Investigation of the Sharkskin melt instability using optical Fourier analysis

in Journal of Applied Polymer Science (2019), 137(24), 48806

An optical method allowing the characterization of melt flow instabilities typically occurring during an extrusion process of polymers and polymer compounds is presented. It is based on a camera‐acquired ... [more ▼]

An optical method allowing the characterization of melt flow instabilities typically occurring during an extrusion process of polymers and polymer compounds is presented. It is based on a camera‐acquired image of the extruded compound with a reference length scale. Application of image processing and transformation of the calibrated image to the frequency domain yields the magnitude spectrum of the instability. The effectiveness of the before mentioned approach is shown on Styrene‐butadiene rubber (SBR) compounds, covering a wide range of silica filler content, extruded through a Göttfert capillary rheometer. The results of the image‐based analysis are compared with the results from the sharkskin option, a series of highly sensitive pressure transducers installed inside the rheometer. A simplified version of the code used to produce the optical analysis results is included as supplementary material. [less ▲]

« Le pli, un défi herméneutique et épistémologique » au Collège des Bernardins dans le cadre du séminaire Revêtir l’invisible en partenariat avec le Collège des Bernardins Paris et le Luxembourg School for Religion and Society

Speeches/Talks (2019)

A Coordinated Europeanization of the Comics Industry through Distribution: The Politics of the Global Journey of Astérix and Tintin through the Strategic Distribution of their Magazines and Contents in the 1960s

in On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture (2019), 8(Winter),

Researchers have usually focused on the Tintin and Astérix series’ global book diffusion through translation. However, little has been discussed about the distribution policies of the comics magazine ... [more ▼]

Researchers have usually focused on the Tintin and Astérix series’ global book diffusion through translation. However, little has been discussed about the distribution policies of the comics magazine format, a key factor in the development of European comics. This paper will consider the continentalization of western European national comics industries via the intra-EEC networking of distribution channels during the 1960s. By facilitating the exchange of comics features in the Franco-Belgian area, publishers such as Casterman, Le Lombard, and Dargaud ensured the rise of the industry and of the products they wanted to disseminate. Contemplating the motivations of publishers this article will delve deeper into the emergence of cooperative and competitive distribution channels among national publishers and between countries. Through the archives of Casterman and primary sources this article intends to contribute to a greater understanding of how the carefully planned distribution network of comics influenced the development of the European industry as a whole. [less ▲]

Deep Pattern Mining for Program Repair

Doctoral thesis (2019)

Error-free software is a myth. Debugging thus accounts for a significant portion of software maintenance and absorbs a large part of software cost. In particular, the manual task of fixing bugs is tedious ... [more ▼]

Error-free software is a myth. Debugging thus accounts for a significant portion of software maintenance and absorbs a large part of software cost. In particular, the manual task of fixing bugs is tedious, error- prone and time-consuming. In the last decade, automatic bug-fixing, also referred to as automated program repair (APR) has boomed as a promising endeavor of software engineering towards alleviating developers’ burden. Several potentially promising techniques have been proposed making APR an increasingly prominent topic in both the research and practice communities. In production, APR will drastically reduce time-to-fix delays and limit downtime. In a development cycle, APR can help suggest changes to accelerate debugging. As an emergent domain, however, program repair has many open problems that the community is still exploring. Our work contributes to this momentum on two angles: the repair of programs for functionality bugs, and the repair of programs for method naming issues. The thesis starts with highlighting findings on key empirical studies that we have performed to inform future repair approaches. Then, we focus on template-based program repair scenarios and explore deep learning models for inferring accurate and relevant patterns. Finally, we integrate these patterns into APR pipelines, which yield the state of the art repair tools. The dissertation includes the following contributions: • Real-world Patch Study: Existing APR studies have shown that the state-of-the-art techniques in automated repair tend to generate patches only for a small number of bugs even with quality issues (e.g., incorrect behavior and nonsensical changes). To improve APR techniques, the community should deepen its knowledge on repair actions from real-world patches since most of the techniques rely on patches written by human developers. However, previous investigations on real-world patches are limited to statement level that is not sufficiently fine-grained to build this knowledge. This dissertation starts with deepening this knowledge via a systematic and fine-grained study of real-world Java program bug fixes. • Fault Localization Impact: Existing test-suite-based APR systems are highly dependent on the performance of the fault localization (FL) technique that is the process of the widely studied APR pipeline. However, APR systems generally focus on the patch generation, but tend to use similar but different strategies for fault localization. To assess the impact of FL on APR, we identify and investigate a practical bias caused by the FL step in a repair pipeline. We propose to highlight the different FL configurations used in the literature, and their impact on APR systems when applied to the real bugs. Then, we explore the performance variations that can be achieved by “tweaking” the FL step. • Fix Pattern Mining: Fix patterns (a.k.a. fix templates) have been studied in various APR scenarios. Particularly, fix patterns have been widely used in different APR systems. To date, fix pattern mining is mainly studied in three ways: manually summarization, transformation inferring and code change action statistics. In this dissertation, we explore mining fix patterns for static bugs leveraging deep learning and clustering algorithms. • Avatar: Fix pattern based patch generation is a promising direction in the APR community. Notably, it has been demonstrated to produce more acceptable and correct patches than the patches obtained with mutation operators through genetic programming. The performance of fix pattern based APR systems, however, depends on the fix ingredients mined from commit changes in development histories. Unfortunately, collecting a reliable set of bug fixes in repositories can be challenging. We propose to investigate the possibility in an APR scenario of leveraging code changes that address violations by static bug detection tools. To that end, we build the Avatar APR system, which exploits fix patterns of static analysis violations as ingredients for patch generation. • TBar: Fix patterns are widely used in patch generation of APR, however, the repair performance of a single fix pattern is not studied. We revisit the performance of template-based APR to build comprehensive knowledge about the effectiveness of fix patterns, and to highlight the importance of complementary steps such as fault localization or donor code retrieval. To that end, we first investigate the literature to collect, summarize and label recurrently-used fix patterns. Based on the investigation, we build TBar, a straightforward APR tool that systematically attempts to apply these fix patterns to program bugs. We thoroughly evaluate TBar on the Defects4J benchmark. In particular, we assess the actual qualitative and quantitative diversity of fix patterns, as well as their effectiveness in yielding plausible or correct patches. • Debugging Method Names: Except the issues about semantic/static bugs in programs, we note that how to debug inconsistent method names automatically is important to improve program quality. In this dissertation, we propose a deep learning based approach to spotting and refactoring inconsistent method names in programs. [less ▲]

Review of Clara Rauchegger and Anna Wallerman (eds.) The Eurosceptic Challenge: National Implementation and Interpretation of EU Law (Hart 2019)

in European Law Blog (2019)

Book review published on European Law Blog

From home to early childhood education: beliefs, language ideologies and OPOL

Scientific Conference (2019, December 18)

From Kinora to Small-Gauge: An Experimental Media Archaeological Approach to Early-Twentieth Century Home Cinema

Presentation (2019, December 17)

In this workshop contribution, I present my post-doctoral study within the "Doing Experimental Media Archaeology" (DEMA) research project in which I examine the genealogy of home cinema and amateur ... [more ▼]

In this workshop contribution, I present my post-doctoral study within the "Doing Experimental Media Archaeology" (DEMA) research project in which I examine the genealogy of home cinema and amateur moviemaking as early-twentieth century practices by means of a comparative, intermedial and experimental media archaeological approach. Through hands-on media archaeological experiments with the Kinora, one of the first motion picture viewing and recording technologies designed for home use from the 1900s, and various “small-gauge” film technologies from the 1920s and early 1930s, including Pathé-Baby 9.5mm and Kodak 16mm film cameras and projectors, two different “dispositifs” of home cinema and amateur moviemaking will be explored and compared. Various hands-on experiments will be conducted to provide a better understanding of the materiality and functionality of the Kinora and small-gauge film technologies as historical media objects as well as their technological affordances and performative qualities. The study aims to contribute to the development of experimental media archaeology as an alternative, experimental and sensorial approach to media historiography. [less ▲]

A Review of RFI Mitigation Techniques in Microwave Radiometry

in Remote Sensing (2019), 11(24), 3042

Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a well-known problem in microwave radiometry (MWR). Any undesired signal overlapping the MWR protected frequency bands introduces a bias in the measurements, which ... [more ▼]

Radio frequency interference (RFI) is a well-known problem in microwave radiometry (MWR). Any undesired signal overlapping the MWR protected frequency bands introduces a bias in the measurements, which can corrupt the retrieved geophysical parameters. This paper presents a literature review of RFI detection and mitigation techniques for microwave radiometry from space. The reviewed techniques are divided between real aperture and aperture synthesis. A discussion and assessment of the application of RFI mitigation techniques is presented for each type of radiometer. [less ▲]

La défense des Droits et Libertés fondamentaux au Gran-Duché de Luxembourg. Rôle, contribution respective et concertation des organes impliqués

Scientific Conference (2019, December 16)

Variants in Miro1 cause alterations of ER-mitochondria contact sites in fibroblasts from Parkinson's disease patients

in Journal of Clinical Medicine (2019)

Background: Although most cases of Parkinson´s disease (PD) are idiopathic with unknown cause, an increasing number of genes and genetic risk factors have been discovered that play a role in PD ... [more ▼]

Background: Although most cases of Parkinson´s disease (PD) are idiopathic with unknown cause, an increasing number of genes and genetic risk factors have been discovered that play a role in PD pathogenesis. Many of the PD‐associated proteins are involved in mitochondrial quality control, e.g., PINK1, Parkin, and LRRK2, which were recently identified as regulators of mitochondrial‐endoplasmic reticulum (ER) contact sites (MERCs) linking mitochondrial homeostasis to intracellular calcium handling. In this context, Miro1 is increasingly recognized to play a role in PD pathology. Recently, we identified the first PD patients carrying mutations in RHOT1, the gene coding for Miro1. Here, we describe two novel RHOT1 mutations identified in two PD patients and the characterization of the cellular phenotypes. Methods: Using whole exome sequencing we identified two PD patients carrying heterozygous mutations leading to the amino acid exchanges T351A and T610A in Miro1. We analyzed calcium homeostasis and MERCs in detail by live cell imaging and immunocytochemistry in patient‐derived fibroblasts. Results: We show that fibroblasts expressing mutant T351A or T610A Miro1 display impaired calcium homeostasis and a reduced amount of MERCs. All fibroblast lines from patients with pathogenic variants in Miro1, revealed alterations of the structure of MERCs. Conclusion: Our data suggest that Miro1 is important for the regulation of the structure and function of MERCs. Moreover, our study supports the role of MERCs in the pathogenesis of PD and further establishes variants in RHOT1 as rare genetic risk factors for neurodegeneration. [less ▲]