the rapid growth of world wide web has affected the nature of interactions between customers and companies enormously. one significant consequence of this phenomenon is definitely the emergence and development of e-commerce websites and online stores all over the web. in spite of its great benefits, online shopping could turn into a complicated procedure from the customer point of view. in most...

Homoploid hybrid speciation (HHS) is the establishment of a novel species through introgressive hybridization without a change in chromosome number. We discuss different routes by which this might occur and propose a novel term, ‘hybrid trait speciation’, which combines the idea that hybridization can generate adaptive novelty with the ‘magic trait’ model of ecological speciation. Heliconius bu...

Wnt signals control cell fate decisions and orchestrate cell behavior in metazoan animals. In the fruit fly Drosophila, embryos defective in signaling mediated by the Wnt protein Wingless (Wg) exhibit severe segmentation defects. The Drosophila segment polarity gene naked cuticle (nkd) encodes an EF hand protein that regulates early Wg activity by acting as an inducible antagonist. Nkd antagoni...

Hybrid fuzzy expert systems are one of the most practical intelligent paradigm of soft computing techniques with the high potential for managing uncertainty associated to the medical diagnosis. The potential of genetic algorithm (GA) by inspiring from natural evolution as a learning and optimization technique has been vastly concentrated for improving fuzzy expert systems. In this paper, the GA...

This study investigates the prediction model of compressive strength of self–compacting concrete (SCC) by utilizing soft computing techniques. The techniques consist of adaptive neuro–based fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), artificial neural network (ANN) and the hybrid of particle swarm optimization with passive congregation (PSOPC) and ANFIS called PSOPC–ANFIS. Their perf...

1 Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology, Graduate School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan 2 Gene Discovery Research Center, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), 1-1-1 Higashi, Tsukuba Science City 305-8562, Japan 3 Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Tsukuba, 1-1-1, Tsukuba Science C...

From the Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125; the *Department of Microbiology, University of Texas Health Science Center at Dallas, Dallas, Texas 75235; the *Department of Microbiology, University of Southern California School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California 90033; and the ~Immunology Branch, National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of ...

Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is the most frequent non-traumatic neurological disease capable of causing disability in young adults. Detection of MS lesions with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most common technique. However, manual interpretation of vast amounts of data is often tedious and error-prone. Furthermore, changes in lesions are often subtle and extremely unrepresentati...

A recent innovation in artificial intelligence research has been the integration of multiple artificial intelligence techniques into hybrid intelligent systems. Hybrid artificial intelligent systems seek to overcome the deficiencies of traditional artificial techniques by combining techniques with complementary capabilities. Using these hybrid systems, researchers have been able to solve a vari...