Despite being an ancient disease, leprosy remains a public health problem in several countries -particularly in India, Brazil and Indonesia. The current operational guidelines emphasize the evaluation of disability from the time of diagnosis and stipulate as fundamental principles for disease control: early detection and proper treatment. Continued efforts are needed to establish and improve qu...

Endogenous opioid peptides take part in various functions as hormones or neuromodulators. In 1979, Takagi and his co-workers identified a new morphine-like substance “kyotorphin” (Kyo) a dipeptide synthesized in specific brain regions. The highest levels were found in the lower brain stem and dorsal spinal cord areas closely associated with the pain regulatory system. The peptide binds to a spe...

Nowadays, many configurable products and services are sold via web. For supporting a customer in configuring the desired product, the interaction with the configurator has to be personalised according to the user's interests. In this paper, we show how these interests can be estimated. In an idealisation, we ascribe the Multi-Attribute Utility Theory as evaluation process to the user. Based on ...

Recommender systems apply knowledge discovery techniques to the problem of making personalized product recommendations during a live customer interaction. These systems, especially the k-nearest neighbor collaborative filtering based ones, are achieving widespread success in E-commerce nowadays. The tremendous growth of customers and products in recent years poses some key challenges for recomm...

Cooperation between manufacturing enterprises has recently become widespread in order to cope with newly emerged challenges, such as growing customer expectations, increasing product variety and decreasing product lifecycles. Nowadays the response to these challenges seems to be the formation of tight relations in supply chains and networks, which enables joint handling of market risks and invo...

Nowadays, the alignment of business processes to corporate strategy is an important success factor. However, especially implemented business processes do not sufficiently incorporate business objectives. Process managers are facing the challenge on how to optimize already established workflows in organizations based on strategic goals. This contribution proposes a new modeling approach that lin...

As early as 1997 many corporate executives realised that in the network era a web site would influence a company’s image immensely. Anecdotal evidence suggests that in the electronic commerce environment nowadays this influence is becoming more visible as the customer quality perceptions of web sites play a vital role in a company’s success. Research reported in this paper investigates the infl...