Modern manufacturing is moving away from vertically integrated companies that control all aspects of production and distribution, toward networks of independent suppliers and distributors. These supply networks (more commonly called “supply chains”) address a number of business needs, including concentration on core competencies and the ability to respond rapidly to unanticipated change. Howeve...

Over the past five years, the MyCampus group at Carnegie Mellon University has been developing and experimenting with Ambient Intelligence technologies aimed at enhancing everyday life. The project has drawn on multiple areas of expertise, combining the development of an open Semantic Web infrastructure for context-aware service provisioning with an emphasis on issues of privacy and usability. ...

1. Motivation The SeSAm (Shell for Simulated Agent Systems) provides a generic environment for modeling and experimenting with agent-based systems. We specially focused on providing a framework for the easy construction of complex models. Although the idea of a domain-independent multi-agent simulation environment is not new, none of the existing environments fulfills the claim of usage without...

We present a system for Internet communication that enhances traditional text-based chatting with real-time analysis and synthesis of the chat parties’ facial expressions. It is composed of three main modules: a real-time facial expression analysis component, a 3D agent with facial expression synthesis and text-to-speech capabilities – a talking head, and a communication module. So far we have ...

INTRODUCTION Making change towards child and family-based and coordinated services is critical to improve quality, outcomes and value. The Let's Talk about Children (LTC) approach, which consists of brief psychoeducational discussions with parents of kindergarten-aged and school-aged children, has been launched as a municipality-specific programme in the Council of Oulu Region. The aim of this ...

OBJECTIVES To assess temporal trends of hospitalizations and deaths from pertussis in Brazilian children in the period of 1996-2013. METHODS This was a descriptive ecological study of temporal trends, based on the DATASUS database. The number of hospitalizations and deaths from pertussis in children up to 19 years of age from January 1996 to December 2013 was obtained. Descriptive statistics ...

An appealing genome-wide association study design compares one large control group against several disease samples. A pioneering study by the Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium that employed such a design has identified multiple susceptibility regions, many of which have been independently replicated. While reusing a control sample provides effective utilization of data, it also creates cor...

Measuring the outcome of an intervention is central to the practice of evidence based medicine, and most research papers evaluating patient outcomes now incorporate some form of patient-based metric, such as questionnaires or performance tests. Once an outcome has been defined, researchers typically want to know if any other factors can influence the result. This is typically assessed with regr...

OBJECTIVES Changes in air temperature and its relation to ambulance transports due to heat stroke in all 47 prefectures, in Japan were evaluated. METHODS Data on air temperature were obtained from the Japanese Meteorological Agency. Data on ambulance transports due to heat stroke was directly obtained from the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, Japan. We also used the number of deaths due t...

There are numerous guides on Web design but for the most part, these are based on designers' intuition and common sense Ð with little theoretical or experimental validation. A major problem is that there is a general lack of cognitive guidelines for Web design. Of the few available theoretical guidelines for designing hypermedia documents, very little experimental research is available that tes...