Despite twenty years of development in patient rights, end-of-life decisions still trouble law and medicine. It is estimated that more than 14,000 patients live in a permanent unconscious state, often supported by artificial means.1 Given that almost 80% of deaths occur in medical or nursing care institutions, and approximately 70% of these deaths result from an active decision to withdraw or w...

Finding long-term solutions to meet the growing energy demands of the human society is one of the greatest challenges of our age. Photocatalysis, a topic of many decades of attention, has recently received renewed and more intense interest in developing innovative solutions towards achieving our sustainability goal. Though immensely inspired by natural photosynthesis, the research on artificial...

Environmental Studies and Artificial Intelligence are both of strategic interest. Both areas can provide society with nice solutions for many real applications, in order to protect the environment. The encounter between these fields is a new challenge for many researchers of both communities. In the foreword of the Environmental Science and Engineering for the 21st Century report [6], we can re...

ZEEE Expert, a bimonthly publication of the IEEE Computer Society, reaches an international audience of professionals who specify, design, document, test, use, maintain, purchase, engineer, sell, teach, research, and manage the production of expert systems, artificial-intelligence technologies, and knowledge-based/database systems. They are particularly interested in learning about new tools, t...

The ever-increasing technological demands of our modem society require innovative approaches to highly demanding control problems. Artificial neural networks with their massive parallelism and learning capabilities offer the promise of better solutions, at least to some problems. By now, the control community has heard of neural networks and wonders if these networks can be used to provide b...

We report an interesting observation of minimization of bacterial attachment on titanium nitride coatings of increased thickness. DC magnetron sputtering method was used to prepare titanium nitride coatings of different thickness and the attachment of an oral bacteria Porphyromonas gingivalis was studied. With increase in thickness of the coatings the particle size increased and the order of ba...

Abstraet--A new method is presented to find prototypes for a nearest neighbour classifier. The prototype locations are opfimised through a gradient descent and a deterministic annealing process. The proposed algorithm also includes an initialisation strategy which alms to provide the maximum classification rate on the training set with the minimum number of prototypes. Experiments show the effi...

The increasing impact of immersive technologies (e.g., Virtual Reality (VE) and Augmented (AR)) Artificial Intelligence (AI) in business society present challenges that deserve atte...

When discussing the role of digital technologies in pluralist democracies, artificial intelligence (AI) is probably most controversial. This technology triggers greatest hopes (e.g. AI can help making sense out millions comments) and at same time raises many concerns reinforce existing biases). As remains quite difficult to grasp, including for those a position make political decision (i.e., po...