250 fs), indicative of an electronically driven process involving a high degree of cooperativity. The surprisingly high degree of cooperation in the observed structural dynamics between the electronic and lattice system illustrates the potential for the technique in studies of strongly correlated systems.

Strength and reliability of surface treated Y‐TZP dental ceramics

Abstract: This work was undertaken to evaluate the effects of dental grinding and sandblasting on the biaxial flexural strength and Weibull modulus of various Y-TZP ceramics containing 3 mol% yttria. In addition, the susceptibility of pristine and mechanically treated materials to low-temperature degradation under the conditions adopted for testing the chemical solubility of dental ceramics was investigated. The results revealed that surface grinding and sandblasting exhibit a counteracting effect on the strength of Y-TZP ceramics. Dental grinding lowered the mean strength and Weibull modulus, whereas sandblasting provided a powerful method for strengthening, but at the expense of somewhat lower reliability. The finest-grained material exhibited the highest strength after sintering, but it was less damage tolerant than tougher, coarse-grained materials. Upon extraction with the acetic acid solution and the ammonia solution, a significant amount of tetragonal zirconia had transformed to monoclinic, but extensive microcracking and attendant strength degradation had not yet occurred. Standard grade Y-TZP ceramics are more resistant in an alkaline than in an acidic environment, and there was a strong grain-size dependence of the diffusion-controlled transformation. Since a special Y-TZP grade containing a small amount of alumina exhibited the highest damage tolerance and superior stability in an acidic environment, this material shows considerable promise for dental applications.