The Lowlands team at TRECVID 2008

In this paper we describe our experiments performed for TRECVID 2008. We participated in the High Level Feature extraction and the Search task. For the High Level Feature extraction task we mainly installed our detection environment. In the Search task we applied our new PRFUBE ranking model together with an estimation method which estimates a vital parameter of the model, the probability of a concept occurring in relevant shots. The PRFUBE model has similarities to the well known Probabilistic Text Information Retrieval methodology and follows the Probability Ranking Principle

The Lowlands team at TRECVID 2007

In this report we summarize our methods and results for the search tasks in\ud TRECVID 2007. We employ two different kinds of search: purely ASR based and\ud purely concept based search. However, there is not significant difference of the\ud performance of the two systems. Using neighboring shots for the combination of\ud two concepts seems to be beneficial. General preprocessing of queries increased\ud the performance and choosing detector sources helped. However, for all automatic\ud search components we need to perform further investigations

VITALAS at TRECVID-2008

In this paper, we present our experiments in TRECVID 2008 about High-Level feature extraction task. This is the first year for our participation in TRECVID, our system adopts some popular approaches that other workgroups proposed before. We proposed 2 advanced low-level features NEW Gabor texture descriptor and the Compact-SIFT Codeword histogram. Our system applied well-known LIBSVM to train the SVM classifier for the basic classifier. In fusion step, some methods were employed such as the Voting, SVM-base, HCRF and Bootstrap Average AdaBoost(BAAB)

Cost benefit and cost effectiveness of antifungal prophylaxis in immunocompromised patients treated for haematological malignancies:reviewing the available evidence

There has been a large increase in the incidence of invasive fungal infections (IFIs) over the past decades, largely because of the increasing size of the population at risk. One of the major risk groups for IFIs are patients with haematological malignancies treated with cytotoxic chemotherapy or undergoing haematopoietic stem cell transplantation. These IFIs are associated with high morbidity and mortality rates. Consequently, as the diagnosis of IFIs is difficult, antifungal prophylaxis is desirable in high-risk patients. Furthermore, as the economic impact of IFIs is also significant, it is important to assess the cost benefit and cost effectiveness of each prophylactic agent in order to aid decisions concerning which prophylactic agent provides the best value for limited healthcare resources. This article systematically reviews the available pharmacoeconomic evidence regarding antifungal prophylaxis in immunocompromised patients treated for haematological malignancies. Furthermore, specific points of interest concerning economic analyses of antifungal prophylaxis are briefly discussed. Considering the available evidence, antifungal prophylaxis in immunocompromised patients treated for haematological malignancies seems to be an intervention with favourable cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness and cost-saving potential. Furthermore, recently introduced antifungal agents seem to be attractive alternatives to fluconazole from a pharmacoeconomic point of view. However, due to wide heterogeneity in patient characteristics, underlying diseases, hospital settings and study methods in the included economic studies, as well as the lack of 'head-to-head' trials, it is difficult to find clear evidence of the economic advantages of a single prophylactic agent. Furthermore, we show that the results of cost-effectiveness analyses are highly dependent on several crucial factors that influence the baseline IFI incidence rates and, therefore, differ per patient population or region

Twenty-five well-justified fossil calibrations for primate divergences

Phylogenies with estimates of divergence times are essential for investigating many evolutionary questions. In principle, “tip-dating” is arguably the most appropriate approach, with fossil and extant taxa analysed together in a single analysis, and topology and divergence times estimated simultaneously. However, “node-dating” (as used in many molecular clock analyses), in which fossil evidence is used to calibrate the age of particular nodes a priori, will probably remain the dominant approach, due to various issues with analysing morphological and molecular data together. Here, we provide a list of 25 well-justified node calibrations for primate divergences, following best practices: 16 within Haplorhini, four within Strepsirrhini, one for crown Primates, and four for older divergences within Euarchontoglires. In each case, we provide a hard minimum bound, and for 22 of these we also provide a soft maximum bound and a suggested prior distribution. For each calibrated node, we provide the age of the oldest fossil of each daughter lineage that descends from it, which allows use of the “CladeAge” method for specifying priors on node ages

Uniqueness Typing for Resource Management in Message-Passing Concurrency

We view channels as the main form of resources in a message-passing programming paradigm. These channels need to be carefully managed in settings where resources are scarce. To study this problem, we extend the pi-calculus with primitives for channel allocation and deallocation and allow channels to be reused to communicate values of different types. Inevitably, the added expressiveness increases the possibilities for runtime errors. We define a substructural type system which combines uniqueness typing and affine typing to reject these ill-behaved programs