A clinical evaluation in children of the Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system for inhalant allergens

BACKGROUND: The Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system (CAP) for assaying serum IgE specific antibodies was evaluated in a clinical setting against skin-prick test (SPT) performed using Dome/Hollister-Steir allergen extracts. The five common inhalant allergens D. pteronyssinus, D. farinae, mould mix, grass mix and cat epithelium were tested concurrently by both methods in 167 children aged 7.5-12 years. The specific SPT for D. pteronyssinus and D. farinae were also tested against the CAP house dust mite (HDM) mix. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the study was to determine the sensitivity and specificity of the Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system for detecting serum IgE specific antibodies to inhalant allergens in a clinical setting, using SPT result as the "gold standard'. METHODS: The SPTs were performed using Dome/Hollister-Steir allergen extracts. The serum IgE specific antibodies were quantitated using the radioimmunoassay version of the Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system. A history of allergic disease was assessed using a validated questionnaire. RESULTS: SPT gave more positive reactions than CAP with the exception of cat epithelium. The concordance between SPT and CAP results was 91% over all the tests. The concordance with SPT was slightly higher for the specific CAP for D. pteronyssinus and D. farinae (93% and 95% respectively) than for the CAP HDM mix (86% and 90% respectively). There was a higher proportion of positive results for both SPT and CAP in the 115 children defined as having a history of allergic disease. Using SPT defined allergy as the gold standard, the sensitivity of the CAP system was 87% for the two specific house dust mites but was lower for cat epithelium (67%), mould mix (59%) and grass mix (46%). The sensitivity of the CAP system improved for D. pteronyssinus (96%) and the HDM mix (91%) when tested in subjects defined as having a history of allergy associated disease. The specificity of the CAP system showed less variation between allergens and ranged from 90-99%. CONCLUSION: The results of this study of children aged 7.5-12 years demonstrate that, for the inhalant allergens tested, the Pharmacia ImmunoCAP system performs well in the setting of known allergic disease.     

Animatronic shader lamps avatars

Applications such as telepresence and training involve the display of real or synthetic humans to multiple viewers. When attempting to render the humans with conventional displays, non-verbal cues such as head pose, gaze direction, body posture, and facial expression are difficult to convey correctly to all viewers. In addition, a framed image of a human conveys only a limited physical sense of presence—primarily through the display’s location. While progress continues on articulated robots that mimic humans, the focus has been on the motion and behavior of the robots rather than on their appearance. We introduce a new approach for robotic avatars of real people: the use of cameras and projectors to capture and map both the dynamic motion and the appearance of a real person onto a humanoid animatronic model. We call these devices animatronic Shader Lamps Avatars (SLA). We present a proof-of-concept prototype comprised of a camera, a tracking system, a digital projector, and a life-sized styrofoam head mounted on a pan-tilt unit. The system captures imagery of a moving, talking user and maps the appearance and motion onto the animatronic SLA, delivering a dynamic, real-time representation of the user to multiple viewers.     

Podcasting in education: Are students as ready and eager as we think they are?

Instructors in higher education are disseminating instructional content via podcasting, as many rally behind the technology’s potential benefits. Others have expressed concern about the risks of deleterious effects that might accompany the adoption of podcasting, such as lower class attendance. Yet, relatively few studies have investigated students’ perceptions of podcasting for educational purposes, especially in relation to different podcasting forms: repetitive and supplemental. The present study explored students’ readiness and attitudes towards these two forms of podcasting to provide fundamental information for future researchers and educators. The results indicated that students may not be as ready or eager to use podcasting for repetitive or supplemental educational purposes as much as we think they are, but they could be persuaded.     

Privacy policies for shared content in social network sites

Social networking is one of the major technological phenomena of the Web 2.0, with hundreds of millions of subscribed users. Social networks enable a form of self-expression for users and help them to socialize and share content with other users. In spite of the fact that content sharing represents one of the prominent features of existing Social network sites, they do not provide any mechanisms for collective management of privacy settings for shared content. In this paper, using game theory, we model the problem of collective enforcement of privacy policies on shared data. In particular, we propose a solution that offers automated ways to share images based on an extended notion of content ownership. Building upon the Clarke-Tax mechanism, we describe a simple mechanism that promotes truthfulness and that rewards users who promote co-ownership. Our approach enables social network users to compose friendship based policies based on distances from an agreed upon central user selected using several social networks metrics. We integrate our design with inference techniques that free the users from the burden of manually selecting privacy preferences for each picture. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time such a privacy protection mechanism for social networking has been proposed. We also extend our mechanism so as to support collective enforcement across multiple social network sites. In the paper, we also show a proof-of-concept application, which we implemented in the context of Facebook, one of today’s most popular social networks. Through our implementation, we show the feasibility of such approach and show that it can be implemented with a minimal increase in overhead to end-users. We complete our analysis by conducting a user study to investigate users’ understanding of co-ownership, usefulness and understanding of our approach. Users responded favorably to the approach, indicating a general understanding of co-ownership and the auction, and found the approach to be both useful and fair.     

命名和征服(英文)

This paper introduces a technique that has been used successfully in University College Dublin,Ireland and Fudan University in Shanghai,China,to teach the formal aspects of computer programming to undergraduate students.The technique,name and conquer,relies on the use of modelling small mathematical domains and allowing the results of these models to form the basis for the programming task.     

Development of a pit filling algorithm for LiDAR canopy height models

LiDAR canopy height models (CHMs) can exhibit unnatural looking holes or pits, i.e., pixels with a much lower digital number than their immediate neighbors. These artifacts may be caused by a combination of factors, from data acquisition to post-processing, that not only result in a noisy appearance to the CHM but may also limit semi-automated tree-crown delineation and lead to errors in biomass estimates. We present a highly effective semi-automated pit filling algorithm that interactively detects data pits based on a simple user-defined threshold, and then fills them with a value derived from their neighborhood. We briefly describe this algorithm and its graphical user interface, and show its result in a LiDAR CHM populated with data pits. This method can be rapidly applied to any CHM with minimal user interaction. Visualization confirms that our method effectively and quickly removes data pits.     

Utility function of TCP

Understanding the TCP congestion control mechanism from a global optimization point of view is not only important in its own right, but also crucial to the design of other transport layer traffic control protocols with provable properties. In this paper, we derive a global utility function and the corresponding optimal control law, known as TCP control law, which maximizes the global utility. The TCP control law captures the essential behaviors of TCP, including slow start, congestion avoidance, and the binary nature of congestion feedback in TCP. We find that the utility function of TCP is linear in the slow start phase and is proportional to the additive increase rate and approaches the well-known logarithm function as the data rate becomes large in the congestion avoidance phase. We also find that understanding the slow start phase with a fixed threshold is critical to the design of new transport layer control protocols to enable quality of service features. Finally, as an application, we design a Minimum Rate Guaranteed (MRG) traffic control law that shares the same utility function as the TCP control law. Our simulation study of the MRG control law indicates that it is indeed TCP friendly and can provide minimum rate guarantee as long as the percentage of network resource consumed by the MRG flows is moderately small.     

Immunity-based hybrid evolutionary algorithm for multi-objective optimization in global container repositioning

The development of evolutionary algorithms for optimization has always been a stimulating and growing research area with an increasing demand in using them to solve complex industrial optimization problems. A novel immunity-based hybrid evolutionary algorithm known as Hybrid Artificial Immune Systems (HAIS) for solving both unconstrained and constrained multi-objective optimization problems is developed in this research. The algorithm adopts the clonal selection and immune suppression theories, with a sorting scheme featuring uniform crossover, multi-point mutation, non-dominance and crowding distance sorting to attain the Pareto optimal front in an efficient manner. The proposed algorithm was verified with nine benchmarking functions on its global optimal search ability as well as compared with four optimization algorithms to assess its diversity and spread. Sensitivity analysis was also carried out to investigate the selection of key parameters of the algorithm. It is found that the developed immunity-based hybrid evolutionary algorithm provides a useful means for solving optimization problems and has successfully applied to the problem of global repositioning of containers, which is one of a constrained multi-objective optimization problem. The developed HAIS will assist shipping liners on timely decision making and planning of container repositioning operations in global container transportation business in an optimized and cost effective manner.     

Scale‐aware Structure‐Preserving Texture Filtering

This paper presents a novel method to enhance the performance of structure‐preserving image and texture filtering. With conventional edge‐aware filters, it is often challenging to handle images of high complexity where features of multiple scales coexist. In particular, it is not always easy to find the right balance between removing unimportant details and protecting important features when they come in multiple sizes, shapes, and contrasts. Unlike previous approaches, we address this issue from the perspective of adaptive kernel scales. Relying on patch‐based statistics, our method identifies texture from structure and also finds an optimal per‐pixel smoothing scale. We show that the proposed mechanism helps achieve enhanced image/texture filtering performance in terms of protecting the prominent geometric structures in the image, such as edges and corners, and keeping them sharp even after significant smoothing of the original signal.