Towards the architecture of an instructional multimedia database

The applicability of multimedia databases in education may be extended if they can serve multiple target groups, leading to affordable costs per unit for the user. In this contribution, an approach is described to build generic multimedia databases to serve that purpose. This approach is elaborated within the ODB Project ('Instructional Design of an Optical DataBase'); the term optical refers to the use of optical storage media to hold the audiovisual components. The project aims at developing a database in which a hypermedia encyclopedia is combined with instructional multimedia applications for different target groups at different educational levels. The architecture of the Optical Database will allow for switching between application types while working (for instance from tutorial instruction via the encyclopedia to a simulation and back). For instruction, the content of the database is thereby organized around so-called standard instruction routes: one route per target group. In the project, the teacher is regarded as the manager of instruction.\ud \ud From that perspective, the database is primarily organized as a teaching facility. Central to the research is the condition that the architecture of the Optical Database has to enable teachers to select and tailor instruction routes to their needs in a way that is perceived as logical and easy to use

Implementing PRISMA/DB in an OOPL

PRISMA/DB is implemented in a parallel object-oriented language to gain insight in the usage of parallelism. This environment allows us to experiment with parallelism by simply changing the allocation of objects to the processors of the PRISMA machine. These objects are obtained by a strictly modular design of PRISMA/DB. Communication between the objects is required to cooperatively handle the various tasks, but it limits the potential for parallelism. From this approach, we hope to gain a better understanding of parallelism, which can be used to enhance the performance of PRISMA/DB.\ud The work reported in this document was conducted as part of the PRISMA project, a joint effort with Philips Research Eindhoven, partially supported by the Dutch "Stimuleringsprojectteam Informaticaonderzoek (SPIN)

The NorthStar Ambulatory Assessment in Duchenne muscular dystrophy: considerations for the design of clinical trials.

With the emergence of experimental therapies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), it is fundamental to understand the natural history of this disorder to properly design clinical trials. The aims of this study were to assess the effects produced on motor function by different DMD genotypes and early initiation of glucocorticoids

A decision support environment for behavioral synthesis

We present a specification of a general environment for behavioral synthesis centered around the user/designer as the primary motivator for decisions in design development. At each stage of the design process, the user can perform transformations on the design description through graphical user interfaces. Quality measures, physical estimates, and design hints are given to the user at each stage

Experience-driven formation of parts-based representations in a model of layered visual memory

Growing neuropsychological and neurophysiological evidence suggests that the visual cortex uses parts-based representations to encode, store and retrieve relevant objects. In such a scheme, objects are represented as a set of spatially distributed local features, or parts, arranged in stereotypical fashion. To encode the local appearance and to represent the relations between the constituent parts, there has to be an appropriate memory structure formed by previous experience with visual objects. Here, we propose a model how a hierarchical memory structure supporting efficient storage and rapid recall of parts-based representations can be established by an experience-driven process of self-organization. The process is based on the collaboration of slow bidirectional synaptic plasticity and homeostatic unit activity regulation, both running at the top of fast activity dynamics with winner-take-all character modulated by an oscillatory rhythm. These neural mechanisms lay down the basis for cooperation and competition between the distributed units and their synaptic connections. Choosing human face recognition as a test task, we show that, under the condition of open-ended, unsupervised incremental learning, the system is able to form memory traces for individual faces in a parts-based fashion. On a lower memory layer the synaptic structure is developed to represent local facial features and their interrelations, while the identities of different persons are captured explicitly on a higher layer. An additional property of the resulting representations is the sparseness of both the activity during the recall and the synaptic patterns comprising the memory traces.Comment: 34 pages, 12 Figures, 1 Table, published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience (Special Issue on Complex Systems Science and Brain Dynamics), http://www.frontiersin.org/neuroscience/computationalneuroscience/paper/10.3389/neuro.10/015.2009

The Hypertext Internet Connection: E-mail, Online Search, Gopher

In this paper we show how to handle and organize the large amount of information accessible through the Internet or other public communication networks in a hypertext environment. The C(K)onstance-Hypertext-System (KHS) uses typed units to indicate the differences and the content and structure of information, comprising text, forms, images pointers to external information. We show how to imbed Internet services, which usual require rather different interaction styles, such as point-to-point communication (e-mail query formulation (online databases) or browsing (Gopher) into the uniform interaction model of the KHS. The integration of Internet services in an open hypertext environment produces value-adding effects which are also discussed. (DIPF/Orig.

A new census of protein tandem repeats and their relationship with intrinsic disorder

Protein tandem repeats (TRs) are often associated with immunity-related functions and diseases. Since that last census of protein TRs in 1999, the number of curated proteins increased more than seven-fold and new TR prediction methods were published. TRs appear to be enriched with intrinsic disorder and vice versa. The significance and the biological reasons for this association are unknown. Here, we characterize protein TRs across all kingdoms of life and their overlap with intrinsic disorder in unprecedented detail. Using state-of-the-art prediction methods, we estimate that 50.9% of proteins contain at least one TR, often located at the sequence flanks. Positive linear correlation between the proportion of TRs and the protein length was observed universally, with Eukaryotes in general having more TRs, but when the difference in length is taken into account the difference is quite small. TRs were enriched with disorder-promoting amino acids and were inside intrinsically disordered regions. Many such TRs were homorepeats. Our results support that TRs mostly originate by duplication and are involved in essential functions such as transcription processes, structural organization, electron transport and iron-binding. In viruses, TRs are found in proteins essential for virulence