A cost engine system for estimating whole-life cycle cost of long-term digital preservation activities

This research paper presents a cost engine system that estimates the whole life cycle cost of long-term digital preservation (LTDP) activities using cloud-based technologies. A qualitative research methodology has been employed and the activity based costing (ABC) technique has been used to develop the cost model. The unified modelling language (UML) notation and the object oriented paradigm (OOP) are utilised to design the architecture of the software system. In addition, the service oriented architecture (SOA) style has been used to deploy the function of the cost engine as a web service in order to ensure its accessibility over the web. The cost engine is a module that is part of a larger digital preservation system and has been validated qualitatively through experts’ opinion. Its benefits are realised in the accurate and detailed estimation of cost for companies wishing to employ LTDP activities

A framework for identifying uncertainties in long-term digital preservation

With the current expansion in digital information comes an increasing need to preserve such assets. The ENSURE (Enabling knowledge Sustainability, Usability and Recovery for Economic value) pro-ject, a research project under the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme, is the par-ent project to this research area and its aim is to conduct advanced research to address the challenges of Long Term Digital Preservation (LTDP) to ensure the successful preservation, availability and ac-cessibility of preserved data in the future. Focusing on identifying uncertainties in the LTDP activities and their impact on cost and economic performance of digital preservation systems, this paper dis-cusses a framework to identify uncertainties in LTDP for business sectors interested

Towards a framework for predicting whole life-cycle cost for long-term digital preservation

Estimating the costs for the whole lifecycle of long-term digital preservation (LTDP) activities ena-bles decision makers to choose carefully what data to preserve, duration of preservation and type of preservation techniques best applied for their information. To address this need, a framework is de-veloped to generate a cost model that will estimate costs for long-term digital preservation activities using storage in the cloud and taking into consideration the impact of mitigating uncertainties, espe-cially obsolescence issues on future costs. This cost estimating framework is part of the European pro-ject entitled ‘Enabling kNowledge Sustainability Usability and Recovery for Economic value’ which aims to provide a total long-term digital preservation solution for companies and public sector organi-sations interested in keeping their digital information alive for the long-term within the healthcare, fi-nancial and the clinical trials business sectors

Molecular aspects of resistance to late blight disease in potato (solanum tuberosum L.)

Diseases caused by micro-organisms are still a major threat to the agro-industry worldwide. Diseases not only have negative effects on crop yields, but also they can affect the quality of crops post-harvest. Genetic engineering is one of several strategies that have been developed to control plant diseases and to enhance plant disease resistance to pathogens. Although some genetic strategies have provided plants with enhanced disease resistance, some pathogens can easily overcome this resistance by rapid evolution resulting in a lack of durability in the field. The oomycete Phytophthora infestans, the causal pathogen of late blight disease of potato, is an example of a crop pathogen that causes a major problem in one of the most important crops worldwide. Many efforts have been made trying to control this pathogen including chemical controls and genetic engineering, but unfortunately it remains a severe problem and the control measures are rarely very successful. Due to the complexity of this pathogen, and to limit the need for chemical control, breeding programmes to incorporate durable forms of genetic resistance are crucially needed. Although, this type of resistance is believed to be effective against all known races of P. infestans and provide in additional some level of general resistance, until now the genetic bases of this type of resistance is still unknown and the molecular mechanisms poorly understood. This project set out to isolate and identify gene sequences that are induced during the compatible interaction between cultured potato plants and P. infestans, specifically those leading to the establishment of durable resistance. It was demonstrated that the potato variety Stirling is capable of developing this type of resistance as judged by the development of resistant shoots during the interaction with Phytophthora. These shoots showed very strong resistance not only to Phytophthora but also to other potato pathogens (R. solani and F. sulphureum) even after two generations of culturing the plants in the absence of the pathogen. The fast production of ROS and the tight deposition of callose surrounding the hypersensitive cells, which deprive the pathogen of nutrients and limit pathogen growth to a small region of the plant, may be important factors in the success of the durable plants in defending themselves against the pathogen attack

Framework for engineering design systems architectures evaluation and selection: case study

Engineering companies face the challenge of developing complex Engineering Design Systems. These systems involve huge financial, people, and time investments within an environment that is characterised by continuously changing technologies and processes. Systems architecture provides the strategies and modelling approaches to ensure that adequate resources are spent in developing the possible To Be states for a target system. Architecture selection and evaluation involves evaluating different architectural alternatives with respect to multiple criteria, hence an Architecture Evaluation Framework which evaluates and down selects the appropriate architectures solutions is crucial to assess how these systems will deliver value over their lifetime, and where to channel the financial and human investments to maximize benefit delivered to the business’ bottom line. In this paper, an evaluation and selection architecture framework is proposed, which targets to maximise the alignment of Engineering Design Systems with business goals based on a quality centric architecture evaluation approach. The framework utilised software Quality Attributes as well as SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat) and PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) analyses to capture different viewpoints related to technical, political and business context. The framework proposed employing AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) to quantitatively elicit relationships between Quality Attributes trade-offs and architectural characteristics. The framework was applied to a real case study considering five Engineering Design Systems alternative architectures, where workshops with subject matter experts and stakeholders were held to reach an informative decision, that maximise architectural quality, whilst maintaining business alignment

The essence of fertilization: oocyte meets sperm

The problem of reduced fertility in high yielding dairy cattle is a very complicated one, and the relationship between various measures of fertility and level of milk production remains controversial. In this brief review the essence of the problem is considered: what is the oocyte's and the sperm's contribution, and what is the importance of the resulting embryo in the declining fertility of the Holstein Friesian cow

Extractive Text Summarization on Single Documents Using Deep Learning

The task of summarization can be categorized into two methods, extractive and abstractive summarization. Extractive approach selects highly meaningful sentences to form a summary while the abstractive approach interprets the original document and generates the summary in its own words. The task of generating a summary, whether extractive or abstractive, has been studied with different approaches such as statistical-based, graph-based, and deep-learning based approaches. Deep learning has achieved promising performance in comparison with the classical approaches and with the evolution of neural networks such as the attention network or commonly known as the Transformer architecture, there are potential areas for improving the summarization approach. The introduction of transformers and its encoder model BERT, has created advancement in the performance of many downstream tasks in NLP, including the summarization task. The objective of this thesis is to study the performance of deep learning-based models on text summarization through a series of experiments, and propose “SqueezeBERTSum”, a trained summarization model fine-tuned with the SqueezeBERT encoder which achieved competitive ROUGE scores retaining original BERT model’s performance by 98% with ~49% fewer trainable parameters

Synthesis of some new S-glycosyl pyrimidine and condensed pyrimidine derivatives

Mercaptopyrimidine (4) was synthesized by the reaction of isothiocyanate and acrylate (1). It was allowed to react with preacetylated sugar bromide and/or halomethylene derivatives to produce alkylated pyrimidines (5,7a-d). Hydrolysis of compound (5) produced compound (6). Interacyclization of compounds (7a-d) afforded thienopyrimidines (8a-d). Moreover oxidation of compound (7b) gave the corresponding thienopyrimidine dioxide (9). Cyanoethylation of compound (4) afforded compound (10) that reacted with hydrazine hydrate to give pyrazolopyrimidine (11). Oxidation of compound 4 afforded bisulphide (12). The cycloaddition product (13) was obtained by reaction of compound 4 with maleic anhydride. Pyrimidopyrimidine, pyrimidopyridazine and tetrazolopyriminde derivatives (16-20) were obtained by reaction of 4-chloropyrimidine (15) with thiourea, benzilhydrazone and sodium azide, respectively. N-alkylated pyrazolopyrimidine (21) was obtained by reaction of compound (15) with acetophenonehydrazone