HOT–Lines: Tracking Lines in Higher Order Tensor Fields

Tensors occur in many areas of science and engineering. Especially, they are used to describe charge, mass and energy transport (i.e. electrical conductivity tensor, diffusion tensor, thermal conduction tensor resp.) If the locale transport pattern is complicated, usual second order tensor representation is not sufficient. So far, there are no appropriate visualization methods for this case. We point out similarities of symmetric higher order tensors and spherical harmonics. A spherical harmonic representation is used to improve tensor glyphs. This paper unites the definition of streamlines and tensor lines and generalizes tensor lines to those applications where second order tensors representations fail. The algorithm is tested on the tractography problem in diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI) and improved for this special application

miR-3151 interplays with its host gene BAALC and independently impacts on outcome of patients with cytogenetically normal acute myeloid leukemia

High expression levels of the gene BAALC (brain and acute leukemia, cytoplasmic) are associated with poor prognosis in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients, but the underlying mechanisms are not yet understood. We evaluated the prognostic significance of expression levels of miR-3151, a newly discovered microRNA embedded in intron 1 of the BAALC gene, in a cohort of 179 older (≥60 years) cytogenetically normal AML (CN-AML) patients, in the context of established molecular markers and especially with regard to the possible interplay with its host gene BAALC. In multivariable analyses, high miR-3151 was associated with shorter disease-free and overall survival (OS), while higher BAALC expression strongly predicted failure of complete remission attainment and OS. Patients exhibiting both high miR-3151 and BAALC expression had worse outcome than patients expressing low levels of either one of the genes or both. Next, gene - and microRNA-expression profiles associated with miR-3151 expression were derived using microarrays, and a pathway analysis of the miR-3151 associated gene signature was performed using Ingenuity software. High miR-3151 expressers showed downregulation of genes involved in transcriptional regulation, post-translational modifications and cell-cycle control. Two genes of the ubiquitination pathway, FBXL20 and USP40, were experimentally validated as direct miR-3151 targets. In summary, we identified high expression levels of the intronic miR-3151 as a novel, independent prognosticator for poor outcome in CN-AML. Interestingly, miR-3151 impacted differently on outcome than its host gene BAALC; and the combination of both markers identified a patient subset with the poorest outcome, suggesting that the microRNA and its host gene contribute to clinical and prognostic features of CN-AML independently and through distinct mechanisms. This is the first example of the interplay of an intronic miR and its host gene in leukemia. Its discovery may have important biologic implications for future targeted treatment strategies.:Bibliografische Beschreibung 1 Referat / Abstract 2 Publikation /Publication 6 Zusammenfassung / Conclusion 16 Referenz der Publikation / Reference of the publication 27 Komplette Publikationsliste / Complete List of Publications 28 Lebenslauf / Curriculum Vitae 31 Erklärung über die eigenständige Abfassung der Arbeit 35 Danksagung / Acknowledgements 3

`Love`encoding in Swahili: a semantic description through a corpus-based analysis.

Several studies have described emotional expressions used by speakers from different linguistic and cultural areas all around the world. It has been demonstrated that there are universal cognitive bases for the metaphorical expressions that speakers use to describe their emotional status. There are indeed significant differences concerning the use of emotional expressions, not only across languages but also language-internally. Quite a number of studies focus on the language of emotions in several European languages and languages of West Africa, whereas not enough research has been done on this regard on Eastern African language

Clustering Approaches for Multi-source Entity Resolution

Entity Resolution (ER) or deduplication aims at identifying entities, such as specific customer or product descriptions, in one or several data sources that refer to the same real-world entity. ER is of key importance for improving data quality and has a crucial role in data integration and querying. The previous generation of ER approaches focus on integrating records from two relational databases or performing deduplication within a single database. Nevertheless, in the era of Big Data the number of available data sources is increasing rapidly. Therefore, large-scale data mining or querying systems need to integrate data obtained from numerous sources. For example, in online digital libraries or E-Shops, publications or products are incorporated from a large number of archives or suppliers across the world or within a specified region or country to provide a unified view for the user. This process requires data consolidation from numerous heterogeneous data sources, which are mostly evolving. By raising the number of sources, data heterogeneity and velocity as well as the variance in data quality is increased. Therefore, multi-source ER, i.e. finding matching entities in an arbitrary number of sources, is a challenging task. Previous efforts for matching and clustering entities between multiple sources (> 2) mostly treated all sources as a single source. This approach excludes utilizing metadata or provenance information for enhancing the integration quality and leads up to poor results due to ignorance of the discrepancy between quality of sources. The conventional ER pipeline consists of blocking, pair-wise matching of entities, and classification. In order to meet the new needs and requirements, holistic clustering approaches that are capable of scaling to many data sources are needed. The holistic clustering-based ER should further overcome the restriction of pairwise linking of entities by making the process capable of grouping entities from multiple sources into clusters. The clustering step aims at removing false links while adding missing true links across sources. Additionally, incremental clustering and repairing approaches need to be developed to cope with the ever-increasing number of sources and new incoming entities. To this end, we developed novel clustering and repairing schemes for multi-source entity resolution. The approaches are capable of grouping entities from multiple clean (duplicate-free) sources, as well as handling data from an arbitrary combination of clean and dirty sources. The multi-source clustering schemes exclusively developed for multi-source ER can obtain superior results compared to general purpose clustering algorithms. Additionally, we developed incremental clustering and repairing methods in order to handle the evolving sources. The proposed incremental approaches are capable of incorporating new sources as well as new entities from existing sources. The more sophisticated approach is able to repair previously determined clusters, and consequently yields improved quality and a reduced dependency on the insert order of the new entities. To ensure scalability, the parallel variation of all approaches are implemented on top of the Apache Flink framework which is a distributed processing engine. The proposed methods have been integrated in a new end-to-end ER tool named FAMER (FAst Multi-source Entity Resolution system). The FAMER framework is comprised of Linking and Clustering components encompassing both batch and incremental ER functionalities. The output of Linking part is recorded as a similarity graph where each vertex represents an entity and each edge maintains the similarity relationship between two entities. Such a similarity graph is the input of the Clustering component. The comprehensive comparative evaluations overall show that the proposed clustering and repairing approaches for both batch and incremental ER achieve high quality while maintaining the scalability

Twomey Effect of Trade Wind Cumuli

In this thesis upward spectral radiances are analyzed, which were sampled above subtropical trade wind cumuli near Barbados. Data were collected by a new measurement setup consisting of two payloads attached to a helicopter. This unique approach allows for collocated measurements of high–resolution microphysical cloud data, aerosol particle number size dis- tributions and the radiation reflected from cloud top, yielding a quantification of the first indirect aerosol effect of shallow water clouds. With the help of the spectral radiation data methods are introduced which help to identify cloud data that are influenced by the albedo of the water surface, as well as three–dimensional radiative effects. A statistical measure of cloud inhomogeneity is introduced, characterizing the observed trade wind cumuli to exhibit medium to high inhomogeneity with respect to upward radiances in the visible wavelength range. The influence of the substantial cloud inhomogeneity on the remote sensing of the cloud optical thickness and the effective droplet radius is quantified. It is shown, that misrep- resentation of the often observed overlying thin cirrus layers in the usual retrieval approaches yields an overestimation in retrieved effective droplet radius of up to 50% and and underestimation in retrieved cloud optical thickness of up to 6%. A new retrieval algorithm is introduced which minimizes the effects of the overlying cirrus without a priori knowledge of its properties. The results from the new algorithm are compared to in situ observations of the effective droplet radius, yielding a high agreement of ±1 μm. Relative susceptibilities of the retrieved microphysical and optical cloud parameters, as well as cloud top reflectivities, are derived to quantify the first indirect aerosol effect for subtropical trade wind cumuli. These relative susceptibilities are in the range of the maximum possible susceptibility following the theory for homogeneous clouds. Parameterizations of the cloud optical thickness and the effective droplet radius as a function of the derived relative susceptibilities and the liquid water path are introduced. The parameterized and measured parameters agreee with a correlation coefficient of 0.97, showing that the parameterization can reliably represent the measurements