In this paper, the accumulated Kullback divergence (AKD) is used to analyze ASR performance deterioration due to the presence of background noise. The AKD represents a distance between the feature value distribution observed during training and the distribution of the observations in the noisy test condition for each individual feature vector component. In our experiments the AKD summed over al...

A decidability result and a model-checking procedure for a rich subset of Duration Calculus (DC) [19] is obtained through reductions to first-order logic over the real-closed field and to Multi-Priced Timed Automata (MPTA) [13]. In contrast to other reductions of fragments of DC to reachability problems in timed automata, the reductions do also cover constraints on positive linear combinations ...

Light and electron microscopic studies of corn plants (Zea mays L.) exposed to Pb in hydroponic solution showed that the roots generally accumulated a surface Pb precipitate and slowly accumulated Pb crystals in the cell walls. The root surface precipitate formed without the apparent influence of any cell organelles. In contrast, Pb taken up by roots was concentrated in dictyosome vesicles. Dic...

One of the long standing problems affecting electron holography, such as lateral coherence limitation, has been solved by the split illumination method with a specially customized transmission electron microscope (TEM). The customized TEM has single [1] or double [2] biprisms in a condenser optical system. Conventional TEM, constructed for electron holography, however, does not have any biprism...

In this paper we present a scheme for accumulating local visual information in 3D, under known motion. Information about the object’s 3D shape is provided by reconstructing local contour descriptors. This shape information is accumulated over time in three ways: 1) disambiguation: erroneous stereo correspondences that are unsuccessfully tracked are discarded. We make use of aspect cues to incre...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the leading cause of dementia in developed countries. It is characterized by two major pathological hallmarks, one of which is the extracellular aggregation of the neurotoxic peptide amyloid-β (Aβ), which is known to generate oxidative stress. In this study, we showed that the presence of Aβ in a neuroblastoma cell line led to an increase in both nuclear and mitochon...

The anti-inflammatory cytokines alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (MSH) and interleukin (IL)-10 inhibit acute renal failure (ARF) after ischemia or cisplatin administration; however, these agents have not been tested in a pure nephrotoxic model of ARF. Therefore, we examined the effects of alpha-MSH and IL-10 in HgCl(2)-induced ARF. Mice were injected subcutaneously with HgCl(2) and then giv...

Transcriptional regulation of the Hedgehog (HH) signaling response is mediated by GLI genes (GLI1, GLI2) downstream of SMO, that are also activated by oncogenic signaling pathways. We have demonstrated the importance of targeting GLI downstream of SMO in the induction of cell death in human colon carcinoma cells. In HT29 cells inhibition of GLI1/GLI2 by the small molecule inhibitor GANT61 induc...

PURPOSE Increasing evidence suggests a central role for mitochondrial (mt) dysfunction in age-related macular degeneration (AMD). Previous proteomic data from the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) revealed significant changes to mt proteins, suggesting potential functional defects and damage to mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) with AMD progression. The present study tests the hypothesis that mtDNA dama...

The idea that alterations in the brain immunomodulation are critical for Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathogenesis provides the most integrative view on this cognitive disorder, considering that converging research lines have revealed the involvement of inflammatory processes in AD. We have proposed the damage signal hypothesis as a unifying scheme in that release of endogenous damage/alarm signals...