8,935 research outputs found
Technical Paper Recommendation: A Study in Combining Multiple Information Sources
The growing need to manage and exploit the proliferation of online data
sources is opening up new opportunities for bringing people closer to the
resources they need. For instance, consider a recommendation service through
which researchers can receive daily pointers to journal papers in their fields
of interest. We survey some of the known approaches to the problem of technical
paper recommendation and ask how they can be extended to deal with multiple
information sources. More specifically, we focus on a variant of this problem -
recommending conference paper submissions to reviewing committee members -
which offers us a testbed to try different approaches. Using WHIRL - an
information integration system - we are able to implement different
recommendation algorithms derived from information retrieval principles. We
also use a novel autonomous procedure for gathering reviewer interest
information from the Web. We evaluate our approach and compare it to other
methods using preference data provided by members of the AAAI-98 conference
reviewing committee along with data about the actual submissions
Pilus distribution among lineages of group b <i>streptococcus</i>: an evolutionary and clinical perspective
<b>Background</b><p></p>
Group B Streptococcus (GBS) is an opportunistic pathogen in both humans and bovines. Epidemiological and phylogenetic analyses have found strains belonging to certain phylogenetic lineages to be more frequently associated with invasive newborn disease, asymptomatic maternal colonization, and subclinical bovine mastitis. Pilus structures in GBS facilitate colonization and invasion of host tissues and play a role in biofilm formation, though few large-scale studies have estimated the frequency and diversity of the three pilus islands (PIs) across diverse genotypes. Here, we examined the distribution of pilus islands (PI) 1, 2a and 2b among 295 GBS strains representing 73 multilocus sequence types (STs) belonging to eight clonal complexes. PCR-based RFLP was also used to evaluate variation in the genes encoding pilus backbone proteins of PI-2a and PI-2b.<p></p>
<b>Results</b><p></p>
All 295 strains harbored one of the PI-2 variants and most human-derived strains contained PI-1. Bovine-derived strains lacked PI-1 and possessed a unique PI-2b backbone protein allele. Neonatal strains more frequently had PI-1 and a PI-2 variant than maternal colonizing strains, and most CC-17 strains had PI-1 and PI-2b with a distinct backbone protein allele. Furthermore, we present evidence for the frequent gain and loss of genes encoding certain pilus types.<p></p>
<b>Conclusions</b><p></p>
These data suggest that pilus combinations impact host specificity and disease presentation and that diversification often involves the loss or acquisition of PIs. Such findings have implications for the development of GBS vaccines that target the three pilus islands
A Longitudinal Study of Hospitalization Rates for Patients with Chronic Disease: Results from the Medical Outcomes Study.
To prospectively compare inpatient and outpatient utilization rates between prepaid (PPD) and fee-for-service (FFS) insurance coverage for patients with chronic disease. Data from the Medical Outcomes Study, a longitudinal observational study of chronic disease patients conducted in Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles.A four-year prospective study of resource utilization among 1,681 patients under treatment for hypertension, diabetes, myocardial infarction, or congestive heart failure in the practices of 367 clinicians
Photon collection from a trapped ion--cavity system
We present the design and implementation of a trapped ion cavity QED system.
A single ytterbium ion is confined by a micron-scale ion trap inside a 2 mm
optical cavity. The ion is coherently pumped by near resonant laser light while
the cavity output is monitored as a function of pump intensity and cavity
detuning. We observe a Purcell enhancement of scattered light into the solid
angle subtended by the optical cavity, as well as a three-peak structure
arising from strongly driving the atom. This system can be integrated into
existing atom{photon quantum network protocols and is a pathway towards an
efficient atom{photon quantum interface
Semirelativistic stability of N-boson systems bound by 1/r pair potentials
We analyze a system of self-gravitating identical bosons by means of a
semirelativistic Hamiltonian comprising the relativistic kinetic energies of
the involved particles and added (instantaneous) Newtonian gravitational pair
potentials. With the help of an improved lower bound to the bottom of the
spectrum of this Hamiltonian, we are able to enlarge the known region for
relativistic stability for such boson systems against gravitational collapse
and to sharpen the predictions for their maximum stable mass.Comment: 11 pages, considerably enlarged introduction and motivation,
remainder of the paper unchange
Smooth-AP: Smoothing the Path Towards Large-Scale Image Retrieval
Optimising a ranking-based metric, such as Average Precision (AP), is
notoriously challenging due to the fact that it is non-differentiable, and
hence cannot be optimised directly using gradient-descent methods. To this end,
we introduce an objective that optimises instead a smoothed approximation of
AP, coined Smooth-AP. Smooth-AP is a plug-and-play objective function that
allows for end-to-end training of deep networks with a simple and elegant
implementation. We also present an analysis for why directly optimising the
ranking based metric of AP offers benefits over other deep metric learning
losses. We apply Smooth-AP to standard retrieval benchmarks: Stanford Online
products and VehicleID, and also evaluate on larger-scale datasets: INaturalist
for fine-grained category retrieval, and VGGFace2 and IJB-C for face retrieval.
In all cases, we improve the performance over the state-of-the-art, especially
for larger-scale datasets, thus demonstrating the effectiveness and scalability
of Smooth-AP to real-world scenarios.Comment: Accepted at ECCV 202
Classification of protein interaction sentences via gaussian processes
The increase in the availability of protein interaction studies in textual format coupled with the demand for easier access to the key results has lead to a need for text mining solutions. In the text processing pipeline, classification is a key step for extraction of small sections of relevant text. Consequently, for the task of locating protein-protein interaction sentences, we examine the use of a classifier which has rarely been applied to text, the Gaussian processes (GPs). GPs are a non-parametric probabilistic analogue to the more popular support vector machines (SVMs). We find that GPs outperform the SVM and na\"ive Bayes classifiers on binary sentence data, whilst showing equivalent performance on abstract and multiclass sentence corpora. In addition, the lack of the margin parameter, which requires costly tuning, along with the principled multiclass extensions enabled by the probabilistic framework make GPs an appealing alternative worth of further adoption
The Wicked Machinery of Government: Malta and the Problems of Continuity under the New Model Administration
This is a study focused on the early years of British rule in Malta (1800-1813). It explores the application to the island of the “new model” of colonial government, one based on direct rule from London mediated by the continuation of existing laws and institutions. Systemic deficiencies are identified. These tended to undermine the effectiveness of direct British rule. This study also reveals, in the context of legal and constitutional continuity, unresolved tensions between modernity and tradition. The political stability of the island was damaged and the possibility of continued British possession was threatened
Torsional fluctuations in columnar DNA assemblies
In columnar assemblies of helical bio-molecules the azimuthal degrees of
freedom, i.e. rotations about the long axes of molecules, may be important in
determining the structure of the assemblies especially when the interaction
energy between neighbouring molecules explicitly depends on their relative
azimuthal orientations. For DNA this leads to a rich variety of mesophases for
columnar assemblies, each categorized by a specific azimuthal ordering. In a
preceding paper [A. Wynveen, D. J. Lee, and A. A. Kornyshev, Eur. Phys. J. E,
16, 303 (2005)] a statistical mechanical theory was developed for the
assemblies of torsionally rigid molecues in order to determine how thermal
fluctuations influence the structure of these mesophases. Here we extend this
theory by including torsional fluctuations of the molecules, where a DNA
molecule may twist about its long axis at the cost of torsional elastic energy.
Comparing this with the previous study, we find that inclusion of torsional
fluctuations further increases the density at which the transition between the
hexagonal structure and the predicted rhombic phase occurs and reduces the
level of distortion in the rhombic phase. As X-ray diffraction may probe the
2-D lattice structure of such assemblies and provide information concerning the
underlying interaction between molecules, we have also calculated correlation
functions for the azimuthal ordering which are manifest in an x-ray scattering
intensity profiles.Comment: 33 pages, 8 figure
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