Electronic commerce technology offers the opportunity to integrate and optimize the global production and distribution on the supply chain. Computers of various corporations, located throughout the world, communicate with each other to determine the availability of components, to place and confirm orders, and to negotiate delivery timescales over the Internet. Software agents help to automate a...

In automated negotiation systems consisting of self-interested agents, contracts have traditionally been binding, i.e., impossible to breach. Such contracts do not allow the agents to e$ciently deal with future events. This de"ciency can be tackled by using a leveled commitment contracting protocol which allows the agents to decommit from contracts by paying a monetary penalty to the contractin...

In (automated) negotiation systems for self-interested agents, contracts have traditionally been binding. They do not accommodate future events. Contingency contracts address this but are often impractical. As an alternative, we propose leveled-commitment contracts. The level of commitment is set by decommitting penalties. To be freed from the contract, an agent simply pays its penalty to the o...

If stretched out to a flat plain, the cortex of a brain in an adult human may have a surface area of around 2,000 square centimeters. It contains 1-2 billion neurons in six distinguishable layers, adding up to the 2-3 mm thick “grey matter”. For the rest of the brain, its majority volume is made of “white matter” of neural fibers (axons and dendrites) and other cells, e.g., glial cells, which p...

The paper presents color as a case study for the analysis of phenomena that pertain to several levels of reality and are typically framed by different sciences and disciplines. Color, in fact, is studied by physics, biology, phenomenology, and esthetics, among others. Our thesis is that color is a different entity for each level of reality, and that for this reason color generates different obs...

Philips Medical Systems produces medical diagnostic imaging products, such as MR, X-ray and CT scanners. The software of these devices is complex, has been evolving for several decades and is currently a multi-MLOC monolithic software archive. In this paper we report on splitting a single software archive into multiple smaller archives so that these can be developed independently, easing the so...

In this work we generalize primitive recursion in order to construct a hierarchy of terminating total recursive operators which we refer to as leveled primitive recursion of order i(PRi). Primitive recursion is equivalent to leveled primitive recursion of order 1 (PR1). The functions constructable from the basic functions make up PR0. Interestingly, we show that PR2 is a conservative extension ...

Four decades ago, specialized chemotherapy regimens turned osteosarcoma, once considered a uniformly fatal disease, into a disease in which a majority of patients survive. Though significant survival gains were made from the 1960s to the 1980s, further outcome improvements appear to have plateaued. This study aims to comprehensively review all significant, published data regarding osteosarcoma ...

Registration of point clouds is a necessary step to obtain a complete overview of scanned objects of interest. The majority of the current registration approaches target the general case where a full range of the registration parameters search space is assumed and searched. It is very common in urban objects scanning to have leveled point clouds with small roll and pitch angles and with also a ...