An approach for selecting text from e-mail in satellite-based education

It was in September 2004 that Indian Space Research Organization(ISRO), in its endeavor to provide sustainable distance education service in India, launched EDUSAT that is designed to supplement the present teaching system in the country.The EDUSAT project has sought to wipe out disparities in quality between the various educational institut ions by addressing itself to key issues of access, interactivity, cost-effectiveness and consistency of information to students.One subject expert can simultaneously teach hundreds of students in multiple locations across a vast geographical area.The major issue of paucity of faculty members in higher education has been tackled in one single stroke. In this regard, VTU has set up a Forum(http://forum.vtu.ac.in), which provides a platform for students to exchange their view, share resources and also get answers from subject experts by sending their queries into this Forum by e-mail.As this VTU-EDUSAT network is being used by a whopping 150,000 students, there will be thousands of questions from students across different subjects that will be handled through the network by hundreds of subject experts.The questions will be aired by the students during the live sessions of the satellite-based programme or by sending e-mail post transmission of sessions.Further, there will be number of questions by the students after they go through the e-Learning content.It has become impossible to answer all these questions by the subject experts because of paucity of time.It is also observed that there will be many questions that are similar or repetitive or these questions would have been answered earlier by the subject experts.Also, it is impossible for the subject expert to go through all the e-mails completely.Therefore, it is required to develop a solution that involves summarization of e-mail text sent by the students, which means selection of important sentences or text so as to compare them with the current database of questions. Once comparison is made, only the non- repetitive questions are extracted and place them before the subject expert. Further, if the answer is already available for questions, the system advices students to refer the FAQ data base.Here, it is necessary to distinguish the important information with less important information within the original text (e-mail).For this, we need the combination of two steps: information filtering and text reduction.The on-going research is to address such an issue by domain-specific text summarization. We have made an attempt to develop a model that examines content-based text selection

Bundling up carbon nanotubes through Wigner defects

We show, using ab initio total energy density functional theory, that the so-called Wigner defects, an interstitial carbon atom right besides a vacancy, which are present in irradiated graphite can also exist in bundles of carbon nanotubes. Due to the geometrical structure of a nanotube, however, this defect has a rather low formation energy, lower than the vacancy itself, suggesting that it may be one of the most important defects that are created after electron or ion irradiation. Moreover, they form a strong link between the nanotubes in bundles, increasing their shear modulus by a sizeable amount, clearly indicating its importance for the mechanical properties of nanotube bundles.Comment: 5 pages and 4 figure

Analysis of cardiac signals using spatial filling index and time-frequency domain

BACKGROUND: Analysis of heart rate variation (HRV) has become a popular noninvasive tool for assessing the activities of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). HRV analysis is based on the concept that fast fluctuations may specifically reflect changes of sympathetic and vagal activity. It shows that the structure generating the signal is not simply linear, but also involves nonlinear contributions. These signals are essentially non-stationary; may contain indicators of current disease, or even warnings about impending diseases. The indicators may be present at all times or may occur at random in the time scale. However, to study and pinpoint abnormalities in voluminous data collected over several hours is strenuous and time consuming. METHODS: This paper presents the spatial filling index and time-frequency analysis of heart rate variability signal for disease identification. Renyi's entropy is evaluated for the signal in the Wigner-Ville and Continuous Wavelet Transformation (CWT) domain. RESULTS: This Renyi's entropy gives lower 'p' value for scalogram than Wigner-Ville distribution and also, the contours of scalogram visually show the features of the diseases. And in the time-frequency analysis, the Renyi's entropy gives better result for scalogram than the Wigner-Ville distribution. CONCLUSION: Spatial filling index and Renyi's entropy has distinct regions for various diseases with an accuracy of more than 95%

Molecular Cloning and Expression Analysis of fushi tarazu Factor 1 in the Brain of Air-Breathing Catfish, Clarias gariepinus

BACKGROUND: Fushi tarazu factor 1 (FTZ-F1) encodes an orphan nuclear receptor belonging to the nuclear receptor family 5A (NR5A) which includes adrenal 4-binding protein or steroidogenic factor-1 (Ad4BP/SF-1) and liver receptor homologue 1 (LRH-1) and plays a pivotal role in the regulation of aromatases. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Present study was aimed to understand the importance of FTZ-F1 in relation to brain aromatase (cyp19a1b) during development, recrudescence and after human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) induction. Initially, we cloned FTZ-F1 from the brain of air-breathing catfish, Clarias gariepinus through degenerate primer RT-PCR and RACE. Its sequence analysis revealed high homology with other NR5A1 group members Ad4BP/SF-1 and LRH-1, and also analogous to the spatial expression pattern of the latter. In order to draw functional correlation of cyp19a1b and FTZ-F1, we analyzed the expression pattern of the latter in brain during gonadal ontogeny, which revealed early expression during gonadal differentiation. The tissue distribution both at transcript and protein levels revealed its prominent expression in brain along with liver, kidney and testis. The expression pattern of brain FTZ-F1 during reproductive cycle and after hCG induction, in vivo was analogous to that of cyp19a1b shown in our earlier study indicating its involvement in recrudescence. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Based on our previous results on cyp19a1b and the present data, it is plausible to implicate potential roles for brain FTZ-F1 in ovarian differentiation and recrudescence process probably through regulation of cyp19a1b in teleosts. Nevertheless, these interactions would require primary coordinated response from ovarian aromatase and its related transcription factors

Prospective Observational Study on acute Appendicitis Worldwide (POSAW)

Acute appendicitis (AA) is the most common surgical disease, and appendectomy is the treatment of choice in the majority of cases. A correct diagnosis is key for decreasing the negative appendectomy rate. The management can become difficult in case of complicated appendicitis. The aim of this study is to describe the worldwide clinical and diagnostic work-up and management of AA in surgical departments.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Multimodel analysis of energy and water fluxes: Intercomparisons between operational analyses, a land surface model, and remote sensing

Using data from seven global model operational analyses (OA), one land surface model, and various remote sensing retrievals, the energy and water fluxes over global land areas are intercompared for 2003/04. Remote sensing estimates of evapotranspiration (ET) are obtained from three process-based models that use input forcings from multisensor satellites. An ensemble mean (linear average) of the seven operational (mean-OA) models is used primarily to intercompare the fluxes with comparisons performed at both global and basin scales. At the global scale, it is found that all components of the energy budget represented by the ensemble mean of the OA models have a significant bias. Net radiation estimates had a positive bias (global mean) of 234 MJ m -2 yr -1 (7.4 W m -2) as compared to the remote sensing estimates, with the latent and sensible heat fluxes biased by 470 MJ m -2 yr -1 (13.3 W m -2) and 2367 MJ m -2 yr -1 (11.7 W m -2), respectively. The bias in the latent heat flux is affected by the bias in the net radiation, which is primarily due to the biases in the incoming shortwave and outgoing longwave radiation and to the nudging process of the operational models. The OA models also suffer from improper partitioning of the surface heat fluxes. Comparison of precipitation (P) analyses from the various OA models, gauge analysis, and remote sensing retrievals showed better agreement than the energy fluxes. Basin-scale comparisons were consistent with the global-scale results, with the results for the Amazon in particular showing disparities betweenOAand remote sensing estimates of energy fluxes. The biases in the fluxes are attributable to a combination of errors in the forcing from the OA atmospheric models and the flux calculation methods in their land surface schemes. The atmospheric forcing errors aremainly attributable to high shortwave radiation likely due to the underestimation of clouds, but also precipitation errors, especially in water-limited regions.</p