The European Commission’s recommendation on the definition of nanomaterial (2011/696/EU) established an applicable standard for material categorization. However, manufacturers face regulatory challenges during registration of their products. Reliable categorization is difficult and requires considerable expertise in existing measurement techniques (MTs). Additionally, organizational complexity is increased as different authorities’ registration processes require distinct reporting. The NanoDefine project tackled these obstacles by providing the NanoDefiner e-tool: A decision support expert system for nanomaterial identification in a regulatory context. It provides MT recommendations for categorization of specific materials using a tiered approach (screening/confirmatory), and was constructed with experts from academia and industry to be extensible, interoperable, and adaptable for forthcoming revisions of the nanomaterial definition. An implemented MT-driven material categorization scheme allows detailed description. Its guided workflow is suitable for a variety of user groups. Direct feedback and explanation enable transparent decisions. Expert knowledge is held in a knowledge base for representation of MT performance criteria and physicochemical particle type properties. Continuous revision ensured data quality and validity. Recommendations were validated by independent case studies on industry-relevant particulate materials. Besides supporting material identification and registration, the free and open-source e-tool may serve as template for other expert systems within the nanoscience domain.
This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2022 lab that was organized as part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum -CLEF Labs 2022. ImageCLEF is an ongoing evaluation initiative (first run in 2003) that promotes the evaluation of technologies for annotation, indexing and retrieval of visual data with the aim of providing information access to large collections of images in various usage scenarios and domains. In 2022, the 20th edition of ImageCLEF runs four main tasks: (i) a medical task that groups two previous tasks, i.e., caption analysis and tuberculosis prediction, (ii) a social media aware task on estimating potential real-life effects of online image sharing, (iii) a nature coral task about segmenting and labeling collections of coral reef images, and (iv) a new fusion task addressing the design of late fusion schemes for boosting the performance, with two real-world applications: image search diversification (retrieval) and prediction of visual interestingness (regression). The benchmark campaign received the participation of over 25 groups submitting more than 258 runs.
Graduating computer science students with skills sufficient for industrial needs is a priority in higher education teaching. Project-based approaches are promising to develop practical and social skills, needed to address real-world problems in teams. However, rapid technological transition makes an initial training of contemporary methods challenging. This affects the currently much-discussed machine learning domain as well. The study at hand describes a re-framed teaching approach for a machine learning course, offered to various computer science master programs. Project-based learning is introduced with differentiated projects provided by industrial partners that address the diverse study programs. Course attendees are supported with manuals, tools, and tutoring, passing through the Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM). Observations made during two iterations are reported, accompanied by a first empiric evaluation of student experiences.
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