Many works have proposed the enrichment of database query languages with preferences, aiding the user to better rank the results. In this work we propose and examine the hypothesis that effective preference specification in many cases presupposes knowledge of the information space and the available choices. Otherwise, the expression of intentional preferences can be a tiresome process, leading ...

The products in the real-world application to be studied in this thesis are the rail cars used by BASF to transport products between plants and from plants to customers. The transported product poses minimum requirements on certain rail car characteristics (material, heating, etc.). These characteristics define a rail car type. Types with higher quality characteristics can be used as substitute...

Most adenoviruses bind to the coxsackie- and adenovirus receptor (CAR). Surprisingly, CAR is not expressed apically on polarized cells and is thus not easily available to viruses. Consequently, alternative mechanisms for entry of coxsackievirus and adenovirus into cells have been suggested. We have found that tear fluid promotes adenovirus infection, and we have identified human lactoferrin (HL...

Rewriting modulo AC, i.e., associativity and/or commutativity of certain symbols, is among the most frequently used extensions of term rewriting by equational theories. In this paper we present a generalization of the dependency pair framework for termination analysis to rewriting modulo AC. It subsumes existing variants of AC dependency pairs, admits standard dependency graph analyses, and in ...

Adapting acoustic models to a new environment is usually realized by considering model transformations that are estimated on the adaptation corpus. Since such a corpus usually contains very few data, the models' Gaussians are most often partitioned into a few regression classes, and all the Gaussians in the same class share the same transformation. It is further possible to increase the number ...

in this study two modes ofreading (car and traditional print mode) were compared in regards to their effectiveness for l2 reading comprehension. a group of 120 english major students were divided into three classes: car, traditional, and control. based on the english proficiency scores each class was divided into two groups (high and low levels of proficiency). three classes were taught by the ...

Accurate land use mapping in the Amazon is crucial to support implementation of environmental policies. The new Brazilian Forest Code published 2012 defines a “consolidated rural area” (CRA) as an area within property and occupied by humans prior July 22, 2008. Environmental infractions that occurred before date are granted amnesty landowners exempted from obligation restore degraded areas. To ...