Machine Learning of User Profiles: Representational Issues

As more information becomes available electronically, tools for finding information of interest to users becomes increasingly important. The goal of the research described here is to build a system for generating comprehensible user profiles that accurately capture user interest with minimum user interaction. The research described here focuses on the importance of a suitable generalization hierarchy and representation for learning profiles which are predictively accurate and comprehensible. In our experiments we evaluated both traditional features based on weighted term vectors as well as subject features corresponding to categories which could be drawn from a thesaurus. Our experiments, conducted in the context of a content-based profiling system for on-line newspapers on the World Wide Web (the IDD News Browser), demonstrate the importance of a generalization hierarchy and the promise of combining natural language processing techniques with machine learning (ML) to address an information retrieval (IR) problem.Comment: 6 page

Buying back the right to health: legal and policy framework for facilitating access to essential medicines in developing countries

The concept of public healthcare has perennially involved the institution of measures that are necessary for the prevention of large scale epidemics. This preventive approach embodies principles of sanitation, water purification and more recently vaccination. However, the advent of new strains of viruses and an unprecedented increase in the susceptible population has expanded the ambit of primary healthcare to include effective treatment. Especially in developing countries, treatment through affordable medicines is considered fundamental to the achievement of public health goals. Thus, there exists a humanitarian obligation on the international community and the respective governments of nations, to provide effective medication to those who cannot afford it, in the larger interest of maintaining a sense of equity in the sustenance of human life. This paper analyses relevant international treaties and domestic judicial interventions that could effectuate positive change in the formulation of international trade and intellectual property policies, with regard to healthcare, at national as well as an supranational levels. The paper argues for the transfer of the decision making powers, with regard to the distribution of drugs, from the private pharmaceutical industry to the governments of countries. This, it argues, would result in a shift in prioritization from profit making motives, to the universal realization of the right to health.Keywords: Healthcare, intellectual property, human right

Heavy landings of juveniles of grouper in trawl at Neendakara Fisheries Harbour, Kollam

Neendakara Fisheries Harbour is one of the major fish landing centres of Kerala. During August- December 2005, a large number of juveniles of the grouper Epinephelus diacanthus was landed by the trawlers. The average catch/hour was 1.5 kg (Table-1), estimated catch was 316 t and the estimated numbers was about 8301763 during this period

Unusual landing of whale shark Rhincodon typus at Neendakara Fisheries Harbour, Kerala

On 29-01-2010, a whale shark (Rhincodon typus) was landed at Neendakara Fisheries Harbour in Kollam District, Kerala. The shark was caught in Hooks and Line off Chavara. The specimen landed was a juvenile female shark measuring 4.15 m (TL) and 0.83 m (maximum body depth), weighing around 450 kg. The fish was hurriedly put in a lorry and taken away and hence detailed measurements could not be taken

Variational approach to probabilistic finite elements

Probabilistic finite element method (PFEM), synthesizing the power of finite element methods with second-moment techniques, are formulated for various classes of problems in structural and solid mechanics. Time-invariant random materials, geometric properties, and loads are incorporated in terms of their fundamental statistics viz. second-moments. Analogous to the discretization of the displacement field in finite element methods, the random fields are also discretized. Preserving the conceptual simplicity, the response moments are calculated with minimal computations. By incorporating certain computational techniques, these methods are shown to be capable of handling large systems with many sources of uncertainties. By construction, these methods are applicable when the scale of randomness is not very large and when the probabilistic density functions have decaying tails. The accuracy and efficiency of these methods, along with their limitations, are demonstrated by various applications. Results obtained are compared with those of Monte Carlo simulation and it is shown that good accuracy can be obtained for both linear and nonlinear problems. The methods are amenable to implementation in deterministic FEM based computer codes

(k,q)-Compressed Sensing for dMRI with Joint Spatial-Angular Sparsity Prior

Advanced diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) techniques, like diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI) and high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI), remain underutilized compared to diffusion tensor imaging because the scan times needed to produce accurate estimations of fiber orientation are significantly longer. To accelerate DSI and HARDI, recent methods from compressed sensing (CS) exploit a sparse underlying representation of the data in the spatial and angular domains to undersample in the respective k- and q-spaces. State-of-the-art frameworks, however, impose sparsity in the spatial and angular domains separately and involve the sum of the corresponding sparse regularizers. In contrast, we propose a unified (k,q)-CS formulation which imposes sparsity jointly in the spatial-angular domain to further increase sparsity of dMRI signals and reduce the required subsampling rate. To efficiently solve this large-scale global reconstruction problem, we introduce a novel adaptation of the FISTA algorithm that exploits dictionary separability. We show on phantom and real HARDI data that our approach achieves significantly more accurate signal reconstructions than the state of the art while sampling only 2-4% of the (k,q)-space, allowing for the potential of new levels of dMRI acceleration.Comment: To be published in the 2017 Computational Diffusion MRI Workshop of MICCA

A prospective study on the pattern of antibiotic use in a tertiary care hospital

Background: Indiscriminate use of antimicrobials is rampant throughout India, and this is a matter of serious concern. There are several reports linking antibiotic usage to bacterial resistance. Towards addressing this problem, community wise surveillance needs to be undertaken to monitor antibiotic exposure including their misuse. This study was meant to assess the extent and pattern of antibiotic use in a tertiary care facility.Methods: Subjects for study were patients attending a suburban hospital in central Kerala. Case records of patients who were prescribed systemic antibiotics were perused for relevant data. Seriously ill patients were excluded from the study.Results: 610 encounters with antibiotics could be identified from a total of around 2000 patient records, indicating an encounter rate of 29%; which is quite acceptable as per the WHO standard of prescribing indicators. However, more than 70% of prescriptions carried only brand names of medications. Use of antibiotics was mostly on the basis of clinical symptoms (presumptive), and culture reports were not given due credence. Prescriptions were invariably therapeutic in nature, and the concepts of surgical prophylaxis conveniently given a go by. The most common infections were those of the Upper Respiratory Tract (URTI), followed by skin and soft tissue infections. Ampicillin, azithromycin and cefuroxime were the most frequently prescribed agents. More than one third of infections were treated with a combination of antimicrobials. A general temptation for using cephalosporin - betalactamase inhibitor combinations could be related to the aggressive promotional policies of the pharmaceutical industry.Conclusions: The overall antibiotic encounter rate is acceptable as per WHO standards. But the tendency for using injections as well as antibiotic combinations is very high. Prophylactic use of antibiotics in surgical procedures is not being followed at all. A serious attempt needs to be made to implement National Guidelines for use of antimicrobials

Quantum discord and non-Markovianity of quantum dynamics

The problem of recognizing (non-)Markovianity of a quantum dynamics is revisited through analyzing quantum correlations. We argue that instantaneously-vanishing quantum discord provides a necessary and sufficient condition for Markovianity of a quantum map. This is used to introduce a measure of non-Markovianity. This measure, however, requires demanding knowledge about the system and the environment. By using a quantum correlation monogamy property and an ancillary system, we propose a simplified measure with less requirements. Non-Markovianity is thereby decided by quantum state tomography of the system and the ancilla.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure