A key point in the CMD-problems is that the universe to be specified is not an example from a textbook but a piece of reality like a bank or an airport. In addition, the specification has to be somehow extracted from multiple, very informal and often hardly consistent descriptions provided by different people. Moreover, as the process of information system design is going on, and mutual underst...

Cassava mosaic disease (CMD) is the most widespread and economically important disease of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) in tropical Africa. A disease of cassava was first described in East Africa in the nineteenth century (Warburg, 1894) and cassava mosaic, as it came to be called, was subsequently reported as spreading throughout the cassava-growing areas of Central and West Africa (Calve...

Evidence is presented to suggest that, in three dimensions, spherical 6-designs with N points exist for N = 24, 26, ≥ 28; 7-designs for N = 24, 30, 32, 34, ≥ 36; 8-designs for N = 36, 40, 42, ≥ 44; 9-designs for N = 48, 50, 52, ≥ 54; 10-designs for N = 60, 62, ≥ 64; 11-designs for N = 70, 72, ≥ 74; and 12-designs for N = 84, ≥ 86. The existence of some of these designs is established analytical...

We investigated Parameterized Poker Squares to approximate an optimal game playing agent. We organized our inquiry along three dimensions: partial hand representation, search algorithms, and partial hand utility learning. For each dimension we implemented and evaluated several designs, among which we selected the best strategies to use for BeeMo, our final product. BeeMo uses a parallel flat Mo...

BACKGROUND Anterior cervical discectomy with fusion is a common surgical procedure for patients experiencing pain and/or neurological deficits due to cervical spondylosis. Although iliac crest bone graft remains the gold standard today, the associated morbidity has inspired the search for alternatives, including allograft, synthetic and factor/cell-based grafts; and has further led to a focus o...

Optimal design for the joint estimation of the mean and covariance matrix of the random effects in hierarchical linear models is discussed. A criterion is derived under a Bayesian formulation which requires the integration over the prior distribution of the covariance matrix of the random effects. A theoretical optimal design structure is obtained for the situation of independent and homoscedas...

We investigate minimax Latin hypercube designs in two dimensions for several distance measures. For the `-distance we are able to construct minimax Latin hypercube designs of n points, and to determine the minimal covering radius, for all n. For the `1-distance we have a lower bound for the covering radius, and a construction of minimax Latin hypercube designs for (infinitely) many values of n....

The Toolbox approach to the automated design of microfluidic components is extended to include a genetic algorithm search of candidate designs. Performance metrics for characterizing surface delivery are described, and the software is applied to choose sequences of grooves to add to a rectangular microchannel in order to optimize surface delivery for pressure-driven flow. Initial searches using...

We present and discuss the theory of minimax Iand D-robust designs on a finite design space, and detail three methods for their construction that are new in this context: (i) a numerical search for the optimal parameters in a provably minimax robust parametric class of designs, (ii) a first-order iterative algorithm similar to that of Wynn (Ann Math Stat 5:1655–1664, 1970), and (iii) response-a...

In order to design a quantum circuit that performs a desired quantum computation, it is necessary to find a decomposition of the unitary matrix that represents that computation in terms of a sequence of quantum gate operations. To date, such designs have either been found by hand or by exhaustive enumeration of all possible circuit topologies. In this paper we propose an automated approach to q...