University of Alicante

About: University of Alicante is a education organization based out in Alicante, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Catalysis & Population. The organization has 8681 authors who have published 22690 publications receiving 476064 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitat d'Alacant & Universidad de Alicante.

High-Loading Cobalt Oxide Coupled with Nitrogen-Doped Graphene for Oxygen Reduction in Anion-Exchange-Membrane Alkaline Fuel Cells

Abstract: A new nanocomposite catalyst consisting of high-loading cobalt oxide (CoO) on nitrogen-doped reduced graphene oxide (rGO) for oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) was prepared in this work. Its high activity for the ORR in alkaline electrolyte was determined using the rotating disk electrode technique, and further confirmed in real alkaline membrane fuel cells. A combination of physicochemical characterization (e.g., X-ray absorption and X-ray photo- electron spectra) and density functional theory (DFT) calculation suggests that cobalt(II) cations in the composite catalyst may coordinate with the pyridinic nitrogen atoms doped into graphene planes, most likely the active species for the ORR. Especially, the DFT calculations indicate that a stable rGO(N)−Co(II)−O−Co(II)−rGO(N) structure can be formed in the nitrogen-doped graphene catalyst. Kinetic parameter analysis shows a high selectivity of four-electron reduction on the composite catalyst during the ORR with an average electron transfer number of 3.75. A synergistic effect between the rGO(N) and CoO may exist, yielding a much higher catalytic activity on the CoO/rGO(N) catalyst, compared to either rGO(N) or CoO controls. The novel synthesis procedure utilizing rGO(N) to further couple Co(II) yields a high loading of Co species (24.7 wt %). Thus, a relatively thinner cathode in fuel cell can accommodate more active Co species and facilitate O2 transfer. Due to the high intrinsic activity and efficient mass transport, the CoO−rGO(N) ORR catalyst achieved approaching performance to state- of-the-art Pt/C cathodes in anion-exchange-membrane alkaline fuel cells.

Microplastics in Spanish Table Salt.

Abstract: Marine debris is widely recognized as a global environmental problem. One of its main components, microplastics, has been found in several sea salt samples from different countries, indicating that sea products are irremediably contaminated by microplastics. Previous studies show very confusing results, reporting amounts of microparticles (MPs) in salt ranging from zero to 680 MPs/kg, with no mention of the possible causes of such differences. Several errors in the experimental procedures used were found and are reported in the present work. Likewise, 21 different samples of commercial table salt from Spain have been analyzed for MPs content and nature. The samples comprise sea salts and well salts, before and after packing. The microplastic content found was of 50–280 MPs/kg salt, being polyethylene-terephthalate (PET) the most frequently found polymer, followed by polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE), with no significant differences among all the samples. The results indicate that even though the micro-particles might originate from multiple sources, there is a background presence of microplastics in the environment.

Editorial: Advances on natural language processing

Abstract: The Information Society needs of a daily progress in order to provide techniques and applications to manage huge amounts of information. NLDB Conferences have been held for the last ten years showing the advances and new techniques developed in the Information Society Technologies (IST) area and Database subject. NDLB Conferences have obtained a maturity in the last few years increasing the number of submissions: 32 submissions in 2003, 65 submissions in 2004 and 95 papers submitted in 2005. But, not only the number of submissions have been increased, the quality of submission has also been increased. For this reason, some papers with positive reviews have been rejected because we could not accept more than a fixed number of papers. Papers were reviewed by three reviewers from the Program Committee. This clearly contributed to the significant number of papers submitted (95). Twenty-nine were accepted as regular papers, while 18 were accepted as short papers. Six of the highest rated papers were selected for extension and publication in this special issue of the Data and Knowledge Engineering Journal. NLDB 2005, the 10th International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems was held on June 15–17, 2005, at the University of Alicante, Spain. Since the first NLDB conference in 1995 the main goal has been to provide a forum to discuss and disseminate research on the integration of natural language resources in Information System Engineering. The development and convergence of computing, telecommunications and information systems has already led to a revolution in the way that we work, communicate with each other, buy goods and use services, and even in the way we entertain and educate ourselves. The revolution continues and one of its results is that large volumes of information will increasingly be held in a form which is more natural for users than the data presentation formats typical of computer systems of the past. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is crucial in solving these problems and language technologies will make an indispensable contribution to the success of the information systems. We would like to express here our thanks to all the reviewers for their quick and excellent work. We are also indebted to a number of individuals for taking care of specific parts of the conference program like Reind van de Riet, Elisabeth Mëtais and Farid Mezaine. And finally, thanks to the authors for the excellent quality of their work. The accepted papers are summarised in the following:

Text summarisation in progress: a literature review

Abstract: This paper contains a large literature review in the research field of Text Summarisation (TS) based on Human Language Technologies (HLT). TS helps users manage the vast amount of information available, by condensing documents' content and extracting the most relevant facts or topics included in them. The rapid development of emerging technologies poses new challenges to this research field, which still need to be solved. Therefore, it is essential to analyse its progress over the years, and provide an overview of the past, present and future directions, highlighting the main advances achieved and outlining remaining limitations. With this purpose, several important aspects are addressed within the scope of this survey. On the one hand, the paper aims at giving a general perspective on the state-of-the-art, describing the main concepts, as well as different summarisation approaches, and relevant international forums. Furthermore, it is important to stress upon the fact that the birth of new requirements and scenarios has led to new types of summaries with specific purposes (e.g. sentiment-based summaries), and novel domains within which TS has proven to be also suitable for (e.g. blogs). In addition, TS is successfully combined with a number of intelligent systems based on HLT (e.g. information retrieval, question answering, and text classification). On the other hand, a deep study of the evaluation of summaries is also conducted in this paper, where the existing methodologies and systems are explained, as well as new research that has emerged concerning the automatic evaluation of summaries' quality. Finally, some thoughts about TS in general and its future will encourage the reader to think of novel approaches, applications and lines to conduct research in the next years. The analysis of these issues allows the reader to have a wide and useful background on the main important aspects of this research field.