Romanian Academy

About: Romanian Academy is a archive organization based out in Bucharest, Romania. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Nonlinear system. The organization has 3662 authors who have published 10491 publications receiving 146447 citations. The organization is also known as: Academia Română & Societatea Literară Română.

Creating Roadmaps in Aerial Images with Generative Adversarial Networks and Smoothing-Based Optimization

Abstract: Recognizing roads and intersections in aerial images is a challenging problem in computer vision with many real world applications, such as localization and navigation for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The problem is currently gaining momentum in computer vision and is still far from being solved. While recent approaches have greatly improved due to the advances in deep learning, they provide only pixel-level semantic segmentations. In this paper, we argue that roads and intersections should be recognized at the higher semantic level of road graphs - with roads being edges that connect nodes. Towards this goal we present a method consisting of two stages. During the first stage, we detect roads and intersections with a novel, dual-hop generative adversarial network (DH-GAN) that segments images at the level of pixels. At the second stage, given the pixelwise road segmentation, we find its best covering road graph by applying a smoothing-based graph optimization procedure. Our approach is able to outperform recent published methods and baselines on a large dataset with European roads.

EPR and circular dichroism solution studies on the interactions of bovine serum albumin with ionic surfactants and β-cyclodextrin.

Abstract: The interactions of bovine serum albumin (BSA) with ionic surfactants (sodium dodecyl sulfate, SDS, and cetyltrimethylammonium bromide, CTAB) and β-cyclodextrin (β-CD) have been investigated by electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) and circular dichroism measurements. The spin probe selected to report on the interaction of albumin with surfactants and/or β-CD was 4-N,N-dimethyl hexadecyl ammonium-2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidine-1-oxyl iodide (CAT16), on account of (a) its balance between electrostatic and hydrophobic character and (b) the ability of BSA to form complexes with various organic molecules. The distribution of the spin probe among different environments in solutions containing only BSA was confirmed by the existence of two components in the EPR spectra: one revealing a restricted mobility of the spin probe, attributed to the protein–spin probe complex, and another one showing free movement, attributed to the spin probe in solution. The presence of surfactants and/or β-CD alters the distribution ...

Instability mode interaction: From Van Der Neut model to ECBL approach

Abstract: In the case of an ideal structure, the theoretical equilibrium bifurcation point and the corresponding load, Ncr, are obtained at the intersection of the pre-critical (primary) force–displacement curve with the post-critical (secondary) curve. For a real structure, affected by a generic imperfection the bifurcation point does not appear anymore and, instead, the equilibrium limit point is the one characterizing the ultimate capacity, Nu, of the structure. The difference between Ncr and Nu represents the Erosion of the Critical Bifurcation Load (ECBL), due to the imperfections. This model applies in the instability mode interaction. The meaning of mode interaction inherently refers to the erosion of critical bifurcation load in case of interaction of two (or more) buckling modes associated with the same, or nearly the same, critical load. A well-known example of such a mode interaction is the one resulting from the coupling of local or distortional buckling with overall buckling in the case of thin-walled cold-formed members. Van der Neut [1] stated the erosion due to coupling and imperfection effects is maximum in the local–global coupling point. The ECBL approach extracts its basic principle from this conclusion. This is a review paper of which purpose is to summarize the mode interaction problem and ECBL approach, presenting the last results obtained by the authors.