Kogenerační cykly ve vodotrubných kotlech

Cogeneration – joint generation of electricity and heat brings savings in consumption of primary fuels. Therefore, it contributes to reduction of harmful substances emission to the atmosphere (CO2 emission), which also means reduction of external costs of energy and heat generation. Until present, the cogeneration cycles have not been used in heating plants equipped with water boilers (in particular the water-tube ones). This paper presents a concept of innovative cogeneration cycle which operates with a water heating or industrial boiler. The cogeneration cycle does not change the approval of technical parameters of the boiler and it does not limit the scope of its use. The developed comparative cycles in the h-s and T-s systems and simulation model of the unit cogeneration cycle are presented as diagrams and cogeneration indicators. Furthermore, economic indicators of cogeneration are presented for water boilers.Kogenerace - společná výroba elektřiny a tepla přináší úspory spotřeby primárních paliv. Proto přispívá ke snížení emisí škodlivých látek do ovzduší (emise CO2), což také znamená snížení externích nákladů na výrobu energie a tepla. Dosud nebyly kogenerační cykly používány v teplárnách s parními kotly (zejména vodotrubnými). Tento článek představuje koncept inovačního kogeneračního cyklu, který pracuje s ohřevem vody u průmyslového kotle. Kogenerační cyklus nemění schválené technické parametry kotle a neomezuje rozsah jeho použití. Vyvinuté srovnávací cykly v systémech h-s a T-s a simulační model kogeneračního cyklu jednotky jsou prezentovány jako diagramy a ukazatele kogenerace. Dále jsou představeny ekonomické ukazatele kogenerace pro vodotrubné kotle

Categorization of indoor places using the Kinect sensor

The categorization of places in indoor environments is an important capability for service robots working and interacting with humans. In this paper we present a method to categorize different areas in indoor environments using a mobile robot equipped with a Kinect camera. Our approach transforms depth and grey scale images taken at each place into histograms of local binary patterns (LBPs) whose dimensionality is further reduced following a uniform criterion. The histograms are then combined into a single feature vector which is categorized using a supervised method. In this work we compare the performance of support vector machines and random forests as supervised classifiers. Finally, we apply our technique to distinguish five different place categories: corridors, laboratories, offices, kitchens, and study rooms. Experimental results show that we can categorize these places with high accuracy using our approach

Initial Evidence from the German Audit Market

This study investigates the economic auditor–client dependency issue by examining the association between abnormal audit fee pricing and audit quality. Our study is the first to analyze this phenomenon empirically for the institutional setting of German IFRS firms by using a sample of 2,334 firm- year observations for the period from 2005 to 2010. Our empirical results demonstrate that positive abnormal audit fees are negatively associated with audit quality and imply that the audit fee premium is a significant indicator of compromised auditor independence due to economic auditor–client bonding. Audit fee discounts generally do not lead to a reduced audit effort, or respectively, audit quality is not impaired when client bargaining power is strong. The association of positive abnormal audit fees and audit quality is robust to different audit quality surrogates such as absolute discretionary accruals, financial restatements, and meeting or beating analysts’ earnings forecasts

ImageCLEF 2013: The vision, the data and the open challenges

This paper presents an overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 lab. Since its first edition in 2003, ImageCLEF has become one of the key initiatives promoting the benchmark evaluation of algorithms for the cross-language annotation and retrieval of images in various domains, such as public and personal images, to data acquired by mobile robot platforms and botanic collections. Over the years, by providing new data collections and challenging tasks to the community of interest, the ImageCLEF lab has achieved an unique position in the multi lingual image annotation and retrieval research landscape. The 2013 edition consisted of three tasks: the photo annotation and retrieval task, the plant identification task and the robot vision task. Furthermore, the medical annotation task, that traditionally has been under the ImageCLEF umbrella and that this year celebrates its tenth anniversary, has been organized in conjunction with AMIA for the first time. The paper describes the tasks and the 2013 competition, giving an unifying perspective of the present activities of the lab while discussion the future challenges and opportunities.This work has been partially supported by the Halser Foundation (B. C.),by the LiMoSINe FP7 project under grant # 288024 (B. T.), by the Khresmoi (grant# 257528) and PROMISE ( grant # 258191) FP 7 projects (H.M.) and by the tranScriptorium FP7 project under grant # 600707 (M. V., R. P.)Caputo ., B.; Muller ., H.; Thomee ., B.; Villegas, M.; Paredes Palacios, R.; Zellhofer ., D.; Goeau ., H.... (2013). ImageCLEF 2013: The vision, the data and the open challenges. En Information Access Evaluation. Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Visualization. Springer Verlag (Germany). 8138:250-268. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40802-1_26S2502688138Muller, H., Clough, P., Deselaers, T., Caputo, B.: ImageCLEF: experimental evaluation in visual information retrieval. Springer (2010)Tsikrika, T., Seco de Herrera, A.G., Müller, H.: Assessing the scholarly impact of imageCLEF. In: Forner, P., Gonzalo, J., Kekäläinen, J., Lalmas, M., de Rijke, M. (eds.) CLEF 2011. LNCS, vol. 6941, pp. 95–106. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)Huiskes, M., Lew, M.: The MIR Flickr retrieval evaluation. In: Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval, Vancouver, BC, Canada, pp. 39–43 (2008)Huiskes, M., Thomee, B., Lew, M.: New trends and ideas in visual concept detection. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Multimedia Information Retrieval, Philadelphia, PA, USA, pp. 527–536 (2010)Villegas, M., Paredes, R.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2012 Scalable Web Image Annotation Task. In: CLEF 2012 Evaluation Labs and Workshop, Online Working Notes, Rome, Italy (2012)Zellhöfer, D.: Overview of the Personal Photo Retrieval Pilot Task at ImageCLEF 2012. In: CLEF 2012 Evaluation Labs and Workshop, Online Working Notes, Rome, Italy (2012)Villegas, M., Paredes, R., Thomee, B.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 Scalable Concept Image Annotation Subtask. In: CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop, Online Working Notes, Valencia, Spain (2013)Zellhöfer, D.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 Personal Photo Retrieval Subtask. In: CLEF 2013 Evaluation Labs and Workshop, Online Working Notes, Valencia, Spain (2013)Leafsnap (2011)Plantnet (2013)Mobile flora (2013)Folia (2012)Goëau, H., Bonnet, P., Joly, A., Bakic, V., Boujemaa, N., Barthelemy, D., Molino, J.F.: The imageclef 2013 plant identification task. In: ImageCLEF 2013 Working Notes (2013)Pronobis, A., Xing, L., Caputo, B.: Overview of the CLEF 2009 robot vision track. In: Peters, C., Caputo, B., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Müller, H., Tsikrika, T. (eds.) CLEF 2009. LNCS, vol. 6242, pp. 110–119. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Pronobis, A., Caputo, B.: The robot vision task. In: Muller, H., Clough, P., Deselaers, T., Caputo, B. (eds.) ImageCLEF. The Information Retrieval Series, vol. 32, pp. 185–198. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Pronobis, A., Christensen, H.I., Caputo, B.: Overview of the imageCLEF@ICPR 2010 robot vision track. In: Ünay, D., Çataltepe, Z., Aksoy, S. (eds.) ICPR 2010. LNCS, vol. 6388, pp. 171–179. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Martinez-Gomez, J., Garcia-Varea, I., Caputo, B.: Overview of the imageclef 2012 robot vision task. In: CLEF 2012 Working Notes (2012)Rusu, R., Cousins, S.: 3d is here: Point cloud library (pcl). In: 2011 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 1–4. IEEE (2011)Bosch, A., Zisserman, A., Munoz, X.: Image classification using random forests and ferns. In: International Conference on Computer Vision, pp. 1–8. Citeseer (2007)Dalal, N., Triggs, B.: Histograms of oriented gradients for human detection. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2005, vol. 1, pp. 886–893. IEEE (2005)Linde, O., Lindeberg, T.: Object recognition using composed receptive field histograms of higher dimensionality. In: Proc. ICPR. Citeseer (2004)Orabona, F., Castellini, C., Caputo, B., Luo, J., Sandini, G.: Indoor place recognition using online independent support vector machines. In: Proc. BMVC, vol. 7 (2007)Orabona, F., Castellini, C., Caputo, B., Jie, L., Sandini, G.: On-line independent support vector machines. Pattern Recognition 43, 1402–1412 (2010)Orabona, F., Jie, L., Caputo, B.: Online-Batch Strongly Convex Multi Kernel Learning. In: Proc. of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR (2010)Orabona, F., Jie, L., Caputo, B.: Multi kernel learning with online-batch optimization. Journal of Machine Learning Research 13, 165–191 (2012)Clough, P., Müller, H., Sanderson, M.: The CLEF 2004 cross-language image retrieval track. In: Peters, C., Clough, P., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kluck, M., Magnini, B. (eds.) CLEF 2004. LNCS, vol. 3491, pp. 597–613. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)Clough, P., Müller, H., Deselaers, T., Grubinger, M., Lehmann, T.M., Jensen, J., Hersh, W.: The CLEF 2005 cross–language image retrieval track. In: Peters, C., Gey, F.C., Gonzalo, J., Müller, H., Jones, G.J.F., Kluck, M., Magnini, B., de Rijke, M., Giampiccolo, D. (eds.) CLEF 2005. LNCS, vol. 4022, pp. 535–557. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)Müller, H., Deselaers, T., Deserno, T., Clough, P., Kim, E., Hersh, W.: Overview of the imageCLEFmed 2006 medical retrieval and medical annotation tasks. In: Peters, C., Clough, P., Gey, F.C., Karlgren, J., Magnini, B., Oard, D.W., de Rijke, M., Stempfhuber, M. (eds.) CLEF 2006. LNCS, vol. 4730, pp. 595–608. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)Müller, H., Deselaers, T., Deserno, T., Kalpathy–Cramer, J., Kim, E., Hersh, W.: Overview of the imageCLEFmed 2007 medical retrieval and medical annotation tasks. In: Peters, C., Jijkoun, V., Mandl, T., Müller, H., Oard, D.W., Peñas, A., Petras, V., Santos, D. (eds.) CLEF 2007. LNCS, vol. 5152, pp. 472–491. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Müller, H., Kalpathy–Cramer, J., Eggel, I., Bedrick, S., Radhouani, S., Bakke, B., Kahn Jr., C.E., Hersh, W.: Overview of the CLEF 2009 medical image retrieval track. In: Peters, C., Caputo, B., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Müller, H., Tsikrika, T. (eds.) CLEF 2009, Part II. LNCS, vol. 6242, pp. 72–84. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Tommasi, T., Caputo, B., Welter, P., Güld, M.O., Deserno, T.M.: Overview of the CLEF 2009 medical image annotation track. In: Peters, C., Caputo, B., Gonzalo, J., Jones, G.J.F., Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Müller, H., Tsikrika, T. (eds.) CLEF 2009. LNCS, vol. 6242, pp. 85–93. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Müller, H., Clough, P., Deselaers, T., Caputo, B. (eds.): ImageCLEF – Experimental Evaluation in Visual Information Retrieval. The Springer International Series on Information Retrieval, vol. 32. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Müller, H., Bedrick, S., Eggel, I., García Seco de Herrera, A., Tsikrika, T.: The CLEF 2011 medical image retrieval and classification tasks. In: Working Notes of CLEF 2011 (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) (2011)Müller, H., García Seco de Herrera, A., Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Demner Fushman, D., Antani, S., Eggel, I.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2012 medical image retrieval and classification tasks. In: Working Notes of CLEF 2012 (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) (2012)García Seco de Herrera, A., Kalpathy-Cramer, J., Demner Fushman, D., Antani, S., Müller, H.: Overview of the ImageCLEF 2013 medical tasks. In: Working Notes of CLEF 2013 (Cross Language Evaluation Forum) (2013

LOOKING INSIDE THE WNT/BETA-CATENIN DESTRUCTION COMPLEX: MECHANISMS AND THE MINIMAL MACHINE

The Wnt/beta-catenin pathway is one of the most studied signaling pathways. It is essential throughout development, and its dysregulation is linked to various diseases including cancer. We have learned much about on how Wnt signaling is activated, but less is known about its downregulation. Wnt signals are transduced via effects on levels of the transcriptional co-activator β-catenin (βcat). This is achieved by the destruction complex which consists of Adenomatous polyposis coli (APC), the scaffold Axin, and the kinases GSK3 and CK1 which target βcat for ubiquitination and subsequent proteasomal degradation. APC and Axin are the key negative regulators of Wnt signaling. While Axin acts as the scaffold of the destruction complex, APC’s role remained unknown. In our work we first explored APC’s βcat binding sites and their role in regulation of Wnt signaling. We found that the βcat binding sites act additively in the sequestration of βcat. Next we explored APC’s mechanistic function in the destruction complex. We found that the destruction complex is not a static entity but a dynamic structure in which assembly and conformational change drive βcat degradation. My work revealed the internal structure of the APC:Axin complex, in which Axin forms strands and sheets, while APC stimulates Axin multimerization. Based on my data, we concluded that APC plays two roles inside the destruction complex: (1) APC promotes efficient Axin multimerization through one known and one novel APC:Axin interaction site, and (2) APC promotes turnover of βcat to the E3-ligase by a GSK3-regulated mechanism. In my third project we investigated the interplay of APC and Axin and their functional relationship. Both APC and Axin are essential at endogenous levels. However, in APC deficient cell lines overexpression of Axin compensates for mutation of APC and reduces βcat, suggesting APC and Axin act redundantly to facilitate βcat destruction. Based on my data I found that (1) several combinations of non-functional APC and Axin mutants can complement one another in stimulating βcat degradation, suggesting that the APC:Axin complex is a robust machine, (2) that a total of 5 regions in APC and Axin are essential for a functional destruction complex, and (3) that these 5 essential regions can reconstitute the wildtype APC:Axin complex in features and functions, thus representing the minimal βcat destruction machine.Doctor of Philosoph