A pathogen is usually defined as a microorganism that causes, or can cause, disease. We have defined a pathogen as a microbe that can cause damage in a host. However, this definition immediately raises the question of what it is about the microorganism that enables it to cause disease or damage; and this takes us to an ongoing debate that dates back to the late 19th century when the germ theory...

This paper will introduce a new method to obtain the order weightsof the Ordered Weighted Averaging (OWA) operator. We will first show therelation between fuzzy quantifiers and neat OWA operators and then offer anew combination of them. Fuzzy quantifiers are applied for soft computingin modeling the optimism degree of the decision maker. In using neat operators,the ordering of the inputs is not...

Although individual ants have an extremely basic intelligence, and are completely incapable of surviving on their own, colonies of ants can develop remarkably sophisticated and biologically successful behavior. This paper discusses a set of experiments which attempt to simulate one of these behaviors, namely the ability of ants to place pheromones as a way of communication. These experiments in...

Autoignition of binary blends of n-butanol and n-heptane was studied in a rapid compression machine at an equivalence ratio of 0.4 and a compressed pressure of 20 bar with the compressed temperature varying from 700 K to 907 K. Within the temperature range covered in this study, no cool flame or negative temperature coefficient behavior was observed for neat n-butanol. With the presence of n-he...

NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) has been successfully applied to intelligent gameplay. To further improve its effectiveness, a key technique is to reuse the knowledge learned from source gameplay tasks to boost performance on target gameplay tasks. We consider this as a Transfer Learning (TL) problem. However, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) evolved by NEAT are usually unnecess...

An obstacle to validating and benchmarking methods for genome analysis is that there are few reference datasets available for which the "ground truth" about the mutational landscape of the sample genome is known and fully validated. Additionally, the free and public availability of real human genome datasets is incompatible with the preservation of donor privacy. In order to better analyze and ...

In this paper a flexible interface to high-level synthesis data (NEAT) is presented. NEAT offers three design views to common high-level synthesis data domains. Interand intra-domain relations are used to represent design relations between synthesis objects and to store synthesis results. To extend the functionality of the common synthesis interface programmers use object oriented programming t...

Chitosan film reinforced with nano-sized chitin whiskers and crosslinked using tannic acid was synthesized by the casting-vaporation method. The mechanical and physicochemical properties of several film samples (consisting of different ratio of chitin and tannic acid) were compared with neat chitosan. Tensile tests show that the addition of chitin improves the nanocomposite films mechanical pro...