IMPROVING THE DEPENDABILITY OF DESTINATION RECOMMENDATIONS USING INFORMATION ON SOCIAL ASPECTS

Prior knowledge of the social aspects of prospective destinations can be very influential in making travel destination decisions, especially in instances where social concerns do exist about specific destinations. In this paper, we describe the implementation of an ontology-enabled Hybrid Destination Recommender System (HDRS) that leverages an ontological description of five specific social attributes of major Nigerian cities, and hybrid architecture of content-based and case-based filtering techniques to generate personalised top-n destination recommendations. An empirical usability test was conducted on the system, which revealed that the dependability of recommendations from Destination Recommender Systems (DRS) could be improved if the semantic representation of social attributes information of destinations is made a factor in the destination recommendation process

Evaluating the Relationship Between Running Times and DNA Sequence Sizes using a Generic-Based Filtering Program.

Generic programming depends on the decomposition of programs into simpler components which may be developed separately and combined arbitrarily, subject only to well- defined interfaces. Bioinformatics deals with the application of computational techniques to data present in the Biological sciences. A genetic sequence is a succession of letters which represents the basic structure of a hypothetical DNA molecule, with the capacity to carry information. This research article studied the relationship between the running times of a generic-based filtering program and different samples of genetic sequences in an increasing order of magnitude. A graphical result was obtained to adequately depict this relationship. It was also discovered that the complexity of the generic tree program was O (log2 N). This research article provided one of the systematic approaches of generic programming to Bioinformatics, which could be instrumental in elucidating major discoveries in Bioinformatics, as regards efficient data management and analysis

Capillary HPLC Separation of Selected Neuropeptides

Neuropeptides play a pivotal role in brain and peripheral nervous system function. As high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) becomes the central tool in the separation and characterization of peptide and protein samples, its selectivity optimization has attracted increasing attention. This research program aims to develop useful, quantitative analysis methods for neuropeptides and their hydrolysis fragments by capillary HPLC. Related peptide pairs are successfully separated, such as leu-enkephalin and [Des-Tyr1] leu-enkephalin, dynorphin A and dynorphin B, galanin and its fragment Gal1-16. The hydrolysis of leu-enkephalin to [Des-Tyr1] leu-enkephalin by organotypic hippocampal slice cultures (OHSCs) can be monitored by the same HPLC system. The separation of seven hippocampal neuropeptides with similar hydrophobicity, Bj-PRO-5a, [Des-Tyr1] leu-enkephalin, leu-enkephalin, pentagastrin, Antho-RW-amide I, dynorphin A 1-6 and angiotensin II, is accomplished by thermally tuned tandem capillary columns (T3C). The chromatographic selectivity is continuously, systematically and significantly optimized by individual adjustment of each column’s temperature. The T3C concept is applied for the first time with capillary columns, which is an important step towards optimization of selectivity for separations of small samples by liquid chromatography

Investigating soil-water retention characteristics at high suctions using Relative Humidity control

A technique for controlling relative humidity (RH) is presented, which involves supplying a sealed chamber with a continuous flow of air at a computer-regulated RH. The desired value of RH is achieved by mixing dry and wet air at appropriate volumes and is measured for servo-control at three locations in the chamber with capacitive RH sensors and checked with a sensitive VAISALA sensor. The setup is capable of controlling RH steadily and continuously with a deviation of less than 0.2% RH. The technique was adopted to determine wetting soil-water retention curves (SWRC) of statically compacted London Clay, under both free-swelling and constant volume conditions. The RH within the chamber was increased in a step-wise fashion, with each step maintained until vapour equilibrium between the chamber atmosphere and the soil samples was established. Independent filter paper measurements further validate the method, while the obtained retention curves complement those available in the literature for lower ranges of suction

A guided tour of asynchronous cellular automata

Research on asynchronous cellular automata has received a great amount of attention these last years and has turned to a thriving field. We survey the recent research that has been carried out on this topic and present a wide state of the art where computing and modelling issues are both represented.Comment: To appear in the Journal of Cellular Automat