The Faculty of Engineering and Science – Department of Energy Technology – AAU

The transport, agglomeration and subsequently deposition of small adhesive particles play important roles in many industrial and fundamental processes. These processes range from particles accumulating at heat transfer surfaces, particles blocking pores in membrane filtration systems, particles being inhaled and deposited in our lungs to interstellar medium agglomerating causing early stages of new planets to form in space.
The purpose of this study is look into how particle response time and particle adhesiveness affect the agglomeration rate. To obtain a fully-developed flow, the computational domain is made periodic in the stream-wise direction. To avoid imposing any limitations on the agglomeration process, the soft-sphere DEM approach is used to resolve how particles collide, agglomerate, deposit and are re-entrained into the fluid due to collisions with other particles or by fluid forces.

Publication

Centre for Language Technology – Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics – KU

We are interested in automatically generating rap lyrics, using a dataset with over 30,000 rap songs. Past approaches in poetry/verse generation typically involve analytical approaches with hand-crafted grammars and rules. In rap lyrics generation, there are hybrid approaches, where the authors devise an architecture to structurally analyze rap texts and suggest the closest matching next line from a database. On the other hand, we have pure unsupervised approaches using the Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent neural networks (RNN) variant with promising results, albeit using a limited corpus. Recently, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and similar methods have been proved to model well specific styles.

Faculty of Health Science – Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Biodemography – Human Genetics – SDU

Body mass index is an important indicator for determining obesity, which is highly correlated with cardiometabolic problem like coronary heart disease. It is contributed form multiple genetic and epigenetic factors. In this study, we focus on DNA methylation study and use twins discordant for BMI to control the genetic factors. Our results could benefit the public in the aspects of improve life quality and drug development. We have collected 30 twin pairs and measure their methylation level using reduced presentation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) technology. RRBS is based on sequencing technology and it is a relatively new. The pipeline for processing such type of data is rather complex. Millions of reads need to be processed and mapped onto reference human genome, and the process need large amount of computational power.

Faculty of Health Science – Department of Clinical Research – Human Genetics – SDU

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. Up to 10% of all cases are inherited. Since breast cancer is associated with high mortality patients with a strong family history of breast/ovarian cancer are referred to screening of the high-risk genes BRCA1 and BRCA2. In families where a mutation is identified, half of the daughters of a mutation carrier will not carry it and they can be spared prophylactic mastectomy and oophorectomy. Patients with BRCA1/2 mutations have been shown to respond better to certain types of chemotherapy and a new targeted treatment, PARP inhibitors. A major problem in clinical managing is that mutations in BRCA1/2 are only identified in app. 10% of referred families hampering counseling and treatment.

We will seek to improve treatment and counseling of hereditary breast cancer by identifying molecular subtypes and the missing causal genetic factors for non-BRCA1/2 familial breast cancers.

Faculty of Engineering – Center for Nano Optics – The Mads Clausen Institute – SDU

Plasmonics studies collective oscillations of free electrons, typically excited by light, in conducting media such as metals. While these interactions are commonly treated classically, we focus on situations where classical electrodynamics is interfacing regimes with quantum physics.

Faculty of Science – Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy (FKF) – SDU

Migratory songbirds can perceive the Earth’s magnetic field for the purpose of navigating their exceptional voyages or orienting in their local habitats. One particular modality of this sense, a magnetic inclination compass, is thought to rely on magnetically sensitive radical pairs formed photochemically in cryptochrome proteins in the animal’s retinae. This process is a striking example of a truly quantum mechanical process in sensory biology. It necessitates long-lived electron spin coherences in the radical pair.

An important requirement of this hypothesis is that the electron spin relaxation is slow enough for the Earth’s magnetic field to have a significant effect on the coherent spin dynamics of the transient radical pair. This proposal aims to elucidate spin relaxation pathways based on a comprehensive analysis of the thermally induced motions in the radicals and their surroundings.

Faculty of Science – Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (IMADA) – SDU

For an evaluation study on unsupervised outlier detection and ensemble techniques, we run various methods with various parameterizations on many datasets, resulting in ca. 4.5 mio. individual experiments which are to a certain extent independent of each other and try to see what the benefits of parallelization are on this effort.

Faculty of Science – Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy (FKF) – SDU

The aim of this project is to rethink the current standard colorectal cancer (CRC) screening program Computational chemistry is emerging as an extremely powerful addition to the experimental tool box of chemistry and biology. Calculations performed on HPC systems have the potential to both explain and guide experiments. In this project, we use computational methods to study the structure and stability of chemically engineered nucleic acid duplexes as well as to study a key process in the synthesis of the bacterial cell wall. The projects will provide new insight and understanding at an atomic level.

Faculty of Science – Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy (FKF) – SDU

Gels made of stiff polymers are of interest for multiple reasons. Fundamentally, their topological entanglement properties are quite different from dens melts of flexible chains, secondly many biomaterials such as f-actin gels are composed of stiff biological polymers. Computationally, naively simulating stiff polymers with bead-spring models are expensive, since stiff chains require angular potentials with high spring strengths, and hence require small time steps, and many beads are required to decorate the chain. Recently, it became possible to add pair interactions not between beads, but between the bonds connecting beads. Such interactions allow for computationally much more effective models of stiff polymer gels, since much fewer beads are required to model a stiff polymer. Secondly, the bond pair interactions can be designed to ensure gel topology is conserved. In the present project, we investigate and benchmark how to apply these computational techniques and optionally how to map the gel models onto biological gel systems.

Faculty of Engineering – Maersk Mc-Kinney Moller Institute – SDU Embodied Systems for Robotics and Learning – SDU

The aim of this project is to rethink the current standard colorectal cancer (CRC) screening program and significantly improve the efficiency in terms of accuracy, acceptability, reduced complication rate and cost effectiveness.

An endoscopic camera pill produces up to 500,000 images per patient. All the recorded images are investigated manually by trained nurses which results in inefficient use of personnel. Each year, approximately 130,000 patients will go through screening. We are developing a new deep learning algorithm to fully automatise this process. ABACUS 2.0 offers the platform to handle large scale data and will be used for machine learning algorithms and big data analytics for detection of any cancer precursor, such as polyp detection, classification and characterization.