Genomes have both deterministic and random aspects, with the underlying DNA sequences exhibiting features at numerous scales, from codons to regions of conserved or divergent gene order. Genomic signatures work by capturing one or more such features efficiently into a compact mathematical structure. This work examines the unique manner in which oligonucleotides fit together to comprise a genome, within a graph-theoretic setting. A de Bruijn chain (DBC) is a marriage of a de Bruijn graph and a finite Markov chain. By representing a DNA sequence as a walk over a DBC and retaining specific information at nodes and edges, we are able to obtain the de Bruijn chain genomic signature (DBCGS), based on both graph structure and the stationary distribution of the DBC. We demonstrate that DBCGS is information-rich, efficient, sufficiently representative of the sequence from which it is derived, and superior to existing genomic signatures such as the dinucleotides odds ratio and word frequency based signatures. We develop a mathematical framework to elucidate the power of the DBCGS signature to distinguish between sequences hypothesized to be generated by DBCs of distinct parameters. We study the effect of order of the DBCGS signature on accuracy while presenting relationships with genome size and genome variety. We illustrate its practical value in distinguishing genomic sequences and predicting the origin of short DNA sequences of unknown origin, while highlighting its superior performance compared to existing genomic signatures including the dinucleotides odds ratio. Additionally, we describe details of the CMGS database, a centralized repository for raw and value-added data particular to C. elegans. / Ph. D.

The following pages contain the imagination for a library to be built in the manner of a sestina. The question that titles the book and the work within has preoccupied me for a while and at this moment, it would be an error to say that a conclusion has been reached; ultimately, solutions only propel echoes, foretelling of the blind fold before our eyes, ignorance. There is only a hope that the images here are to you, the reader, as crystalline as they were to me, the dreamer. / Master of Architecture

This diploma thesis deals with comprehension of newly borrowed anglicisms into the Czech language. As newly borrowed we considered those which are listed in the dictionaries of neologisms, or have not been included in them yet. The comprehension was tested at primary school pupils and students of lower secondary school. The theoretical part describes ways of enriching vocabulary, especially borrowing from foreign languages. The main research method used in the practical part was a survey. It took place in April 2014 among the pupils of the 6th and 9th classes at one of Prague's primary schools and in corresponding classes at Opava secondary school. The results were related to the sex and age of the respondents and also to the type of school they are attending. We observed increased number of successful responses in closed questions testing the passive comprehension of anglicisms than in the open-ended questions testing the active comprehension of anglicisms. Comparing responses by gender, girls reached higher percentage of successful answers or the successful answers of boys and girls were balanced. The most striking differences brought comparison of respondents by age. Older pupils reached on all issues significantly higher success rate than younger pupils. Differences were also observed in the...

Diversas áreas da Computação (Personalização e Adaptação de Conteúdo, Recuperação de Informação, entre outras) se beneficiam da segmentação de vídeo em unidades menores de informação. A literatura apresenta diversos métodos e técnicas cujo objetivo é identificar essas unidades. Uma limitação é que tais técnicas não tratam o problema da detecção de cenas em segmentos semanticamente complexos, definidos como trechos de vídeo que apresentam mais de um assunto ou tema, e cuja semântica latente dificilmente pode ser determinada utilizando-se somente uma única mídia. Esses segmentos são muito relevantes, pois estão presentes em diversos domínios de vídeo, tais como filmes, noticiários e mesmo comerciais. A presente Dissertação de Mestrado propõe uma técnica de segmentação de vídeo capaz de identificar cenas em segmentos semanticamente complexos. Para isso utiliza a semântica latente alcançada com o uso de Bag of Visual Words para agrupar os segmentos de um vídeo. O agrupamento é baseado em multimodalidade, analisando-se características visuais e sonoras de cada vídeo e combinando-se os resultados por meio da estratégia fusão tardia. O presente trabalho demonstra a viabilidade técnica em reconhecer cenas em segmentos semanticamente complexos / Many Computational Science areas (Content Personalization and Adaptation, Information Retrieval, among other) benefit from video segmentation in smaller information units. The literature reports lots of techniques and methods, whose goal is to identify these units. One of these techniques limitations is that they dont handle scene detection in semantically complex segments, which are defined as video snippets that present more than one subject or theme, whose latent semantics can hardly be determined using only one media. Those segments are very relevant, since they are present in multiple video domains as movies, news and even television commercials. This Masters dissertation proposes a video scene segmentation technique able to detect scenes in semantically complex segments. In order to achieve this goal it uses latent semantics extracted by the Bag of VisualWords to group a video segments. This grouping process is based on multimodality, through the visual and aural features analysis, and their results combination using late fusion strategy. This works demonstrates technical feasibility in recognizing scenes in semantically complex segments

There is an increasing trend towards object detection from aerial and satellite images. Most of the widely used object detection algorithms are based on local features. In such an approach, first, the local features are detected and described in an image, then a representation of the images are formed using these local features for supervised learning and these representations are used during classification . In this thesis, Harris and SIFT algorithms are used as local feature detector and SIFT approach is used as a local feature descriptor. Using these tools, Bag of Visual Words algorithm is examined in order to represent an image by the help of histograms of visual words. Finally, SVM classifier is trained by using positive and negative samples from a training set. In addition to the classical bag of visual words approach, two novel extensions are also proposed. As the first case, the visual words are weighted proportional to their importance of belonging to positive samples. The important features are basically the features occurring more in the object and less in the background. Secondly, a principal component analysis after forming the histograms is processed in order to remove the undesired redundancy and noise in the data, reduce the dimension of the data to yield better classifying performance. Based on the test results, it could be argued that the proposed approach is capable to detecting a number of geo-spatial objects, such as airplane or ships, for a reasonable performance.

Temporal logics are a very popular family of logical languages, used to specify properties of abstracted systems. In the last few years, many extensions of temporal logics have been proposed, in order to address the need to express more than just abstract properties. In our work we study temporal logics extended by local constraints, which allow to express quantitative properties on data values from an arbitrary relational structure called the concrete domain. An example of concrete domain can be (Z, <, =), where the integers are considered as a relational structure over the binary order relation and the equality relation. Formulas of temporal logics with constraints are evaluated on data-words or data-trees, in which each node or position is labeled by a vector of data from the concrete domain. We call the constraints local because they can only compare values at a fixed distance inside such models. Several positive results regarding the satisfiability of LTL (linear temporal logic) with constraints over the integers have been established in the past years, while the corresponding results for branching time logics were only partial. In this work we prove that satisfiability of CTL* (computation tree logic) with constraints over the integers is decidable and also lift this result to ECTL*, a proper extension of CTL*. We also consider other classes of concrete domains, particularly ones that are \"tree-like\". We consider semi-linear orders, ordinal trees and trees of a fixed height, and prove decidability in this framework as well. At the same time we prove that our method cannot be applied in the case of the infinite binary tree or the infinitely branching infinite tree. We also look into extending the expressiveness of our logic adding non-local constraints, and find that this leads to undecidability of the satisfiability problem, even on very simple domains like (Z, <, =). We then find a way to restrict the power of the non-local constraints to regain decidability.

The discourse functions of three Taiwanese particles la, hon and ne are analyzed. These utterance particles occur primarily found in the spoken language, usually conversation. The corpus of the study comprises transcription of recorded face-to-face, telephone, and radio talk show conversation, casual interviews, and church sermons. All three Taiwanese particles express a form of emphasis but in different ways. La has five interrelated functions, depending on the context: 1. To express in an assertion and in an answer to a question; 2. To express a sense of guessing or questioning; 3. To express one's impatience, dislike, or annoyance; 4. To indicate a sense of coaxing; 5. To emphasize each item in an incomplete list. Hon expresses the lowest degree of speaker emphasis of the three particles. It is used to elicit a minimal or a positive response from the addressee. Finally, ne expresses the strongest degree of emphasis of the three. It is usually used to draw the addressee's attention to information that the speaker assumes is new to the hearer. / Department of English

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Diversas áreas da Computação (Personalização e Adaptação de Conteúdo, Recuperação de Informação, entre outras) se beneficiam da segmentação de vídeo em unidades menores de informação. A literatura apresenta diversos métodos e técnicas cujo objetivo é identificar essas unidades. Uma limitação é que tais técnicas não tratam o problema da detecção de cenas em segmentos semanticamente complexos, definidos como trechos de vídeo que apresentam mais de um assunto ou tema, e cuja semântica latente dificilmente pode ser determinada utilizando-se somente uma única mídia. Esses segmentos são muito relevantes, pois estão presentes em diversos domínios de vídeo, tais como filmes, noticiários e mesmo comerciais. A presente Dissertação de Mestrado propõe uma técnica de segmentação de vídeo capaz de identificar cenas em segmentos semanticamente complexos. Para isso utiliza a semântica latente alcançada com o uso de Bag of Visual Words para agrupar os segmentos de um vídeo. O agrupamento é baseado em multimodalidade, analisando-se características visuais e sonoras de cada vídeo e combinando-se os resultados por meio da estratégia fusão tardia. O presente trabalho demonstra a viabilidade técnica em reconhecer cenas em segmentos semanticamente complexos / Many Computational Science areas (Content Personalization and Adaptation, Information Retrieval, among other) benefit from video segmentation in smaller information units. The literature reports lots of techniques and methods, whose goal is to identify these units. One of these techniques limitations is that they dont handle scene detection in semantically complex segments, which are defined as video snippets that present more than one subject or theme, whose latent semantics can hardly be determined using only one media. Those segments are very relevant, since they are present in multiple video domains as movies, news and even television commercials. This Masters dissertation proposes a video scene segmentation technique able to detect scenes in semantically complex segments. In order to achieve this goal it uses latent semantics extracted by the Bag of VisualWords to group a video segments. This grouping process is based on multimodality, through the visual and aural features analysis, and their results combination using late fusion strategy. This works demonstrates technical feasibility in recognizing scenes in semantically complex segments

Many teachers of English are challenged with the question, "Why do we study these ancient myths?" The most obvious justification is the great contribution of mythology to music, literature, and other arts. However, the modern, questioning student is not entirely satisfied with this answer. A more practical appeal is made in this study of the contributions of mythology to modern language.