Background: Constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) has proved to increase the amount and quality of function of an affected upper extremity after stroke by overcoming learned non-use to bring about functional reorganization of the primary motor cortex. The objective of the study was to examine the effects of distributed model of CIMT in improving upper extremity (UE) functions in subacute s...

a major constraint to the application of any form of knowledge and principles is the awareness, understanding and acceptance of the knowledge and principles. systems thinking (st) is a way of understanding and thinking about the nature of  health systems and how to make and implement decisions within health systems to maximize desired and minimize undesired effects. a major constraint to applyi...

The current investigation examined the differential susceptibility of parents to the effects of marital quality on changes in parenting. We predicted that parents who were high on the personality constructs Negative Affect and Constraint would be more susceptible to the effects of marital quality on their level of sensitivity. Sensitivity was assessed at 3.5 and 13 months for both mothers and f...

In this paper, we present PICPA, the “Population and Interval Constraint Propagation Algorithm” which is able to produce high quality approximate solutions while giving guaranteed bounds for the Pareto optimal front. These bounds allow us to know whether the heuristic solutions are close to or far away from the optimal front. PICPA combines “Interval Constraint Propagation” (ICP) techniques [1,...

We advance a general technique for enriching logical systems with soft constraints, making them suitable for specifying complex software systems where parts are put together not just based on how they meet certain functional requirements but also on how they optimise certain constraints. This added expressive power is required, for example, for capturing quality attributes that need to be optim...

Semantic web service compositions must be aligned with requirements from the target users in terms of quality requirements. Given a set of quality requirements, one can choose to either find the optimal composition or a “good enough” composition, which satisfies these requirements. Since optimizing compositions of semantic services under quality constraints is known to be NP-hard, it is unsuita...

The Employee Timetabling Problem (ETP) is a general class of problems widely encountered in service organizations (such as call centers for instance). Given a set of activities, a set of demand curves (specifying the demand in terms of employees for each activity for each time period) the problem consists of constructing a set of work shifts such that each activity is at all time covered by a s...

In this paper, we propose a Bayesian approach to image hallucination. Given a generic low resolution image, we hallucinate a high resolution image using a set of training images. Our work is inspired by recent progress on natural image statistics that the priors of image primitives can be well represented by examples. Specifically, primal sketch priors (e.g., edges, ridges and corners) are cons...

This paper tries to analyze common bridge construction defects, classify them into appropriate groups, and redefine them as a precautionary measure and means to improve quality in bridge construction. For this purpose, data on bridge construction since January 2007 were obtained from the evaluation report of the Public Construction Committee (PCC) of Taiwan. Bridge construction defects were cla...

This paper proposes modeling motion in a bilateral domain that augments spatial information with the motion itself. We use the bilateral domain to reformulate a piecewise smooth constraint as continuous global modeling constraint. The resultant model can be robustly computed from highly noisy scattered feature points using a global minimization. We demonstrate how the model can reliably obtain ...