In this article, we explore the phenomenon of acculturation in filial practices among 21 Chinese immigrants in a suburban city in the Midwestern United States using focus groups and individual interviews. All participants were situational-reciprocal-filial caregivers who had acculturated into mainstream filial practices while preserving their heritage to deal with the challenges of parental car...

Auctions are useful mechanism for allocating items (goods, tasks, resources, etc.) in multiagent systems. The bulk of auction theory assumes that the bidders’ valuations for items are given a priori. In many applications, however, the bidders need to expend significant effort to determine their valuations. In this paper we analyze computational bidder agents that can refine their valuations (ow...

This paper focuses on investigating immunological principles in designing the multi-agent security architecture for intrusion detection and response in mobile ad hoc networks. In this approach, the immunitybased agents monitor the situation in the network. These agents can take appropriate actions according to the underlying security policies. Specifically, their activities are coordinated in a...

This paper proposes a nonlinear approach for designing traffic responsive and coordinated ramp control using a self adapting fuzzy system. The traffic responsive metering rate is determined every minute by an adaptive fuzzy logic algorithm. The coordination between multiple on-ramps is ensured by the integration of a common input into all ramp controllers upstream of a bottleneck and a periodic...

Identifying and designing physical systems for use as qubits, the basic units of quantum information, are critical steps in the development of a quantum computer. Among the possibilities in the solid state, a defect in diamond known as the nitrogen-vacancy (NV(-1)) center stands out for its robustness--its quantum state can be initialized, manipulated, and measured with high fidelity at room te...

Energy-efficient transmission is fast becoming a critical factor in designing future mobile broadband cellular communication systems. This research work examines the constraints with regard to the achievable throughput and energy efficiency that can be attained on the use of precoding-based massive MIMO systems, bearing in mind the effect of some key performance impacting parameters. We first i...

When choosing between nest sites, a honeybee swarm makes decisions that are sensitive to the values of the alternatives. Value-sensitivity is enabled by a distributed social effort among the honeybees, and it leads to decisionmaking dynamics of the swarm that are efficient, robust and adaptive. To explore and generalize these features to other networks, we design distributed multi-agent system ...

The paper presents two mechanisms for designing an on-demand, reliable and efficient collection protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. The former is the Bidirectional Link Quality Estimation, which allows nodes to easily and quickly compute the quality of a link between a pair of nodes. The latter, Hierarchical Range Sectoring, organizes sensors in different sectors based on their location with...

Software engineering research addresses professional ways of designing, developing and implementing software. So far, software engineering more or less takes for granted that software professionals have control over the material implementation of a piece of software. Though users might use the software innovatively or even customise it, neither enduser tailoring (EUT) nor end-user development (...

Vertically coordinated ties are purportedly effective responses to the uncertainties of fast-changing purchasing environments. Building on transaction costs arguments and related work in marketing, the authors analyze vertical coordination as a response to external uncertainty and show that its effectiveness is highly contingent on the magnitude of the safeguarding problem present. Indeed, its ...