The purpose of this study is to identify the soft skills, relevant to the future talent pool in the information technology (IT) sector. Further, the study aims to investigate soft skills gaps among ...students which are hampering the availability of talent. Soft skills traits were first identified through a literature review. Then, using a structured questionnaire, we surveyed 269 IT professionals working in five IT companies and 329 students pursuing degrees in the IT/CS from 12 technical institutes. The analysis was performed using principal component analysis and an independent t test. We examined important soft skills such as personal traits, leadership, interpersonal skills, team skills, enterprising skills, and organizational skills. The independent t test results showed a perception gap between professionals and students regarding the importance of soft skills. This study contributes to the literature by adding to the understanding of critical soft skills in IT sector. It underlines the partnership between educational institutions and the IT industry to address this gap. This partnership will benefit all stakeholders. We argue that although talent management is dealt with at the industry level, academia play an important role in making this process easier and effective by developing the desired skills in students.
The use of novel and improved chemopreventive and chemotherapeutic agents for the prevention and treatment of cancer is on the rise. Natural products have always afforded a rich source of such ...agents. Epidemiological evidence suggests that a higher flavonoid intake is associated with low cancer risk. Accumulating data clearly indicate that the induction of apoptosis is an important component in the chemoprevention of cancer by naturally occurring dietary agents. Resveratrol, a naturally occurring polyphenol, demonstrates pleiotropic health benefits, including antioxidant, anti‐inflammatory, antiaging, cardioprotective, and neuroprotective activities. Because of these properties and their wide distribution throughout the plant kingdom, resveratrol is envisioned as a potential chemopreventive/curative agent. Currently, a number of preclinical findings from our lab and elsewhere suggest resveratrol to be a promising natural weapon in the war against cancer. Remarkable progress in elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying the anticancer properties of resveratrol has been achieved. Here, we focus on some of the myriad pathways that resveratrol targets to exert its chemopreventive role and advocate that resveratrol holds tremendous potential as an efficient anticancer drug of the future.
De novo lipogenesis, a hallmark for cancers is required for cellular transformation. Further it is believed that resistance to apoptosis and epithelial-to-mesenchymal-transition(EMT) facilitates ...metastasis via over-expression of anti-apoptotic Bcl-2. Previously we demonstrated that hsa-miR-195 targets BCL2, induces apoptosis and augmented the effect of etoposide in breast cancer cells. However, the mechanism behind its function remains elusive. Herein gene expression profiling was done in presence/absence of hsa-miR-195 in Breast cancer cells. IPA revealed mitochondrial dysfunction, fatty acid metabolism and xenobiotic metabolism signalling among the top processes being affected. For the first time we herein identified ACACA, FASN (the key enzymes of de novo fatty acid synthesis), HMGCR (the key enzyme of de novo cholesterol synthesis) and CYP27B1 as direct targets of hsa-miR-195. We further showed that ectopic expression of hsa-miR-195 in MCF-7 and MDA-MB-231 cells not only altered cellular cholesterol and triglyceride levels significantly but also resulted in reduced proliferation, invasion and migration. We further demonstrated that over expression of hsa-miR-195 decreased the Mesenchymal markers expression and enhanced Epithelial markers. In conclusion we say that hsa-miR-195 targets the genes of de novo lipogenesis, inhibits cell proliferation, migration, and invasion which potentially opens new avenues for the treatment of breast cancer.
A number of anti-cancer strategies aim to target the mitochondrial apoptotic machinery to induce tumour cell death. Mitochondria play a key role as death amplifiers by releasing apoptogenic factors ...from the mitochondrial inter-membrane space into the cytosol. BCL2 proteins are known for their ability to regulate both mitochondrial physiology and cell death, and their deregulated expression often renders cancer cells insensitive to apoptosis-inducing anticancer drugs. Recently, a few microRNAs, a novel class of gene regulators, have been demonstrated to regulate expression of some members of the BCL2 family. Here, we have combined computational and experimental approaches to identify miRNAs that can regulate the anti-apoptotic protein BCL2. We report that miR-195, miR-24-2 and miR-365-2 act as negative regulators of BCL2 through direct binding to their respective binding sites in the 3'-UTR of the human BCL2 gene. Ectopic expression of miR-195, miR-24-2 and miR-365-2 individually led to a significant reduction of the levels of BCL2 protein. Additionally, we found that overexpression of these miRNAs induced dissipation of the mitochondrial membrane potential and release of cytochrome c from mitochondria into the cytosol. Furthermore, we demonstrated that overexpression of these miRNAs not only caused an increase in apoptosis but also augmented the apoptotic effect of etoposide in breast cancer MCF7 cells. These data not only show the apoptotic nature of miR-195, miR-24-2 and miR-365-2 but also highlight the therapeutic potential of these miRNAs.
Display omitted
•A literature review of ocular modalities such as iris and periocular is presented.•Information fusion approaches that combine ocular modalities with other modalities are ...reviewed.•Future research directions are presented on sensing technologies, algorithms, and fusion approaches.
Biometrics, an integral component of Identity Science, is widely used in several large-scale-county-wide projects to provide a meaningful way of recognizing individuals. Among existing modalities, ocular biometric traits such as iris, periocular, retina, and eye movement have received significant attention in the recent past. Iris recognition is used in Unique Identification Authority of India’s Aadhaar Program and the United Arab Emirate’s border security programs, whereas the periocular recognition is used to augment the performance of face or iris when only ocular region is present in the image. This paper reviews the research progression in these modalities. The paper discusses existing algorithms and the limitations of each of the biometric traits and information fusion approaches which combine ocular modalities with other modalities. We also propose a path forward to advance the research on ocular recognition by (i) improving the sensing technology, (ii) heterogeneous recognition for addressing interoperability, (iii) utilizing advanced machine learning algorithms for better representation and classification, (iv) developing algorithms for ocular recognition at a distance, (v) using multimodal ocular biometrics for recognition, and (vi) encouraging benchmarking standards and open-source software development.
Mitochondrial dysfunction and oxidative stress characterize major factors involved in the activation of complex processes corresponding to apoptosis-mediated neuronal senescence of dopaminergic ...neurons (DA) in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Here, we evaluated the molecular mechanisms participating in the treatment of a 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydopyridine- (MPTP-) intoxicated PD mouse model in response to chlorogenic acid (CGA). The results indicate that CGA treatment significantly improved the motor coordination of the MPTP-intoxicated mice. CGA also alleviated the fall in activity of mitochondrial complexes I, IV, and V in accordance with ameliorating the level of superoxide dismutase and mitochondrial glutathione in the midbrain of MPTP-induced mice. CGA inhibited the activation of proapoptotic proteins including Bax and caspase-3, while elevating the expression of antiapoptotic protein like Bcl-2 consequently preventing the MPTP-mediated apoptotic cascade. The study also revealed the improved phosphorylation state of Akt, ERK1/2, and GSK3β which was downregulated as an effect of MPTP toxicity. Our findings signify that CGA may possess pharmacological properties and contribute to neuroprotection against MPTP induced toxicity in a PD mouse model associated with phosphorylation of GSK3β via activating Akt/ERK signalling in the mitochondrial intrinsic apoptotic pathway. Thus, CGA treatment may arise as a potential therapeutic candidate for mitochondrial-mediated apoptotic senescence of DA neurons in PD.
Two popular representation learning paradigms are dictionary learning and deep learning. While dictionary learning focuses on learning "basis" and "features" by matrix factorization, deep learning ...focuses on extracting features via learning "weights" or "filter" in a greedy layer by layer fashion. This paper focuses on combining the concepts of these two paradigms by proposing deep dictionary learning and show how deeper architectures can be built using the layers of dictionary learning. The proposed technique is compared with other deep learning approaches, such as stacked autoencoder, deep belief network, and convolutional neural network. Experiments on benchmark data sets show that the proposed technique achieves higher classification and clustering accuracies. On a real-world problem of electrical appliance classification, we show that deep dictionary learning excels where others do not yield at-par performance. We postulate that the proposed formulation can pave the path for a new class of deep learning tools.
Face verification, though an easy task for humans, is a long-standing open research area. This is largely due to the challenging covariates, such as disguise and aging, which make it very hard to ...accurately verify the identity of a person. This paper investigates human and machine performance for recognizing/verifying disguised faces. Performance is also evaluated under familiarity and match/mismatch with the ethnicity of observers. The findings of this study are used to develop an automated algorithm to verify the faces presented under disguise variations. We use automatically localized feature descriptors which can identify disguised face patches and account for this information to achieve improved matching accuracy. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on the IIIT-Delhi Disguise database that contains images pertaining to 75 subjects with different kinds of disguise variations. The experiments suggest that the proposed algorithm can outperform a popular commercial system and evaluates them against humans in matching disguised face images.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
A novel One MoNomer dual imprinted graphene oxide/carbon black composite polymer was developed applying ‘surface-grafting from’ approach on the screen printed carbon electrode for the electrochemical ...sensing of dopamine and epinephrine. Acryloylated-graphene oxide/carbon black was synthesized for the first time. This served both as a crosslinker and monomer leading to the fast electron transfer from the redox centre to the electrode. The oxidation peak potentials of both the targets were found separated by 200 mV which enabled their simultaneous analysis in real world samples, without any cross reactivity, interferences, and false-positives. The detection limits realized by the proposed sensor, under optimized analytical conditions, were found to be as low as 0.028, 0.028,0.061 and 0.029 ng mL−1 for dopamine and 0.017, 0.018, 0.019 and 0.020 ng mL−1 for epinephrine (S/N = 3) in aqueous, blood serum, urine and pharmaceutical samples. Such sensor could be considered suitable for the primitive diagnosis of several chronic diseases, manifested at ultra-trace level.
•A novel One MoNomer dual imprinted graphene oxide/carbon black composite polymer was developed on the screen printed carbon electrode for the electrochemical sensing of dopamine and epinephrine.•We have incorporated CB into graphene layers which inhibits the agglomeration of GO and improves electrolyte–electrode accessibility as well as electrode conductivity.•Ultra-trace analysis of dopamine and epinephrine in aqueous and real samples was feasible; without any analyte derivatization, cross reactivity and false positives.•The stringent limit detection of dopamine and epinephrine in biological fluids can be utilized to unravel chronic diseases manifested on account of their deficiency.
Scope of algae as third generation biofuels Behera, Shuvashish; Singh, Richa; Arora, Richa ...
Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology,
02/2015, Letnik:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
An initiative has been taken to develop different solid, liquid, and gaseous biofuels as the alternative energy resources. The current research and technology based on the third generation biofuels ...derived from algal biomass have been considered as the best alternative bioresource that avoids the disadvantages of first and second generation biofuels. Algal biomass has been investigated for the implementation of economic conversion processes producing different biofuels such as biodiesel, bioethanol, biogas, biohydrogen, and other valuable co-products. In the present review, the recent findings and advance developments in algal biomass for improved biofuel production have been explored. This review discusses about the importance of the algal cell contents, various strategies for product formation through various conversion technologies, and its future scope as an energy security.