The cost of maintenance of mechanized and automated mining systems is too high necessitating efforts to enhance the effectiveness of maintenance systems and organization. For effective maintenance planning, it is important to have a good understanding of the reliability and availability characteristics of the systems. This is essential for determining the Mean Residual Life (MRL) of systems so ...

Identification of quantitative trait loci (QTLs) associated with rice root morphology provides useful information for avoiding drought stress and maintaining yield production under the irrigation condition. In this study, a set of chromosome segment substitution lines derived from 9311 as the recipient and Nipponbare as donor, were used to analysis root morphology. By combining the resequencing...

Systemic lupus erythematosus is a complement-mediated autoimmune disease. While genetic deficiencies of classical pathway components lead to an increased risk of developing systemic lupus erythematosus, end organ damage is associated with complement activation and immune complex deposition. The role of classical pathway regulators in systemic lupus erythematosus is unknown. C4 binding protein (...

The hippocampus is involved in declarative memory and produces new neurons throughout adulthood. Numerous experiments have been aimed at testing the possibility that adult neurogenesis is required for learning and memory. However, progress has been encumbered by the fact that abating adult neurogenesis usually affects other biological processes, confounding the interpretation of such experiment...

Herbaspirillum seropedicae is a plant growth-promoting diazotrophic betaproteobacterium which associates with important crops, such as maize, wheat, rice and sugar-cane. We have previously reported that intact lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is required for H. seropedicae attachment and endophytic colonization of maize roots. In this study, we present evidence that the LPS biosynthesis gene waaL (code...

This thesis focuses on learning natural language interfaces using synchronous grammars, λ-calculus and statistical modeling of parse probabilities. A major focus of the thesis has been to replicate Mooney and Wong’s λ-WASP [17] algorithm and implement it inside the C-PHRASE [12] Natural Language Interface (NLI) system. By doing this we can use C-PHRASE’s more expressive and transportable meanin...

The current study examines the role of the L3T4 T cell subset in the development of lupus-like autoimmunity and lymphoproliferation in lpr-bearing mice. Chronic treatment of MRL-lpr/lpr mice with anti-L3T4 antibody beginning at 4 wk old was found to markedly decrease the production of IgG anti-DNA and antihistone antibodies, while having no effect on IgM autoantibodies. A dramatic reduction in ...

Anti-DNA antibodies, specifically those that stain nuclei in a homogenous nuclear (HN) fashion, are diagnostic of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and the MRL-lpr/lpr SLE murine model. We have used a heavy chain transgene that increases the frequency of anti-HN antibodies to address whether their production in SLE is the consequence of a defect in B cell tolerance. Anti-HN B cells were undete...

This work presents a new approach that allows the use of cases in a case base as heuristics to speed up Multiagent Reinforcement Learning algorithms, combining Case Based Reasoning (CBR) and Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (MRL) techniques. This approach, called Case Based Heuristically Accelerated Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (CB-HAMRL), builds upon an emerging technique, Heuristic Acce...

This paper presents a novel algorithm of Multiagent Reinforcement Learning called State Elimination in Accelerated Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (SEA-MRL), that successfully produces faster learning without incorporating internal knowledge or human intervention such as reward shaping, transfer learning, parameter tuning, and even heuristics, into the learning system. Since the learning spee...