Search

The relevant content search has become a challenging task with the increase in the availability of knowledge and volume of information on the web. Among the various factors that affect the search, the terms or keywords used in the input query has utmost effect on the retrieved results by any search application. The resultant links corresponding to a search request are dependent on the input query supplied by the user. Query expansion is the concept to expand the input query for the inclusion of more relevant terms. This study is an attempt to present state-of-art query expansion approaches along with an abstract model for e-content search in engineering domain using ontological approach. Ontology is the major focus area for semantic search where the search approaches either use generic ontology (such as WordNet) while other augment search with domain specific ontology or the combination of both.

Pap smear test plays an important role for the early diagnosis of cervical cancer in which human cells taken from the cervix of patient are analysed for pre-cancerous changes. The manual analysis of these cells by expert cytologist is labor intensive and time consuming job. In this paper, an improved nucleus segmentation algorithm is proposed using FCM clustering and BPNN. The existing algorithm based on FCM clustering has been improved by finding optimum clusters instead of fixed clusters. Further, shape based features are extracted from each region which act as input to Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN); to classify regions as nucleus or non-nucleus. Thus false detected regions are removed to produce the accurate segmentation of nucleus regions. The proposed work is evaluated on the public available Herlev dataset. Experimental results show the improvement in performance (precision, recall and Dice Coefficient) of nucleus segmentation by 1%, 7% and 5% respectively compared to existing work.

Agile software development has been prevalent in IT industry since more than two decades now. Conceptually, Agile was introduced as an iterative, incremental and adaptive methodology for software development. There are quite a few studies that discuss the success of agile development projects on account of multiple factors like cost, time, quality and productivity. Owing to its popular virtues like enhanced flexibility to incorporate evolving requirements, incremental delivery, quick time to market and ability to keep pace with market trends [1], clients tend to leverage agile methods for a variety of project types in addition to typical small scale development projects. Through this paper, we discuss some of the practical aspects, pros and cons of applying agile principles to different types of IT projects including testing projects, maintenance projects and large-scale development projects.