Efficient end-to-end parallel/distributed processing of polygon-based spatial data (also known as vector-based data) has been a long-standing research question in GIS community. The irregular and data intensive nature of the underlying computation has impeded the exploratory research in this space. We have created an open architecture based system named Crayons for Azure cloud platform using st...

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is an efficient retrieval of relevant images from large databases based on features extracted from the image. This paper proposes a system that can be used for retrieving images related to a query image from a large set of distinct images. It follows an image segmentation based approach to extract the different features present in an image. The above feature...

A simple, rapid calorimetric assay for plasma heparin is presented. The assay employs the metachromasia of azure A when heparin is added. It is useful for 0 to 10 units/ml and does not depend on heparin’s anticoagulant activity. Heparin concentrations determined with this assay are not exactly the same as those determined with coagulation assays. This is probably because azure A determines chem...

ion and execution model that fits the communication, computation and reliability features of Clouds platforms and offer innovative problems for further research.

We discuss the applicability of the Microsoft cloud computing platform, Azure, for bioinformatics. We focus on the usability of the resource rather than its performance. We provide an example of how R can be used on Azure to analyse a large amount of microarray expression data deposited at the public database ArrayExpress. We provide a walk through to demonstrate explicitly how Azure can be use...

Message passing interface (MPI) has been widely used for implementing parallel and distributed applications. The emergence of cloud computing offers a scalable, fault-tolerant, on-demand alternative to traditional on-premise clusters. In this thesis, we investigate the possibility of adopting the cloud platform as an alternative to conventional MPI-based solutions. We show that cloud platform c...

A new colorimetric method for determining the surface-accessible acidic lignin hydroxyl groups in lignocellulose solid fractions was developed. The method is based on selective adsorption of Azure B, a basic dye, onto acidic hydroxyl groups of lignin. Selectivity of adsorption of Azure B on lignin was demonstrated using lignin and cellulose materials as adsorbents. Adsorption isotherms of Azure...

Mixtures of methylene blue and azure-2 are stated to stain neutral lipid droplets an intense dark blue in 0-5-10 ,um-thick Araldite sections of osmiumfixed kidney (Muehrcke, Mandal, Volini, and Epstein, 1969; Tobian, Ishii, and Duke, 1969). Neither group of investigators, however, detail either the composition of the stain or the method. A modification of the methylene blue-azure-2 method of Ri...