Resolution of linear entity and path geometries expressed via partially-geospatial natural language

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-102).When conveying geospatial information via natural language, people typically combine implicit, commonsense knowledge with explicitly-stated information. Usually, much of this is contextual and relies on establishing locations by relating them to other locations mentioned earlier in the conversation. Because people and objects move through the world, a common and useful kind of geospatial phrase is the path expression, which is formed by designating multiple locations as landmarks on the path and relating those landmarks to one another in sequence. These phrases often include nongeospatial information, and the paths often include linear entities. This thesis builds upon the work done for the GeoCoder spatial reasoning system, by addressing several of its limitations and extending its functionality.by John Javier Marrero.M.Eng

Ubiquitous Scalable Graphics: An End-to-End Framework using Wavelets

Advances in ubiquitous displays and wireless communications have fueled the emergence of exciting mobile graphics applications including 3D virtual product catalogs, 3D maps, security monitoring systems and mobile games. Current trends that use cameras to capture geometry, material reflectance and other graphics elements means that very high resolution inputs is accessible to render extremely photorealistic scenes. However, captured graphics content can be many gigabytes in size, and must be simplified before they can be used on small mobile devices, which have limited resources, such as memory, screen size and battery energy. Scaling and converting graphics content to a suitable rendering format involves running several software tools, and selecting the best resolution for target mobile device is often done by trial and error, which all takes time. Wireless errors can also affect transmitted content and aggressive compression is needed for low-bandwidth wireless networks. Most rendering algorithms are currently optimized for visual realism and speed, but are not resource or energy efficient on mobile device. This dissertation focuses on the improvement of rendering performance by reducing the impacts of these problems with UbiWave, an end-to-end Framework to enable real time mobile access to high resolution graphics using wavelets. The framework tackles the issues including simplification, transmission, and resource efficient rendering of graphics content on mobile device based on wavelets by utilizing 1) a Perceptual Error Metric (PoI) for automatically computing the best resolution of graphics content for a given mobile display to eliminate guesswork and save resources, 2) Unequal Error Protection (UEP) to improve the resilience to wireless errors, 3) an Energy-efficient Adaptive Real-time Rendering (EARR) heuristic to balance energy consumption, rendering speed and image quality and 4) an Energy-efficient Streaming Technique. The results facilitate a new class of mobile graphics application which can gracefully adapt the lowest acceptable rendering resolution to the wireless network conditions and the availability of resources and battery energy on mobile device adaptively

XenDB: Full length cDNA prediction and cross species mapping in Xenopus laevis

BACKGROUND: Research using the model system Xenopus laevis has provided critical insights into the mechanisms of early vertebrate development and cell biology. Large scale sequencing efforts have provided an increasingly important resource for researchers. To provide full advantage of the available sequence, we have analyzed 350,468 Xenopus laevis Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) both to identify full length protein encoding sequences and to develop a unique database system to support comparative approaches between X. laevis and other model systems. DESCRIPTION: Using a suffix array based clustering approach, we have identified 25,971 clusters and 40,877 singleton sequences. Generation of a consensus sequence for each cluster resulted in 31,353 tentative contig and 4,801 singleton sequences. Using both BLASTX and FASTY comparison to five model organisms and the NR protein database, more than 15,000 sequences are predicted to encode full length proteins and these have been matched to publicly available IMAGE clones when available. Each sequence has been compared to the KOG database and ~67% of the sequences have been assigned a putative functional category. Based on sequence homology to mouse and human, putative GO annotations have been determined. CONCLUSION: The results of the analysis have been stored in a publicly available database XenDB . A unique capability of the database is the ability to batch upload cross species queries to identify potential Xenopus homologues and their associated full length clones. Examples are provided including mapping of microarray results and application of 'in silico' analysis. The ability to quickly translate the results of various species into 'Xenopus-centric' information should greatly enhance comparative embryological approaches. Supplementary material can be found at

Interactive visual management of curriculum

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Structure-based classification and ontology in chemistry

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recent years have seen an explosion in the availability of data in the chemistry domain. With this information explosion, however, retrieving <it>relevant </it>results from the available information, and <it>organising </it>those results, become even harder problems. Computational processing is essential to filter and organise the available resources so as to better facilitate the work of scientists. Ontologies encode expert domain knowledge in a hierarchically organised machine-processable format. One such ontology for the chemical domain is ChEBI. ChEBI provides a classification of chemicals based on their structural features and a role or activity-based classification. An example of a structure-based class is 'pentacyclic compound' (compounds containing five-ring structures), while an example of a role-based class is 'analgesic', since many different chemicals can act as analgesics without sharing structural features. Structure-based classification in chemistry exploits elegant regularities and symmetries in the underlying chemical domain. As yet, there has been neither a systematic analysis of the types of structural classification in use in chemistry nor a comparison to the capabilities of available technologies.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We analyze the different categories of structural classes in chemistry, presenting a list of patterns for features found in class definitions. We compare these patterns of class definition to tools which allow for automation of hierarchy construction within cheminformatics and within logic-based ontology technology, going into detail in the latter case with respect to the expressive capabilities of the Web Ontology Language and recent extensions for modelling structured objects. Finally we discuss the relationships and interactions between cheminformatics approaches and logic-based approaches.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Systems that perform intelligent reasoning tasks on chemistry data require a diverse set of underlying computational utilities including algorithmic, statistical and logic-based tools. For the task of automatic structure-based classification of chemical entities, essential to managing the vast swathes of chemical data being brought online, systems which are capable of hybrid reasoning combining several different approaches are crucial. We provide a thorough review of the available tools and methodologies, and identify areas of open research.</p

User-centric knowledge extraction and maintenance

An ontology is a machine readable knowledge collection. There is an abundance of information available for human consumption. Thus, large general knowledge ontologies are typically generated tapping into this information source using imperfect automatic extraction approaches that translate human readable text into machine readable semantic knowledge. This thesis provides methods for user-driven ontology generation and maintenance. In particular, this work consists of three main contributions: 1. An interactive human-supported extraction tool: LUKe. The system extends an automatic extraction framework to integrate human feedback on extraction decisions and extracted information on multiple levels. 2. A document retrieval approach based on semantic statements: S3K. While one application is the retrieval of documents that support extracted information to verify the correctness of the piece of information, another application in combination with an extraction system is a fact based indexing of a document corpus allowing statement based document retrieval. 3. A method for similarity based ontology navigation: QBEES. The approach enables search by example. That is, given a set of semantic entities, it provides the most similar entities with respect to their semantic properties considering different aspects. All three components are integrated into a modular architecture that also provides an interface for third-party components.Eine Ontologie ist eine Wissenssammlung in maschinenlesbarer Form. Da eine große Bandbreite an Informationen nur in natürlichsprachlicher Form verfügbar ist, werden maschinenlesbare Ontologien häufig durch imperfekte automatische Verfahren erzeugt, die eine Übersetzung in eine maschinenlesbare Darstellung vornehmen. In der vorliegenden Arbeit werden Methoden zur menschlichen Unterstützung des Extraktionsprozesses und Wartung der erzeugten Wissensbasen präsentiert. Dabei werden drei Beiträge geleistet: 1. Zum ersten wird ein interaktives Extraktionstool (LUKe) vorgestellt. Hierfür wird ein bestehendes Extraktionssystem um die Integration von Nutzerkorrekturen auf verschiedenen Ebenen der Extraktion erweitert und an ein beispielhaftes Szenario angepasst. 2. Zum zweiten wird ein Ansatz (S3K) zur Dokumentsuche basierend auf faktischen Aussagen beschrieben. Dieser erlaubt eine aussagenbasierte Suche nach Belegstellen oder weiteren Informationen im Zusammenhang mit diesen Aussagen in den Dokumentsammlungen die der Wissensbasis zugrunde liegen. 3. Zuletzt wird QBEES, eine Ähnlichkeitssuche in Ontologien, vorgestellt. QBEES ermöglicht die Suche bzw. Empfehlung von ähnlichen Entitäten auf Basis der semantischen Eigenschaften die sie mit einer als Beispiel angegebenen Menge von Entitäten gemein haben. Alle einzelnen Komponenten sind zudem in eine modulare Gesamtarchitektur integriert

Lightweight mobile and wireless systems: technologies, architectures, and services

1Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering (ICSE), University of the Aegean, 81100 Mytilene, Greece 2Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), University of Trento, 38123 Trento, Italy 3Department of Informatics, Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, 574 00 Macedonia, Greece 4Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), 08860 Barcelona, Spain 5North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, NC 27695, US

Apparatuses and Methods for Producing Runtime Architectures of Computer Program Modules

Apparatuses and methods for producing run-time architectures of computer program modules. One embodiment includes creating an abstract graph from the computer program module and from containment information corresponding to the computer program module, wherein the abstract graph has nodes including types and objects, and wherein the abstract graph relates an object to a type, and wherein for a specific object the abstract graph relates the specific object to a type containing the specific object; and creating a runtime graph from the abstract graph, wherein the runtime graph is a representation of the true runtime object graph, wherein the runtime graph represents containment information such that, for a specific object, the runtime graph relates the specific object to another object that contains the specific object

Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications, part 1

The application of artificial intelligence to spacecraft and aerospace systems is discussed. Expert systems, robotics, space station automation, fault diagnostics, parallel processing, knowledge representation, scheduling, man-machine interfaces and neural nets are among the topics discussed

Slivers, computational modularity via synchronized lazy aggregates

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (p. 435-442).by Farnklyn Albin Turbak.Ph.D