In this paper we describe XenC, an open-source tool for data selection aimed at Natural Language Processing (NLP) in general and Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) or Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) in particular. Usually, when building a SMT or ASR system, the considered task is related to a specific domain of application, like news articles or scientific talks for instance. The goal of XenC is to allow selection of relevant data regarding the considered task, which will be used to build the statistical models for such a system. It is done by computing the difference between cross-entropy scores of sentences from a large out-of-domain corpus and sentences from a corpus considered as in-domain for the task. Written in C++, this tool can operate on monolingual or bilingual data and is language-independent. XenC, now part of the LIUM toolchain for SMT, is actively developed since December 2011 and used in many MT projects.

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The requirements of ITER neutral beam injectors (1 MeV, 40 A negative deuterium ion current for 1 h) have never been simultaneously attained; therefore, a dedicated Neutral Beam Test Facility (NBTF) was set up at Consorzio RFX (Padova, Italy). The NBTF includes two experiments: SPIDER (Source for the Production of Ions of Deuterium Extracted from Rf plasma), the full-scale prototype of the source of ITER injectors, with a 100 keV accelerator, to investigate and optimize the properties of the ion source; and MITICA, the full-scale prototype of the entire injector, devoted to the issues related to the accelerator, including voltage holding at low gas pressure. The present paper gives an account of the status of the procurements, of the timeline, and of the voltage holding tests and experiments for MITICA. As for SPIDER, the first year of operation is described, regarding the solution of some issues connected with the radiofrequency power, the source operation, and the characterization of the first negative ion beam.

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Potassium niobate thin films were grown by pulsed laser deposition on various substrates. Influence of deposition conditions on films characteristics was studied. Structural investigation evidenced that single phase polycrystalline randomly oriented films were grown on sintered alumina whereas epitaxial films were grown on (100)SrTiO 3 and (100)MgO substrates. The microstructure was highly controled by the structural characteristics. Interdigited capacitors built from KNbO 3 films on two different substrates (alumina andMgO) showed the strong influence of the structural characteristics on the dielectric behaviour.The variation of the equivalent capacitance measured on the interdigital capacitor on MgO was 6.4 % at 2.5 GHz while it was 1.5 % on alumina, in both cases for a moderate applied field of ~ 15 kV.cm -1 . The results show the potentiality of this ferroelectric materials for use in frequency agile microwave electronics.