This paper considers SIR and SIS epidemics among a population partitioned into households. This heterogeneity has important implications for the threshold behaviour of epidemics and optimal vaccination strategies. It is shown that taking into account household structures when modelling public health problems is valuable. An overview of households models is given, including a determination of th...

The monitoring of emotional user states can help to assess the progress of human-machine-communication. If we look at specific databases, however, we are faced with several problems: users behave differently, even within one and the same setting, and some phenomena are sparse; thus it is not possible to model and classify them reliably. We exemplify these difficulties on the basis of SympaFly, ...

Article history: Received 7 June 2006 Received in revised form 14 September 2006 Accepted 16 September 2006 The study of functional structure in species assemblages emphasizes the detection of significant guild aggregation patterns. Thus, protocols based on intensive resampling of empirical data have been proposed to assess guild structure. Such protocols obtain the frequency distribution of a ...

This essay studies the optimal timing for a firm to adopt a new process innovation in the presence of learning. A policy that has been implemented by governments throughout the world to reduce the cost level of infant industries with positive externalities, is to either subsidize the research of these technologies or their distribution. This model demonstrates how government interventions can a...

This article aims at showing how the philosopher G. Anders develops his ontology of technology as described in Outdatedness Mankind, volumes I and II. The is structured following manner: first, there will be a discussion on role played by machine Andersian philosophy technology. Second, an analysis mechanism through which radio television alter traditional anthropomorphic notion ‘experience’ cr...

Video games can position players in a specific time and space. This paper will argue that the experiences of both are closely interdependent. As a consequence, we need to re-evaluate our models of time in video games. The discussion will exemplify the suggested interdependencies of temporal and spatial experience. The result is a playercentered perspective towards time in game spaces. Author

This study examines BDI logics in the context of Gabbay’s fibring semantics. We show that dovetailing (a special form of fibring) can be adopted as a semantic methodology to combine BDI logics. We develop a set of interaction axioms that can capture static as well as dynamic aspects of the mental states in BDI systems, using Catach’s incestual schema Ga,b,c,d . Further we exemplify the constrai...

This paper presents some steps in manually building a verb valency lexicon for Romanian. We refer to some major previous works by focusing on their information representation. We select that information for different stages of our project and we show the conceptual problems encountered during the first phase. Finally we present the gradually building procedure of the lexicon and we exemplify th...

This paper presents an architecture to help the decisionmaking process of disaster managers. Here we focus on a core aspect of this process which is taking decisions in the presence of conflicting options. We exemplify this problem with three simple scenarios related to diverse contexts and provide an explanation on how our system will advice in all these cases.