background various researchers have shown that the health level, performance status, and quality of life (qol) are often less than expected especially in hemodialysis (hd) patients. objectives this study aimed to determine the effect of the two methods of educational programs on health- related qol (hrqol) in iranian hd patients. patients and methods in this quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest...

The special issue collects a subset of the best papers presented at the ICRA’05 workshop on the Social Mechanisms of Robot Programming by Demonstration. The workshop took place on April 21st 2005 in Barcelona, Spain, at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’05). Eleven of the best papers presented at the workshop were subsequently submitted for peer review before publication in t...

Programming by demonstration systems acquire procedural knowledge from examples, and then use that knowledge to execute the learned procedure on new instances. We present an architecture, called version space algebra, for learning this type of procedural knowledge, and describe an implemented system for programming by demonstration in the text-editing domain. We present results showing the syst...

It has been shown that for k = 8 or 9, there exists a BIBD(v, k, 1) for all positive integers v == 1 or k (mod k(k-1)), with some possible exceptions. We show that such designs exist for 49 of these exceptional values. A balanced incomplete block design (BIBD) with parameters (v, k, 1) is a pair (X, A) where X is a v-set and A is a family of k-subsets (where 2 < k < v) called blocks, such that ...

This paper describes Familiar, a domain-independent programming by demonstration system for automating iterative tasks in existing, unmodified applications on a popular commercial platform. Familiar is domainindependent in an immediate and practical sense: it requires no domain knowledge from the developer and works immediately with new applications as soon as they are installed. Based on the A...

Sprinkler irrigation is a common farming practice in those states where the semi-arid climate and lack of sufficient rainfall during critical growing periods necessitate the use of supplemental water. The source of most irrigation water is groundwater which can be contaminated with volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Since the groundwater may be the primary or only source of drinking water for a...

One of the most natural ways to acquire procedural knowledge is to watch somebody performing a number of actions and try to abstract this observed action sequence in order to make it applicable to a wider range of situations. This abstraction process can be significantly facilitated if the performing agent gives additional hints e.g. on the reasons for choosing a particular action or dealing wi...

For every v ≡ 5 (mod 6) there exists a pairwise balanced design (PBD) of order v with exactly one block of size 5 and the rest of size 3. We will refer to such a PBD as a PBD(5∗, 3). A flower in a PBD(5∗, 3) is the set of all blocks containing a given point. If (S,B) is a PBD(5∗, 3) and F is a flower, we will write F ∗ to indicate that F contains the block of size 5. The flower intersection pro...