Hemisphere asymmetry can be influenced by hand contractions. Brain imaging studies have indicated that pre-performance left-hand contractions may reduce verbal-analytical engagement in motor planning, whereas right-hand increase planning. This study examined whether a contraction protocol reduced during practice of golf putting task, thereby causing implicit learning. Forty-eight golf-novices w...

Service-Oriented Computing is a cornerstone for the realization of user needs through the automatic composition of services from service descriptions and user tasks, i.e., high-level descriptions of the user needs. Yet, automatic service composition processes commonly assume that service descriptions and user tasks share the same abstraction level, and that services have been pre-designed to in...

This paper describes a multi-layered hierarchical motion planning strategy for a class of self-reconfigurable modular robotic systems, I-Cubes. The approach is based on the synthesis of motion on the basis of metacubes, which have a particular structure possessing 8 Cubes and 16 Links. The developed strategy organizes the metacube motions and the corresponding cube-level motions. At the lowest ...

Ethics is a crucial issue in the different dimensions of human life; hence, there seems to be a dire need for research to be conducted on ethics in different domains including translation studies and interpreting. This qualitative-exploratory research aimed at investigating the attitudes and strategies of applying ethics in in- terpreting through employing a triangulation method. Twenty interpr...

BACKGROUND Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is commonly applied to study the neural substrates of language in clinical research and for neurosurgical planning. fMRI language mapping is used to assess language lateralisation, or determine hemispheric dominance, and to localise regions of the brain involved in language. Routine fMRI has been introduced in the Epilepsy Unit at Mediclin...

In crisis response, hierarchical organizations are being replaced by dynamic assemblies of autonomous agents that promise more agility. However, these autonomous agents might cause a decrease in effectiveness when individually constructed plans for moderately-coupled tasks are not jointly feasible. Existing coordination techniques can be applied in the pre-planning phase to guarantee feasible j...

We present an architecture that provides a robust, scalable and flexible software framework for planning and scheduling systems through the use of standardized industrial-strength middleware and multi-agent technology. It utilizes knowledgebased components that dynamically perform and verify the system’s configuration. The system is based on a proper formal account of hybrid planning, the integ...

Many real-world application domains that demand planning and scheduling support do not allow for a clear separation of these capabilities. Typically, an adequate mixture of both methodologies is required, since some aspects of the underlying planning problem imply consequences on the scheduling part and vice versa. Several integration efforts have been undertaken to couple planning and scheduli...

As a sustainability property, energy efficiency is of an extreme importance, especially in environments that are heavy energy consumers, such as homes and buildings. Nowadays, homes and buildings are equipped with many devices that could be exploited in order to make them smart and energy-efficient. Our vision is to bring convergence of smart environments, energy efficiency and automated planni...