e Research Excellence award is given to a scientist who has carried out a program of research of consistently high quality yielding several substantial results. Past recipients of this honor are the most illustrious group of scientists from the field of artificial intelligence. ey are John McCarthy (1985), Allen Newell (1989), Marvin Minsky (1991), Raymond Reiter (1993), Herbert Simon (1995),...

In the early 1980’s the technique of releasing yearling parent-reared cranes was perfected with the Mississippi sandhill crane (Grus canadensis pulla). In the late 1980’s, we discovered that hand-reared yearlings could also be released with good expectation of survival in both migratory and nonmigratory situations. In the mid-1990’s, efforts expanded in many directions including (1) the use of ...

Distinguished regions can be detected with high repeatability in different images of the same scene. Two definitions of distinguished regions of an image in a mathematical morphology framework are proposed: one based on the use of reconstruction operators on a series of cross sections of a greyscale image, and the second based on extracting regions present in a large number of levels of a water...

In these notes we first offer an overview of two core areas in the dynamics of probability measure preserving systems, the Kolmogorov-Sinai theory of entropy and the theory of orbit equivalence. Entropy is a nontrivial invariant that, said simply, measures the exponential growth rate of the number of orbits in a dynamical system, a very rough measure of the complexity of the orbit structure. On...

California Youth Connection (CYC) is the state's only non-profi t youth advocacy and leadership organization dedicated to giving current and former foster youth the skills necessary to engage directly with policymakers to improve the foster care system. Formed out of the fundamental belief that policymakers can benefi t from the input of those who have experienced fi rst-hand the impact of chil...

Every year scores of new pharmaceuticals enter the market, almost never with human fetal safety data. Such data typically accumulate during the "rst years of clinical use, in the form of case reports, case series, prospective and retrospective cohorts and case control studies. All of these methods su#er from serious sources of bias, o$en leading to alarming signals of teratogenicity that are la...