The More the Worse? Mining Valuable Ideas with Sentiment Analysis for Idea Recommendation

Many firms have an interest in an open innovation community, recognizing its business value. They can collect and analyze the ideas of their customers from the community to get valuable ideas which can lead to innovation such as a new product or service. However, such a community overloaded with too many ideas from customers cannot make use of them at the right time because of the limited time and human resources to deal with them. Therefore, it would be a great help to those firms if they have a recommendation system which recommends top n ideas for innovation. MyStarbucksIdea (MSI) is such an open community, created by Starbucks. To build such an innovative idea recommendation system for Starbucks, we analyzed a dataset collected from MSI, utilizing data mining and sentiment analysis techniques. Experimental results show that our recommendation system can help firms identify prospective ideas which can be valuable enough for their innovation among a large amount of ideas, efficiently

Growth responses of Escherichia coli and Myxococcus xanthus on agar gel substrates with different levels of stiffness

Bacteria colonize surfaces responding to the physicochemical properties of substrates. A systematic study was carried out with growing single bacterial colonies on the surface of agar media to decipher the interaction between bacterial growth and substrate stiffness. We investigated the growth kinetics of wild-type Escherichia coli, non-motile E. coli, and Myxococcus xanthus, cultured on semi-solid agar substrates containing different amounts of nutrient and agar. We found that substrate stiffness, which was controlled by agar concentration, modulates the growth of motile bacteria, such as wild-type E. coli and M. xanthus, independently of the nutrient level, but does not affect the growth response of non-motile E. coli. Interestingly, growth of M. xanthus moving with type IV pili correlates negatively with the substrate stiffness in contrast to wild-type E. coli propelled by flagella. The present study demonstrates that the type of surface motility is a key  determinant of the growth response of bacteria to substrate stiffness, and has potential application to the design of surfaces that prevent or promote biofilm formation.Key words: Bacterial colonization, substrate stiffness, surface motility, swarming, Escherichia coli, Myxococcus xanthus

Inference of Admixture Origins in Indigenous African Cattle.

Present-day African cattle retain a unique genetic profile composed of a mixture of the Bos taurus and Bos indicus populations introduced into the continent at different time periods. However, details of the admixture history and the exact origins of the source populations remain obscure. Here, we infer the source of admixture in the earliest domestic cattle in Africa, African taurine. We detect a significant contribution (up to ∼20%) from a basal taurine lineage, which might represent the now-extinct African aurochs. In addition, we show that the indicine ancestry of African cattle, although most closely related to so-far sampled North Indian indicine breeds, has a small amount of additional genetic affinity to Southeast Asian indicine breeds. Our findings support the hypothesis of aurochs introgression into African taurine and generate a novel hypothesis that the origin of indicine ancestry in Africa might be different indicine populations than the ones found in North India today

Visual information priming in Internet of things: focusing on the interface of smart refrigerator

Internet of Things (IoT) supports an environment where users are able to interact and get information by sharing visual informational cues. The purpose of this study was to investigate what effect was made on the perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, intention to use and self efficacy about use of smart refrigerator when visual information related to the food and function is provided in advance in the interface. A data was collected from a between-subjects experiment (N = 26) with an independent variable (priming visual information vs. non-priming). According to the experiment results, users who were primed about the visual cues perceived higher usefulness (PU), ease of use (PEoU), intention to use (IU), and self-efficacy (SE) toward the fridge compared to the users in a non-primed group.The study proposes theoretical and practical implications for designing food-related smart home appliances’ interface and visual affordances

Prediction of Advanced Fibrosis in Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: An Enhanced Model of BARD Score.

UNLABELLED: BACKGROUNDAIMS: The BARD score is a model to detect advanced liver fibrosis in nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) patients. The aims of this study were to identify additional factors and then to build an enhanced version of the BARD score. METHODS: One hundred seven patients with biopsy-proven NAFLD were enrolled retrospectively. Logistic regressions were performed to identify independent risk factors for advanced liver fibrosis (stage 3 or 4). An enhanced model of the BARD score (BARDI score) was built and evaluated with a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. RESULTS: In multivariate analysis, age (odds ratio [OR], 0.89; p=0.04), aspartate aminotransferase/alanine aminotransferase ratio (OR, 1.73; p CONCLUSIONS: The BARDI score had an improved PPV over the BARD score and maintained an excellent NPV. Further study is warranted for its external validation and comparison with other models

A Nanofiber-embedded Microfluidic Platform for Studying Neurobiology

Due to their biomimetic properties, electrospun nanofibers have been widely used in neurobiology studies. However, mechanistic understanding of cell-nanofiber interactions is challenging based on the current in vitro culture systems due to the lack of control of spatiotemporal patterning of cells and difficulty in monitoring single cell behavior. To overcome these issues, we apply microfluidic technology in combination with electrospun nanofibers for in vitro studies of interactions between neurons and nanofiber materials. We demonstrate a unique nanofiber embedded microfluidic device which contains patterned aligned or random electrospun nanofibers as a new culture system. With this device, we test how different topographies affect axonal growth. Also, we conduct laser based axotomy on neurons cultured on our device to investigate axonal regeneration. The proposed device could be a useful tool for investigating nerve injury mechanisms and high-throughput screening of biomaterials or drugs for nerve repair. The knowledge obtained using this device can be applicable to design medical devices such as nerve conduits for effective nerve regeneration

Gene-Gene Interaction Analysis for the Accelerated Failure Time Model Using a Unified Model-Based Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction Method

Although a large number of genetic variants have been identified to be associated with common diseases through genome-wide association studies, there still exits limitations in explaining the missing heritability. One approach to solving this missing heritability problem is to investigate gene-gene interactions, rather than a single-locus approach. For gene-gene interaction analysis, the multifactor dimensionality reduction (MDR) method has been widely applied, since the constructive induction algorithm of MDR efficiently reduces high-order dimensions into one dimension by classifying multi-level genotypes into high- and low-risk groups. The MDR method has been extended to various phenotypes and has been improved to provide a significance test for gene-gene interactions. In this paper, we propose a simple method, called accelerated failure time (AFT) UM-MDR, in which the idea of a unified model-based MDR is extended to the survival phenotype by incorporating AFT-MDR into the classification step. The proposed AFT UM-MDR method is compared with AFT-MDR through simulation studies, and a short discussion is given