Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
A Process Model for Developing Semantic Web Systems

Before the Web era various software development methodologies have been proposed for the development of software applications for different domains. The main objectives of those methodologies were to meet user's requirements, find out means to suggest a systematic software development and reduce the maintenance cost of the developed software. On the emergence of the Web and to develop the web-based software systems, some existing methodologies have been extended. Also, new approaches (or informal methodologies) are introduced for the development of web-based systems because the development process for these systems is not considered as an extension of the classical software engineering, although both development processes for web-based systems and non web-based systems have the same basic objective which is software development. Of course, the development of the web-based systems needs a new kind of development methodologies which should meet and capture their unique and different requirements. Currently available software development methodologies are inappropriate and unsuitable to use for the development of web-based software systems, especially for the third generation web, called Semantic Web. In this paper, we present a brief review of the existing software development methodologies for the development of web-based systems. Some informal software development methodologies (or approaches) for the semantic web are also reviewed. Then, based on this analytical review, we propose a model for the development of semantic web systems. This model can be used as a benchmark to propose formal methodologies for the development of the semantic web systems. (New York Science Journal 2010;3(9):34-39). (ISSN: 1554-0200).
3D reconstruction of complex structures with bundle adjustment: an incremental approach

This paper introduces an incremental method for "structure from motion" of complex scenes from a video sequence. More precisely, we estimate the 3D positions of the viewed points in images and the camera positions and orientations through the sequence. The method can be seen as a fast but accurate alternative to classical reconstruction methods that use bundle adjustment, and that can become slow and computation time expensive for very long scenes. Our results are compared to the reconstruction obtained by the classical hierarchical bundle adjustment method. They have also been successfully used as a reference sequence for the vision based localization of an autonomous mobile robot
Egr-1 Activation by Cancer-Derived Extracellular Vesicles Promotes Endothelial Cell Migration via ERK1/2 and JNK Signaling Pathways

Various mammalian cells, including cancer cells, shed extracellular vesicles (EVs), also known as exosomes and microvesicles, into surrounding tissues. These EVs play roles in tumor growth and metastasis by promoting angiogenesis. However, the detailed mechanism of how cancer-derived EVs elicit endothelial cell activation remains unknown. Here, we provide evidence that early growth response-1 (Egr-1) activation in endothelial cells is involved in the angiogenic activity of colorectal cancer cell-derived EVs. Both RNA interference–mediated downregulation of Egr-1 and ERK1/2 or JNK inhibitor significantly blocked EV-mediated Egr-1 activation and endothelial cell migration. Furthermore, lipid raft-mediated endocytosis inhibitor effectively blocked endothelial Egr-1 activation and migration induced by cancer-derived EVs. Our results suggest that Egr-1 activation in endothelial cells may be a key mechanism involved in the angiogenic activity of cancer-derived EVs. These findings will improve our understanding regarding the proangiogenic activities of EVs in diverse pathological conditions including cancer, cardiovascular diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Highly Sensitive Measurement of Liquid Density in Air Using Suspended Microcapillary Resonators

We report the use of commercially available glass microcapillaries as micromechanical resonators for real-time monitoring of the mass density of a liquid that flows through the capillary. The vibration of a suspended region of the microcapillary is optically detected by measuring the forward scattering of a laser beam. The resonance frequency of the liquid filled microcapillary is measured for liquid binary mixtures of ethanol in water, glycerol in water and Triton in ethanol. The method achieves a detection limit in an air environment of 50 µg/mL that is only five times higher than that obtained with state-of-the-art suspended microchannel resonators encapsulated in vacuum. The method opens the door to novel advances for miniaturized total analysis systems based on microcapillaries with the add-on of mechanical transduction for sensing the rheological properties of the analyzed fluids without the need for vacuum encapsulation of the resonators.
An efficient uni-representation approach towards combining machine learners

In this paper, we present a novel approach towards combining various machine learners. Our novel approach shows an increase in the accuracy for solving the classification problems in machine learning. We first present a technique of combining learners and also show its implementation using Python programming and then show its comparison with other learners. Later we discuss feature space design and show its implementation on our new approach of combining learners. In Section I we have first provided an idea about the language (Python) we have used for implementing our technique and the machine learning tool we used for accessing the learning algorithms. Section II and Section III provide an idea about the concept of combining learners and various types of combination techniques. In Section IV we discuss our technique, its procedure, experiment and the results. Section V presents the feature space design, feature selection techniques, steps of feature selection method used, experiment and results.
Performance analysis of Sweep3D on Blue Gene/P with the Scalasca toolset

In studying the scalability of the Scalasca performance analysis toolset to several hundred thousand MPI processes on IBM Blue Gene/P, we investigated a progressive execution performance deterioration of the well-known ASCI Sweep3D compact application. Scalasca runtime summarization analysis quantified MPI communication time that correlated wth computational imbalance, and automated trace analysis confirmed growing amounts of MPI waiting times. Further instrumentation, measurement and analyses pinpointed a conditional section of highly imbalanced computation which amplified waiting times inherent in the associated wavefront communication that seriously degraded overall execution efficiency at very large scales. By employing effective data collation, management and graphical presentation, Scalasca was thereby able to demonstrate performance measurements and analyses with 294,912 processes for the first time.
CRAFT: a framework for evaluating software clustering results in the absence of benchmark decompositions [Clustering Results Analysis Framework and Tools]

Software clustering algorithms are used to create high-level views of a system's structure using source code-level artifacts. Software clustering is an active area of research that has produced many clustering algorithms. However, we have so far seen very little work that investigates how the results of these algorithms can be evaluated objectively in the absence of a benchmark decomposition or without the active participation of the original designers of the system. Ideally, for a given system, art agreed upon reference (benchmark) decomposition of the system's structure would exist, allowing the results of various clustering algorithms to be compared against it. Since such benchmarks seldom exist, we seek alternative methods to gain confidence in the quality of results produced by software clustering algorithms. In this paper, we present a tool that supports the evaluation of software clustering results in the absence of a benchmark decomposition.
Detection and classification of retinal fundus images exudates using region based multiscale LBP texture approach

Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the most important cause of vision loss in diabetic patients. The most primary sign of DR is the presence of exudates, and detecting these in early screening is crucial in preventing vision loss. This paper proposes a system for automatic exudate detection using a combination of texture features, extracted from different local binary pattern (LBP) variants, with an artificial neural network (ANN) classifier. The publicly available database DIARETDB0 of colour fundus images was used for testing purposes and the values of sensitivity, specificity and accuracy found were 98.68%, 94.81 % and 96.73% respectively for the neural network based classification. These results have also been shown to outperform existing work.
AUX/IAA Proteins Are Active Repressors, and Their Stability and Activity Are Modulated by Auxin Article, publication date, and citation information can be found at www.plantcell.org/cgi/doi/10.1105/tpc.010289.

Aux/IAA genes are early auxin response genes that encode short-lived nuclear proteins with four conserved domains, referred to as I, II, III, and IV. Arabidopsis Aux/IAA proteins repressed transcription on auxin-responsive reporter genes in protoplast transfection assays. Mutations in domain II resulted in increased repression, whereas mutations in domains I and III partially relieved repression. Aux/IAA proteins fused to a heterologous DNA binding domain were targeted to promoters of constitutively expressed reporter genes and actively repressed transcription in an auxin-responsive and dose-dependent manner. In comparison with an unfused luciferase protein, luciferase fused to Aux/IAA proteins displayed less luciferase activity, which further decreased in the presence of auxin in transfected protoplasts. Domain II mutations increased and domain I mutations decreased luciferase activity with the fusion proteins. These results suggested that Aux/IAA proteins function as active repressors by dimerizing with auxin response factors bound to auxin response elements and that early auxin response genes are regulated by auxin-modulated stabilities of Aux/IAA proteins.
A mediated crisis: news and the national mind

The thesis examines a mediated crisis and how The Straits Times and The Australian approach the reporting of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). It looks at how this mediated crisis exemplifies the culture of the national newspaper and in turn how the national newspaper has an historical influence on the national psyche. A total of 649 reports and headlines and 141 letters about SARS in The Straits Times (including The Straits Time Interactive) were examined from April 2003 to November 2003 as were 125 headlines from The Australian. The early sections of the thesis discuss how a crisis makes news; examine how the media report a crisis and what emphasis is given to aspects such as: actors, primary definers, vocabulary, lexical choices, subjects, themes, issues and value dimension or stance. The first chapter defines crisis, journalism and crisis journalism and discusses where the latter sits within the continuing expansion and development of major theoretical frameworks, including living in a risk society. The implication here is that crisis and risk have a symbiotic relationship. Historical perspectives of news are discussed in Chapter 2, and the newspaper is placed within the context of contemporary media. The chapter discusses how newspapers are aligned with the concept of the national mind and demonstrates the roles and formations of the two newspapers in relation to the SARS crisis. Chapter 3 codes the headlines, article titles and subtitles of The Straits Times and The Australian and using content analysis of the headlines, analyses the reporting of a serious health crisis SARS that lasted from March to November, 2003. The quantification within content analysis enables a researcher to read and interpret questions that relate to the intensity of meaning in texts, their social impact, the relationships between media texts and the realities and representations they reflect (Hansen et al, 1998). The theory and method of content analysis is used in this chapter to consider differences between The Straits Times and The Australian and to exemplify the media's representation of the narratives of SARS as it happened in the countries of Singapore and Australia. Aspects of crisis and risk, the newspaper and the national mind, narratives, presentations, and post SARS events are discussed in the last chapter. It is concluded from these discussions there is a world narrative that tells the story of how the human condition likes to live and rely on a safe social environment always being available. The relationship between a mediated crisis and risk are also discussed. In addition, it is maintained that reporting in 2003 was not just about SARS but a way of reporting that allowed one to view journalism as an aid to good governance, particularly with regard to living in a risk and crisis-ridden society.
Wavelet based Cepstral Coefficients for neural network speech recognition

Traditional cepstral analysis methods are often used as part of feature extraction process in speech recognition. However the cepstral analysis method uses the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) in one of its computation process. The DFT uses fixed frame resolution to analyze frames of signal thus it will result in an analysis that would not accurately analyze localized events. This paper investigates the use of the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for calculating the cepstrum coefficients. Two wavelet types with different decomposition level are experimented to yield the cepstrum which is called the Wavelet Cepstral Coefficient (WCC). To test the WCC speech recognizing task of recognizing 26 English alphabets were conducted. Under same number of feature dimension the WCC outperformed the MFCC with about 20% in terms of recognition rate under both speaker dependent and speaker independent task.
The Effect of Essential Oils and Bioactive Fractions on Streptococcus mutans and Candida albicans Biofilms: A Confocal Analysis

The essential oils (EO) and bioactive fractions (BF) from Aloysia gratissima, Baccharis dracunculifolia, Coriandrum sativum, Cyperus articulatus, and Lippia sidoides were proven to have strong antimicrobial activity on planktonic microorganisms; however, little is known about their effects on the morphology or viability of oral biofilms. Previously, we determined the EO/fractions with the best antimicrobial activity against Streptococcus mutans and Candida spp. In this report, we used a confocal analysis to investigate the effect of these EO and BF on the morphology of S. mutans biofilms (thickness, biovolume, and architecture) and on the metabolic viability of C. albicans biofilms. The analysis of intact treated S. mutans biofilms showed no statistical difference for thickness in all groups compared to the control. However, a significant reduction in the biovolume of extracellular polysaccharides and bacteria was observed for A. gratissima and L. sidoides groups, indicating that these BF disrupt biofilm integrity and may have created porosity in the biofilm. This phenomenon could potentially result in a weakened structure and affect biofilm dynamics. Finally, C. sativum EO drastically affected C. albicans viability when compared to the control. These results highlight the promising antimicrobial activity of these plant species and support future translational research on the treatment of dental caries and oral candidiasis.
SAPIR: Scalable and Distributed Image Searching

In this paper we present a scalable and distributed system for image retrieval based on visual features and annotated text. This system is the core of the SAPIR project. Its architecture makes use of Peer-to-Peer networks to achieve scalability and efficiency allowing the management of huge amount of data. For the presented demo we use 10 million images and accompanying text (tags, comments, etc.) taken from Flickr. Through the web interface it is possible to efficient perform contentbased similarity search, as well as traditional text search on the metadata annotated by the Flickr community. Fast complex query processing is also possible combining visual features and text. We show that the combination of content-based and text search on a large scale can dramatically improve the capability of a multimedia search system to answer the users needs and that the Peer-to-Peer based architecture can cope with the scalability issues (response time obtained for this demo over 10 million images is always below 500 milliseconds).
An overview of content-based image retrieval techniques

Content-based image retrieval is currently a very important area of research in the area of multimedia databases. Plenty of research work has been undertaken to design efficient image retrieval techniques from image or multimedia databases. Although a large number of indexing and retrieval techniques have been developed, there are still no universally accepted feature extraction, indexing and retrieval techniques available. In this paper, we present an up-to-date review of various content-based image retrieval systems. Since the volume of literature available in the field is enormous, only selected works are mentioned.
One-point touch input of vector information for computer displays

The finger as a graphical stylus enjoys a coefficient of friction with glass sufficient to provide input of direction and torque as well as position from a single point. This report describes a pressure-sensitive digitizer (PSD) capable of accepting these force inputs, and discusses a set of five simple input applications used to assess the capabilities of this device. These applications include techniques for specifying vectors, and pushing, pulling, dispersing and reorienting objects with a single touch. Experience gained from these applications demonstrates that touch and pressure sensing open a rich channel for immediate and multi-dimensional interaction.
An “Electronic Fluorescent Pictograph” Browser for Exploring and Analyzing Large-Scale Biological Data Sets

Background The exploration of microarray data and data from other high-throughput projects for hypothesis generation has become a vital aspect of post-genomic research. For the non-bioinformatics specialist, however, many of the currently available tools provide overwhelming amounts of data that are presented in a non-intuitive way. Methodology/Principal Findings In order to facilitate the interpretation and analysis of microarray data and data from other large-scale data sets, we have developed a tool, which we have dubbed the electronic Fluorescent Pictograph – or eFP – Browser, available at http://www.bar. utoronto.ca/, for exploring microarray and other data for hypothesis generation. This eFP Browser engine paints data from large-scale data sets onto pictographic representations of the experimental samples used to generate the data sets. We give examples of using the tool to present Arabidopsis gene expression data from the AtGenExpress Consortium (Arabidopsis eFP Browser), data for subcellular localization of Arabidopsis proteins (Cell eFP Browser), and mouse tissue atlas microarray data (Mouse eFP Browser). Conclusions/Significance The eFP Browser software is easily adaptable to microarray or other large-scale data sets from any organism and thus should prove useful to a wide community for visualizing and interpreting these data sets for hypothesis generation.
Walking-pad: a step-in-place locomotion interface for virtual environments

This paper presents a new locomotion interface that provides users with the ability to engage in a life-like walking experience using stepping in place. Stepping actions are performed on top of a flat platform that has an embedded grid of switch sensors that detect footfalls pressure. Based on data received from sensors, the system can compute different variables that represent user's walking behavior such as walking direction, walking speed, standstill, jump, and walking. The overall platform status is scanned at a rate of 100Hz with which we can deliver real-time visual feedback reaction to user actions. The proposed system is portable and easy to integrate into major virtual environment with large projection feature such as CAVE and DOME systems. The overall weight of the Walking-Pad is less than 5 Kg and can be connected to any computer via USB port, which make it even controllable via a portable computer.
Towards Efficient ID-Based Signature Schemes with Batch Verifications from Bilinear Pairings

Many group-oriented applications and multicast communications often need to verify which group members have sent/received a message. However, individual verification of signed messages would require a significant computation cost. A secure signature scheme with supporting variant batch verifications extremely improves performance. In 2003, Cha and Cheon proposed an efficient identity (ID)-based signature scheme with bilinear pairings. Recently, Yoon et al. pointed out that their scheme does not provide batch verifications for multiple signatures. In this paper, we examine and discuss twelve kinds of Cha-Cheon like signature schemes and security properties. We obtain an efficient ID-based signature scheme supporting batch verifications. In the random oracle model and under the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption, we show that this new scheme is secure against existential forgery attacks under various types of batch verifications.
Fitting Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Optical Spectra

In this work, a comprehensive methodology for the fitting of single-walled carbon nanotube absorption spectra is presented. Different approaches to background subtraction, choice of line profile, and calculation of full width at half-maximum are discussed both in the context of previous literature and the contemporary understanding of carbon nanotube photophysics. The fitting is improved by the inclusion of exciton–phonon sidebands, and new techniques to improve the individualization of overlapped nanotube spectra by exploiting correlations between the first- and second-order optical transitions and the exciton–phonon sidebands are presented. Consideration of metallic nanotubes allows an analysis of the metallic/semiconducting content, and a process of constraining the fit of highly congested spectra of carbon nanotube solid films according to the spectral weights of each (n, m) species in solution is also presented, allowing for more reliable resolution of overlapping peaks into single (n, m) species contributions.
Legitimacy and the politics of opposition in the Middle East and North Africa

Approved: ____________________________________ Thesis Supervisor ____________________________________ Title and Department ____________________________________ Date 1 LEGITIMACY AND THE POLITICS OF OPPOSITION IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA by Gail Jeanne Buttorff A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Political Science in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa