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Traditional Semantic Table Interpretation (STI) methods rely primarily on the underlying table data to create semantic annotations. This year's SemTab challenge introduced the ``Metadata to KG'' track, which focuses on performing STI by using only metadata information, without access to the underlying data. In response to this new challenge, we introduce a new term: Column Vocabulary Association (CVA). This term refers to the task of semantic annotation of column headers solely based on metadata information. In this study, we evaluate the performance of various methods in executing the CVA task, including a Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approach, as well as a more traditional similarity approach with SemanticBERT. Our methodology uses a zero-shot setting, with no pretraining or examples passed to the Large Language Models (LLMs), as we aim to avoid a domain-specific setting. We investigate a total of 7 different LLMs, of which three commercial GPT models (i.e. gpt-3.5-turbo-0.125, gpt-4o and gpt-4-turbo) and four open source models (i.e. llama3-80b, llama3-7b, gemma-7b and mixtral-8x7b). We integrate this models with RAG systems, and we explore how variations in temperature settings affect performances. Moreover, we continue our investigation by performing the CVA task utilizing SemanticBERT, analyzing how various metadata information influence its performance. Initial findings indicate that LLMs generally perform well at temperatures below 1.0, achieving an accuracy of 100\% in certain cases. Nevertheless, our investigation also reveal that the nature of the data significantly influences CVA task outcomes. In fact, in cases where the input data and glossary are related (for example by being created by the same organizations) traditional methods appear to surpass the performance of LLMs.

Machine learning potentials (MLPs) offer efficient and accurate material simulations, but constructing the reference ab initio database remains a significant challenge, particularly for catalyst-adsorbate systems. Training an MLP with a small dataset can lead to overfitting, thus limiting its practical applications. This study explores the feasibility of developing computationally cost-effective and accurate MLPs for catalyst-adsorbate systems with a limited number of ab initio references by leveraging a transfer learning strategy from subsets of a comprehensive public database. Using the Open Catalyst Project 2020 (OC20) -- a dataset closely related to our system of interest -- we pre-trained MLP models on OC20 subsets using the {\ae}net-PyTorch framework. We compared several strategies for database subset selection. Our findings indicate that MLPs constructed via transfer learning exhibit better generalizability than those constructed from scratch, as demonstrated by the consistency in the dynamics simulations. Remarkably, transfer learning enhances the stability and accuracy of MLPs for the CuAu/H2O system with approximately 600 reference data points. This approach achieved excellent extrapolation performance in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for the larger CuAu/6H2O system, sustaining up to 250 ps, whereas MLPs without transfer learning lasted less than 50 ps. We also examine the potential limitations of this strategy. This work proposes an alternative, cost-effective approach for constructing MLPs for the challenging simulation of catalytic systems. Finally, we anticipate that this methodology will pave the way for broader applications in material science and catalysis research, facilitating more efficient and accurate simulations across various systems., Comment: 41 pages, 11 figures, 10 SI figures

Jacobus C. Kapteyn is regarded as one of the coryfees of the University of Groningen. Part of his legacy is two paintings of him by Dutch painter Jan Pieter Veth. One, showing him at his desk, decorates the Kapteyn Room in the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, and the other one, displaying him in academic attire, is in the University's gallery of professors in the central Academy Building. The first was offered to the Kapteyns on the occasion of his 40-th anniversary as professor in 1918 and the second to the University after his retirement in 1921. It has been suggested that there must have been a third portrait that now is lost. Former director Adriaan Blaauw has proposed that the one in the Academy Building actually was first offered in 1918, but at Mrs. Kapteyn's request replaced by the one now in the Kapteyn Room. The first version was then later adapted to the requirements of the gallery of professors by Veth himself by overpainting it with academic attire. A preliminary trial version by Veth, in the possession of Kapteyn's greatgrandson, shows what it would have looked like before the adaption. The following reports on new evidence: the biography of Jan Veth that historian Johan Huizinga, friend of Veth, wrote, and letters Veth wrote to his wife while he was working on these paintings. This provides strong support of Blaauw's sequence of events with a few modifications. No third painting has ever been produced., Comment: This paper has been submitted for publication to the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage. It has 14 figures, some of them illustrating paintings by Veth. A version with high-resolution figures is available at www.astro.rug.nl/~vdkruit/Veth.pdf

Antonie (Anton) Pannekoek (1873-1960) is remembered as one of the initiators of the field of stellar atmospheres. A second part of his research concerned Galactic astronomy. He was convinced that the sidereal system was built up of clouds of stars in a smooth, low-density stratum. In addition there were dark clouds together with streaks with little or no extinction in between. Pannekoek looked at bright star clouds and estimated their distance from their contribution to star counts. He found values of tens of kpc, which would mean their distribution was similar in extent to that of Shapleys globular cluster system. Later he had to reduce his distance by a factor over two, and later still retract the method. He developed a rigorous method of estimating distances of dark clouds from modeling star counts off and on the cloud, preceding Wolf's quick and dirty method. He should have received more credit for this. He started isophotal maps of the northern and southern Milky Way, first from visual observations, later from photographic surface photometry using out-of-focus exposures. I compare Pannekoeks maps with detailed photographic surface photometry of the south by the group in Bochum and to the almost all-sky mapping by the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, free of zodiacal light, from beyond the asteroid belt. This shows Panneloeks maps to be surprisingly accurate. The legacy of Pannekoek in the area of Galactic research consists of his mapping of the structure of the nearby part of the Galaxy, the distances of dark clouds, and isophotal maps of the Milky Way. His other contributions turned out inconclusive or wrong as a result of his conviction, resulting from his many years of observing and mapping the Milky Way, that the nearby distribution is characterized primarily by more or less isolated clouds of stars and by dust restricted to isolated dark clouds and streaks., Comment: 92 pages, 32 figures, 4 tables. This paper has been accepted for publication in the March issue by the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage. For a version with high-resolution figures please go to the my homepage, where a link will be provided

In this contribution I discuss the Kapteyn Astronomical Laboratory during the period of Pieter Johannes van Rhijn's directorate, which lasted from 1921 to 1957. It had developed under the founder Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn into one of the leading astronomical research institutes in the world. When van Rhijn took over at the retirement of Kapteyn, it was in the process of coordinating Kapteyn's Plan of Selected Areas. Van Rhijn's research was solid and professional work, but in his papers he invariably stopped before discussing how his findings did fit into the larger scheme of things. He maybe was unimaginative but it did lack the link to the larger view towards the emerging picture of the structure of the Galaxy. Van Rhijn was unfortunate to be hampered throughout almost his complete directorate by factors, that severely limited his attempts to obtain more funding in spite of local support by his university. These were of course in the first place the Great Depression of the 1930s and the Second World War and its aftermath, while during most of the 1940s he suffered from tuberculosis. But also the remote location of Groningen compared to Leiden, where a major infrastructure led by three important protegees of Kapteyn was in place, and the governmental bias towards support for Leiden over Groningen was an important factor. Finally I examine the developments in the 1950s and the circumstances that made Adriaan Blaauw accept his appointment as van Rhijn's successor in 1957 and initiate the beginnings of the revival under his leadership., Comment: Accepted by the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage. For a version with high-res figures please see www.astro.rug.nl/~vdkruit/PJvRhijn.pdf

Tables in scientific papers contain a wealth of valuable knowledge for the scientific enterprise. To help the many of us who frequently consult this type of knowledge, we present Tab2Know, a new end-to-end system to build a Knowledge Base (KB) from tables in scientific papers. Tab2Know addresses the challenge of automatically interpreting the tables in papers and of disambiguating the entities that they contain. To solve these problems, we propose a pipeline that employs both statistical-based classifiers and logic-based reasoning. First, our pipeline applies weakly supervised classifiers to recognize the type of tables and columns, with the help of a data labeling system and an ontology specifically designed for our purpose. Then, logic-based reasoning is used to link equivalent entities (via sameAs links) in different tables. An empirical evaluation of our approach using a corpus of papers in the Computer Science domain has returned satisfactory performance. This suggests that ours is a promising step to create a large-scale KB of scientific knowledge., Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, conference: The Semantic Web -- ISWC 2020

Honorary degrees and particularly doctorates are important instruments to enhance the standing of universities and professors, in addition to receiving these as a measure of a scientist's recognition. Jacobus C. Kapteyn from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, one of the most prominent astronomers of his times, received three of these and has persuaded his university to award at least three, possibly five. I examine the background of the selection of the latter in view of developments in Kapteyn's times in his career, international astronomy and political and cultural circumstances., Comment: Accepted for publication in the Journal for Astronomical History and Heritage. For a version with hi-res figures see https://www.astro.rug.nl/%7Evdkruit/honocaus.pdf

The use of electron mirrors in aberration correction and surface-sensitive microscopy techniques such as low-energy electron microscopy has been established. However, in this work, by implementing an easy to construct, fully electrostatic electron mirror system under a sample in a conventional scanning electron microscope (SEM), we present a new imaging scheme which allows us to form scanned images of the top and bottom surfaces of the sample simultaneously. We believe that this imaging scheme could be of great value to the field of in-situ SEM which has been limited to observation of dynamic changes such as crack propagation and other surface phenomena on one side of samples at a time. We analyze the image properties when using a flat versus a concave electron mirror system and discuss two different regimes of operation. In addition to in-situ SEM, we foresee that our imaging scheme could open up avenues toward spherical aberration correction by the use of electron mirrors in SEMs without the need for complex beam separators.

We propose a new end-to-end method for extending a Knowledge Graph (KG) from tables. Existing techniques tend to interpret tables by focusing on information that is already in the KG, and therefore tend to extract many redundant facts. Our method aims to find more novel facts. We introduce a new technique for table interpretation based on a scalable graphical model using entity similarities. Our method further disambiguates cell values using KG embeddings as additional ranking method. Other distinctive features are the lack of assumptions about the underlying KG and the enabling of a fine-grained tuning of the precision/recall trade-off of extracted facts. Our experiments show that our approach has a higher recall during the interpretation process than the state-of-the-art, and is more resistant against the bias observed in extracting mostly redundant facts since it produces more novel extractions.

Semi-transparent mirrors are standard elements in light optics for splitting light beams or creating two versions of the same image. Such mirrors do not exist in electron optics, although they could be beneficial in existing techniques such as electron interferometry and holography and enable novel electron imaging and spectroscopy techniques. We propose a design for an electron beam splitter using the concept of quantum interaction-free measurement (IFM). The design combines an electron resonator with a weak phase grating. Fast switching gates allow electrons to enter and exit the resonator. While in the resonator, the phase grating transfers intensity from the direct beam into one of the weakly diffracted beams at each pass. To make the beam splitter an efficient two-port splitter, the intensity in all other diffracted beams is blocked by an aperture. The IFM principle minimizes the loss of total intensity by this aperture. We use a scattering matrix method to analyze the performance of the beam splitter, including the effects of inelastic scattering in the phase grating. This design can be generalized to beam splitters for not only electrons, but also photons, neutrons, atoms, and other quantum mechanical systems.