Toward Good Read-Across Practice (GRAP) guidance.

Grouping of substances and utilizing read-across of data within those groups represents an important data gap filling technique for chemical safety assessments. Categories/analogue groups are typically developed based on structural similarity and, increasingly often, also on mechanistic (biological) similarity. While read-across can play a key role in complying with legislations such as the European REACH regulation, the lack of consensus regarding the extent and type of evidence necessary to support it often hampers its successful application and acceptance by regulatory authorities. Despite a potentially broad user community, expertise is still concentrated across a handful of organizations and individuals. In order to facilitate the effective use of read-across, this document aims to summarize the state-of-the-art, summarizes insights learned from reviewing ECHA published decisions as far as the relative successes/pitfalls surrounding read-across under REACH and compile the relevant activities and guidance documents. Special emphasis is given to the available existing tools and approaches, an analysis of ECHA's published final decisions associated with all levels of compliance checks and testing proposals, the consideration and expression of uncertainty, the use of biological support data and the impact of the ECHA Read-Across Assessment Framework (RAAF) published in 2015

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Video browsing interfaces and applications: a review

We present a comprehensive review of the state of the art in video browsing and retrieval systems, with special emphasis on interfaces and applications. There has been a significant increase in activity (e.g., storage, retrieval, and sharing) employing video data in the past decade, both for personal and professional use. The ever-growing amount of video content available for human consumption and the inherent characteristics of video data—which, if presented in its raw format, is rather unwieldy and costly—have become driving forces for the development of more effective solutions to present video contents and allow rich user interaction. As a result, there are many contemporary research efforts toward developing better video browsing solutions, which we summarize. We review more than 40 different video browsing and retrieval interfaces and classify them into three groups: applications that use video-player-like interaction, video retrieval applications, and browsing solutions based on video surrogates. For each category, we present a summary of existing work, highlight the technical aspects of each solution, and compare them against each other

NANoREG harmonised terminology for environmental health and safety assessment of nanomaterials

Several terms in the field of environmental health and safety (EHS) assessment of chemicals and nanomaterials (hereinafter NMs) have been defined or used by the scientific community and different organisations, including international bodies, European authorities, and industry associations. This is also true for multidisciplinary projects such as NANoREG, which aims at supporting regulatory authorities and industry in dealing with EHS issues of manufactured NMs. The objective of the present JRC technical report is to publish the harmonised terminology that has been developed and used within NANoREG. It has been agreed upon and adopted by all project partners in their activities and related documents. The report specifically includes: i) the methodology used to select key terms that form the harmonised terminology and to develop harmonised definitions; ii) the existing literature definitions that have been used as a starting point to develop for each key term a harmonised definition; and iii) the reason(s) behind the choices that have been made in drafting a definition. As far as possible, the harmonised definition is reproducing (an) already existing definition text(s), thus avoiding the creation of new and unwelcome information. The discussion on the key terms to be considered for the harmonised terminology led to the selection of 43 key terms. The list includes terms with international regulatory relevance, such as those defined at OECD level, as well as terms that have a specific meaning and use under REACH. The 'NANoREG Harmonised Terminology' has already proven very useful in the context of the OECD work, as support document to the April 2016 OECD Expert Meeting on 'Grouping and read-across for the hazard assessment of manufactured nanomaterials', and in a regulatory context, as support document to the work recently released by RIVM, ECHA and JRC on using (eco)toxicological data for bridging data gaps between nanoforms of the same substance (March 2016). For quick access, the 'NANoREG Harmonised Terminology' is reported in Section 3.JRC.I.4-Nanobioscience

A Project Portfolio Management model adapted to non-profit organizations

As they strive towards greater professionalism in carrying out their activities, non-profit organizations (NPOs) have begun paying attention to project management. The non-profit sector (NPS) has also begun to adopt strategic planning techniques, thus making the acceptance of project portfolio management (PPM) methodology a natural consequence. This article aims to propose a project portfolio management model adapted to the context of NPOs

Android Malware Clustering through Malicious Payload Mining

Clustering has been well studied for desktop malware analysis as an effective triage method. Conventional similarity-based clustering techniques, however, cannot be immediately applied to Android malware analysis due to the excessive use of third-party libraries in Android application development and the widespread use of repackaging in malware development. We design and implement an Android malware clustering system through iterative mining of malicious payload and checking whether malware samples share the same version of malicious payload. Our system utilizes a hierarchical clustering technique and an efficient bit-vector format to represent Android apps. Experimental results demonstrate that our clustering approach achieves precision of 0.90 and recall of 0.75 for Android Genome malware dataset, and average precision of 0.98 and recall of 0.96 with respect to manually verified ground-truth.Comment: Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses (RAID 2017

The contribution of data mining to information science

The information explosion is a serious challenge for current information institutions. On the other hand, data mining, which is the search for valuable information in large volumes of data, is one of the solutions to face this challenge. In the past several years, data mining has made a significant contribution to the field of information science. This paper examines the impact of data mining by reviewing existing applications, including personalized environments, electronic commerce, and search engines. For these three types of application, how data mining can enhance their functions is discussed. The reader of this paper is expected to get an overview of the state of the art research associated with these applications. Furthermore, we identify the limitations of current work and raise several directions for future research