Building smart meeting rooms requires the support of a computing system architecture. In this paper, we describe the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA), a broker-centric agent architecture for pervasive contextaware systems. CoBrA exploits the Web Ontology Language OWL for supporting knowledge sharing and data fusion, uses logic inferences for resolving and detecting inconsistent context knowl...

Modern real-world optimization problems are often high dimensional and subject to many constraints. These problems are typically expensive in terms of cost and computational time. In order to optimize such problems, conventional constraintbased solvers require a high number of function evaluations which are not affordable in practice. Employment of fast surrogate models to approximate objective...

The enzyme L-Amino Acid Oxidase (LAAO) is widely distributed in snake venoms, contributes a reasonable toxicity to the venoms. However LAAO from Indian cobra (Naja naja ) snake venom has not yet isolated previously. In the present study LAAO from Indian cobra (Naja naja ) snake venom was purified by sequential steps of cation exchange chromatography (CM-Sephadex C-25; CM-52 cellulose), followed...

Characterizing and monitoring biodiversity and assessing its drivers require accurate and comparable data on species assemblages, which, in turn, should rely on efficient and standardized field collection. Unfortunately, protocols that follow such criteria remain scarce and it is unclear whether they can be applied to megadiverse communities, whose study can be particularly challenging. Here, w...

This paper describes SOUPA (Standard Ontology for Ubiquitous and Pervasive Applications) and the use of this ontology in building the Context Broker Architecture (CoBrA). CoBrA is a new agent architecture for supporting pervasive context-aware systems in a smart space environment. The SOUPA ontology is expressed using the Web Ontology Language OWL and includes modular component vocabularies to ...

As the U.S. economic downturn continues and job losses mount, more working Americans are likely to lose access to affordable health benefits subsidized by their employers. Analysis of the 2007 Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey finds that two of three working adults would be eligible to extend job-based coverage, under the 1985 Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COB...

teristic pharmacological properties. With this end in view we started with cobra venom and Russell's viper venom. The cobra and Russell's viper belong to two different families of snakes, viz, Colubridce and Viperidce, respectively, and though the venoms from these have some characteristics in common they differ strikingly in other respects. For instance the neurotoxic element is preponderant i...

A Huey Cobra helicopter was just finishing up a nighttime practice run. The pilot was working on his low hover maneuvers at the air base when he tipped his tail rotor sharply backward, snapping off his tail boom. Without the tail —which keeps a helicopter from spinning around in circles— the helicopter took off like a pinwheel, sliding down the runway doing 360’s in a brilliant shower of sparks...

AKR mice with spontaneous leukemia were infused with normal serum from a variety of species. Leukemia cell destruction was produced by serum from strains of mice possessing the full spectrum of complement components, but not by serum from strains with a genetically determined deficiency of C5. Serum from guinea pigs, horses, and humans also causes destruction of leukemia cells. The antileukemic...