RadialPheno: A tool for near-surface phenology analysis through radial layouts

Premise Increasingly, researchers studying plant phenology are exploring novel technologies to remotely observe plant changes over time. The increasing use of phenocams to monitor leaf phenology, based on the analysis of indices extracted from sequences of daily digital vegetation images, has demanded the development of appropriate tools for data visualization and analysis. Here, we describe RadialPheno, a tool that uses radial layouts to represent time series from digital repeat photographs, and applies them to the analysis of leafing patterns and leaf exchange strategies of different vegetations. Methods and Results We developed a web tool, RadialPheno, provided with the R and Shiny environments, which uses radial visual structures to represent cyclical multidimensional temporal data associated with digital image time series. We demonstrate the application of our methods and tool for a savanna vegetation phenology in the Brazilian Cerrado. We visually represented the greenness index extracted from sequential imagery using the RadialPheno tool. Conclusions RadialPheno was successfully applied for the visualization and interpretation of individual, species, and community long-term leafing phenology data associated with near-surface phenological observations of Cerrado vegetation. RadialPheno was also effective for intercomparisons of ground-based direct visual observations and camera-derived phenology observations

Representation and Processing of Composition, Variation and Approximation in Language Resources and Tools

In my habilitation dissertation, meant to validate my capacity of and maturity for directingresearch activities, I present a panorama of several topics in computational linguistics, linguisticsand computer science.Over the past decade, I was notably concerned with the phenomena of compositionalityand variability of linguistic objects. I illustrate the advantages of a compositional approachto the language in the domain of emotion detection and I explain how some linguistic objects,most prominently multi-word expressions, defy the compositionality principles. I demonstratethat the complex properties of MWEs, notably variability, are partially regular and partiallyidiosyncratic. This fact places the MWEs on the frontiers between different levels of linguisticprocessing, such as lexicon and syntax.I show the highly heterogeneous nature of MWEs by citing their two existing taxonomies.After an extensive state-of-the art study of MWE description and processing, I summarizeMultiflex, a formalism and a tool for lexical high-quality morphosyntactic description of MWUs.It uses a graph-based approach in which the inflection of a MWU is expressed in function ofthe morphology of its components, and of morphosyntactic transformation patterns. Due tounification the inflection paradigms are represented compactly. Orthographic, inflectional andsyntactic variants are treated within the same framework. The proposal is multilingual: it hasbeen tested on six European languages of three different origins (Germanic, Romance and Slavic),I believe that many others can also be successfully covered. Multiflex proves interoperable. Itadapts to different morphological language models, token boundary definitions, and underlyingmodules for the morphology of single words. It has been applied to the creation and enrichmentof linguistic resources, as well as to morphosyntactic analysis and generation. It can be integratedinto other NLP applications requiring the conflation of different surface realizations of the sameconcept.Another chapter of my activity concerns named entities, most of which are particular types ofMWEs. Their rich semantic load turned them into a hot topic in the NLP community, which isdocumented in my state-of-the art survey. I present the main assumptions, processes and resultsissued from large annotation tasks at two levels (for named entities and for coreference), parts ofthe National Corpus of Polish construction. I have also contributed to the development of bothrule-based and probabilistic named entity recognition tools, and to an automated enrichment ofProlexbase, a large multilingual database of proper names, from open sources.With respect to multi-word expressions, named entities and coreference mentions, I pay aspecial attention to nested structures. This problem sheds new light on the treatment of complexlinguistic units in NLP. When these units start being modeled as trees (or, more generally, asacyclic graphs) rather than as flat sequences of tokens, long-distance dependencies, discontinu-ities, overlapping and other frequent linguistic properties become easier to represent. This callsfor more complex processing methods which control larger contexts than what usually happensin sequential processing. Thus, both named entity recognition and coreference resolution comesvery close to parsing, and named entities or mentions with their nested structures are analogous3to multi-word expressions with embedded complements.My parallel activity concerns finite-state methods for natural language and XML processing.My main contribution in this field, co-authored with 2 colleagues, is the first full-fledged methodfor tree-to-language correction, and more precisely for correcting XML documents with respectto a DTD. We have also produced interesting results in incremental finite-state algorithmics,particularly relevant to data evolution contexts such as dynamic vocabularies or user updates.Multilingualism is the leitmotif of my research. I have applied my methods to several naturallanguages, most importantly to Polish, Serbian, English and French. I have been among theinitiators of a highly multilingual European scientific network dedicated to parsing and multi-word expressions. I have used multilingual linguistic data in experimental studies. I believethat it is particularly worthwhile to design NLP solutions taking declension-rich (e.g. Slavic)languages into account, since this leads to more universal solutions, at least as far as nominalconstructions (MWUs, NEs, mentions) are concerned. For instance, when Multiflex had beendeveloped with Polish in mind it could be applied as such to French, English, Serbian and Greek.Also, a French-Serbian collaboration led to substantial modifications in morphological modelingin Prolexbase in its early development stages. This allowed for its later application to Polishwith very few adaptations of the existing model. Other researchers also stress the advantages ofNLP studies on highly inflected languages since their morphology encodes much more syntacticinformation than is the case e.g. in English.In this dissertation I am also supposed to demonstrate my ability of playing an active rolein shaping the scientific landscape, on a local, national and international scale. I describemy: (i) various scientific collaborations and supervision activities, (ii) roles in over 10 regional,national and international projects, (iii) responsibilities in collective bodies such as program andorganizing committees of conferences and workshops, PhD juries, and the National UniversityCouncil (CNU), (iv) activity as an evaluator and a reviewer of European collaborative projects.The issues addressed in this dissertation open interesting scientific perspectives, in whicha special impact is put on links among various domains and communities. These perspectivesinclude: (i) integrating fine-grained language data into the linked open data, (ii) deep parsingof multi-word expressions, (iii) modeling multi-word expression identification in a treebank as atree-to-language correction problem, and (iv) a taxonomy and an experimental benchmark fortree-to-language correction approaches

The Great Umar Khayyam

The Rubáiyát by the Persian poet ‘Umar Khayyæm (1048-1131) is used in contemporary Iran as a resistance literature, symbolizing the secularist voice in cultural debates. While Islamic fundamentalists criticize Khayyæm as an atheist and materialist philosopher who questions God’s creation and the promise of reward or punishment in the hereafter, secularist intellectuals see in him an example of a scientist who scrutinizes the mysteries of the world. Others see a spiritual master, a Sufi, who guides people to the truth. This volume collects eighteen essays on the history of the reception of ‘Umar Khayyæm in various literary traditions, exploring how his philosophy of doubt, carpe diem, hedonism, and in vino veritas has inspired generations of poets, novelists, painters, musicians, calligraphers and film-makers

The diary of Charles Blagden: information management and the gentleman of science in eighteenth-century Britain

This thesis provides a transcription and examination of the diary of Charles Blagden (1748-1820), physician and secretary of the Royal Society between 1784 and 1797. The diary is here understood as a ‘paper tool’ for managing information, that assisted Blagden’s efforts in fashioning his identity as a gentleman. Informed by a variety of manuscript genres, the diary operated as an aide-memoire, in accordance with eighteenth-century understandings of associationism. Blagden used the diary to advance through patronage and emulation, by cultivating relationships with eminent male scholars—the chemist Henry Cavendish and president of the Royal Society Joseph Banks. The eighteenth century saw the emergence of alternative cultures of advancement that favoured meritocracy and scientific publication over displays of patronage. This thesis reassesses key events in Blagden’s career, in the priority dispute known as the ‘water controversy’ and the Royal Society ‘dissensions’ of the 1780s, as examples where such cultures of advancement conflicted. In building his career, Blagden undertook natural philosophical investigations with his patrons, supported by his diary. This thesis exposes Blagden’s scientific agenda, and his approach to record keeping, as examples of eighteenth-century ‘oeconomy’. Though Blagden had sought the patronage of Banks and Cavendish, this strategy did not furnish him with the gentlemanly status he desired. Dissatisfied by the rate of advancement and reward, Blagden increasingly attached himself to a community of socially elevated women in London in the 1790s, whose lifestyle he emulated in order to pursue his social ambitions, as seen in his diary for the year 1795. Exploring the development of Blagden’s diary reveals the role of a material object in assisting the self-fashioning of the identity of the gentleman of science in Britain, at the end of the eighteenth century

Mining of uncertain Web log sequences with access history probabilities

An uncertain data sequence is a sequence of data that exist with some level of doubt or probability. Each data item in the uncertain sequence is represented with a label and probability values, referred to as existential probability, ranging from 0 to 1. Existing algorithms are either unsuitable or inefficient for discovering frequent sequences in uncertain data. This thesis presents mining of uncertain Web sequences with a method that combines access history probabilities from several Web log sessions with features of the PLWAP web sequential miner. The method is Uncertain Position Coded Pre-order Linked Web Access Pattern (U-PLWAP) algorithm for mining frequent sequential patterns in uncertain web logs. While PLWAP only considers a session of weblogs, U-PLWAP takes more sessions of weblogs from which existential probabilities are generated. Experiments show that U-PLWAP is at least 100% faster than U-apriori, and 33% faster than UF-growth. The UF-growth algorithm also fails to take into consideration the order of the items, thereby making U-PLWAP a richer algorithm in terms of the information its result contains

Enhanced PL-WAP tree method for incremental mining of sequential patterns.

Sequential mining as web usage mining has been used in improving web site design, increasing volume of e-business and providing marketing decision support. This thesis proposes PL4UP and EPL4UP algorithms which use the PLWAP tree structure to incrementally update sequential patterns. PL4UP does not scan old DB except when previous small 1-itemsets become large in updated database during which time its scans only all transactions in the old database that contain any small itemsets. EPL4UP rebuilds the old PLWAP tree using only the list of previous small itemsets once rather than scanning the entire old database twice like original PLWAP. PL4UP and EPL4UP first update old frequent patterns on the small PLWAP tree built for only the incremented part of the database, then they compare new added patterns generated from the small tree with the old frequent patterns to reduce the number of patterns to be checked on the old PLWAP tree. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2003 .C47. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 42-03, page: 0959. Adviser: Christie Ezeife. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2003

Modélisation et manipulation d'entrepôts de données complexes et historisées

Le mémoire de cette thèse traite de la modélisation conceptuelle et de la manipulation des données (par des algèbres) dans les systèmes d'aide à la décision. Notre thèse repose sur la dichotomie de deux espaces de stockage : l'entrepôt de données regroupe les extraits des bases sources utiles pour les décideurs et les magasins de données sont déduits de l'entrepôt et dédiés à un besoin d'analyse particulier.Au niveau de l'entrepôt, nous définissons un modèle de données permettant de décrire l'évolution temporelle des objets complexes. Dans notre proposition, l'objet entrepôt intègre des états courants, passés et archivés modélisant les données décisionnelles et leurs évolutions. L'extension du concept d'objet engendre une extension du concept de classe. Cette extension est composée de filtres (temporels et d'archives) pour construire les états passés et archivés ainsi que d'une fonction de construction modélisant le processus d'extraction (origine source). Nous introduisons également le concept d'environnement qui définit des parties temporelles cohérentes de tailles adaptées aux exigences des décideurs. La manipulation des données est une extension des algèbres objet prenant en compte les caractéristiques du modèle de représentation de l'entrepôt. L'extension se situe au niveau des opérateurs temporels et des opérateurs de manipulation des ensembles d'états.Au niveau des magasins, nous définissons un modèle de données multidimensionnelles permettant de représenter l'information en une constellation de faits ainsi que de dimensions munies de hiérarchies multiples. La manipulation des données s'appuie sur une algèbre englobant l'ensemble des opérations multidimensionnelles et offrant des opérations spécifiques à notre modèle. Nous proposons une démarche d'élaboration des magasins à partir de l'entrepôt.Pour valider nos propositions, nous présentons le logiciel GEDOOH (Générateur d'Entrepôts de Données Orientées Objet et Historisées) d'aide à la conception et à la création des entrepôts dans le cadre de l'application médicale REANIMATIC

Empowering vulnerable women by participatory design workshops

This contribution addresses the issue of homeless women’s empowerment through design workshops and according to the capability approach. The paper presents small, ordinary stories of women that experience being designers. Besides the professional label, being a designer means to approach reality from the transformative perspective of pursuing a positive change. It also translates in claiming the space for the expression of a personal vision of the world, within a cooperative environment. It enables to experiment innovative strategies to solve problems and to pursue self-determination in practical activities