Abstract

We present a computationally simple and general purpose scheme for the detection of all salient object contours in real images. The scheme is inspired by the mechanism of surround influence that is exhibited in 80% of neurons in the primary visual cortex of primates. It is based on the observation that the local context of a contour significantly affects the global saliency of the contour. The proposed scheme consists of two steps: first find the edge response at all points in an image using gradient computation and in the second step modulate the edge response at a point by the response in its surround. In this paper, we present the results of implementing this scheme using a Sobel edge operator followed by a mask operation for the surround influence. The proposed scheme has been tested successfully on a large set of images. The performance of the proposed detector compares favourably both computationally and qualitatively, in comparison with another contour detector which is also based on surround influence. Hence, the proposed scheme can serve as a low cost preprocessing step for high level tasks such shape based recognition and image retrieval.

Abstract

Noncanonical base pairs in RNA have strong structural and functional implications but are currently not considered for secondary structure predictions. We present results of comparative ab initio studies of stabilities and interaction energies for the three standard and 24 selected unusual RNA base pairs reported in the literature. Hydrogen added models of isolated base pairs, with heavy atoms frozen in their away from equilibrium geometries, built from coordinates extracted from NDB, were geometry optimized using HF/6-31G** basis set, both before and after unfreezing the heavy atoms. Interaction energies, including BSSE and deformation energy corrections, were calculated, compared with respective single point MP2 energies, and correlated with occurrence frequencies and with types and geometries of hydrogen bonding interactions. Systems having two or more N-HO/N hydrogen bonds had reasonable interaction energies which correlated well with respective occurrence frequencies and highlighted the possibility of some of them playing important roles in improved secondary structure prediction methods. Several of the remaining base pairs with one N-HO/N and/or one C-HO/N interactions respectively, had poor interaction energies and negligible occurrences. High geometry variations on optimization of some of these were suggestive of their conformational switch like characteristics.

Abstract

Biological systems function with the aid of large number of proteins involved in complex network of chemical reactions. Interfering with the expression of proteins native or foreign leads to overall changes in the functioning of the biological systems . Manipulating the expression of proteins responsible for the manifestation of diseases has therefore been an interesting area for alternative efficient therapautic possibilities. Proteins are expressed from the correspondig genes involving the trancription and translation of messenger RNAs . Interfering with these RNA has emerged as an effective method of silencing unwanted genes. This project deals with designing effective methods for gene silencing through RNA Interference. RNA interference (RNAi) has emerged as an effective method of silencing gene expression in eukaryotic cells. This technology allows scientists to study the phenotypic effect of reducing expression levels of individual genes, and essentially negates the arduous task of producing single gene knockout or dominant negative expressing cell lines. RNAi has very quickly been utilized both in basic science and medical research. Among its many applications are the characterization and regulation of gene function, signaling pathway analysis and target validation. The potential therapeutic value of RNAi is indicated in recent studies showing that the RNAi pathway is functional in mice and is effective against a variety of infectious diseases including HIV and Hepatitis B. Since the early work describing the use of double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) for post-transcriptional gene silencing (PTGS) by Fire and Mello and the application of short interfering RNA (siRNA) to induce specific gene suppression in mammalian cells by Elbashir et al., there has been a flurry of RNAi-related developments and applications. The vast number of recent scientific journal articles, the scramble for intellectual property, and the formation of multiple biotechnology tools, kits, reagents and therapeutics companies all reflect the power and popularity of this technique. In 2002, Science voted RNAi scientific breakthrough of the year. This paper talks about a novel method of finding efficient siRNA targets on the mRNA sequences. It consists of two parts. In the first part program was written to select suitable targets based on the Elbashir's guidelines. In the second part involves prediction of secondary structure of siRNA antisense strands of the targets predicted in the first part and also the secondary structure of the mRNA sequence, and using these results to further filter the targets.

Abstract

The ultimate goal of molecular cell biology is to understand the physiology of living cells in terms of the information that is encoded in the genome of the cell and we would like to address the question how computational biology can help in achieving this goal. Genes coding for proteins is a very important pattern recognition problem in bioinformatics and this lecture focuses on some computational issues in gene identification.

Abstract

Timely agro-advisory service and efficient risk mitigation mechanisms can provide stableincome to the farmers. To provide timely agro-advisory service, e-Sagu systemhas beendeveloped by IIIT-Hyderabad and Media Lab Asia. It is an IT-based personalized agro-advisorysystemwhich is being developedto provide high-qualitypersonalized (farm-specific) agricultural expert adviceto each and everyfarmin a timely manner at thefarmer’s door-step without farmer asking a question. The results show that significantbenefits have flowntothe farmers interms of reducedinputs andenhancedyield.Regarding risk mitigation, the agri-insurance schemes around the worldwhether anadvanced or a developing nation like India are suffering due to catastrophic losses,covariate risks, asymmetric information and lack of quality data. These problems maypose a serious threat to the survival of the implementing agencies unless the there is aneffective monitoring systemin place, with enough man power and robust infrastructure.In this paper we explain how agri-insurance schemes can be effectively implemented ontop of eSagu system. The agri-insurance scheme can bevery cost-effective as it can useresources and processes of eSagu system. Also, as eSagu provides quality and reliabledata at farmlevel,the problemof asymmetric information can be effectively hedged.Most important, eSagualsoimproves the performance offormal risk mitigationmechanisms through farm-specific agro-advisory and monitoring system.

Abstract

To bridge the information gap between the agricultural expert and the farmer, International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad has built the eSagu (“Sagu” means cultivation in Telugu language) system, which is an IT-based personalized agricultural extension system to improve agricultural productivity by disseminating a fresh expert agricultural advice to the farmers, both in a timely and personalized manner. In e-Sagu, the agricultural experts generate the expert advice based on the information about the crop situation received in the form of both text and digital photographs. In Kharif2 2004, a prototype was developed and implemented with 1051 farms. In the prototype, a team of agricultural experts stayed at IIIT, Hyderabad (India) and delivered 20,000 pieces of agricultural expert advice to 1051 cotton farms of three villages (Oorugonda, Gudeppad and Oglapur) in Atmakur Mandal of Warangal district in Andhra Pradesh state, India, by looking at digital photographs and other farm information supplied by some educated and experienced farmers (coordinators) in these villages. The pilot project was implemented successfully. In this article, an analysis of 51 registered farmers’ regarding compliance of advices and corresponding effect is reported. The following of expert advice on pest and disease management and IPM practices were analyzed by giving appropriate scores based on their effect on yield and input cost. The analysis showed that about fifty percent of farmers have followed the practices which increase yield and reduce input cost. A high positive correlation (r=0.46**) was observed between the compliance rate and the yields. Though some farmers obtained same yield as the farmers who have followed the advices, their input costs were significantly higher.

Abstract

Security is one of the major concerns of modern software development, but there is a wide gap between the industry practice and the academic instruction. Security issues are usually not addressed in academic setup and those attempt to make it as part of their software engineering curriculum realize quickly that it is difficult to make learning happen in a conventional lecture based approach. We explored a case study centered non-conventional approach and found it to be instrumental in bridging this gap between the industry and the academia. We give a detailed methodology for using the case study and our experience, observations and result of the approach. Whole case exercise aims at creating software professionals who realize the importance of security and are well versed with the related concepts, skills and dispositions and thus handle security related challenges in a structured manner.

Abstract

This paper presents the experiments of Language Technologies Research Centre (LTRC) 1 as part of their participation in CLEF2 2006 ad-hoc document retrieval task. This is our first participation in the CLEF evaluation tasks and we focused on Afaan Oromo, Hindi and Telugu as query languages for retrieval from English document collection. In this paper we discuss our Hindi and Telugu to English CLIR system and the experiments at CLEF.

Abstract

The task in Document Understanding Conferences (DUC1) 2006 is to generate a fixed length, user oriented, multi document summary, which remains same as that of DUC 2005. We have used two features to score the sentences based. The sentences are picked to form the summary based on the calculated score. The first feature is a query dependent scoring of a sentence which is an improvement over the HAL feature. The second feature is based on the observation that sentence importance, which is independent of the query, needs to be captured in the current approaches. We have explored the use of web in scoring the sentences in a query independent manner. Experiments show a performance gain of 6-7% over HAL feature by the inclusion of two new features. Our summarization system was ranked 1st in all automatic evaluations with significant margin from second best system, 5th in responsiveness and 9th in linguistic quality evaluations in DUC 2006. Relatively lower performance in linguistic quality can be attributed to the stripped off sentences at the end of summary, when the summary length is exceeding 250 words.

Abstract

Today web search engines provide the easiest way to reach information on the web. In this scenario, more than 95% of Indian language content on the web is not searchable due to multiple encodings of web pages. Most of these encodings are proprietary and hence need some kind of standardization for making the content accessible via a search engine. In this paper we present a search engine called WebKhoj which is capable of searching multi-script and multi-encoded Indian language content on the web. We describe a language focused crawler and the transcoding processes involved to achieve accessibility of Indian langauge content. In the end we report some of the experiments that were conducted along with results on Indian language web content.