We define a new set of functions called semi-monotone, a subclass of skew-supermodular functions. We show that the problem of augmenting a given graph to cover a symmetric semi-monotone function is NP-complete if all the values of the function are in {0, 1} and we provide a minimax theorem if all the values of the function are different from 1. Our problem is equivalent to the node to area augm...

OBJECTIVE To facilitate patient handoffs between physicians, the computerized patient handoff tool (PHT) extracts information from the electronic health record to populate a form that is printed and given to the cross-cover physician. OBJECTIVES were to: (1) evaluate the rate at which data elements of interest were extracted from the electronic health record into the PHT, (2) assess the frequen...

Auto-Associative models cover a large class of methods used in data analysis, among them are for example the famous PCA and the auto-associative neural networks. In this paper, we describe the general properties of these models when the projection component is linear and we propose and test an easy to implement Probabilistic Semi-Linear Auto-Associative model in a Gaussian setting. We show that...

This paper presents a comprehensive navigation system capable of extended coverage operations in semi-structured environments. By semi-structured, we mean pre-mapped terrain that although locally smooth has potentially large changes in elevation and that is generally free of obstacles. The system has three key capabilities -it is able to track specified paths with high accuracy, detect small ob...

This paper illustrates how the use of mathematical morphology can be a powerful tool for the mapping of ligneous cover in semi-arid lands. Ligneous cover plays a fundamental role in Sahel semi-arid regions since this resource is vital to the resilience of rural societies and can be used as an indicator of socio-environmental conditions. Grey tone vertical images from Sahelian villages in 1975 a...

Global climate change and other anthropogenic stressors have heightened the need to rapidly characterize ecological changes in marine benthic communities across large scales. Digital photography enables rapid collection of survey images to meet this need, but the subsequent image annotation is typically a time consuming, manual task. We investigated the feasibility of using automated point-anno...

identification of rapid degradation of ecological resources requires effective environmental monitoring including ecological integrity assessment .our first aim is to analyze ecological integrity in a landscape context while developing a method to assess integrity in spite of a dearth of historical data. we used a spatial-temporal reference framework for land cover maps for assessing ecologica...

Extensive research on geodata uncertainty has been conducted in the past decades, mostly related to modeling, quantifying, and communicating uncertainty. But findings on if and how users can incorporate this information into spatial analyses are still rare. In this paper we address these questions with a focus on land cover change analysis. We conducted semi-structured interviews with three exp...

The vegetation cover and rangeland production are the most important factors to determine the proper planning system for effective utilization and management of rangelands. In this research, the effect of climatic factors (temperature and rainfall) were studied on vegetation cover and forage production of four species (Festuca ovina, Bromus tomentellus, Dactylis glomerata and Agropyron trichoph...

The optimal path cover problem is to find a minimum number of vertex disjoint paths which together cover all the vertices of the graph. Finding an optimal path cover for an arbitrary graph is known to be NP-complete [3]. However, polynornial-time algorithms exist for trees [4], cacti [4] and for interval graphs [9]. The solution presented in [2] For circular-arc graphs is known to be wrong. In ...