Near the US Capitol, in front of the National Academy of Sciences sits a gigantic bronze statue of Albert Einstein. The monument was created to celebrate Einstein and the sense of awe and wonder his work represents. However, while under construction, art critics and some scientists derided the idea of the memorial. They felt the scale of such a giant memorial did not fit the modesty of Einstein...

IEEE President-Elect Candidates Respond to Questions on Governance Issues T he IEEE Computer Society has established a reputation for excellence within the computing field. As a component of the IEEE, the Computer Society’s activities parallel those of 44 other societies and councils serving the computing and engineering disciplines. Representing by far the largest IEEE society contingent, the ...

This paper describes a best answer estimation system called ASURA. The features of ASURA were decided on the basis of the results of experiments that were conducted to determine how people estimated which of a given set of answers was the best. There are two ASURA models, ASURA-1, which has 5 features, and ASURA-2, that has thirteen features. We outline ASURA-1 and ASURA-2 in this paper, and we...

We make a step towards the interactive exploration of data in the ontology-mediated setting, presenting a technique to construct an offline compilation that allows us to answer efficiently different related queries in online phase, without the need to access again the original data. We also propose algorithms to construct relevant variations of a given query that, for example, reduce or increas...

A strong advantage of bottom up generating techniques is their ability to guarantee finiteness of all inferences in a deductive database system involving recursive axioms. But a "brute force" generating answers to a query would be very inefficient producing many facts useless for the query evaluation. An economy generating method is presented based on discovering explicit facts relevant to the ...

When confronted with a large amount of text, it is difficult to manually extract important and relevant information from it. Having a way to extract that information is a highly interesting research problem that has the potential to improve question answering capabilities. Specifically, identifying sections of text that describe a term, phenomenon, or abstract idea and transforming them into st...

Online forum is an important source that people use to find answers to questions. Most search engines simply retrieve “relevant” threads, but those are not necessarily good threads in terms of providing quality answers. In this paper we propose a two-step approach to classify online forum threads according to their informativeness in terms of question answering. We use statistical models to fir...

Assessment is used to evaluate the learner’s knowledge about the concepts learnt. Evaluation through objective testing is common in all evaluation system, where Multiple Choice Questions, Fill in the Blanks, Matching etc. are used for evaluation. The method of objective testing is not sufficient to completely verify all the concepts learnt by the learner. Thus computer assisted assessment of sh...

Cooperative database systems support a database user by searching for answers that are closely related to his query and hence are informative answers. Common operators to relax the user query are Dropping Condition, Anti-Instantiation and Goal Replacement. In this article, we provide an algebraic version of these operators. Moreover we propose some heuristics to assign a degree of similarity to...

Is There an Answer? is intended to serve as a forum in which readers to IUBMB Life may pose questions of the type that intrigue biochemists but for which there may be no obvious answer or one may be available but not widely known or easily accessible. Readers are invited to e-mail [email protected] if they have questions to contribute or if they can provide answers to questions that are provi...