Factors Influencing Online Banking Customer Satisfaction and Their Importance in Improving Overall Retention Levels: An Indian Banking Perspective

In recent years, the banking industry around the world has been undergoing a rapid transformation. The deepening of information technology has facilitated better tracking and fulfillment of commitments, multiple delivery channels for online customers and faster resolution of issues. In India too, the wave of deregulation in the early 1990s has created heightened competition and greater risks for banks and financial intermediaries. Today, customers expect higher quality services from banks which, if fulfilled, could result in significantly improved customer satisfaction levels. This empirical research study mainly focuses on investigating the major factors that influence online customers' satisfaction with the overall service quality of their banks. This study also helps in assessing the power of these factors in the context of Online(Internet) banking and would, therefore, help the bank management not only in improving the level of satisfaction but also strengthening the bond between the banks and their customers, thereby helping them to retain and/or expand their overall customer base. Keywords: Online Banking, Customer Satisfactio

Heterogeneous Photonic Network-on-Chip with Dynamic Bandwidth Allocation

Advancements in the field of chip fabrication has facilitated in integrating more number of transistors in a given area which has lead to an era of multi-core processors. Future multi-core chips or chip multiprocessors (CMPs) will have hundreds of heterogeneous components including processing engines, custom logic, GPU units, programmable fabrics and distributed memory. Such multi-core chips are expected to run varied multiple parallel workloads simultaneously. Hence, different communicating cores will require different bandwidths leading to the necessity of a heterogeneous Network-on-Chip (NoC) architecture. Simply over-provisioning for performance will invariably result in loss of power efficiency. On the other hand, recent research has shown that photonic interconnects are capable of achieving high-bandwidth and energy-efficient on-chip data transfer. In this paper we propose a dynamic heterogeneous photonic NoC (d-HetPNOC) architecture with dynamic bandwidth allocation to achieve better performance and energy-efficiency compared to a homogeneous photonic NoC architecture with the same aggregate data bandwidth

HIV-1 gp120 and Methamphetamine-mediated Induction of Proinflammatory Cytokines/chemokines and Oxidative Stress in Astrocytes: Implications in Neuroinflammation

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on April 2, 2014Dissertation advisor: Anil KumarVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 135-162)Thesis (Ph. D.)--School of Pharmacy and School of Biological Sciences. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2013HIV associated neurocognitive disorder (HAND) remains a major concern for patients infected with HIV. The viral envelope protein, gp120 has been extensively studied and some of its neurotoxic effects are due to the increased expression of various proinflammatory cytokines. Additionally, it has been well documented that various drugs of abuse can exacerbate HAND, but the mechanism by which this occurs is still poorly understood. The present study was based on the central hypothesis that HIV-1 gp120 and methamphetamine (MA) interact with each other to increase the cytotoxicity in the astrocytes, which is mediated via induction of various pro-inflammatory cytokines/chemokines and oxidative stress. In order to test these hypothesis four different studies were designed. We also investigated the mechanism(s) and pathways involved in the functional interaction between gp120 and MA. Furthermore, in order to understand the functional implications of the interaction between MA and gp120, we examined the combined effect of MA and gp120 to produce oxidative stress and apoptotic cell death. In the first study, we investigated the role of gp120 in the cytokine production in astrocytes. SVGA astrocytes and human fetal astrocytes were either transfected with a plasmid coding gp120 or treated with recombinant gp120 protein and the expression levels of various cytokines at RNA and protein levels were measured. In order to better explain the role of gp120 in the induction of proinflammatory cytokines/chemokines, 3 major and highly induced cytokines/chemokines were screened and further mechanistic studies were aimed with these 3 cytokines/chemokines. We investigated the role of NF- κB pathway in the transcriptional regulation followed by studies to identify molecular mechanisms. Various MAPKs were assessed for their involvement in the gp120-mediated cytokine/chemokine production. Finally the involvement of PI3K/Akt was explored to understand the signaling pathway upstream of NF-κB. The second study was designed to address the role of MA in the cytokine production in astrocytes. As observed with gp120, MA also showed increase in the expression of various proinflammatory cytokines. In particular, the induction of IL-6 and IL-8 was found to involve the NF-κB pathway. Furthermore, the activation of NF-κB was found to be independent of MAPKs. However, our studies with PI3K/Akt pathway and mGluR5 suggested that these signaling molecules could trigger the activation of NF-κB. In the third part of the study, we demonstrated that astrocytes treated with both MA and gp120 increased the expression of IL-6 to levels that are much higher than when cells are treated with either agent alone. This suggested that MA and gp120 may act synergistically to increase the expression of IL-6. Furthermore, the increase in the levels of IL-6 due to treatment with both gp120 and MA was found to involve the PI3K/Akt and NF-κB pathways. Inhibition of either of these pathways could abrogate the increased expression of IL-6 due to MA or gp120 alone, and the increased expression of IL-6 when the astrocytes were treated with both gp120 and MA. Additionally, our results demonstrated that neither MA nor gp120 utilized the JNK-MAPK and ERK1/2 pathways to increase IL-6 expression. In the final chapter, we also demonstrated that gp120 and MA cause apoptotic cell death by inducing oxidative stress through the cytochrome P450 (CYP) and NADPH oxidase (NOX) pathways. The results showed that both MA and gp120 induced ROS production in concentration- and time-dependent manners. The combination of gp120 and MA also induced CYP2E1 expression at both mRNA and protein levels, suggesting the involvement of CYP2E1 in ROS production. This was further confirmed by using selective inhibitors of ROS (Vitamin C), CYP2E1 (DAS), NOX, diphenyleneiodonium (DPI), and FWH reaction, deferoxamine (DFO), which significantly reduced ROS production. These findings were further confirmed using specific siRNAs against NOX2 and NOX4 (NADPH oxidase family). Furthermore, gp120 and MA both induced apoptosis (as evidenced by increased caspase-3 activity and DNA lesion via TUNEL assay) and cell death (measured using MTT assay). Additionally, Vitamin C, DAS, DPI, and DFO completely abolished apoptosis and cell death, suggesting the involvement of CYP and NOX pathways in ROS-mediated apoptotic cell death. In conclusion, we showed that both MA and gp120 independently and in combination increased the production of pro-inflammatory cytokine/chemokines via different pathways. The functional consequences for the interaction between gp120 and MA led to oxidative stress and apoptotic cell death in astrocytes. Thus, our current study provides the evidence and underlying mechanism for the neurotoxic potential of HIV protein, gp120 and substance of abuse, methamphetamineAbstract -- Tables -- Illustrations -- Abbreviations -- Acknowledgements -- General introduction -- General materials and methods -- Evaluation of the role of HIV-1 gp120 in the expression of proinflammatory cytokines/chemokines and the underlying mechanism(s) -- Evaluation of the role of methamphetamine on the expression of IL-6 and IL-8 in astrocytes and the underlying mechanism(s) -- Synergistic cooperation between methamphetamine and HIV-1 gp120 through the PI3K/Akt pathway induces IL-6 but not IL-8 expression in astrocytes -- HIV gp120 and methamphetamine-mediated oxidative stress induces astrocyte apoptosis via cytochrome P450 2E1 -- Future directions -- Appendix -- Reference

Bayes-TrEx: a Bayesian Sampling Approach to Model Transparency by Example

Post-hoc explanation methods are gaining popularity for interpreting, understanding, and debugging neural networks. Most analyses using such methods explain decisions in response to inputs drawn from the test set. However, the test set may have few examples that trigger some model behaviors, such as high-confidence failures or ambiguous classifications. To address these challenges, we introduce a flexible model inspection framework: Bayes-TrEx. Given a data distribution, Bayes-TrEx finds in-distribution examples with a specified prediction confidence. We demonstrate several use cases of Bayes-TrEx, including revealing highly confident (mis)classifications, visualizing class boundaries via ambiguous examples, understanding novel-class extrapolation behavior, and exposing neural network overconfidence. We use Bayes-TrEx to study classifiers trained on CLEVR, MNIST, and Fashion-MNIST, and we show that this framework enables more flexible holistic model analysis than just inspecting the test set. Code is available at https://github.com/serenabooth/Bayes-TrEx.Comment: Accepted at AAAI 202