1 We explore the notion of a tour guide software agent for assisting users browsing the World Wide Web. A Web tour guide agent provides assistance similar to that provided by a human tour guide in a museum { it guides the user along an appropriate path through the collection, based on its knowledge of the user's interests, of the location and relevance of various items in the collection, and of...

We consider constrained versions of the prize-collecting traveling salesman and the minimum spanning tree problems. The goal is to maximize the number of vertices in the returned tour/tree subject to a bound on the tour/tree cost. We present a 2-approximation algorithm for these problems based on a primal-dual approach. The algorithm relies on finding a threshold value for the dual variable cor...

Professional golf is an area that is particularly attractive to study because it models a perfectly competitive economy where payoffs are directly related to individual productivity (Scully 2002). Since one‟s earnings on the PGA Tour are based on individual performance, different skill factors and other variables such as tour experience and the number of events entered can be compared to determ...

We use a modified version of the halo-based group finder developed by Yang et al. to select galaxy groups from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS DR4). In the first step, a combination of two methods is used to identify the centers of potential groups and to estimate their characteristic luminosity. Using an iterative approach, the adaptive group finder then uses the average mass-to-light ratio...

36 37 As tour-based methods for activity and travel participation patterns replaces trip-based methods, time-38 of-day (TOD) choice modeling remains problematic. In practice, most travel demand model systems 39 handle tour scheduling via joint-choice multinomial logit (MNL) models, which suffer from the well-40 known independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) assumption. This paper introduce...

In the Euclidean Traveling Salesman Problem, a set of points in the plane is given, and we look for a shortest closed curve through these lines (a \tour"). We treat two special cases of this problem which are solvable in polynomial time. The rst solvable case is the N-line Traveling Salesman Problem, where the points lie on a small number (N) of parallel lines. Such problems arise for example i...

In this paper we apply a Population based Ant Colony Optimization (PACO) algorithm for solving the following new version of the Traveling Salesperson problem that is called the Combined Tours TSP (CT-TSP). Given are a set of cities, for each pair of cities a cost function and an integer k. The aim is to find a set of k (cyclic) tours, i.e., each city is contained exactly once in each tour and e...

In order to promote the development of further research on “object finder”, this paper aims utilize existing mode and modern scientific technological progress. By combining with TRIZ innovation method, shortcomings original plans are analyzed, intending propose a new concept for object finder, which consists two components, i.e., “locator” “searcher”. Additionally, explores both “searcher” resp...

The CRISPR system holds much promise for successful genome engineering, but therapeutic, industrial, and research applications will place high demand on improving the specificity and efficiency of this tool. CT-Finder (http://bioinfolab.miamioh.edu/ct-finder) is a web service to help users design guide RNAs (gRNAs) optimized for specificity. CT-Finder accommodates the original single-gRNA Cas9 ...