Domain Specificity

In this paper we present a framework for unified, personalized access to heterogeneous multimedia content in distributed repositories. Focusing on semantic analysis of multimedia documents, metadata, user queries and user profiles, it contributes to the bridging of the gap between the semantic nature of user queries and raw multimedia documents. The proposed approach utilizes as input visual content analysis results, as well as analyzes and exploits associated textual annotation, in order to extract the underlying semantics, construct a semantic index and classify documents to topics, based on a unified knowledge and semantics representation model. It may then accept user queries, and, carrying out semantic interpretation and expansion, retrieve documents from the index and rank them according to user preferences, similarly to text retrieval. All processes are based on a novel semantic processing methodology, employing fuzzy algebra and principles of taxonomic knowledge representation. The first part of this work presented in this paper deals with data and knowledge models, manipulation of multimedia content annotations and semantic indexing, while the second part will continue on the use of the extracted semantic information for personalized retrieval.

This method, however, is limited to "local" interpretations, and cannot take full advantage of the distributed nature of neural networks. In this paper we discuss a technique for extracting distributed symbolic rules from trained connectionist networks. This technique is based on the k-means cluster analysis of activation values across all hidden units instead of single units as in the banding analysis. A novel stopping rule-based on domain specific heuristic information-is defined such that the optimum number of clusters are extracted from the network. Once the appropriate clusters are determined, simple statistics are computed to determine the shared characteristics of all patterns within a cluster. The utility of this technique is illustrated on two benchmark problems. It is concluded that this form of distributed rule extraction is more succinct than simple local analysis of internal structure.

Recent work on a network interpretation technique called “banding analysis” has shown how symbolic rules can be easily extracted from trained connectionist networks. This method, however, is limited to “local” interpretations, and cannot take full advantage of the distributed nature of neural networks. In this paper we discuss a technique for extracting distributed symbolic rules from trained connectionist networks. This technique is based on the k-means cluster analysis of activation values across all hidden units instead of single units as in the banding analysis. A novel stopping rule, based on domain specific heuristic information, is defined such that the optimum number of clusters are extracted from the network. Once the appropriate clusters are determined simple statistics are computed to determine the shared characteristics of all patterns within a cluster. The utility of this technique is illustrated on two benchmark problems. It is concluded that this form of distributed r...

People who are particularly vulnerable to disease may reduce their likelihood of contracting illnesses during social interactions by having particularly strong aversions to individuals who appear ill. Consistent with this proposal, here we show that men and women who perceive themselves to be particularly vulnerable to disease have stronger preferences for apparent health in dynamic faces than individuals who perceive themselves to be relatively less vulnerable to disease. This relationship was independent of possible effects of general disgust sensitivity. Furthermore, perceived vulnerability to disease was not related to preferences for other facial cues that are attractive but do not necessarily signal an individual's current health (i.e. perceiver-directed smiles). Our findings complement previous studies implicating perceived vulnerability to disease in attitudes to out-group individuals and those with physical abnormalities by implicating perceived vulnerability to disease as a factor in face preferences. Collectively, our findings reveal a relatively domain-specific association between perceived vulnerability to disease and the strength of aversions to facial cues associated with illness. Additionally, they are further evidence that variation in attractiveness judgments is not arbitrary, but rather reflects potentially adaptive individual differences in face preferences.

Some individuals with aphantasia, an absent or reduced ability to form visual imagery, report face recognition difficulties, and studies have shown aphantasics exhibit impaired face recognition performance on the Cambridge Face Memory Test. While this impaired performance may be due to poor face memory, it may instead, or in addition, be due to difficulties in other face processing domains (such as face perception or face matching). The Cambridge Face Memory Test, Oxford Face Matching Test and a novel analysis strategy were used to obtain independent measures of face memory, face matching and face perception from 34 individuals with aphantasia and an age-matched control group. Results showed that individuals with aphantasia exhibit impairments in face memory and face perception, but not face matching. This study therefore provides information about the specific face processing mechanisms that may be impaired in aphantasia.

Recent experimental studies on the effect of age of on language acquisition revealed that effect of age of onset could not be generalized across all language domains or languages. Age could have a positive effect on acquisition of vocabulary, while it could have a negative effect on the acquisition of morphosyntax (Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2011; Veríssimo, Heyer, Jacob & Clahsen, 2018). While existing studies account for the effect of biological factors, including age, they underestimate the effect of the environment (quantity and quality of input) on second language acquisition. Moreover, there is a need to understand second language acquisition for late learners of French-who start learning French at age 6-as most studies focused on children who start learning French between the age of 3 and 5 (Prévost, 2006; Strik, Pirvulescu & Roberge, 2015). This study wishes to fill these gaps by comparing non-francophone children according to their age of acquisition of L2 French and quantity of input received in school in terms of their acquisition of French object clitic.  Specifically, our study wishes to determine whether patterns of acquisition of French morphosyntax for second language learners differ when children start their acquisition at age three (early learners) versus age 6 (late learners).

This paper addresses a critical problem in deploying a spoken dialog system (SDS). One of the main bottlenecks of SDS deployment for a new domain is data sparseness in building a statistical language model. Our goal is to devise a method to efficiently build a reliable language model for a new SDS. We consider the worst yet quite common scenario where only a small amount (∼1.7K utterances) of domain specific data is available for the target domain. We present a new method that exploits external static text resources that are collected for other speech recognition tasks as well as dynamic text resources acquired from World Wide Web (WWW). We show that language models built using external resources can jointly be used with limited in-domain (baseline) language model to obtain significant improvements in speech recognition accuracy. Combining language models built using external resources with the in-domain language model provides over 20% reduction in WER over the baseline in-domain language model. Equivalently, we achieve almost the same level of performance by having ten times as much in-domain data (17K utterances).

Abstract. The proliferation of safety-critical embedded systems has created great demands for online fault diagnosis and fault-adaptive control techniques. A number of methodologies have been proposed, but the implementation of on-line schemes that integrate the fault detection, isolation, identification, and fault accommodation or reconfiguration tasks remains challenging. We present a tool chain using a Model Integrated Computing (MIC) approach to develop Fault adaptive control systems. The domain specific features support physical ...

Since decade, with rapid growth of available multimedia documents and increasing demand for information indexing and retrieval, much effort has been done on text extraction in images and videos. There are many challenges and difficulties for designer and developer of video extraction process. A lot of work has been done in the field of video extraction from multimedia data. But most of the work is application specific and there is still need of work in designing domain independent systems. This is because there are so many challenges when extracting video with variation in fonts, size, color, alignment, orientation, illumination and background. Problem of video extraction get very difficult because of these deviations. This paper presents a conceptual framework for video extraction derived from the research literature and used as a means for surveying the research literature.

Since decade, with rapid growth of available multimedia documents and increasing demand for information indexing and retrieval, much effort has been done on text extraction in images and videos. There are many challenges and difficulties for designer and developer of video extraction process. A lot of work has been done in the field of video extraction from multimedia data. But most of the work is application specific and there is still need of work in designing domain independent systems. This is because there are so many challenges when extracting video with variation in fonts, size, color, alignment, orientation, illumination and background. Problem of video extraction get very difficult because of these deviations. This paper presents a conceptual framework for video extraction derived from the research literature and used as a means for surveying the research literature.

Objective Within the context of the Third i2b2 Workshop on Natural Language Processing Challenges for Clinical Records, the authors (also referred to as 'the i2b2 medication challenge team' or 'the i2b2 team' for short) organized a community annotation experiment. Design For this experiment, the authors released annotation guidelines and a small set of annotated discharge summaries. They asked the participants of the Third i2b2 Workshop to annotate 10 discharge summaries per person; each discharge summary was annotated by two annotators from two different teams, and a third annotator from a third team resolved disagreements. Measurements In order to evaluate the reliability of the annotations thus produced, the authors measured community inter-annotator agreement and compared it with the inter-annotator agreement of expert annotators when both the community and the expert annotators generated ground truth based on pooled system outputs. For this purpose, the pool consisted of the three most densely populated automatic annotations of each record. The authors also compared the community interannotator agreement with expert inter-annotator agreement when the experts annotated raw records without using the pool. Finally, they measured the quality of the community ground truth by comparing it with the expert ground truth. The authors found that the community annotators achieved comparable interannotator agreement to expert annotators, regardless of whether the experts annotated from the pool. Furthermore, the ground truth generated by the community obtained F-measures above 0.90 against the ground truth of the experts, indicating the value of the community as a source of high-quality ground truth even on intricate and domain-specific annotation tasks.

An Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) is a meta-heuristic and stochastic optimization search process that mimics Darwinian evolution theory and Mendel's Genetics. Each process facilitates (a) population(s) evolve into fittest and/or convergence by setting parameters of selection, mutation, crossover, population resizing, and/or many other variant operators. However, due to two primary identified factors, EAs are still a challenging research topic: (1) Value choices/ranges for parameters (i.e., parameter settings) will greatly influence the evolution performance of a search process in terms of fittest and/or convergence; and (2) Parameter settings that are good for one fitness function do not guarantee the same evolution performance of another fitness function. Namely, parameter settings are function-specific. Different functions may have various characteristics that request specific attention. In order to better organize and overcome the parameter setting problem, Eiben et al. have classified parameter settings into parameter tuning and parameter control : Parameter tuning determines parameter values before a search process begins while parameter control changes parameter values during a search process. More specifically, parameter control adjusts parameters on-the-fly using three different approaches: (1) Deterministic approach alters parameters based on certain pre-determined rules or formulae; (2) Adaptive approach strategically adjusts parameter values based on the feedbacks of a search process. Such feedbacks could be fitness, diversity, distance, among others; and (3) Self-adaptive approach encodes parameters to be adapted and evolves them along with a search process. Yet, even with such a classification, to our best knowledge there is no existing tool to assist researchers with conducting experiments of parameter settings with ease. Namely, researchers need to find out appropriate places out of thousand lines of EA source code to introduce and update specific parameters (including feedbacks) as well as formulae and adaptive strategies. Additionally, a number of revisions for EA source code will be also required for different kinds of experiments. To EA experimenters, such endeavor is time consuming and error prone. To EA developers, complex and tangling source code, resulted from different www.

The acrosome is a peculiar vacuole that at fertilization undergoes the acrosome reaction (AR), an event unique in the sperm life. Contents released promote sperm penetration through oocyte's investments; membranous components are involved in sperm–egg interaction/fusion. Therefore, both constituents play a role in fertilization. The biogenesis of this vacuole, however, has not been clarified yet; recently, it has been proposed as a novel lysosome-related organelle (LRO). Our research focuses on the involvement of the endosomal pathway in acrosomogenesis starting from the early phases. The trafficking sorted by USP8/UBPy, an endosomal regulator recently described as a compelling candidate for male fertility gene, was investigated in comparison to that of SP56, a marker of the biosynthetic pathway. Mouse spermatids were double/triple immunolabeled and examined by confocal microscopy. The contribution of the vesicular traffic assisted by the cortical microtubule array was also eval...

Simulation models are abstract representations of systems one wants to study through computer simulation. In multi- agent based simulation, such models usually represent agents and their relations. An important issue concerning these models is how they can be effectively reused across different simulations. But while much attention has been given to other engineering issues, model reuse has remained mostly untreated.

We are developing corpus-based techniques for identifying semantic relations at an intermediate level of description (more specific than those used in case frames, but more general than those used in traditional knowledge representation systems). In this paper we describe a classification algorithm for identifying relationships between two-word noun compounds. We find that a very simple approach using a machine learning algorithm and a domain-specific lexical hierarchy successfully generalizes from training instances, performing better on previously unseen words than a baseline consisting of training on the words themselves. N Examples Wrong parse (1) 109 exhibit asthma, ten drugs, measure headache Subtype (4) 393 headaches migraine, fungus candida, hbv carrier, giant cell, mexico city, t1 tumour, ht1 receptor Activity/Physical process (5) 59 bile delivery, virus reproduction, bile drainage, headache activity, bowel function, tb transmission Ending/reduction 8 migraine relief, headache resolution Beginning of activity 2 headache induction, headache onset Change 26 papilloma growth, headache transformation, disease development, tissue reinforcement Produces (on a genetic level) (7) 47 polyomavirus genome, actin mrna, cmv dna, protein gene Cause (1-2) (20) 116 asthma hospitalizations, aids death, automobile accident heat shock, university fatigue, food infection Cause (2-1) 18 flu virus, diarrhoea virus, influenza infection Characteristic (8) 33 receptor hypersensitivity, cell immunity, drug toxicity, gene polymorphism, drug susceptibility Physical property 9 blood pressure, artery diameter, water solubility Defect (27) 52 hormone deficiency, csf fistulas, gene mutation Physical Make Up 6 blood plasma, bile vomit Person afflicted (15) 55 aids patient, bmt children, headache group, polio survivors Demographic attributes 19 childhood migraine, infant colic, women migraineur Person/center who treats 20 headache specialist, headache center, diseases physicians, asthma nurse, children hospital Research on 11 asthma researchers, headache study, language research Attribute of clinical study (18) 77 headache parameter, attack study, headache interview, biology analyses, biology laboratory, influenza epidemiology Procedure (36) 60 tumor marker, genotype diagnosis, blood culture, brain biopsy, tissue pathology Frequency/time of (2-1) (22) 25 headache interval, attack frequency, football season, headache phase, influenza season Time of (1-2) 4 morning headache, hour headache, weekend migraine Measure of (23) 54 relief rate, asthma mortality, asthma morbidity, cell population, hospital survival Standard 5

Prior research has suggested an ERP correlate of implicit memory for words consisting of a centro-parietal positivity around 400 ms. We attempted (1) to replicate this ERP modulation in a different task, involving only trials with correct responses, and (2) to compare the findings to the domain of faces. Two experiments were conducted with a modified Sternberg task, in which both targets and nontargets were presented repeatedly. In Experiment 1, positive ERP differences between repeated and new nontargets were observed, which were domain-specific in topography and, for words, replicated the previously reported findings. In Experiment 2, the amplitude of the modulation for words, but not for faces, was unaffected by a variation of the level of processing during encoding, supporting the implicitness of the processes underlying the ERP modulation to nontarget words.

Heuristic Search techniques are known for their efficiency and effectiveness in solving NP-Hard problems. However, there has been limited success so far in constructing a software toolkit which is dedicated to these methods and can fully support all the stages and aspects of researching and developing a system based on these techniques. Some of the reasons for that include the lack of problem modelling facilities and domain specific frameworks which specifically suit the operations of heuristic search, tedious code optimisations which are often required to achieve efficient implementations of these methods, and the large number of available algorithms -both local search and population-based -which make it difficult to implement and evaluate a range of techniques to find the most efficient one for the problem at hand. The iOpt Toolkit, presented in this article, attempts to address these issues by providing problem modelling facilities well-matched to heuristic search operations, a generic framework for developing scheduling applications, and a logically structured heuristic search framework allowing the synthesis and evaluation of a variety of algorithms. In addition to these, the toolkit incorporates interactive graphical components for the visualisation of problem and scheduling models, and also for monitoring the run-time behaviour and configuring the parameters of heuristic search algorithms.

Young and older adults performed verbal and spatial storage-only and storage-plus-processing working memory tasks while performing a secondary finger tapping task, and the effects on both the maximum capacity (measured as the longest series correct) and the reliability (measured as the proportion of items correct) of working memory were assessed. Tapping tended to produce greater disruption of working memory tasks that place greater demands on executive processes (i.e., storageplus-processing tasks compared to storage-only span tasks). Moreover, tapping produced domaingeneral interference, disrupting both verbal and spatial working memory, providing further support for the idea that tapping interferes with the executive component of the working memory system, rather than domain-specific maintenance processes. Nevertheless, tapping generally produced equivalent interference effects in young and older adults. Taken together, these findings are inconsistent with the hypothesis that age-related declines in working memory are primarily attributable to a deficit in the executive component.

Situation Awareness (SA) is the problem of comprehending elements of an environment within a volume of time and space. It is a crucial factor in decision-making in dynamic environments. The current research challenge is to build systems that support higher-level information fusion, viz., to integrate domain specific knowledge and automatically draw conclusions that would otherwise remain hidden or would have to be drawn by a human operator. To address this challenge, we have developed a novel system architecture and system implementation as part of the Situation Awareness by Inference and Logic (SAIL) project. It differs from other approaches by emphasizing the rôle of formal logics and automated theorem provers in all its main components. This supports a declarative approach to building SA systems across different domains. The paper describes a particular SAIL system and its architecture.

This work introduces and aim to overcome the potential challenges while deploying automated tuning of relational database as a service for a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider. Some of the major challenges identified in this work include (i) automated detection of performance throttling (figure out when the performance of the system is affected due to incorrect configurations of knobs) of a database and identify potential points where a database requires a tuning, (ii) scalability and accuracy of tuning service and (iii) applying the recommendations obtained from tuning services wherein applying an obtained recommendation might require a database restart. In this work, we present a generic tuning service architecture for PaaS providers. To deal with the above challenges, we introduce performance throttling engine which is responsible to detect potential points when a relational database actually needs a knob tuning, which helps in increasing the scalability and accuracy of the tuner deployments (responsible for tuning production landscapes). This work also proposes approaches that facilitate efficiently applying the recommendations without causing much disruption in Quality of Service (QoS) of the underlying database system. Lastly, the results are obtained by evaluation of the proposed methods and modules on multiple cloud native provisioners against various set of metrics. * Produces the permission block, and copyright information † The full version of the author's guide is available as acmart.pdf document

The integrated microbial genomes (IMG) system serves as a community resource for comparative analysis of publicly available genomes in a comprehensive integrated context. IMG contains both draft and complete microbial genomes integrated with other publicly available genomes from all three domains of life, together with a large number of plasmids and viruses. IMG provides tools and viewers for analyzing and reviewing the annotations of genes and genomes in a comparative context. Since its first release in 2005, IMG's data content and analytical capabilities have been constantly expanded through regular releases. Several companion IMG systems have been set up in order to serve domain specific needs, such as expert review of genome annotations. IMG is available at .

ACE inhibitors block B 2 receptor desensitization, thereby potentiating bradykinin beyond blocking its hydrolysis. Angiotensin (Ang)-(1-7) also acts as an ACE inhibitor and, in addition, may stimulate bradykinin release via angiotensin II type 2 receptors. In this study we compared the bradykinin-potentiating effects of Ang-(1-7), quinaprilat, and captopril. Porcine coronary arteries, obtained from 32 pigs, were mounted in organ baths, preconstricted with prostaglandin F 2α , and exposed to quinaprilat, captopril, Ang-(1-7), and/or bradykinin. Bradykinin induced complete relaxation (pEC 50 =8.11±0.07, mean±SEM), whereas quinaprilat, captopril, and Ang-(1-7) alone were without effect. Quinaprilat shifted the bradykinin curve to the left in a biphasic manner: a 5-fold shift at concentrations that specifically block the C-domain (0.1 to 1 nmol/L) and a 10-fold shift at concentrations that block both domains. Captopril and Ang-(1-7) monophasically shifted the bradykinin curve to the lef...

Background: Freshwater unionoidean bivalves, and species representing two marine bivalve orders (Mytiloida and Veneroida), exhibit a mode of mtDNA inheritance involving distinct maternal (F) and paternal (M) transmission routes concomitant with highly divergent gender-associated mtDNA genomes. Additionally, male unionoidean bivalves have a ~550 bp 3' coding extension to the cox2 gene (Mcox2e), that is apparently absent from all other metazoan taxa. Results: Our molecular sequence analyses of MCOX2e indicate that both the primary and secondary structures of the MCOX2e region are evolving much faster than other regions of the F and M COX2-COX1 gene junction. The near Nterminus ~2/3 of the MCOX2e region contains an interspecifically variable number of predicted transmembrane helices (TMH) and interhelical loops (IHL) whereas the C-terminus ~1/3 is relatively conserved and hydrophilic while containing conserved functional motifs. MCOX2e displays an overall pattern of purifying selection that leads to the preservation of TMH/IHL and C-terminus tail sub-regions. However, 14 amino acid positions in the MCOX2e TMH/IHL sub-region might be targeted by diversifying selection, each representing a site where there exists interspecific variation for the constituent amino acids residing in a TMH or IHL. Mcox2e is unique to unionoidean bivalves, likely the result of a single insertion event that took place over 65 MYA and that MCOX2e is functional. The predicted TMH number, length and position variability likely stems from substitution-based processes rather than the typically implicated insertion/deletion events. MCOX2e has relatively high rates of primary and secondary structure evolution, with some amino acid residues potentially subjected to site-specific positive selection, yet an overall pattern of purifying selection leading to the preservation of the TMH/IHL and hydrophilic C-terminus tail subregions. The more conserved C-terminus tail (relative to the TMH/IHL sub-region of MCOX2e) is likely biologically active because it contains functional motifs. The rapid evolution of primary and secondary structure in MCOX2e, combined with the action of both positive and purifying selection, provide supporting evidence for the hypothesis that MCOX2e has a novel reproductive function within unionoidean bivalves. All tolled, our data indicate that unionoidean bivalve MCOX2 is the first reported chimeric animal mtDNA-encoded protein.

Traditional conceptions of talent generally emphasise the construction of threshold values and the development of relatively unitary abilities, and this approach still dominates talent development programmes for elite sport. Most researchers in the areas of talent development and high ability now favour domain-specific, multidimensional conceptions of ability that stress the development of behavioural potential and its interaction with personal and environmental characteristics. This paper presents a model of talent in physical education, drawing together findings from a wide range of literature on the realisation and inhibition of abilities, international studies of effective school-based identification and provision strategies, and a conception of the subject as an integration and realisation of different forms of ability. In presenting this model, the authors aim to redress the imbalance within the current debate from an almost total concern with out-ofschool clubs and the preparation for adult elite sport, in favour of a more equitable and inclusive approach, premised upon the unique importance of mainstream, curricular physical education within any talent development scheme.

Multi-start algorithms are a common and effective tool for metaheuristic searches. In this paper we amplify multi-start capabilities by employing the parallel processing power of the graphics processer unit (GPU) to quickly generate a diverse starting set of solutions for the Unconstrained Binary Quadratic Optimization Problem which are evaluated and used to implement screening methods to select solutions for further optimization. This method is implemented as an initial high quality solution generation phase prior to a secondary steepest ascent search and a comparison of results to best known approaches on benchmark unconstrained binary quadratic problems demonstrates that GPU-enabled diversified multi-start with screening quickly yields very good results.

The GENSS project has developed a flexible generic brokerage framework based on the use of plug-in components that are themselves web services. The focus in GENSS has been on mathematical web services, but the broker itself is domain independent and it is the plug-ins that act as sources of domain-specific knowledge. A range of plug-ins has been developed that offer a variety of matching technologies including ontological reasoning, mathematical reasoning, reputation modelling, and textual analysis. The ranking ...

A number of experimental studies based on domain-specific tasks have evaluated the efficiency of navigation techniques for searching multi-scale worlds. The discrepancies among their results call for a more generic framework similar in spirit to Fitts' reciprocal pointing task, but adapted to a task that significantly differs from pure pointing. We introduce such a framework based on an abstract task and evaluate how four multi-scale navigation techniques perform in one particular multi-scale world configuration. Experimental findings indicate that, in this context, pan & zoom combined with an overview is the most efficient technique of all four, and that focus + context techniques perform better than classical pan & zoom. We relate these findings to more realistic situations, discuss their applicability, and how the framework can be used to cover a broad range of situations.

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Touchstone, an open-source experiment design platform, is designed to help establish a solid research foundation for HCI, especially in the area of novel interaction techniques, by providing a repository and a set of tools to design, run and analyze controlled experiments.. Touchstone includes a design platform for exploring alternative designs of controlled laboratory experiments, a run platform for running subjects and a limited analysis platform for advice and access to on-line statistics packages. Designed for HCI researchers and their students, the goal is to facilitate the process of replicating and extending experiments in the research literature as well as creating new ones. We tested Touchstone by designing two controlled experiments. One replicates and extends a previous study of multiscale pointing interaction techniques: OrthoZoom was fastest, followed by bi-manual Pan & Zoom; SDAZ and traditional Pan & Zoom were significantly slower. The other illustrates how to create a new experiment.

Using a new taxonomy of pointing tasks which includes view pointing beside traditional cursor pointing, we introduce the concept of multi-scale pointing. Analyzing the impact of view size, we demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that (1) the time needed to reach a remotely located target in a multi-scale interface still obeys Fitts' law and (2) the bandwidth of the interaction (i.e., the inverse of Fitts' law slope) is proportional to view size, a relationship bounded by an early ceiling effect. We discuss these results with special reference to navigation in miniaturized and enlarged interfaces.

Metamodels define a foundation for describing software system interfaces which can be used during software or data integration processes. The report is part of the BIZYCLE project, which examines applicability of model-based methods, technologies and tools to the large-scale industrial software and data integration scenarios. The developed metamodels are thus part of the overall BIZYCLE process, comprising of semantic, structural, communication, behavior and property analysis, aiming at facilitating and improving standard integration practice. Therefore, the project framework will be briefly introduced first, followed by the detailed metamodel and transformation description as well as motivation/illustration scenarios.

Many organizations need to respond quickly to change and their workers need to regularly develop new knowledge and skills. The prevailing approach to meeting these demands is on-the-job training, but this is known to be highly ineffective, cause stress and devalue workplace autonomy. Conversely, organizational learning is a process through which workers learn gradually in the work context through experience, reflection on work practice and collaboration with colleagues. Our approach aims to support and enhance organizational learning around enriched work representations. Work representations are tools and documents used to support collaborative working and learning. These are enriched through associations with formal knowledge models and informal discourse. The work representations, informal discourse and associated knowledge models together form on organizational memory from which knowledge can be retrieved later. Our methodological approach to supporting organizational learning is...

We firstly discuss the advantages of the MAS and establish a DFx frame making best of it. Then, we make fhe definition of domain-rpecifc ontology, which is the basis of the MAS. It supports the howledge sharing among agents and the infegration vf the enterprire knowledge. Finally, we give the detailed design of each agenf. The practical results prove that fhe system has the advantages of reconfigurablity, rpl*sabili~y and scalability.

There are five major elements required for the development of an intelligent robot system. Four of these are architectures: 1. Conceptual architecture 2. Functional architecture 3. Software architecture 4. Hardwarearchitecture The fifth element is the software development environment. The original NASREM document describes the conceptual architecture, and suggests the outlines of a functional architecture. Recent work at NIST is defming the functional architecture of the servo and primitive levels, and suggesting the outlines of software and hardware architectures. and s o f t w m development environments.

A common problem with educational interventions is that they require the collection of data across one or many school years before an assessment of their effectiveness can be performed. This paper describes the selection task, and makes the case for its use in evaluating the effectiveness of educational interventions. As an example, a study is described that uses the selection task to determine the degree to which student performance is positively influenced by knowledge of success criteria. Further, this study examined whether the impact of knowledge of this success criteria is inhibited or augmented by the magnitude of the success criteria provided. Participants were given success criteria of 10/10, 8/10, 6/10, 4/10, or nothing (control). Performance on the task was greatest when success criteria were provided, but only when the success criteria were not too strict. Implications for educational practice are discussed.

Folklore has it that Faust’s algebra of blocks can be represented in Hughes’ algebra of Arrows. In this paper we formalise this understanding, showing that blocks can indeed be encoded with Causal Commutative Arrows. Whilst an interesting finding in itself, we believe that this formal translation opens up new avenues of research. For instance, recent work in functional reactive programming on well typed clocks, could provide an alternative to the dependent type approach proposed for multi-rate Faust.

The augmented assembly language @Asm is proposed in order to transcend the fragmentation of architecture-specific dialects, to provide a unified framework for diverse processing paradigms as a universal assembly language and to function as a self-compiling bootstrap instrument adaptable to any processor system. The language augmentations include: flexible machine-language descriptions, general memory and data management directives, custom lexical identification through regular expressions, parsing facilities, generalized macroprocessing, flexible assembly control instructions, customizable encoding and code generation features, compiler-oriented abstraction mechanisms at the language level. The native abstraction augmentations enable expressive and concise high-level descriptions within assembly language for any present, emerging, or future systems.

Aspect-oriented languages provide means to attach certain program units (e.g. advice, filters) to a given set of join points. It is possible that not just a single , but several units need to execute at the same join point. Aspects that specify the insertion of these units are said to "share" the same join point. Such shared join points may give rise to several issues, such as determining the exact execution order and the dependencies among the aspects. In this position paper, we outline a declarative approach that addresses this problem. We evaluate it with respect to several software engineering properties, in particular comprehensibility, predictability and evolvability.

With the advancement of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs), there has been an increase in the number of ESL learners who are involved in online games. However, there is a lack of empirical studies that focused on the impact of MMORPGs on ESL learners' language performance and their behavioural intentions related to collaborative discussions. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact of learners' behavioural intentions towards collaborative discussions and their language performance through playing MMORPGs. Using a mixed methods approach, 16 online ESL game players were invited to play MMORPG for 15 hours. The changes in language performance of online ESL game players were based on pre-and post-language tests. A 5-point Likert scale questionnaire was used to assess the participants' intentions towards collaborative discussions in online gameplay. The players' interactions during gameplay were also video recorded and analysed to capture instances of collaborative discussions. The findings indicate that participants with high intentions towards engaging in collaborative discussions seem to show a higher frequency of participation in collaborative discussions and scored higher in both language tests. The results revealed that these players' intentions to engage in collaborative discussions do influence their language learning behaviour and their language performance. This study highlights how the MMORPG context could incentivise ESL learners' engagement in collaborative discussions, which inherently impacts their English language performance through verbal exchanges during gameplay sessions that mirror authentic language use.

Background The SH3 domain family is one of the most representative and widely studied cases of so-called Peptide Recognition Modules (PRM). The polyproline II motif PxxP that generally characterizes its ligands does not reflect the complex interaction spectrum of the over 1500 different SH3 domains, and the requirement of a more refined knowledge of their specificity implies the setting up of appropriate experimental and theoretical strategies. Due to the limitations of the current technology for peptide synthesis, several experimental high-throughput approaches have been devised to elucidate protein-protein interaction mechanisms. Such approaches can rely on and take advantage of computational techniques, such as regular expressions or position specific scoring matrices (PSSMs) to pre-process entire proteomes in the search for putative SH3 targets. In this regard, a reliable inference methodology to be used for reducing the sequence space of putative binding peptides represents a v...

Motivation: Wnt signaling is a very active area of research with highly relevant publications appearing at a rate of more than one per day. Building and maintaining databases describing signal transduction networks is a time-consuming and demanding task that requires careful literature analysis and extensive domain-specific knowledge. For instance, more than 50 factors involved in Wnt signal transduction have been identified as of late 2003. In this work we describe a natural language processing (NLP) system that is able to identify references to biological interaction networks in free text and automatically assembles a protein association and interaction map. Results: A 'gold standard' set of names and assertions was derived by manual scanning of the Wnt genes website (. edu/∼rnusse/wntwindow.html) including 53 interactions involved in Wnt signaling. This system was used to analyze a corpus of peerreviewed articles related to Wnt signaling including 3369 Pubmed and 1230 full text papers. Names for key Wnt-pathway associated proteins and biological entities are identified using a chi-squared analysis of noun phrases over-represented in the Wnt literature as compared to the general signal transduction literature. Interestingly, we identified several instances where generic terms were used on the website when more specific terms occur in the literature, and one typographic error on the Wnt canonical pathway. Using the named entity list and performing an exhaustive assertion extraction of the corpus, 34 of the 53 interactions in the 'gold standard' Wnt signaling set were successfully identified (64% recall). In addition, the automated extraction found several interactions involving key Wntrelated molecules which were missing or different from those in the canonical diagram, and these were confirmed by manual review of the text. These results suggest that a combination of NLP techniques for information extraction can form a useful first-pass tool for assisting human annotation and maintenance of signal pathway databases.

Background The WHODAS-2 is a disability assessment instrument based on the conceptual framework of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). It provides a global measure of disability and 7 domain-specific scores. The aim of this study was to assess WHODAS-2 conceptual model and metric properties in a set of chronic and prevalent clinical conditions accounting for a wide scope of disability in Europe. Methods 1,119 patients with one of 13 chronic conditions were recruited in 7 European centres. Participants were clinically evaluated and administered the WHODAS-2 and the SF-36 at baseline, 6 weeks and 3 months of follow-up. The latent structure was explored and confirmed by factor analysis (FA). Reliability was assessed in terms of internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) and reproducibility (intra-class correlation coefficients, ICC). Construct validity was evaluated by correlating the WHODAS-2 and SF-36 domains, and comparing known groups bas...

Introduction: Self-determination theory (SDT) posits the importance of three basic psychological needs (i.e., relatedness, autonomy, and competence) in promoting achievement. However, some cross-cultural researchers have cast doubt on the generalizability of the theory to non-Western cultures. The primary aim of the study was to test whether provision of support for relatedness, autonomy, and competence would be associated with achievement across both Western and Eastern cultures.
Method: We drew on a subsample of students from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (n = 92,325 students from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and USA (Western societies); and Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Macau SAR, Shanghai, South Korea, and Taipei
(Eastern societies); 46,006 were females and 46,319 were males, with a mean age of 15.77 (SD=0.29) years). We used multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MG-CFA) and multi-group structural equation modeling (MG-SEM) to analyze the data. Results: Provision of the three basic needs correlated positively with achievement across cultures, providing broad support for the cross-cultural universality of SDT. MG-SEM indicated that relatedness and autonomy support were equally important for student achievement in both Western and Eastern cultures, whereas competence support was found to be more important to students in the West than in the East. Conclusion: Findings support the cross-cultural relevance of SDT while at the same time highlighting important cultural variations, such as the greater importance of competence support in the West, suggesting the need to be cognizant of both cross-cultural universality and variability in
motivational theorizing.

Ontology mapping focuses on finding correspondences between concepts from different ontologies. While the amount of available ontologies is increasing, also the number of mappings between them is getting higher. Visualization techniques can be used to help researchers in forming a picture of this information. In the paper we present a visual presentation of mappings between BioPortal ontologies. We present results in the form of a graph where identified communities of tightly connected ontologies are shown.We use metrics such as Betweenness Centrality and Community Detection.

The importance of ontologies in biomedicine is increasing in the areas such as the standardization of terminology, the verification of data consistency, and the integration of heterogeneous biomedical databases. New ontologies are being built and added to repositories such as BioPortal. These ontologies represent a large network of biomedical concepts where a single ontology connects a group of closely related concepts. When ontology engineers build new ontologies they often search for existing ontologies to avoid redundancy of concepts. When selecting existing ontologies, engineers consider different factors such as ontology domain, the size of the ontology, and also the relations between ontologies and their concepts. In this paper we present a graph that aims to visualize mappings of all BioPortal ontologies. We believe that this graph can help ontology engineers in deciding which ontology to use when selecting existing concepts for building new ontologies.