A case-based reasoning system was created to support customers who purchased appliances from General Electric. When a customer calls General Electric for help, a call-taker uses the system to diagnose the problem and step the customer through its solution. The system has been in use by 300 call-takers since 1999. It has resulted in a 20 percent increase in the probability the customer’s problem...

The effect of a salient visual feature in orienting spatial attention was examined as a function of the learned association between the visual feature and the observer’s action. During an initial acquisition phase, participants learned that two keypress actions consistently produced red and green visual cues. Next, in a test phase, participants’ actions continued to result in singletons, but th...

We present a family of resource constraints which allow us to model scheduling problems with time variable resource cost. Our main use case is energy cost minimization, by avoiding peak electricity usage periods in the generated schedule. This at the same time helps to balance the overall demand profile, leading to reduced stress on the national electricity grid. The proposed constraints extend...

Explaining the maintenance of sexual reproduction remains one of the greatest challenges in biology. The theoretical oddity of sex is based on at least three advantages that asexual organisms have over sexual ones: 1Asexuals, by not producing males, have a two fold advantage over sexuals, regarding the number of reproductive individuals; 2Sexuals have an evolutionary disadvantage over asexuals,...

In this paper, we present a virtual laboratory platform (VLP) baptized Mercury allowing students to make practical work (PW) on different aspects of mobile wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Our choice of WSNs is motivated mainly by the use of real experiments needed in most courses about WSNs. These experiments require an expensive investment and a lot of nodes in the classroom. To illustrate ou...

Quality education can be delivered at a time, place and pace that suit the learner, teacher and administrator. One way to achieve this is for universities to devise an appropriate and effective web based education environment that supports customization for the individual. Such an environment requires interoperability of heterogeneous systems, reduced cost through re-use of existing invested te...

INTRODUCTION The main scope of this article is to present a heuristic model to deploy government-to-government initiatives effectively, as well as establish some key success factors for building governmentto-government (G2G) enterprises successfully. It also aims to show how public agencies themselves can benefit when they are electronically linked to others, thereby innovating and streamlining...

As the underlying technologies evolve, embedded systems are finding their way into an increasing range of ABB products and applications. Advances in this technology lead to higher performance and more functionality on the one hand, and reduced cost and size on the other. While this benefits the end user, the ever increasing complexity of embedded systems imposes new challenges for developers. T...

I N T E R N A T I O N A L E X P E R I E N C E Around the world many fisheries have collapsed, including some in Australia. Consequently marine fisheries are under increasing pressure to adopt more precautionary management approaches. Although Australia’s fisheries are generally in good shape—few are overfished—many are fully exploited. Overseas experience tells us that even the best fisheries m...

We use the Litvinov-Maslov correspondence principle to reduce and hybridize networks of biochemical reactions. We apply this method to a cell cycle oscillator model. The reduced and hybridized model can be used as a hybrid model for the cell cycle. We also propose a practical recipe for detecting quasi-equilibrium QE reactions and quasi-steady state QSS species in biochemical models with ration...