BACKGROUND International trade for luxury products, medicines, and tonics poses a threat to both terrestrial and marine wildlife. The demand for and consumption of gill plates (known as Peng Yu Sai, "Fish Gill of Mobulid Ray") from devil and manta rays (subfamily Mobulinae, collectively referred to as mobulids) poses a significant threat to these marine fishes because of their extremely low pro...

Effective daily processing of large amounts of paper documents in office environments requires the application of semantic-based indexing techniques during the transformation of paper documents to electronic format. For this purpose a combination of both XML and knowledge technologies can be used. XML distinguishes between data, its structure and semantics, allowing the exchange of data element...

Content Management Systems [1] are widely used in web sites and portals lately, promoting collaboration among groups of users. Collaboration applies to many fields and storytelling in the Web is one of them. When a group of users can contribute into telling a story the result could be apart from a more detailed story, an interesting educational method. Since the main purpose of a storyteller is...

This paper is the extended introduction of a series of papers about modelling T-homotopy by refinement of observation. The notion of T-homotopy equivalence is discussed. A new one is proposed and its behaviour with respect to other construction in dihomotopy theory is explained. The main feature of the two algebraic topological models of higher dimensional automata (or HDA) introduced in [GG03]...

Timeand state-domain methods are two common approaches to nonparametric prediction. Whereas the former uses data predominantly from recent history, the latter relies mainly on historical information. Combining these two pieces of valuable information is an interesting challenge in statistics. We surmount this problem by dynamically integrating information from both the time and state domains. T...

Some historical documents, especially the Einstein-Besso manuscript from 1913, an extensive notebook by Hans Thirring from 1917, and a correspondence between Thirring and Albert Einstein in the year 1917 reveal that most of the merit of the so-called Lense-Thirring effect of general relativity belongs to Einstein. Besides this “central story” of the effect, we comment shortly on some type of pr...

Transcribing documents from the printing press era, a challenge in its own right, is more complicated when documents interleave multiple languages—a common feature of 16th century texts. Additionally, many of these documents precede consistent orthographic conventions, making the task even harder. We extend the state-of-the-art historical OCR model of Berg-Kirkpatrick et al. (2013) to handle wo...

Document image understanding denotes the recognition of semantically relevant components in the layout extracted from a document image. Automatic approaches for document image understanding are highly demanded today by organizations involved in the preservation and valorisation of historical documents that collect more and more document images, whose effective usage critically depends on their ...

This paper is born out of many years of thinking about the issues relating science and theology. I started out as an undergraduate, pondering such questions as those regarding the nature of physical law and the puzzle of why mathematics works in describing nature. Over the years of reflection, I have come to believe that if Christians are to take their faith seriously into the realm of science,...