The ability to predict protein folding rates constitutes an important step in understanding the overall folding mechanisms. Although many of the prediction methods are structure based, successful predictions can also be obtained from the sequence. We developed a novel method called prediction of protein folding rates (PPFR), for the prediction of protein folding rates from protein sequences. PPFR implements a linear regression model for each of the mainstream folding dynamics including two-, multi-, and mixed-state proteins. The proposed method provides predictions characterized by strong correlations with the experimental folding rates, which equal 0.87 for the two- and multistate proteins and 0.82 for the mixed-state proteins, when evaluated with out-of-sample jackknife test. Based on in-sample and out-of-sample tests, the PPFR's predictions are shown to be better than most of other sequence only and structure-based predictors and complementary to the predictions of the most recent sequence-based QRSM method. We show that simultaneous incorporation of several characteristics, including the sequence, physiochemical properties of residues, and predicted secondary structure provides improved quality. This hybridized prediction model was analyzed to reveal the complementary factors that can be used in tandem to predict folding rates. We show that bigger proteins require more time for folding, higher helical and coil content and the presence of Phe, Asn, and Gln may accelerate the folding process, the inclusion of Ile, Val, Thr, and Ser may slow down the folding process, and for the two-state proteins increased beta-strand content may decelerate the folding process. Finally, PPFR provides strong correlation when predicting sequences with low similarity.

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We describe the design of an object-oriented multimedia database management system that can store and manage SGML/HyTime compliant multimedia documents. The system is capable of storing, within one database, dtrerent types of documents by accommodating multiple document type definitions (DTDs). This is accomplished by dynamically creating object types according to element definitions in each DTD. The system also has tools to automatically insert marhed-14~ documents into the database. We discuss the system architecture, design issues and the system features.Recently, a number of multimedia projects that have used DBMSs have been reported in the literature (see [pS97] for a survey). However, there are a number of common deficiencies Permission lo make digilnl/llnrd cop& ofnll or pn~t oftlk materinl for personal or classroom 11s~' is granted \vitllout Ike provided that the copies are not made or distributed I'or prolit or conuncrcinl ndvnnlagc, IlIe copyriglit notice. the lille ol'll~e publicnlion and its date appear, and notice is given La1 copyright is lay permission ol'thr ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, lo republish. lo post 011 servers or lo redistributt lo lists. requires specific permission and/or fee. ACM MulGncdin 97 a%nlllc ~~mhirigion I!L%~Copyriglil I997 ACM O-X979 I-99 I -2/97/l I ..53.50

In September 1993, the Canadian Institute for Telecommunications Research, in collaboration with the IBM Toronto Laboratory Centre for Advanced Studies, initiated a major project on Broadband Services. The goal of this major project is to provide the software technologies required for the development of distributed multimedia applications. Of particular interest are presentational" applications where multimedia documents, stored in database servers, are retrieved by remote users over a broadband network. Emphasis is placed on e ciency and service exibility. By e ciency, w e mean the ability to support many users and many m ultimedia documents. As to service exibility, w e mean the application is able to support a range of quality of service requirements from the users, adapt to changing network conditions, and support multiple document t ypes. The research program consists of six constituent projects: multimedia data management, continuous media le server, quality of service negotiation and adaptation, scalable video encoding, synchronization of multimedia data, and project integration. These projects are investigated by a m ulti-disciplinary team from eight institutions across Canada. Multimedia news has been selected as a target application for development, and the results from the various projects have been integrated into a multimedia news prototype. In this paper, the system architecture, research results, and the prototyping e ort, are presented.

In t,he DISIMA system, an image is composed of salient objects that are regions of interest in the image. A salient object has some syntactic properties (shape, color, textures) on which some similarity searches are defined. In addition, a global multi-precision image similarity based on multi-scale color histograms allows similarity queries on images and subimages.