Fuzzy-valued integrals based on a constructive methodology

summary:The procedures for constructing a fuzzy number and a fuzzy-valued function from a family of closed intervals and two families of real-valued functions, respectively, are proposed in this paper. The constructive methodology follows from the form of the well-known “Resolution Identity” (decomposition theorem) in fuzzy sets theory. The fuzzy-valued measure is also proposed by introducing the notion of convergence for a sequence of fuzzy numbers. Under this setting, we develop the fuzzy-valued integral of fuzzy-valued function with respect to fuzzy-valued measure. Finally, we provide a Dominated Convergence Theorem for fuzzy-valued integrals

Can Social Exchange Theory Explain Individual Knowledge-Sharing Behavior? A Meta-Analysis

Motivating people to contribute knowledge has become an important research topic and a major challenge for organizations. In order to promote knowledge-sharing, managers need to understand the mechanism that drives individuals to contribute their valuable knowledge. Several theories have been applied to study knowledge-sharing behavior. However, the research settings and findings are often inconsistent. In this study, we use the social exchange theory as our base to develop an extended model that includes IT support and organizational type as moderators. A meta-analysis on 29 reported studies was conducted to examine how different factors in the social exchange theory affect knowledge-sharing behavior. The findings confirm that the social exchange theory plays an important role underlying individuals’ knowledge-sharing behavior. The results also demonstrate that social interaction and trust derived from the social exchange theory and moderated by IT contextual factors can predict individual’s knowledge-sharing behavior

A Semi-automatic Approach to Identifying and Unifying Ambiguously Encoded Arabic-Based Characters

In this study, we outline a potential problem in normalising texts that are based on a modified version of the Arabic alphabet. One of the main resources available for processing resource-scarce languages is raw text collected from the Internet. Many less-resourced languages, such as Kurdish, Farsi, Urdu, Pashtu, etc., use a modified version of the Arabic writing system. Many characters in harvested data from the Internet may have exactly the same form but encoded with different Unicode values (ambiguous characters). The existence of ambiguous characters in words leads to word duplication, thus it is important to identify and unify ambiguous characters during the normalisation stage. Here, we demonstrate cases related to ambiguous Kurdish and Farsi characters and propose a semi-automatic approach to identifying and unifying them

Early Detection of Tumor Response by FLT/MicroPET Imaging in a C26 Murine Colon Carcinoma Solid Tumor Animal Model

Fluorine-18 fluorodeoxyglucose (18F-FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) imaging demonstrated the change of glucose consumption of tumor cells, but problems with specificity and difficulties in early detection of tumor response to chemotherapy have led to the development of new PET tracers. Fluorine-18-fluorothymidine (18F-FLT) images cellular proliferation by entering the salvage pathway of DNA synthesis. In this study, we evaluate the early response of colon carcinoma to the chemotherapeutic drug, lipo-Dox, in C26 murine colorectal carcinoma-bearing mice by 18F-FDG and 18F-FLT. The male BALB/c mice were bilaterally inoculated with 1 × 105 and 1 × 106 C26 tumor cells per flank. Mice were intravenously treated with 10 mg/kg lipo-Dox at day 8 after 18F-FDG and 18F-FLT imaging. The biodistribution of 18F-FDG and 18F-FLT were followed by the microPET imaging at day 9. For the quantitative measurement of microPET imaging at day 9, 18F-FLT was superior to 18F-FDG for early detection of tumor response to Lipo-DOX at various tumor sizes (P < 0.05). The data of biodistribution showed similar results with those from the quantification of SUV (standard uptake value) by microPET imaging. The study indicates that 18F-FLT/microPET is a useful imaging modality for early detection of chemotherapy in the colorectal mouse model

Improved Arabic Characters Recognition by Combining Multiple Machine Learning Classifiers

In this paper, we investigate a range of strategies for combining multiple machine learning techniques for recognizing Arabic characters, where we are faced with imperfect and dimensionally variable input characters. Experimental results show that combined confidence-based backoff strategies can produce more accurate results than each technique produces by itself and even the ones exhibited by the majority voting combination