Semantic annotation of narrative media objects

This paper addresses the annotation of the narrative features of media objects. Based on a relevant narratological and computational background, we introduce an ontology?Cbased model called Drammar, an annotation schema for the narrative features of media objects based on Drammar and a software tool, Cinematic, for annotating these objects and validating the annotation. Annotated media objects can also be automatically edited into sequences, with the twofold goal of testing the validity of the annotation??through the reconstruction of the baseline sequence??and exploring the possibility of alternative sequences. The software tool encodes both the narrative model and the annotation itself in ontological format, and relies on external ontologies for representing world knowledge and limit the arbitrariness of the annotation. The paper opens the way to the design of a general annotation schema for narrative multimedia with the long?Cterm goal of building large corpora of annotated video material and of bridging the gap between the low?Clevel signal analysis and the high?Clevel semantic representation of the narrative content of the media objects. Finally, the paper illustrates a few projects elaborated with the Drammar annotation and the Cinematic tool, with purposes of artistic research and cross?Cmedia analysis, that provide an empirical validation of the annotation process.     

A log mining approach for process monitoring in SCADA

SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems are used for controlling and monitoring industrial processes. We propose a methodology to systematically identify potential process-related threats in SCADA. Process-related threats take place when an attacker gains user access rights and performs actions, which look legitimate, but which are intended to disrupt the SCADA process. To detect such threats, we propose a semi-automated approach of log processing. We conduct experiments on a real-life water treatment facility. A preliminary case study suggests that our approach is effective in detecting anomalous events that might alter the regular process workflow.     

Evidence for a Negative Correlation between Human Reactive Enamine-Imine Intermediate Deaminase A (RIDA) Activity and Cell Proliferation Rate: Role of Lysine Succinylation of RIDA

Reactive intermediate deaminase (Rid) proteins are enzymes conserved in all domains of life. UK114, a mammalian member of RidA subfamily, has been firstly identified as a component of liver perchloric acid-soluble proteins (L-PSP). Although still poorly defined, several functions have been attributed to the mammalian protein UK114/RIDA, including the reactive intermediate deamination activity. The expression of UK114/RIDA has been observed in some tumors, arousing interest in this protein as an evaluable tumor marker. However, other studies reported a negative correlation between UK114/RIDA expression, tumor differentiation degree and cell proliferation. This work addressed the question of UK114/RIDA expression in human non-tumor HEK293 cell lines and in some human tumor cell lines. Here we reported that human RIDA (hRIDA) was expressed in all the analyzed cell line and subjected to lysine (K-)succinylation. In HEK293, hRIDA K-succinylation was negatively correlated to the cell proliferation rate and was under the control of SIRT5. Moreover, K-succinylation clearly altered hRIDA quantification by immunoblotting, explaining, at least in part, some discrepancies about RIDA expression reported in previous studies. We found that hRIDA was able to deaminate reactive enamine-imine intermediates and that K-succinylation drastically reduced deaminase activity. As predicted by in silico analysis, the observed reduction of deaminase activity has been related to the drastic alterations of hRIDA structure inferred by K-succinylation. The role of hRIDA and the importance of its K-succinylation in cell metabolism, especially in cancer biology, have been discussed.     

On arginine-based polyurethane-blends specific to vascular prostheses

Polymer blends based on Tecoflex™ and an experimental aliphatic polyurethane (HMDI-PCL-arginine stands for 4,4 (metylene-biscyclohexyl) isocyanate - poly (ε caprolactone) diol, SPUUR stands for segmented poly(urea)urethanes using amino acid of L-Arginine as chain extender) were obtained by solvent casting, and further studied by fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and Raman spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), thermogravimetric analysis, and X-ray diffraction (XRD). Their biological performances were assessed in terms of hemocompatibility and Human umbilical vein endothelial cell (HUVEC) cytotoxicity. Tensile properties of dumbbell specimens were compared to longitudinal and circumferential tensile properties of tubular vascular graft. FTIR showed that as the SPUUR content increased in the blend, absorptions at 2860 cm⁻¹ increased, carbonyl absorptions at 1724 cm⁻¹ broaden and the small peak at 2796 cm⁻¹, typical of Tecoflex™ disappeared. Raman spectroscopy showed that the low intensity carbonyl absorption at 1724 cm⁻¹ also increased with SPUUR content. DSC allowed detection of PCL soft segment melting (T_m = 50°C) in agreement with X-ray reflections at 21.3° and 23.6°, assigned to SPUUR. However, no improvements in thermal stability were detected by TGA by blending. The addition of SPUUR to Tecoflex™ improved hemocompatibility and HUVEC cytotoxicity. The vascular grafts performance showed that 40% SPUUR blends exhibited the highest force in the longitudinal test whereas 50% SPUUR blends showed the highest circumferential force. Pressure burst strength was higher than 1000 mmHg for all blends. Overall, these blends can be used for high caliber vascular grafts.     

Air‐ground Matching: Appearance‐based GPS‐denied Urban Localization of Micro Aerial Vehicles

In this paper, we address the problem of globally localizing and tracking the pose of a camera‐equipped micro aerial vehicle (MAV) flying in urban streets at low altitudes without GPS. An image‐based global positioning system is introduced to localize the MAV with respect to the surrounding buildings. We propose a novel air‐ground image‐matching algorithm to search the airborne image of the MAV within a ground‐level, geotagged image database. Based on the detected matching image features, we infer the global position of the MAV by back‐projecting the corresponding image points onto a cadastral three‐dimensional city model. Furthermore, we describe an algorithm to track the position of the flying vehicle over several frames and to correct the accumulated drift of the visual odometry whenever a good match is detected between the airborne and the ground‐level images. The proposed approach is tested on a 2 km trajectory with a small quadrocopter flying in the streets of Zurich. Our vision‐based global localization can robustly handle extreme changes in viewpoint, illumination, perceptual aliasing, and over‐season variations, thus outperforming conventional visual place‐recognition approaches. The dataset is made publicly available to the research community. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that studies and demonstrates global localization and position tracking of a drone in urban streets with a single onboard camera.     

Evaluating and improving the content access in KAD

We analyze in detail the content retrieval process in kad. kad implements content search (publish and retrieval) functions that use the Kademlia Distributed Hash Table for content routing. Node churn is quite common in peer-to-peer systems and results in information loss and stale routing table entries. To deal with node churn, kad issues parallel route requests and publishes multiple redundant copies of each piece of information. We identify the key design parameters in kad and present an analytical model to evaluate the impact of changes in the values of these parameters on the overall lookup latency and message overhead. Extensive measurements of the lookup performance using an instrumented client allow us to validate the model. The overall lookup latency is in most cases 5 s or larger. We elucidate the cause for such high lookup latencies and propose an improved scheme that significantly decreases the overall lookup latency without increasing the overhead.     

Gauging food and nutritional care quality in hospitals

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Food and nutritional care quality must be assessed and scored, so as to improve health institution efficacy. This study aimed to detect and compare actions related to food and nutritional care quality in public and private hospitals. METHODS: Investigation of the Hospital Food and Nutrition Service (HFNS) of 37 hospitals by means of structured interviews assessing two quality control corpora, namely nutritional care quality (NCQ) and hospital food service quality (FSQ). HFNS was also evaluated with respect to human resources per hospital bed and per produced meal. RESULTS: Comparison between public and private institutions revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between the number of hospital beds per HFNS staff member (p = 0.02) and per dietitian (p < 0.01). The mean compliance with NCQ criteria in public and private institutions was 51.8% and 41.6%, respectively. The percentage of public and private health institutions in conformity with FSQ criteria was 42.4% and 49.1%, respectively. Most of the actions comprising each corpus, NCQ and FSQ, varied considerably between the two types of institution. NCQ was positively influenced by hospital type (general) and presence of a clinical dietitian. FSQ was affected by institution size: large and medium-sized hospitals were significantly better than small ones. CONCLUSIONS: Food and nutritional care in hospital is still incipient, and actions concerning both nutritional care and food service take place on an irregular basis. It is clear that the design of food and nutritional care in hospital indicators is mandatory, and that guidelines for the development of actions as well as qualification and assessment of nutritional care are urgent.     

Labyrinth 3D. Cultural archetypes for exploring media archives

Since the advent of the World Wide Web, online media archives have changed their audience from a restricted number of professionals and amateurs to the general public. This shift is not without consequences: if, on the one side, it represents an important opportunity for archives to engage in a dialogue with a larger audience, on the other side, it advocates novel forms of access that go beyond the highly specialized models underlying traditional access tools. In this paper, we propose to use 3-D graphics for designing novel tools of exploratory search in cultural heritage archives. Our approach has been deployed as an online virtual environment where the user can navigate the meaning relations over the items in the archive. Targeted at cultural heritage, the application, called Labyrinth 3D, relies on the use of cultural archetypes to inform the conceptualization of the archive and the creation of the virtual environment, with the goal of engaging the user in the exploration of the archive through the creation of personal paths.     

Selenocarbamates As a Prodrug-Based Approach to Carbonic Anhydrase Inhibition

A study on the activity of selenocarbamates as a novel chemotype acting as carbonic anhydrase (CA, EC 4.2.1.1) inhibitors is reported. Undergoing CA-mediated hydrolysis, selenocarbamates release selenolates behaving as zinc binding groups and effectively inhibiting CAs. A series of selenocarbamates characterised by high molecular diversity and complexity have been studied against different human CA isoforms such as hCA I, II, IX and XII. Selenocarbamates behave as masked selenols with potential biological applications as prodrugs for CAs inhibition-based strategies. X-ray studies provided insights into the binding mode of this novel class of CA inhibitors.