iiWAS - Towards Context-Based Tracking of Web Services Security.

With the increasing popularity of Web services and increasing complexity of users\u27 needs, there has been a renewed interest in Web services composition. However, composition faces a major obstacle, which is the content heterogeneity of the contexts featuring the component Web services of a composite service. An unawareness or poor consideration of this heterogeneity during Web services composition and execution definitely results in a lack of the quality and relevancy of information that is deemed appropriate for tracking the composition, monitoring the execution, and handling exceptions. An earlier paper had provided a 3-level approach for content reconciliation of Web services\u27 contexts using ontologies. This paper extends the 3-level approach by focusing on the security breaches that threaten the integrity of the context of Web services, and proposes appropriate means to achieve this integrity

Investigation of Temperature Drift with Thermocyclic Oxidation on K-Type Bare Thermocouples

The irrevocable variations in the thermoelectric properties arise in normally used bare type-K thermocouples that are subjected to high temperatures. Over an extended period of time, these long-term modifications may manifest themselves as a systematic shift in the thermocouple’s characteristics. This paper investigates the temporal instability of thermocouple output at temperatures over 800 °C. This investigation focuses on the change in temperature output that occurs in thermocouples of varying diameters after they have been subjected to high temperatures for more than 365 hours. This data was used to assess the relationship between the amount of temperature drift with different lead diameters and the degradation of the material compositions of thermocouple thermoelements. It is critical to determine the pace at which the thermocouple material degrades over time. This paper concentrates in detail on the drift analysis of thermocouples of different diameters which were tested at high temperatures with their segmental material compositions. Within the scope of this investigation, the elemental analysis of the thermocouple could be carried out using scanning electron microscopy in conjunction with an energy dispersive X-ray (SEM-EDAX) both before and after the thermocouple had degraded. The results show that the thermoelectric response decreases dramatically and the highest drift reaches to about 196.4 µV for (Ø0.51 mm), about 118.6 µV for (Ø1.29 mm) and 79.2 µV for (Ø2.05 mm) thermocouples, respectively at 800 °C after prolonged usage of 365 hours. The highest thermal drift was achieved with [90-10] vol% Ni-Cr / [95-05] vol % Ni-Al, Mn, Si composite thermocouples, which related to the increased amount of the 2-3 oxide layers that were formed in the composite of bare thermoelements

Incidence of Lower Limb Lymphedema in Post therapeutic Gynaecological Malignancies

Introduction: Lower limb lymphedema (LLL) is one of the most disabling side effects of surgical and radiotherapy treatment for gynecological cancers (carcinoma of the cervix, carcinoma of the ovary, carcinoma of the endometrium, and carcinoma of the vulva). The incidence of lymphedema varies in gynecological cancers and patients undergoing radiotherapy and surgery. This prospective study aims to determine the incidence of lower limb lymphedema after surgery and radiotherapy in gynecological malignancies. Methodology: A total of 512 subjects who undergo treatment for gynecological malignancies in the department of surgical oncology and / or radiotherapy were screened to find out the incidence of lymphedema by measuring limb circumference with inch tape and extracellular fluid (ECF) volume with bio-impedance analyzer at four intervals, before surgery/ radiotherapy, after surgery/radiotherapy, three months follow-up and six months follow-up. The limb circumference and ECF were used to find out the lymphedema. Results: Turkey's pairwise comparison test was carried out to determine the incidence of lymphedema in both subjects (radiotherapy & surgery). The percentage of incidence of lymphedema in subjects who have undergone radiotherapy and surgical treatment with gynecological malignancies is 18.94% overall. Conclusion: Many subjects developed lymphedema with post-treatment gynecological malignancies. It causes significant functional problems, emotional disturbances, adversely affecting the quality of life, and it also causes a financial burden to the family. Lymphedema can be diagnosed initially using a Bio-impedance analyzer and inch tape to minimize the complications and progression of the disease

Active Online Anomaly Detection using Dirichlet Process Mixture Model and Gaussian Process Classification

We present a novel anomaly detection (AD) system for streaming videos. Different from prior methods that rely on unsupervised learning of clip representations, that are usually coarse in nature, and batch-mode learning, we propose the combination of two non-parametric models for our task: i) Dirichlet process mixture models (DPMM) based modeling of object motion and directions in each cell, and ii) Gaussian process based active learning paradigm involving labeling by a domain expert. Whereas conventional clip representation methods adopt quantizing only motion directions leading to a lossy, coarse representation that are inadequate, our clip representation approach results in fine grained clusters at each cell that model the scene activities (both direction and speed) more effectively. For active anomaly detection, we adapt a Gaussian Process framework to process incoming samples (video snippets) sequentially, seek labels for confusing or informative samples and update the AD model online. Furthermore, the proposed video representation along with a novel query criterion to select informative samples for labeling that incorporates both exploration and exploitation criteria is proposed, and is found to outperform competing criteria on two challenging traffic scene datasets

Mapping ecologically sensitive, significant and salient areas of Western Ghats: proposed protocols and methodology

The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India (GOI) has been asked to identify ecologically sensitive areas (ESAs) along the Western Ghats, and to suggest how to manage them. The concept of ESAs has been extensively discussed in the literature. Several ESAs have been set up in India over the last 22 years under the Environment Protection Act, 1986, and a GOI committee under the chairmanship of Pranob Sen has proposed certain criteria for identification of ESAs. However, WGEEP noted that we still lack a global consensus either on the criteria to define ESAs or on a workable methodology to identify them. Furthermore, there are no clear guidelines on the management regime that should prevail in ESAs, and the Pranob Sen Committee has not addressed this issue at all. Hence, WGEEP decided to undertake an exercise of defining ESAs and developing a workable methodology to assign levels of ecological significance/sensitivity as a first step towards putting ESAs on the map of the Western Ghats. This article provides a report on the outcome of a series of discussions and consultations held by WGEEP to build a consensus on defining and mapping ESAs. It hopes to provoke discussion and feedback from a wider section of experts, with the aim of finalizing a generic methodology for mapping ESAs in other ecologically sign ificant, biodiversity-rich areas within and outside the country. We hope to shortly prepare a companion paper that will address the equally vital management issues

Epigenetic profile of the euchromatic region of human Y chromosome

The genome of a multi-cellular organism acquires various functional capabilities in different cell types by means of distinct chromatin modifications and packaging states. Acquired during early development, the cell type-specific epigenotype is maintained by cellular memory mechanisms that involve epigenetic modifications. Here we present the epigenetic status of the euchromatic region of the human Y chromosome that has mostly been ignored in earlier whole genome epigenetic mapping studies. Using ChIP-on-chip approach, we mapped H3K9ac, H3K9me3, H3K27me3 modifications and CTCF binding sites while DNA methylation analysis of selected CpG islands was done using bisulfite sequencing. The global pattern of histone modifications observed on the Y chromosome reflects the functional state and evolutionary history of the sequences that constitute it. The combination of histone and DNA modifications, along with CTCF association in some cases, reveals the transcriptional potential of all protein coding genes including the sex-determining gene SRY and the oncogene TSPY. We also observe preferential association of histone marks with different tandem repeats, suggesting their importance in genome organization and gene regulation. Our results present the first large scale epigenetic analysis of the human Y chromosome and link a number of cis-elements to epigenetic regulatory mechanisms, enabling an understanding of such mechanisms in Y chromosome linked disorders

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

A Framework for Modeling B2B Applications

This paper presents a Web services-based framework for modeling Business-to-Business (B2B) applications. This framework consists of three levels namely strategic, application, and resource, with focus here on the first two levels. The strategic level is about the common vision that independent businesses define as part of their decision to join forces. And the application level is about the business processes that get virtually integrated as result of this common vision. To implement the strategic and application levels, this paper leverages from our earlier two projects referred to as Context-Aware Web Services and Coordination Model for Web Services, respectively. Hence in line with these projects we model B2B applications as context-aware Web services. Context-based modeling is used for modeling and tracking interactions among B2B applications, with emphasis on how conflicts among the applications are identified and managed. The application of our framework to a BlB scenario relies on a casestudy from the purchasing domain. We also present a prototype implementation of our framework on this domain. © 2008 IEEE

Resveratrol induced inhibition of Escherichia coli proceeds via membrane oxidation and independent of diffusible reactive oxygen species generation

Resveratrol (5-[(E)-2-(4-hydroxyphenyl)ethenyl]benzene-1,3-diol), a redox active phytoalexin with a large number of beneficial activities is also known for antibacterial property. However the mechanism of action of resveratrol against bacteria remains unknown. Due to its extensive redox property it was envisaged if reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation by resveratrol could be a reason behind its antibacterial activity. Employing Escherichia coli as a model organism we have evaluated the role of diffusible reactive oxygen species in the events leading to inhibition of this organism by resveratrol. Evidence for the role of ROS in E. coli treated with resveratrol was investigated by direct quantification of ROS by flow cytometry, supplementation with ROS scavengers, depletion of intracellular glutathione, employing mutants devoid of enzymatic antioxidant defences, induction of adaptive response prior to resveratrol challenge and monitoring oxidative stress response elements oxyR, soxS and soxR upon resveratrol treatment. Resveratrol treatment did not result in scavengable ROS generation in E. coli cells. However, evidence towards membrane damage was obtained by potassium leakage (atomic absorption spectrometry) and propidium iodide uptake (flow cytometry and microscopy) as an early event. Based on the comprehensive evidences this study concludes for the first time the antibacterial property of resveratrol against E. coli does not progress via the diffusible ROS but is mediated by site-specific oxidative damage to the cell membrane as the primary event