The increasing importance of environmental concern, fuel savings and unavailability of power has led to the renewal of interest in renewable energies. This paper examines global research patterns to assess development prospects. The various new and advanced methods to harness solar energy and also the methods to increase the efficiency of the existing techniques are discussed.

Learning with Positive and Unlabeled instances (PU learning) arises widely in information retrieval applications. To address the unavailability issue of negative instances, most existing PU learning approaches require to either identify a reliable set of negative instances from the unlabeled data or estimate probability densities as an intermediate step. However, inaccurate negative-instance id...

Service-based applications are considered a promising technology since they are able to offer complex and flexible functionalities in widely distributed environments by composing different types of services. These applications have to be adaptable to unforeseen changes in the functionality offered by component services and to their unavailability or decreasing performances. Furthermore, when ap...

The traditional transaction processing model is not suitable for many advanced applications, such as those having long duration or those consisting of co-operating activities. Researchers have addressed this problem by proposing various new transaction models capable of processing advanced transactions. Advanced transactions are characterized by having a number of component subtransactions whos...

The internet is considered as the most extensive market in the world. To keep its gradual reputation, it must confront real problems that result from its distribution and from the diversity of the protocols used to insure communications. The Web service technology has diminished significantly the effects of distribution and heterogeneity, but there are several problems that weaken their perform...

Electrostatic forces play a large role in determining the strength of protein-ligand interactions, and the calculation of pKa value shifts upon ligand binding is therefore an important component of any accurate protein-ligand binding calculation. However, such pKa calculations are rarely performed in virtual screening experiments due to the unavailability of ligand solution pKa values and the d...

One key factor contributing to emergency department (ED) overcrowding is prolonged waiting time for admission to inpatient wards, also known as ED boarding time. To gain insights into reducing this waiting time, we study operations in the inpatient wards and their interface with the ED. We focus on understanding the effect of inpatient discharge policies and other operational policies on the ti...

Population data used in GIS analyses is generally assumed to be homogeneous and planar (i.e. census tracts, townships or prefectures) due to the public unavailability of building population data. However, information on building population is required for micro-spatial analysis for improved disaster management and emergency preparedness, public facility management for urban planning, consumer a...

Reliable communications and spatial connection are essential to critical operations of ports. To assure services and security, optimal-degree spider-web networks are prototyped in the dedicated short range communications (DSRC) linked as the surveillance-control network along port’s critical passages to benefit coping with detection-unavailability, radio interference. The radial-ring road confi...

Word-of-Mouth (WOM) has been recognized as one of the most influential resources of information transmission especially for the experience goods. It has been shown that a higher volume of WOM has a positive effect on increasing the demand for a certain product. In addition to the WOM-sales interdependence, there is also dependence between sales and inventory. It is a well-studied concept that s...