Halting an epidemic outbreak in its early stages requires a detailed understanding of the contact dynamics between the agents capable of carrying the pathogen. While current epidemic models assume that agents interact at a uniform rate, following a Poisson process, here we provide evidence that for several computer and biological viruses the inter contact time distribution is heavy tailed. This...

Service-based systems should be able to dynamically seek replacements for faulty or underperforming services, thus performing self-healing. It may however be the case that available services do not match all requirements, leading the system to grind to a halt. In similar situations it would be better to choose alternative candidates which, while not fulfilling all the constraints, allow the sys...

Irrigated agriculture is placing increasing pressure onfinite freshwater resources, especially in developing countries, wherewater extraction is often unregulated, un-priced and even subsidized.To shift agriculture to amore sustainable use ofwaterwithout harming the food security and livelihoods of hundreds ofmillions of smallholders, substantial improvements ofwater use efficiencywill be requi...

We have discovered that films of carbon single wall nanotubes (SWNTs) make excellent back contacts to CdTe devices without any modification to the CdTe surface. Efficiencies of SWNT-contacted devices are slightly higher than otherwise identical devices formed with standard Au/Cu back contacts. The SWNT layer is thermally stable and easily applied with a spray process, and SWNT-contacted devices...

Manufacturers need to evaluate the reliability of their products in order to increase the customer satisfaction. Proper analysis of reliability also requires an effective study of the failure process of a product, especially its failure time. So, the Failure Process Modeling (FPM) plays a key role in the reliability analysis of the system that has been less focused on. This paper introduces a f...

In practice, agricultural films must withstand high solar radiation, high temperature in use, mechanical stresses on the film (e.g., film tension across supports, wind), and most importantly, the antagonistic effects of agro-chemicals (pesticides, insecticides, fumigants, soil disinfectants, etc.) on the performance of the UV light stabilizers protecting the film. With pesticide usage, especial...

This paper presents a particle filtering based long-term RUL prediction method that integrates two data resources: infield Accelerated Degradation testing (ADT) and field operation. This method improves the usage of historical information and makes accurate residual life prediction compared with conventional regression method. ADT data is used as prior information to establish dynamic system mo...

Three different accelerated life tests (ALT) were designed by computer simulation to investigate their practical applicability to quantify kinetics of quality loss in frozen stored foods. Heat transfer and quality degradation inside a green bean were simulated, using a spectral finite element method (SFEM), to develop pseudo-experimental data. Temperature fluctuations inside a refrigerator were...