Remote sensing of chlorophyll concentration: State-of-the-art, 1975

Remote measurement of chlorophyll concentration of the world's oceans from satellite observations could potentially be extremely useful for assessments of productivity in large areas for which measurements by other means would be impractical. The basis of these measurements rests with the physics of the interaction of light with material dissolved and suspended in the water. It is theoretically possible to predict the nature of light upwelled from the ocean surface from a solution to the radiative transfer equation. Practically, however, this is difficult. Monte-Carlo methods presently are thought to be the most viable method to treat the general theoretical problem. With restrictive assumptions of the nature of scattering, it is possible to construct simpler models. Algorithms developed to relate chlorophyll concentration (or some other parameter, i.e., seechi depth) to the upwelled light spectrum are discussed

Usefulness, localizability, humanness, and language-benefit: additional evaluation criteria for natural language dialogue systems

Human–computer dialogue systems interact with human users using natural language. We used the ALICE/AIML chatbot architecture as a platform to develop a range of chatbots covering different languages, genres, text-types, and user-groups, to illustrate qualitative aspects of natural language dialogue system evaluation. We present some of the different evaluation techniques used in natural language dialogue systems, including black box and glass box, comparative, quantitative, and qualitative evaluation. Four aspects of NLP dialogue system evaluation are often overlooked: “usefulness” in terms of a user’s qualitative needs, “localizability” to new genres and languages, “humanness” or “naturalness” compared to human–human dialogues, and “language benefit” compared to alternative interfaces. We illustrated these aspects with respect to our work on machine-learnt chatbot dialogue systems; we believe these aspects are worthwhile in impressing potential new users and customers

Mississippi Sound Remote Sensing Study

The Mississippi Sound Remote Sensing Study was initiated as part of the research program of the NASA Earth Resources Laboratory. The objective of this study is development of remote sensing techniques to study near-shore marine waters. Included within this general objective are the following: (1) evaluate existing techniques and instruments used for remote measurement of parameters of interest within these waters; (2) develop methods for interpretation of state-of-the-art remote sensing data which are most meaningful to an understanding of processes taking place within near-shore waters; (3) define hardware development requirements and/or system specifications; (4) develop a system combining data from remote and surface measurements which will most efficiently assess conditions in near-shore waters; (5) conduct projects in coordination with appropriate operating agencies to demonstrate applicability of this research to environmental and economic problems

Semantic-based Ontology for Malay Qur'an Reader

The Quran has been translated into various languages around the world by Muslim experts. One of them is in Malay. There are numerous applications built to facilitate the retrieval of knowledge from the Malay Qur’an. However, there are limited resources and tools that are available or made accessible for the research on Malay Qur’an. Furthermore, there are several issues that need to be considered when dealing with Malay Qur’an translation; such as ambiguities of words, lack of equivalence words between Malay and English or Malay and Arabic, and different structures of word, sentence, and discourse in these two languages. Therefore, this research summarizes the search techniques used in existing research on Qur’an. Moreover, this paper also studied the previous research conducted on Qur’an Semantic Search and Quran Ontology-Based Search focusing on Malay Qur’an. This review helps the research in addressing the general problems and limitations in Malay Qur’an that influence its accessibility. This research proposed the research framework for new semantic based ontology for Malay Qur’an. The final outcome will be an accessible tool that can help a Malay reader to understand the Qur’an in better ways

Evaluation corpus for restricted-domain question-answering systems for the holy Quran

This paper presents the compilation of a corpus of question-answer pairs for the holy Quran. The corpus has been manually collected from a wide range of sources, and designed to represent the Quran Arabic-English Question and Answer Corpus (QAEQ&AC). QAEQ&AC is a written, bilingual corpus, which comprises Arabic and English text. First, question-answer pairs have been collected from several trusted expert sources. Then the data were merged and cleaned using Microsoft Excel. After that data were converted to the format that suitable for mining tools, where we have created a comma-separated value (CSV) file form at. The corpus obtained consists of more than 1500 question-answer pairs which is nearly 50.000 words, divided over Arabic and English languages. It includes different question types such as what, when, why, etc., and different answer length. We anticipate that the current and subsequent versions of our corpus will be a valuable evaluation resource for computational linguists investigating Quran question and answer; it might be used as a gold standard in researches, that dealing with natural language processing, information retrieval, artificial intelligence. The corpus can be subjected to an annotation to derive linguistic information such as morphological, syntactic, semantic, and lexical information

Optimisation of Cleaning Detergent use in Brewery Fermenter Cleaning

This paper investigates improvement possibilities in the cleaning operations undertaken at an industrial brewery. Experiments were performed on a bench scale cleaning rig which was designed to simulate ‘real life’ cleaning conditions of a clean-in-place (CIP) set in the brewery. The rig was used to clean consistently fouled coupons using difficult soils from the brewery. The objective of the experiments was to determine the reduction in effective cleaning performance with varied levels of Na2CO3 in the detergent from NaOH degradation and the maximum level that may be present before cleaning quality is impacted. The shear force of the cleaning fluid across the surface of the coupon was also varied to determine the impact on cleaning performance. Data collected from these offline measurements has been used to predict the end point of the detergent usage based on cost optimisation within the empirically determined limits. The results show that the NaOH detergent usage can be extended while achieving the same time to clean without impacting the cleaning quality and preventing premature disposal. This will provide an increased confidence level when cleaning fermenters with NaOH. It will also reduce cleaning costs and benefit the environment by reducing chemical effluent and minimising water consumption

Middlesex University’s Invisque visual analytics tool: supported by text analytics techniques from the University of Leeds

This report describes the joint entry from Middlesex University and the University of Leeds for Mini Challenge 3 for the VAST Challenge 2011. In order to address the challenge question, the primary tool we used was Middlesex University’s Interactive Visual Search and Query Environment (INVISQUE), which served as the user interface to the Mini-Challenge 3 news corpus. INVISQUE was supported by corpus text analytics from the University of Leeds, which provided additional information that was visualised on the INVISQUE user interface

An AI-inspired intelligent agent/student architecture to combine language resources research and teaching

This paper describes experimental use of the multi-agent architecture to integrate Natural Language and Information Systems research and teaching, by casting a group of students as intelligent agents to collect and analyse English language resources from around the world. Section 2 and section 3 describe the hybrid intelligent information systems experiments at the University of Leeds and the results generated, including several research papers accepted at international conferences, and a finalist entry in the British Computer Society Machine Intelligence contest. Our proposals for applying the multi-agent idea in other universities such as the Arab Open University are presented in section 4. The conclusion is presented in section 5: the success of hybrid intelligent information systems experiments in generating research papers within a limited time