1. introduction nowadays in most of the countries in the world there is a growing trend towards decentralization and development of local governments. one of the most cited reasons for this issue is the fact that most of the countries apply the decentralization process as a method for enhancing the performance of public sectors and the economic development in as much as the central government w...

Consistency checking plays a central role in qualitative spatial and temporal reasoning. Given a set of variables V , and a set of constraints Γ taken from a qualitative calculus (e.g. the Interval Algebra (IA) or RCC-8), the aim is to decide if Γ is consistent. The consistency problem has been investigated extensively in the literature. Practical applications e.g. urban planning often impose, ...

Qualitative probabilistic networks (QPNs) [13] are an abstraction of in uence diagrams and Bayesian belief networks replacing numerical relations by qualitative in uences and synergies. To reason in a QPN is to nd the e ect of decision or new evidence on a variable of interest in terms of the sign of the change in belief (increase or decrease). We review our work on qualitative belief propagati...

Local R&D laboratories are traditionally a primary source of information and technology involving local talent and intelligence. This paper focuses on R&D units established by foreign companies in China, investigating their R&D mission, laboratory management, integration with the parent organizations, and overall performance. The research is based on 28 qualitative expert interviews with local ...

We study on-line backpropagation and show that the existing theoretical descriptions are strictly valid only on relatively short time scales or in the vicinity of (local) minima of the backpropagation error potential. Qualitative global features (e.g., why is it much easier to escape from local minima than from global minima) may also be explained by these local descriptions, but the current ap...

Synchronous remote usability studies can be a convenient and cost-effective alternative to conventional local usability studies. Although they are common in the field, there has been little research comparing synchronous remote usability studies with local studies. In our comparison of remote and local studies for an expert interface, the primary differences were in the participant’s and facili...

1 Abstract All the qualitative simulation algorithms so far proposed depend upon local propagation paradigm, and hence produce spurious states. Recent approaches use topological constraints in phase space diagrams for filtering the spurious states. We propose an alternative method of recognizing global properties in the graphically expressed qualitative model. Qualitative versions of such syste...