The iCrawl Wizard -- Supporting Interactive Focused Crawl Specification

Collections of Web documents about specific topics are needed for many areas of current research. Focused crawling enables the creation of such collections on demand. Current focused crawlers require the user to manually specify starting points for the crawl (seed URLs). These are also used to describe the expected topic of the collection. The choice of seed URLs influences the quality of the resulting collection and requires a lot of expertise. In this demonstration we present the iCrawl Wizard, a tool that assists users in defining focused crawls efficiently and semi-automatically. Our tool uses major search engines and Social Media APIs as well as information extraction techniques to find seed URLs and a semantic description of the crawl intent. Using the iCrawl Wizard even non-expert users can create semantic specifications for focused crawlers interactively and efficiently.Comment: Published in the Proceedings of the European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR) 201

Fungicide usage is increasing: don’t forget to rotate fungicides

Non-Peer Reviewe

Modes of TAL effector-mediated repression

Engineered transcription activator-like effectors, or TALEs, have emerged as a new class of designer DNA-binding proteins. Their DNA recognition sites can be specified with great flexibility. When fused to appropriate transcriptional regulatory domains, they can serve as designer transcription factors, modulating the activity of targeted promoters. We created tet operator (tetO)-specific TALEs (tetTALEs), with an identical DNA-binding site as the Tet repressor (TetR) and the TetR-based transcription factors that are extensively used in eukaryotic transcriptional control systems. Different constellations of tetTALEs and tetO modified chromosomal transcription units were analyzed for their efficacy in mammalian cells. We find that tetTALE-silencers can entirely abrogate expression from the strong human EF1{alpha} promoter when binding upstream of the transcriptional control sequence. Remarkably, the DNA-binding domain of tetTALE alone can effectively counteract trans-activation mediated by the potent tettrans-activator and also directly interfere with RNA polymerase II transcription initiation from the strong CMV promoter. Our results demonstrate that TALEs can act as highly versatile tools in genetic engineering, serving as trans-activators, trans-silencers and also competitive repressors

The End of the Sharing Economy? Impact of COVID-19 on Airbnb in Germany

This paper analyzes the effect the COVID-19 pandemic is having on the sharing economy. We focus on hosts’ behavior in the German shared housing market and examine hosts’ adaption to the pandemic state. Using monthly data from January 2019 until December 2020 for the city of Berlin, we conduct a probit model regression analysis and investigate the influence of several Airbnb-listing-specific factors and unemployment on the probability of renting the Airbnb accommodation. Through this big data analysis, we find that hosts switch from short-term to long-term options and rent relatively more entire apartments than shared ones during the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the pre-pandemic state

Generating Optimal Decision Functions from Rule Specifications

In this paper we sketch an approach and a tool for rapid evaluation of large systems of weighted decision rules. The tool re-implements the patented miAamics approach, originally devised as a fast technique for multicriterial decision support. The weighted rules are used to express performance critical decision functions. MiAamics optimizes the function and generates its efficient implementation fully automatically. Being declarative, the rules allow experts to define rich sets of complex functions without being familiar with any general purpose programming language. The approach also lends itself to optimize existing decision functions that can be expressed in the form of these rules.The proposed approach first transforms the system of rules into an intermediate representation of Algebraic Decision Diagrams. From this data structure, we generate code in a variety of commonly used target programming languages.We illustrate the principle and tools on a small, easily comprehensible example and present results from experiments with large systems of randomly generated rules. The proposed representation is significantly faster to evaluate and often of smaller size than the original representation. Possible miAamics applications to machine learning concern reducing ensembles of classifiers and allowing for a much faster evaluation of these classification functions. It can also naturally be applied to large scale recommender systems where performance is key

Index to the Albany Times Union, July through December 1987

The Index to the Albany Times Union is an index to the final edition of the Times Union of Albany, New York. The Index provides access to news and editorial opinion about Albany, the Capital District, and the State of New York. Items of national and international focus are indexed only when there is local, regional, or state impact. Only major crime and traffic accidents are indexed. Daily sports events are not included. Births, engagements, divorces, anniversaries, and announcement of events or attractions are not indexed. There is a separate section for obituaries

Index to the Albany Times Union, January through June 1987

The Index to the Albany Times Union is an index to the final edition of the Times Union of Albany, New York. The Index provides access to news and editorial opinion about Albany, the Capital District, and the State of New York. Items of national and international focus are indexed only when there is local, regional, or state impact. Only major crime and traffic accidents are indexed. Daily sports events are not included. Births, engagements, divorces, anniversaries, and announcement of events or attractions are not indexed. There is a separate section for obituaries