Gradient flows for energy functionals have been studied extensively in the past. Well known examples are the heat flow or the mean curvature flow. To make sense of the term gradient an inner product structure is assumed. One works on a Hilbert space, or on the tangent space to a manifold, for example. However, it is possible to do without an inner product. The domain of the energy functionals c...

The complexity of the real world makes a perfect characterization impossible. Purely deliberative approaches such as classical planning are thus susceptible to unexpected failures. Preventive learning approaches address the imperfect theory problem through the diagnosis of such failures and the determination of fixes to avoid similar failures in the future. Curative learning approaches such as ...

Most research in learning for planning has concentrated on eeciency gains. Another important goal is improving the quality of nal plans. Learning to improve plan quality has been examined by a few researchers, however, little research has been done learning to improve both eeciency and quality. This paper explores this problem by using the Scope learning system to acquire control knowledge that...

This paper presents a static analysis of laminated composite doubly-curved shells using refined kinematic models with polynomial and non-polynomial functions recently introduced in the literature. To be specific, Maclaurin, trigonometric, exponential and zig-zag functions are employed. The employed refined models are based on the equivalent single layer theories. A simply supported shell is sub...

FtsZ is a key molecule in bacterial cell division. In the presence of GTP, it polymerizes into tubulin-like protofilaments by head-to-tail association. Protofilaments of FtsZ seem to adopt a straight or a curved conformation in relation to the bound nucleotide. However, although several bacterial and archaeal FtsZ structures have been determined, all of the structures reported previously are co...

: Land use planning and organized urban activities are the pivot of urban planning. Unders tanding patterns of urban land and property ownership is important because it affects the nature and shape of urban development, especially on the edge of cities with many social and economic features in one hand and some illegal subdivision of lands occur in this place on the other hand that is very impo...

Prior studies have shown that the biological mixture of the two hydrophobic surfactant proteins, SP-B and SP-C, produces faster adsorption of the surfactant lipids to an air/water interface, and that they induce 1-palmitoyl-2-oleoyl phosphatidylethanolamine (POPE) to form inverse bicontinuous cubic phases. Previous studies have shown that SP-B has a much greater effect than SP-C on adsorption. ...

Many systems are designed to perform both planning and execution: they include a plan deliberation component to produce plans that are then dispatched to an execution component, or executive, which is responsible for the performance of the actions in the plan. When the plans have temporal constraints, dispatch may be non-trivial, and the system may include a distinct dispatcher, which is respon...

Prior approaches to generating diverse plans in domainindependent planning seek out variations on plan structure such as actions or causal links used, or states entered. As a result, these approaches can achieve great plan set diversity by synthesizing unnecessarily long plans. This type of misleading diversity may be useful if, for example, the plans are used as training data for a learner; ho...