Plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, causes die-offs of colonies of prairie dogs (Cynomys ludovicianus). It has been argued that other small rodents are reservoirs for plague, spreading disease during epizootics and maintaining the pathogen in the absence of prairie dogs; yet there is little empirical support for distinct enzootic and epizootic cycles. Between 2004 and 2006, we coll...

Predicting energy consumption has been a substantial topic because of its ability to lessen wastage and establish an acceptable overall operational efficiency. Thus, this research aims at creating meta-heuristic-based method for autonomous simulation heating cooling loads buildings. The developed is envisioned on two tiers, whereas the first tier encompasses use set meta-heuristic algorithms am...

This article documents the use of Grasshopper and Galapagos (Rhino plugins) as analytical tools to graphically represent and optimize the adjacency requirements in programmatic spaces. The resulting three-dimensional spatial diagrams are evaluated based on evolutionary fitness, which within this research context is defined as minimizing the numerical value of the total distance of all interconn...

This paper describes the system WHUSUM we developed to participate in the update summarization task of TAC 2009. Given a topic and corresponding topic statement, this year's task is to write 2 summaries (one for Document Set A and one for Document Set B) that meet the information need expressed in the topic statement. In order to generate a topic-oriented summary for Set A, We present a co-trai...

This paper describes the results of a protocol study exploring problem–solution coevolution in a parametric design environment (PDE). The study involved eight participants who completed a defined architectural design task using Rhino and Grasshopper software: a typical PDE. The method of protocol analysis was employed to study the cognitive behaviors that occurred while these designers were wor...

CARMA is an advisory system for rangeland grasshopper infestations that demonstrates how AI technology can deliver expert advice to compensate for cutbacks in public services. CARMA uses two knowledge sources for the key task of predicting forage consumption by grasshoppers: cases obtained by asking a group of experts to solve representative hypothetical problems; and a numerical model of range...

SAKWeb pretends to be the first E-Learning research development of spatial autocorrelation and Kriging interpolation for geostatisticiens. It is expected to be available in 2009 as a worldwide Web platform (named myGeoOffice.org) for all research institutes and universities that needs to carried out truly spatial stochastic and deterministic interpolation analysis. This will include simulation,...