Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are popular models in computer vision for solving labeling problems such as image denoising. This paper tackles the rarely addressed but important problem of learning the full form of the potential functions of pairwise CRFs. We examine two popular learning techniques, maximum likelihood estimation and maximum margin training. The main focus of the paper is on m...

Background: Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), of which Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are the two main clinicopathological subtypes, is a group of digestive system diseases of unknown etiology. Risk factors for IBD are environmental factors, genetics, and immune system agents. Mycobacterium avium subspecies paratuberculosis (MAP) is one of the most important infectious factors...

Let X be a complete noncompact Riemannian manifold with Ricci curvature and Sobolev radius (see §6 for the definition) bounded from below and Y a complete Riemannian manifold with nonpositive sectional curvature. We shall study some situations where a smooth map f : X → Y can be deformed continuously into a harmonic map, using a naturally defined flow. The flow used here is not the usual harmon...

The efficacy of bacterial cultures and IS900-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was compared for the detection of Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (MAP) from the mesenteric lymph nodes of goats. Samples were collected from 75 goats slaughtered in Ilam, in southwest of Iran. Tissue homogenates were inoculated onto four media. The genomic DNA was extracted directly from mesenteri...