Steel-structured jacket or template platforms have been extensively installed in Persian Gulf offshore oil & gas fields. For the jackets in the water depth range of 40 meters in this region, utilizing the self-upending concept has been investigated. It has been concluded that designing the light weight jackets, implementing the self-upending process for their installation operations, are econom...

Recently much attention has been paid by horticulturists to light-emitting diodes as a new source of economical and spectral-selective light. The reason is mainly coming from their versatility in handling and mounting, long working time, wattage use efficiency and lower heat production. In this study we examined their potential in promoting seed germination and producing quality flower seedling...

Program conditioning consists of identifying and removing a set of statements which cannot be executed when a condition of interest holds at some point in a program. It has been applied to problems in maintenance, testing, re–use and re–engineering. Program conditioning relies upon both symbolic execution and reasoning about symbolic predicates. Automation of the process therefore requires some...

Emerging mobile social apps use short-range radios to discover nearby devices and users. The device discovery protocol used by these apps must be highly energy-efficient since it runs frequently in the background. Also, a good protocol must enable secure communication (both during and after a period of device co-location), preserve user privacy (users must not be tracked by unauthorized third p...

High-entropy alloys (HEAs) are a new class of solid-solution alloys that have attracted worldwide attention for their outstanding properties. Owing to the demand from transportation and defense industries, light-weight HEAs have also garnered widespread interest from scientists for use as potential structural materials. Great efforts have been made to study the phase-formation rules of HEAs to ...

Inference tasks in computational semantics have mostly been tackled by means of first-order theorem proving tools. While this is an important and welcome development, it has some inherent limitations. First, generating first-order logic representations of natural language documents is hampered by the lack of efficient and sufficiently robust NLP tools. Second, the computational costs of deployi...

The Light-Weight RTI (LWRTI) was developed at GMU as an extension of our work in communication architectures for distributed simulation (Dual-Mode Multicast) and transport protocols for the large multicast environment (Selective Reliable Transmission Protocol or SRTP). This paper reports on our efforts to understand performance issues surrounding the LWRTI. One set of issues, in the area of thr...

Programming interface in general and particularly for XML data manipulation should be simple and flexible. For this purpose, we introduce light-weight and flexible programming interface for XML that provides only some basic operations such as controlling XML parser and XML document generator. Our programming toolkit represents XML documents as S expressions internally; therefore, XML applicatio...

The Semantic Web aims at easy integration and usage of content by building on a semi-structured data model where data semantics are explicitly specified through ontologies. The use of ontologies in real-world applications such as community portals has shown that a new level of data independence is required for ontology-based applications. For example, the customization of information towards th...