209,403 research outputs found
A Novel Long-term, Multi-Channel and Non-invasive Electrophysiology Platform for Zebrafish.
Zebrafish are a popular vertebrate model for human neurological disorders and drug discovery. Although fecundity, breeding convenience, genetic homology and optical transparency have been key advantages, laborious and invasive procedures are required for electrophysiological studies. Using an electrode-integrated microfluidic system, here we demonstrate a novel multichannel electrophysiology unit to record multiple zebrafish. This platform allows spontaneous alignment of zebrafish and maintains, over days, close contact between head and multiple surface electrodes, enabling non-invasive long-term electroencephalographic recording. First, we demonstrate that electrographic seizure events, induced by pentylenetetrazole, can be reliably distinguished from eye or tail movement artifacts, and quantifiably identified with our unique algorithm. Second, we show long-term monitoring during epileptogenic progression in a scn1lab mutant recapitulating human Dravet syndrome. Third, we provide an example of cross-over pharmacology antiepileptic drug testing. Such promising features of this integrated microfluidic platform will greatly facilitate high-throughput drug screening and electrophysiological characterization of epileptic zebrafish
Design Features for the Social Web: The Architecture of Deme
We characterize the "social Web" and argue for several features that are
desirable for users of socially oriented web applications. We describe the
architecture of Deme, a web content management system (WCMS) and extensible
framework, and show how it implements these desired features. We then compare
Deme on our desiderata with other web technologies: traditional HTML, previous
open source WCMSs (illustrated by Drupal), commercial Web 2.0 applications, and
open-source, object-oriented web application frameworks. The analysis suggests
that a WCMS can be well suited to building social websites if it makes more of
the features of object-oriented programming, such as polymorphism, and class
inheritance, available to non-programmers in an accessible vocabulary.Comment: Appeared in Luis Olsina, Oscar Pastor, Daniel Schwabe, Gustavo Rossi,
and Marco Winckler (Editors), Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop
on Web-Oriented Software Technologies (IWWOST 2009), CEUR Workshop
Proceedings, Volume 493, August 2009, pp. 40-51; 12 pages, 2 figures, 1 tabl
Hi, how can I help you?: Automating enterprise IT support help desks
Question answering is one of the primary challenges of natural language
understanding. In realizing such a system, providing complex long answers to
questions is a challenging task as opposed to factoid answering as the former
needs context disambiguation. The different methods explored in the literature
can be broadly classified into three categories namely: 1) classification
based, 2) knowledge graph based and 3) retrieval based. Individually, none of
them address the need of an enterprise wide assistance system for an IT support
and maintenance domain. In this domain the variance of answers is large ranging
from factoid to structured operating procedures; the knowledge is present
across heterogeneous data sources like application specific documentation,
ticket management systems and any single technique for a general purpose
assistance is unable to scale for such a landscape. To address this, we have
built a cognitive platform with capabilities adopted for this domain. Further,
we have built a general purpose question answering system leveraging the
platform that can be instantiated for multiple products, technologies in the
support domain. The system uses a novel hybrid answering model that
orchestrates across a deep learning classifier, a knowledge graph based context
disambiguation module and a sophisticated bag-of-words search system. This
orchestration performs context switching for a provided question and also does
a smooth hand-off of the question to a human expert if none of the automated
techniques can provide a confident answer. This system has been deployed across
675 internal enterprise IT support and maintenance projects.Comment: To appear in IAAI 201
Using the Java Media Framework to build Adaptive Groupware Applications
Realtime audio and video conferencing has not yet been satisfactorily integrated into web-based groupware environments. Conferencing tools are at best only loosely linked to other parts of a shared working environment, and this is in part due to their implications for resource allocation and management. The Java Media Framework offers a promising means of redressing this situation. This paper describes an architecture for integrating the management of video and audio conferences into the resource allocation mechanism of an existing web-based groupware framework. The issue of adaptation is discussed and a means of initialising multimedia session parameters based on predicted QoS is described
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