BACKGROUND The Nasal Allergen Challenge (NAC) model allows the study of Allergic Rhinitis (AR) pathophysiology and the proof of concept of novel therapies. The Allergic Rhinitis - Clinical Investigator Collaborative (AR-CIC) aims to optimize the protocol, ensuring reliability and repeatability of symptoms to better evaluate the therapies under investigation. METHODS 20 AR participants were ch...

We developed a question and answering system QUARK. This system extracts an answer from newspaper corpus as a knowledge source by a statistical technique. We participated in NTCIR3 QAC task to evaluate our system.

Mussel growth in the internal sea water systems of Navy vessels can result in significant performance issues and biosecurity concerns for affected vessels. The primary in-water treatment method for mussel fouling of the internals of Navy vessels is to flush with a 1% detergent solution containing quaternary ammonium compounds (QAC). Parameters for the application of this treatment are based on ...

We propose definitions of QAC, the quantum analog of the classical class AC of constant-depth circuits with AND and OR gates of arbitrary fan-in, and QACC[q], the analog of the class ACC[q] where Modq gates are also allowed. We prove that parity or fanout allows us to construct quantum MODq gates in constant depth for any q, so QACC[2] = QACC. More generally, we show that for any q, p > 1, MODq...

The antiviral activity of a surface-bonded quaternary ammonium chloride (QAC) was examined in this study. The mechanism of inactivation was elucidated by a combination of infectivity assay, radioactive labeling assay, and sedimentation analysis. Although the virions are still infectious when attached onto the chemically modified surface, we found these viruses are inactivated if they are eluted...

Satellite-retrieved aerosol optical depth (AOD) has become an important predictor of ground-level particulate matter (PM) and greatly empowered air pollution research worldwide. We evaluated the AOD parameters included in the Collection 6 aerosol product of the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) for two key factors affecting their applications in air quality research—coverage...

We present an optical system, called the quantitative absorption cytometer (QAC), to measure the volume and hemoglobin mass of red blood cells flowing through a microfluidic channel. In contrast to clinical hematology analyzers, where cells are sphered in order for both volume and hemoglobin to be measured accurately, the QAC measures cells in their normal physiological shape. Human red blood c...

In this paper we describe the Question Answering Challenge (QAC), a question answering task, and its first evaluation (QAC1). The project was carried out as a task of the NTCIR Workshop 3 in October 2002. One objective of the QAC was to develop practical QA systems in a general domain by focusing on research relating to user interaction and information extraction. Our second objective was to de...

Query auto-completion (QAC) is one of the most recognizable and widely used services of modern search engines. Its goal is to assist a user in the process of query formulation. Current QAC systems are mainly reactive. They respond to the present request using past knowledge. Specifically, they mostly rely on query logs analysis [11, 10, 12] or corpus terms co-occurrences [8] and rank suggestion...