Consider a flock of birds that fly interacting between them. The interactions are modelled through a hierarchical system in which each bird, at each time step, adjusts its own velocity according to his past velocity and a weighted mean of the relative velocities of its superiors in the hierarchy. We consider the additional fact, that each of the birds can fail to see any of its superiors with c...

The paper presents a novel method for detecting anomalous mailing behavior based on data mining approaches. Known or unknown email viruses may cause anomalous behaviors. Such behavior can be measured by deviations from a user’s normal behavior. Grouping and association analysis are used to establish a normal user profile. The building process is divided into two stages first, group relation ana...

Software development communities use different communication channels such as mailing lists, forums and bug tracking systems. These channels are not integrated which makes finding information difficult and inefficient. As a result of the ALERT project we developed a system that is able to collect and annotate information from various communication channels and store it in a single knowledge bas...

Participants from different countries and across diverse time zones discuss important design decisions and resolve conflicts in open source projects using mailing lists. A good understanding of the social structure of these mailing lists and the impact of the global participant pool on that structure helps in managing these projects. In this paper, we present a case study which investigates the...

OBJECTIVE To study the medical service utilization changes and return on investment from a health plan's direct mailings that either encouraged members to receive influenza vaccinations or encouraged members to call a nurse advice service. STUDY DESIGN Randomized controlled trial with 2 intervention groups and 1 control group consisting of all members over age 65 years who were enrolled in 5 ...

BACKGROUND This study assessed the application of the Total Design Method (TDM) in a mail survey of Japanese dentists. The TDM was chosen because survey response rates in Japan are unacceptably low and the TDM had previously been used in a general population survey. METHODS Four hundred and seventy eight dentist members of the Okayama Medical and Dental Practitioner's Association were surveye...

Electronic mailing systems are the dominant communication systems in private and business matters. Public administrations deliver documents to citizens and businesses—subpoenas, legal verdicts, notifications, administrative penalties, and so forth. However, official activities are more strongly bound to legal regulations than in civil law. Delivery of crucial and personal documents raises the d...

In this paper we present an approach to organize and classify e-mails using selforganizing maps. The aim is on the one hand to provide an intuitive visual profile of the considered mailing lists and on the other hand to offer an intuitive navigation tool, were similar e-mails are located close to each other, so that the user can scan easily for e-mails similar in content. To be able to evaluate...