A Multilingual Query Processing System using Software Agents

The goal of this work was developing a query processing system using software agents. Open Agent Architecture framework is used for system development. The system supports queries in both Hindi and Malayalam; two prominent regional languages of India. Natural language processing techniques are used for meaning extraction from the plain query and information from database is given back to the user in his native language. The system architecture is designed in a structured way that it can be adapted to other regional languages of India. . This system can be effectively used in application areas like e-governance, agriculture, rural health, education, national resource planning, disaster management, information kiosks etc where people from all walks of life are involved.

L-Glutaminase production by an immobilized marine Pseudomonas sp. BTMS -51

The present study is about the Pseudomonas sp. BTMS-51 isolated from the marine sediments of Cochin Coast. In the present study, it is concluded that marine bacteria are ideal candidates for immobilization using either Ca-alginate entrapment or physical adsorption on to synthetic inert supports and the process of immobilization does not negatively influence them. Thus, Ca-alginate entrapment of the bacteria was found to be well suited for reuse of the biomass and extended operational stability during continuous operation. Adherence of the bacterium to inertsupports was observed to be strong and it imparted minimal stress on the immobilized bacterium and allowed detachment and relocation on the supports which enabled the formation of a dynamic equilibrium maintaining a stable cell loading. This is particularly desirable in the industry for extended operational stability and maintenance of consistently higher outputs. Marine Pseudomonas sp. BTMS-51 is ideal for industrial production of extra cellular L-glutaminase and immobilization on to synthetic inert support such as polyurethane foam could be an efficient technique, employing packed bed reactor for continuous production of the enzyme. Temperature and glutamine concentration had significant effects on enzyme production by cells immobilized on polyurethane foam (PUF).

Invertase immobilised on montmorillonite: reusability enhancement and reduction in leaching

Invertase was immobilised on microporous montmorillonite K-10 via adsorption and covalent binding. The immobilised enzymes were tested for sucrose hydrolysis activity in a batch reactor. Km for immobilised systems was greater than free enzyme. The immobilised forms could be reused for 15 continuous cycles without any loss in activity. After 25 cycles, 85% initial activity was retained. A study on leaching of enzymes showed that 100% enzyme was retained even after 15 cycles of reuse. Leaching increased with reaction temperature. Covalent binding resisted leaching even at temperatures of 70 °C.

Fermentation Of Rice And Related Products By Bacillus Sp.

Recently’ recognition cnf immobilization ‘technology for the rapid conversion of several substrates into metabolites and repeated reuse of the biocatalysts have drawn the attention of the fermentation scientists and technologists to try these new technologies for the rapid production of pnxkmt and enhancement of the efficiencies of the systems Hence in the present study rice was selected,as a substrate since it is a rich source of starch, available and cultivated throughout the year almost in all part of our country. Rice although known for its use as a staple food in many forms as rice, idli, dosai etc., has not been used in industry extensively. However, it ii; a potential resource for’ the production of alcohol, high protein food anui for sugar and sugar syrups as it is evidenced by the few reports mentioned in the review of literature. Of the several microorganisms available, Bacillus sp, is a known candidate for the production of amylases. Hence in the present study Bacillus sp, was desired for its known efficiencies in starch conversion

Design And Development Of A Named Entity Based Question Answering System For Malayalam Language

This is a Named Entity Based Question Answering System for Malayalam Language. Although a vast amount of information is available today in digital form, no effective information access mechanism exists to provide humans with convenient information access. Information Retrieval and Question Answering systems are the two mechanisms available now for information access. Information systems typically return a long list of documents in response to a user’s query which are to be skimmed by the user to determine whether they contain an answer. But a Question Answering System allows the user to state his/her information need as a natural language question and receives most appropriate answer in a word or a sentence or a paragraph. This system is based on Named Entity Tagging and Question Classification. Document tagging extracts useful information from the documents which will be used in finding the answer to the question. Question Classification extracts useful information from the question to determine the type of the question and the way in which the question is to be answered. Various Machine Learning methods are used to tag the documents. Rule-Based Approach is used for Question Classification. Malayalam belongs to the Dravidian family of languages and is one of the four major languages of this family. It is one of the 22 Scheduled Languages of India with official language status in the state of Kerala. It is spoken by 40 million people. Malayalam is a morphologically rich agglutinative language and relatively of free word order. Also Malayalam has a productive morphology that allows the creation of complex words which are often highly ambiguous. Document tagging tools such as Parts-of-Speech Tagger, Phrase Chunker, Named Entity Tagger, and Compound Word Splitter are developed as a part of this research work. No such tools were available for Malayalam language. Finite State Transducer, High Order Conditional Random Field, Artificial Immunity System Principles, and Support Vector Machines are the techniques used for the design of these document preprocessing tools. This research work describes how the Named Entity is used to represent the documents. Single sentence questions are used to test the system. Overall Precision and Recall obtained are 88.5% and 85.9% respectively. This work can be extended in several directions. The coverage of non-factoid questions can be increased and also it can be extended to include open domain applications. Reference Resolution and Word Sense Disambiguation techniques are suggested as the future enhancements

CBIR Using Local and Global Properties of Image Sub-blocks

This paper proposes a content based image retrieval (CBIR) system using the local colour and texture features of selected image sub-blocks and global colour and shape features of the image. The image sub-blocks are roughly identified by segmenting the image into partitions of different configuration, finding the edge density in each partition using edge thresholding, morphological dilation and finding the corner density in each partition. The colour and texture features of the identified regions are computed from the histograms of the quantized HSV colour space and Gray Level Co- occurrence Matrix (GLCM) respectively. A combined colour and texture feature vector is computed for each region. The shape features are computed from the Edge Histogram Descriptor (EHD). Euclidean distance measure is used for computing the distance between the features of the query and target image. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides better retrieving result than retrieval using some of the existing methods

Content Based Image Retrieval Using Low Level Features of Automatically Extracted Regions of Interest

This paper proposes a region based image retrieval system using the local colour and texture features of image sub regions. The regions of interest (ROI) are roughly identified by segmenting the image into fixed partitions, finding the edge map and applying morphological dilation. The colour and texture features of the ROIs are computed from the histograms of the quantized HSV colour space and Gray Level co- occurrence matrix (GLCM) respectively. Each ROI of the query image is compared with same number of ROIs of the target image that are arranged in the descending order of white pixel density in the regions, using Euclidean distance measure for similarity computation. Preliminary experimental results show that the proposed method provides better retrieving result than retrieval using some of the existing methods.

A key based cache replacement policy for cooperative caching in mobile ad hoc networks

Cooperative caching in mobile ad hoc networks aims at improving the efficiency of information access by reducing access latency and bandwidth usage. Cache replacement policy plays a vital role in improving the performance of a cache in a mobile node since it has limited memory. In this paper we propose a new key based cache replacement policy called E-LRU for cooperative caching in ad hoc networks. The proposed scheme for replacement considers the time interval between the recent references, size and consistency as key factors for replacement. Simulation study shows that the proposed replacement policy can significantly improve the cache performance in terms of cache hit ratio and query delay

A Sub-block Based Image Retrieval Using Modified Integrated Region Matching.

This paper proposes a content based image retrieval (CBIR) system using the local colour and texture features of selected image sub-blocks and global colour and shape features of the image. The image sub-blocks are roughly identified by segmenting the image into partitions of different configuration, finding the edge density in each partition using edge thresholding, morphological dilation. The colour and texture features of the identified regions are computed from the histograms of the quantized HSV colour space and Gray Level Co- occurrence Matrix (GLCM) respectively. A combined colour and texture feature vector is computed for each region. The shape features are computed from the Edge Histogram Descriptor (EHD). A modified Integrated Region Matching (IRM) algorithm is used for finding the minimum distance between the sub-blocks of the query and target image. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides better retrieving result than retrieval using some of the existing methods

A virtual backbone based approach for cooperative caching in mobile ad hoc networks

Cache look up is an integral part of cooperative caching in ad hoc networks. In this paper, we discuss a cooperative caching architecture with a distributed cache look up protocol which relies on a virtual backbone for locating and accessing data within a cooperate cache. Our proposal consists of two phases: (i) formation of a virtual backbone and (ii) the cache look up phase. The nodes in a Connected Dominating Set (CDS) form the virtual backbone. The cache look up protocol makes use of the nodes in the virtual backbone for effective data dissemination and discovery. The idea in this scheme is to reduce the number of nodes involved in cache look up process, by constructing a CDS that contains a small number of nodes, still having full coverage of the network. We evaluated the effect of various parameter settings on the performance metrics such as message overhead, cache hit ratio and average query delay. Compared to the previous schemes the proposed scheme not only reduces message overhead, but also improves the cache hit ratio and reduces the average delay

Intelligent Agent-based Multilingual Information Retrieval System

The goal of this work is to develop an Open Agent Architecture for Multilingual information retrieval from Relational Database. The query for information retrieval can be given in plain Hindi or Malayalam; two prominent regional languages of India. The system supports distributed processing of user requests through collaborating agents. Natural language processing techniques are used for meaning extraction from the plain query and information is given back to the user in his/ her native language. The system architecture is designed in a structured way so that it can be adapted to other regional languages of India

English-Malayalam Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval – an Experience

This paper describes about an English-Malayalam Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval system. The system retrieves Malayalam documents in response to query given in English or Malayalam. Thus monolingual information retrieval is also supported in this system. Malayalam is one of the most prominent regional languages of Indian subcontinent. It is spoken by more than 37 million people and is the native language of Kerala state in India. Since we neither had any full-fledged online bilingual dictionary nor any parallel corpora to build the statistical lexicon, we used a bilingual dictionary developed in house for translation. Other language specific resources like Malayalam stemmer, Malayalam morphological root analyzer etc developed in house were used in this work

Content Based Image Retrieval System for Malayalam Handwritten Characters

Content Based Image Retrieval is one of the prominent areas in Computer Vision and Image Processing. Recognition of handwritten characters has been a popular area of research for many years and still remains an open problem. The proposed system uses visual image queries for retrieving similar images from database of Malayalam handwritten characters. Local Binary Pattern (LBP) descriptors of the query images are extracted and those features are compared with the features of the images in database for retrieving desired characters. This system with local binary pattern gives excellent retrieval performance

Continuous production of L-glutaminase by an immobilized marine Pseudomonas sp BTMS-51 in a packed bed reactor

A marine Pseudomonas sp BTMS-51, immobilized by Ca-alginate gel entrapment was used for the production of extracellular Lglutaminase under repeated batch process and continuous process employing a packed bed reactor (PBR). Immobilized cells could produce an average of 25 U/ml of enzyme over 20 cycles of repeated batch operation and did not show any decline in production upon reuse. The enzyme yield correlated well with the biomass content in the beads. Continuous production of the enzyme in PBR was studied at different substrate concentrations and dilution rates. In general, the volumetric productivity increased with increased dilution rate and substrate concentrations and the substrate conversion efficiency declined. The PBR operated under conditions giving maximal substrate conversion efficiency gave an average yield of 21.07 U/ml and an average productivity of 13.49 U/ml/h. The system could be operated for 120 h without any decline in productivity

Impact of Quality on Ethics and Social Responsibility in Marketing, in Industries in Kerala in the present Indian Scenario

The paper ‘Impact of Quality on Ethics and Social Responsibility in Marketing in Industries in Kerala in the present Indian scenario’ highlights the observations, based on a descriptive research carried out in five leading industries in Kerala, in the private and public sector. Ethics and social responsibilities, practiced in these industries, are reflected in the results of the survey conducted on specific queries like awareness of products/services provided by them, total understanding of the requirements of the customer, open discussion on technical matters, accountability of employees to the society and social needs, consumer ethics vis a vis business ethics etc. Team working goes a long way, in building relations, which in turn, results in a progressive and effective marketing strategy. This assumes paramount importance, considering the severe competition we are facing in the light of liberalization, privatization and globalization, which encompasses the globe. The prediction of India becoming a lead nation, along with USA, China and Japan, in this decade, can get fructified only if we follow a very high standards of ethics and social responsibility, in all domains including marketing. Organizations like TRW.Rane, Sundaram Fasteners, TVS Motors, in Chennai are a few among others in India, who have achieved the highest distinction in quality viz Deming Prize, and these demonstrate their commitment to quality, society and humanity at large. Cost effectiveness, without jeopardizing quality has become the need of the hour and MRTP has become history. This trait is being brought out through the survey and the results speak for themselves. Unethical practices like switch and bait, not only brings shame to the organization, and country but also results in the company getting wiped out from the market. Adherence to standards like ISO 14000 helps to maintain the minimum level of social responsibility and environmental friendliness. Like quality audit, safety audit etc, social audit is being insisted in all progressive countries to ensure that the organization comply with the minimum statutory requirements. The paper also touches upon Corporate Social Responsibility practiced in the industries and this becomes crystal clear through their commitment to improve the community. Green Marketing lays a lot of importance on the three Rs of environmentalism viz Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The objective of any business is to achieve optimal profit and this is possible only by reducing the cost as well as waste. In this context, management tools like brainstorming, suggestion schemes, benchmarking etc becomes helpful. These characteristics are brought out through the analysis of survey results. The conclusions drawn throw a lot of information on the desirable practices with respect to Ethics and Social Responsibility in Marketing