This paper proposes an adaptive zooming genetic algorithm (AZGA) for continuous optimisation problems. Other than gradually reducing the search space with a fixed reduction rate during the evolution process, the upper and lower boundaries for variables in the objective function are dynamically adjusted based on the distribution information of variables in the whole population. This technique is...

BACKGROUND Common mental disorders (CMD) and adverse social circumstances are widespread among mothers of infants and toddlers in resource-constrained settings. These can undermine early childhood development through compromised caregiving and insufficient access to essential resources. The aim was to examine the effect of maternal CMD and social adversity in the post-partum year on toddler's l...

The purpose of this thesis is to discuss digital image resolution enhancement by variational methods and the associated computational issues. Two problems related to the basic zooming problem are also studied: super-resolution and quantized deconvolution. Digital zooming is important for mundane computing activities such as web browsing as well as sophisticated applications like satellite image...

Lazarillo (Laz) is a glycosyl-phosphatidylinositol (GPI)-linked glycoprotein first characterized in the developing nervous system of the grasshopper Schistocerca americana. It belongs to the Lipocalins, a functionally diverse family of mostly secreted proteins. In this work we test whether the protective capacity known for Laz homologs in flies and vertebrates (NLaz, GLaz and ApoD) is evolution...

A convenient and eficient indexing system is as essential to managing video information as it is to managing tezt. Creating an indez requires partitioning the video into meaningful segments, assigning indez terms to individual segments and combining the indez terms to form a table of contents o r an inverted indez file. To date, video partitioning methods are still in the research stage. This p...

A new scheme of unsharp masking for image contrast enhancement is presented in this paper. An adaptive algorithm is introduced so that a sharpening action is performed only in locations where the image exhibits signiicant dynamics. Hence, the ampliication of noise in smooth areas is reduced. An adaptive directional l-tering is also performed so as to provide suitable emphasis to the diierent di...

This paper presents an algorithm which solves exponentially fast the average consensus problem on strongly connected network of digital links. The algorithm is based on an efficient zooming-in/zooming-out quantization scheme.