Introdução: A epilepsia é uma doença de grande relevância médica e social, trazendo grande impacto aos pacientes e a sociedade como um todo. A Epilepsia do Lobo Temporal Mesial (ELTM) é a epilepsia refratária mais prevalente, tendo em sua causalidade o impacto do desequilíbrio entre circuitos neuronais excitatórios e inibitórios, necessitando da remoção cirúrgica das estruturas alteradas e da interrupção das suas vias para melhor controle das crises e qualidade de vida dos pacientes. Objetivo: Buscando ampliar o esclarecimento do papel da amígdala junto as modificações intrínsecas nos receptores de neurotransmissores e em suas subunidades nos mecanismos de ictogênese e epileptogênese, possibilitando o aprimoramento das técnicas cirúrgicas atualmente empregadas, além de novas modalidades terapêuticas, o presente estudo analisou as expressões gênicas das subunidades de receptores excitatórios, NMDA (NR2C e NR3A, genes GRIN2C e GRIN3A), Cainato (GluK1 e GluK2, genes GRIK1 e GRIK2), e subunidade de receptor inibitório GABAA (?4 e ?5, genes GABRA4 e GABRA5) e subtipos de receptor de neuropeptídio Y (Y2 e Y5, com genes NPY2R e NPY5R), em núcleos basolaterais de amígdalas humanas de pacientes com ELTM. Material e Métodos: Foram utilizados fragmentos de amígdala de 20 pacientes que fizeram amigdalohipocampectomia junto ao Serviço de Neurocirurgia do HC-FMRP-USP, sendo 10 pacientes com controle efetivo pós-operatório (Engel 1) e 10 pacientes com controle inadequado das crises(Engel 3 e 4), 10 amígdalas obtidas de autópsias (controle), utilizando a qPCR. Resultados: Foram evidenciadas diferenças da expressão nas subunidades NR2C (p=0,006) e ?4 do GABAAr (p=0,008), subtipo de NPYr Y2(p=0.013), com tendência junto a subunidade NR3A(p=0,077). Não evidenciando significância estatísticas nas análises das subunidades GluK1(p=0,147), GluK2(p=0,182) e?5 do GABAAr (p=0,272), para o subtipo NPYr Y1(p=0,242). Conclusão: As análises sugerem diferenças na expressão de receptores de neurotransmissores em pacientes com epilepsia em relação ao controle contendo as subunidadeNR2C e ?4 do GABAAr, com tendências a subunidade NR3A, indicando modificações neuronais amigdalianas possivelmente envolvidas com a zona epileptogênica, possibilitando aprimoramentos terapêuticos junto ao tratamento dasepilepsias refratárias. Também podemos inferir que os mecanismos neuronais envolvendo as subunidades?4 doGABAAr e GRIN2C, e do subtipo Y2 do NPYr na epileptogênese e ictogênese da ELTM podem ser semelhantes entre amígdala e hipocampo, enquanto os envolvendo as subunidades GLUK1 e GLUK2 parecem ser diferenciados; o gene GABRA5 pode ser utilizado como gene de controle endógeno em estudos com amigdala e hipocampo na ELTM. / Introduction: Epilepsy is a disease whith highly medical and social relevance, bringing impact on patients and society as a whole. Mesial Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (MTLE) is the most prevalent refractory epilepsy, in its causality the impact of the imbalance between excitatory neuronal circuits and inhibitory, needing a surgical removal of the altered structures and the interruption of their way to better seizure control and quality of life pacientes. Goal: Searching to increase understanding the role of the amygdala with intrinsic changes in neurotransmitter receptors and their subunits in ictogenesis mechanisms and epileptogenesis, enabling the improvement of surgical techniques currently used, as well as new therapeutic modalities, this study analyzed gene expression on the subunits of excitatory receptors, NMDA (NR2 and NR3A, GRIN2C and GRIN3A genes) and kainate (GluK1 and GluK2, GRIK1 and GRIK2 genes), and inhibitory receptor subunit GABA (?4 and ?5, genes GABRA4 and GABRA5 ), neuropeptide Y receptor subtypes (Y2 and Y5, and NPY5R with NPY2R gene) in the basolateral nucleus of human amygdala of patients with MTLE. Material and Methods: Amygdala fragments were used in 20 patients who made amigdalohipocampectomia with the Service neurosurgery HC-FMRP-USP, 10 patients with postoperative effective control (Engel 1) and 10 patients with inadequate control of seizures (Engel 3:04), and 10 amygdalas obtained from autopsies (control) using qPCR. Results: Were differences evidenced expression in NR2C subunits (p = 0.006) e?4 the GABAAr (p = 0.008), and subtype NPYr Y2 (p = 0.013), along with a tendency of NR3A subunits (p = 0.077). Showing no statistical significance in the analysis of GluK1 subunits (p = 0.147), GluK2 (p = 0.182) e?5 the GABAAr (p = 0.272), and the NPYr Y1 subtype (p = 0.242). Conclusion: The analyzes suggest differences in expression of neurotransmitter receptors in epilepsy patients on control containing the NR2C subunits and ?4 of GABAAr with NR3A subunits trends indicating amygdala neuronal modifications possibly involved in the epileptogenic zone, enabling therapeutic improvements with the refractory epilepsy treatment. As well can infer that the neural mechanisms involving the subunits ?4 GABAAr, GRIN2C and Y2 NPYr subtype in epileptogenesis and ictogenesis of TLE can be similar between the amygdala and hippocampus, while involving GLUK1 and GLUK2 subunits appear to be different; the GABRA5 gene can be used as endogenous control gene in studies of hippocampus and amygdala in TLE.

Temporal relation classification is one of the most challenging areas of natural language processing. Advances in this area have direct relevance to improving practical applications, such as question-answering and summarization systems, as well as informing theoretical understanding of temporal meaning realization in language. With the development of annotated textual materials, this domain is now accessible to empirical machine-learning oriented approaches, where systems treat temporal relation processing as a classification problem: i.e. a decision as per which label (before, after, identity, etc) to assign to a pair (i, j) of event indices in a text. Most reported systems in this new research domain utilize classifiers that make decisions effectively in isolation, without explicitly utilizing the decisions made about other indices in a document. In this work, we present a new strategy for temporal relation classification that utilizes global models of temporal relations in a document, choosing the optimal classification for all pairs of indices in a document subject to global constraints which may be linguistically motivated. We propose and evaluate two applications of global models to temporal semantic processing: joint prediction of situation entities with temporal relations, and temporal relations prediction guided by global coherence constraints. / text

This thesis explores the temporal analysis of text using the implicit temporal cues present in document. We consider the case when all explicit temporal expressions such as specific dates or years are removed from the text and a bag of words based approach is used for timestamp prediction for the text. A set of gold standard text documents with times- tamps are used as the training set. We also predict time spans for Wikipedia biographies based on their text. We have training texts from 3800 BC to present day. We partition this timeline into equal sized chronons and build a probability histogram for a test document over this chronon sequence. The document is assigned to the chronon with the highest probability. We use 2 approaches: 1) a generative language model with Bayesian priors, and 2) a KL divergence based model. To counter the sparsity in the documents and chronons we use 3 different smoothing techniques across models. We use 3 diverse datasets to test our mod- els: 1) Wikipedia Biographies, 2) Guttenberg Short Stories, and 3) Wikipedia Years dataset. Our models are trained on a subset of Wikipedia biographies. We concentrate on two prediction tasks: 1) time-stamp prediction for a generic text or mid-span prediction for a Wikipedia biography , and 2) life-span prediction for a Wikipedia biography. We achieve an f-score of 81.1% for life-span prediction task and a mean error of around 36 years for mid-span prediction for biographies from present day to 3800 BC. The best model gives a mean error of 18 years for publication date prediction for short stories that are uniformly distributed in the range 1700 AD to 2010 AD. Our models exploit the temporal distribu- tion of text for associating time. Our error analysis reveals interesting properties about the models and datasets used. We try to combine explicit temporal cues extracted from the document with its implicit cues and obtain combined prediction model. We show that a combination of the date-based predictions and language model divergence predictions is highly effective for this task: our best model obtains an f-score of 81.1% and the median error between actual and predicted life span midpoints is 6 years. This would be one of the emphasis for our future work. The above analyses demonstrates that there are strong temporal cues within texts that can be exploited statistically for temporal predictions. We also create good benchmark datasets along the way for the research community to further explore this problem. / text

Abnormally slow processing of language may be a factor contributing to the poor verbal memory seen in many patients with lesions of the anterior temporal region in the left hemisphere. This possibility was examined by comparing the performance of 12 patients with left temporal-lobe resections (LT), 10 patients with similar lesions in the right hemisphere (RT) and 13 normal control (NC) subjects on a lexical-decision task, a sentence-plausibility-judgement task, and a story-recall task. Stimuli were presented aurally, and, in the latter two tasks, at 5 different speech rates ranging from 125 words per minute (wpm) to 325 wpm. Recall of stories by LT subjects was not abnormally sensitive to the effect of increasing rate, although it was inferior to that by NC subjects at all speeds. LT patients presented aurally but not visually (Frisk and Milner, 1991), suggesting that the left anterior temporal region plays a special role in the processing of speech sounds.

Diss. (sammanfattning) Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet, 2008. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

Banca : Roberto Antonio Nicodemo / Banca : Maria Amélia Maximo de Araujo / Banca : Miguel Carlos Madeira / Banca : Neivo Luiz Zorzetto / Banca : José Americo de Oliveira / Resumo: Os processos mastóideos de 305 crânios humanos identificados foram estudados com a finalidade de melhor compreender suas características morfológicas básicas, bem como suas relações com outras formações ósseas da área mastóidea. Foram mensuradas, além das várias medidas gerais do crânio, a altura e a largura dos processos mastôideos, a distância bimastóidea e bi-supramastóidea. Foram estudados: a incidência e a forma do processo paramastóideo, do sulco do processo mastóideo e da rugosidade da superfície lateral do processo mastóideo. Todos os resultados ósseos foram submetidos à análise estatística, relacionando-os ao sexo, grupo étnico e forma do crânio. Objetivando um melhor entendimento das formações anatómicas que se relacionam com os processos mastóideos, foram dissecados, em vinte cabeças humanas (quarenta lados), os músculos estemocleidomastóideo, esplênio da cabeça, longo da cabeça e ventre posterior do digástrico. As inserções destes músculos foram mensuradas, tendo-se como referência o plano aurículo-orbital. As áreas de fixação no osso foram medidas através de um analisador de imagens. De maneira geral as características ósseas estudadas mostraram que existem diferenças estatísticas significantes nos grupos formados por sexo e forma do crânio. Os caracteres estudados para a determinação do sexo dos crânios mostraram-se estatisticamente confiáveis, indicando a possibilidade da utilização do processo mastóideo para a determinação do sexo de crânios humanos. As dissecções realizadas mostraram que há relação funcional entre os músculos e as formações ósseas da área mastóidea, principalmente entre o ventre posterior do músculo digástrico e o processo paramastóideo / Not available

In the past years Open Data has become a trend among governments to increase transparency and public engagement by opening up national, regional, and local datasets. However, while many of these datasets come in semi-structured file formats, they use di ff erent schemata and lack geo-references or semantically meaningful links and descriptions of the corresponding geo-entities. We aim to address this by detecting and establishing links to geo-entities in the datasets found in Open Data catalogs and their respective metadata descriptions and link them to a knowledge graph of geo-entities. This knowledge graph does not yet readily exist, though, or at least, not a single one: so, we integrate and interlink several datasets to construct our (extensible) base geo-entities knowledge graph: (i) the openly available geospatial data repository GeoNames, (ii) the map service OpenStreetMap, (iii) country-specific sets of postal codes, and (iv) the European Union's classification system NUTS. As a second step, this base knowledge graph is used to add semantic labels to the open datasets, i.e., we heuristically disambiguate the geo-entities in CSV columns using the context of the labels and the hierarchical graph structure of our base knowledge graph. Finally, in order to interact with and retrieve the content, we index the datasets and provide a demo user interface. Currently we indexed resources from four Open Data portals, and allow search queries for geo-entities as well as full-text matches at http://data.wu.ac.at/odgraph/ .

Intuitively, most datasets found in Open Data are organised by spatio-temporal scope, that is, single datasets provide data for a certain region, valid for a certain time period. For many use cases (such as for instance data journalism and fact checking) a pre-dominant need is to scope down the relevant datasets to a particular period or region. Therefore, we argue that spatio-temporal search is a crucial need for Open Data portals and across Open Data portals, yet - to the best of our knowledge - no working solution exists. We argue that - just like for for regular Web search - knowledge graphs can be helpful to significantly improve search: in fact, the ingredients for a public knowledge graph of geographic entities as well as time periods and events exist already on the Web of Data, although they have not yet been integrated and applied - in a principled manner - to the use case of Open Data search. In the present paper we aim at doing just that: we (i) present a scalable approach to construct a spatio-temporal knowledge graph that hierarchically structures geographical, as well as temporal entities, (ii) annotate a large corpus of tabular datasets from open data portals, (iii) enable structured, spatio-temporal search over Open Data catalogs through our spatio-temporal knowledge graph, both via a search interface as well as via a SPARQL endpoint, available at data.wu.ac.at/odgraphsearch/ / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations

In the past years Open Data has become a trend among governments to increase transparency and public engagement by opening up national, regional, and local datasets. However, while many of these datasets come in semi-structured file formats, they use different schemata and lack geo-references or semantically meaningful links and descriptions of the corresponding geo-entities. We aim to address this by detecting and establishing links to geo-entities in the datasets found in Open Data catalogs and their respective metadata descriptions and link them to a knowledge graph of geo-entities. This knowledge graph does not yet readily exist, though, or at least, not a single one: so, we integrate and interlink several datasets to construct our (extensible) base geo-entities knowledge graph: (i) the openly available geospatial data repository GeoNames, (ii) the map service OpenStreetMap, (iii) country-specific sets of postal codes, and (iv) the European Union¿s classification system NUTS. As a second step, this base knowledge graph is used to add semantic labels to the open datasets, i.e., we heuristically disambiguate the geo-entities in CSV columns using the context of the labels and the hierarchical graph structure of our base knowledge graph. Finally, in order to interact with and retrieve the content, we index the datasets and provide a demo user interface. Currently we indexed resources from four Open Data portals, and allow search queries for geo-entities as well as full-text matches at http://data.wu.ac.at/odgraph/.

A resolução temporal é uma questão-chave em Paleontologia, uma vez que a sua magnitude define a precisão dos estudos não somente paleoecológicos como também evolutivos. A resolução temporal é estimada pela magnitude de time-averaging (mistura de gerações em uma camada, uma amostra). Tais estimativas têm sido amplamente conduzidas em ambientes marinhos recentes. A plataforma continental do sul do Brasil (PSB; 22°S – 34°S) tem sido um laboratório natural para estudos desta natureza desde o início do século XXI. Consequentemente, possui um amplo acervo de dados disponíveis para comparação. Neste contexto, esta tese visou responder (i) qual a magnitude do time-averaging em acumulações de bivalves da PSB? (ii) como este processo varia ao longo de gradientes espaciais? e (iii) como o time-averaging reflete na informação biológica preservada no registro fóssil? Para isto, mais de 140 espécimes de bivalves foram datados integrando racemização de aminoácidos e 14C AMS. Além disto, análises tafonômicas foram realizadas em todas as amostras datadas, incluindo mais sete amostras em sedimentos lamosos. A resolução temporal (time-averaging) e a variabilidade total de idades (mistura temporal) basearam-se em uma nova abordagem numérica, a estatística bayesiana, que integra os erros e as incertezas derivadas da distribuição posterior dos resíduos associados com os modelos resultantes das calibrações das idades. As tendências onshore-offshore — aumento da mediana e da uniformidade das curvas de frequência de distribuição de idades, redução da variabilidade tafonômica, ainda que a escala do time-averaging seja invariante — provavelmente refletem a interação entre as mudanças do nível relativo do mar e da bioprodutividade mais elevada em águas menos profundas. / The temporal resolution of the fossil record plays a key role in paleontology because it determines the scale and the precision of paleoecological and evolutionary studies. The temporal resolution of the fossil record is estimated by the magnitude of time-averaging (non-contemporaneous generations preserved in a single layer, a bulk-sample). Quantitative estimates of time-averaging have been conducted primarily on mollusk shells from modern shallow-water marine settings. Most of them have been addressed in the Southern Brazilian continental shelf (SBS; 22°S up to 34°S), which is considered a natural laboratory for several similar studies since the earlier of current century (XXI). Consequently, the SBS has several available datasets that allow comparisons of the new results displayed here with those previous data. Thus, this thesis aimed answer (i) what is the magnitude of time-averaging on SBS mollusk death assemblages? (ii) how does time-averaging vary across spatial gradients? and (iii) how does time-averaging can reflect on the preservation of the fossil record? Here, >140 specimens were individually dated using amino acid racemization calibrated using radiocarbon ages (14C). In addition, taphonomic analyses were conducted in all samples, including more seven muddy sites. The time-averaging and the total age variability was based on a Bayesian approach that integrates the estimation errors and uncertainties derived from the posterior distribution associated with the 14C–AAR calibration average model. The onshore-offshore trends — increased median age, decreased skewness of age distributions, decreased taphonomic variation, yet the invariant scale of time-averaging — likely reflect the interplay between sea-level changes and elevated bioproductivity in shallower water settings.