Modern electronic calendars offer a variety of functionalities to help a user organize her activities—her tasks and events. However, rarely do these tools support automated scheduling and rescheduling of a user's activities. This demo paper presents SELFPLANNER 2.0, the latest version of a web-based calendar prototype that helps a user to organize her activities by coupling a rich activity mode...

In this paper we introduce a new indexing scheme for progressive traversal and visualization of large regular grids. We demonstrate the potential of our approach by providing a tool that displays at interactive rates planar slices of scalar field data with very modest computing resources. We obtain unprecedented results both in terms of absolute performance and, more importantly, in terms of sc...

The multi-activity multi-task shift scheduling problem consists in assigning interruptible activities and uninterruptible tasks to a set of employees in order to satisfy a demand function. In this paper, we consider the personalized variant of the problem where the employees have different qualifications, preferences, and availabilities. We present a branch-and-price algorithm to solve this pro...

geometrical profile (roughness) of joint surfaces influences the behaviour of rock joints under shear loading. with regard to the dilation, there are two models of direct shear test that may simulate the original loading condition existing in the location from where the specimens have been sampled. the first model in which the normal load is constant (cnl) and the discontinuity is free to dilat...

Virtual power plants can aggregate distributed energy resources and interruptible loads in a region for coordinated regulation unified transaction. However, with the diversification of competition electricity market, operation mechanism between multiple virtual (multi-VPPs) has gradually become research focus. Based on this, this paper proposes new type transactions strategy multi-VPPs, i.e., t...

Hierarchical reinforcement learning techniques operate on structured plans. Although structured representations add expressive power to Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), current approaches impose constraints that force the associated convergence proofs to depend upon a subroutinestyle execution model that restricts adaptive response. We develop an alternate approach to convergent learning that ...

The cloud services market exhibits unique characteristics such as instant accessibility, fluctuating demand and supply, and interruptible service provision. Various pricing mechanisms exist in current industry practice, however, none is comprehensive enough to capture all these features. In my work, I identify key factors related to cloud computing pricing. My dissertation includes three essays...

This paper presents the survey of the smart grid technologies, including the background, motivation and practical applications. The driving forces for the smart grid technologies are presented, including the blackout, global energy crisis and environmental protection requirement. The key technology issues for building the smart grid are discussed. The crucial elements of the smart grid and thei...

In 1992, the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission created a secondary market for natural gas transportation whereby shippers holding firm transportation capacity on interstate natural gas pipelines can compete with the pipeline in the provision of transportation services. However, if a shipper does not use some of its contracted firm transportation capacity, the pipeline can resell that ca...

The visual occlusion technique has received considerable attention in recent years as a method for measuring the interruptible aspects of in-vehicle information system (IVIS) task performance. Because the visual occlusion technique lacks a loading task during “occluded” periods, an alternate method was adopted to provide increased sensitivity to the attentional costs of interruptions on IVIS-st...