Recently, Thomson Reuters has published its 2014 list of highly cited researchers (HCRs)[1]. Initial studies over the list [2] suggested that some universities (for instance, King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia) may have been manipulating its world ranking by contracting with highly cited researchers. In this work, we analyse the ranking of other Saudi universities based solely on the lis...

Background The outcome of patients with bacteremia is influenced by the initial selection of adequate antimicrobial therapy. However, at the early stage of a bloodstream infection, microbiological identification and susceptibility of the causative organism are not available. Therefore, a calculated (empirical) antimicrobial therapy has to be started, based on the knowledge of the most likely mi...

Image processing is often necessary for extracting the content of ancient documents. We present here techniques for restoring images and removing noise, extracting document structures (separating graphical elements and illustrations from text, extracting text lines) and, when possible, recognizing the textual or musical symbols which may be present in the image. These techniques, which are clas...

It is shown that the “hit-and-run” algorithm for sampling from a convex body K (introduced by R.L. Smith) mixes in time O(nR/r), where R and r are the radii of the inscribed and circumscribed balls of K. Thus after appropriate preprocessing, hit-andrun produces an approximately uniformly distributed sample point in time O(n), which matches the best known bound for other sampling algorithms. We ...

The optimal linear preprocessor for classifying two zero-mean Gaussian discrete-time signals which have been corrupted by additive zero-mean Gaussian noise is studied. Conditions for existence of the optimal linear preprocessor that achieves the performance of the likelihood ratio test for the noisy signals are given and the preprocessor is explicitly derived.

A narrow-band-based adaptive level set method is proposed for mesh evolution in this paper. In the preprocessing step, the portions of the mesh with high curvature are detected and clustered as fine geometric details. Then the fine grids with optimal orientations are defined for each detected portions, while the coarse grid is chosen for global evolution. The solutions on different scale grids ...

One of the most interesting tasks of scene analysis is the reconstruction problem, which is the problem of finding a three-dimensional description of a scene from two or more projections. When the scene is assumed to be composed of man-made objects bounded by quadric surfaces, the reconstruction process is simplified if the border lines in each projection are given by means of straight-line seg...

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v List of Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Chapter 1: Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 1.1 Pr...

In this paper, a novel approach to classifier ensemble creation is presented. While other ensemble creation techniques are based on careful selection of existing classifiers or preprocessing of the data, the presented approach automatically creates an optimal labelling for a number of classifiers, which are then assigned to the original data instances and fed to classifiers. The approach has be...