Technical Consultant of the House The Japanese Parliament (Diet) was founded in 1890. Since the very first session, verbatim records had been made by manual shorthand over a hundred years. However, early in this century, the government terminated recruiting stenographers, and investigated alternative methods including ASR technologies. The House of Representatives has chosen ASR for the new sys...

The way that we interact with databases has changed. The ubiquitous textbook example of finding employees with salaries over 60K and ages under 30 no longer reflects a typical use case in modern applications; instead, users are interested in books, movies, music, documents, services, and users that are similar to another object that they have in mind. This sort of similarity search is often imp...

For many countries, increasing energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are key countermeasures to cope with the energy crisis and climate change. Of the various heating equipment such as heat pumps, gas-fired boilers, oil-fired boilers, or electric boilers, heat pumps are widely adopted for space heating, water heating, and process heating by households, business, and industry d...

The efficiency of producing salable products in the pork industry is largely determined by costs associated with feed and by the amount and quality of lean meat produced. The objectives of this paper were 1) to explore heritability and genetic correlations for growth, feed efficiency, and real-time ultrasound traits using both pedigree and marker information and 2) to assess accuracy of genomic...

Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to classify each word of a document into predefined target named entity classes and is now-a-days considered to be fundamental for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as information retrieval, machine translation, information extraction, question answering systems and others. This paper reports about the development of a NER system for Bengali a...

In 2014-15, following a call for expressions of interest open to its subscribers, QAA commissioned six small-scale primary research projects intended to encourage collaboration between providers and promote the formation of communities of practice. This report is one of two on the topic of the role of student satisfaction data in quality assurance and enhancement. The reports are not QAA docume...

The mixing-length theory for the convection, as it is used in the ATLAS9 code (Kurucz, 1993a), is summarized and discussed. We investigated the effect of the modification called “approximate overshooting” on the model structure of the Sun and of starswithTeff included between 4000Kand 8500K, log g included between 2.5 and 4.5, and metallicities [M/H]=0.0 and [M/H]=−3.0.We found that the Kurucz ...

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) causes decreased reproductive performance in breeding animals and increased respiratory problems in growing animals, which result in significant economic losses in the swine industry. Vaccination has generally not been effective in the prevention of PRRS, partially because of the rapid mutation rate and evolution of the virus. The objective o...

Genomic selection is becoming a common practise in dairy cattle, but only few works have studied its introduction in pig selection programs. Results described for this species are highly dependent on the considered traits and the specific population structure. This paper aims to simulate the impact of genomic selection in a pig population with a training cohort of performance-tested and slaught...

The genetic improvement of disease resistance in poultry continues to be a challenge. To identify candidate genes and loci responsible for these traits, genome-wide association studies using the chicken 60k high density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) array for six immune traits, total serum immunoglobulin Y (IgY) level, numbers of, and the ratio of heterophils and lymphocytes, and antibod...