The 2002 Lasker Clinical Medical Research Award honoured Willem Kolff and Belding Scribner, whose seminal work changed kidney failure from a fatal to a treatable disease. What began as exploratory efforts to sustain life and relieve uraemic symptoms in selected patients now provides chronic life-saving replacement therapy to millions of people worldwide. Continued improvements in clinical exper...

Recent developments in and around the SIESTA method of first-principles simulation of condensed matter are described and reviewed, with emphasis on (i) the applicability of the method for large and varied systems, (ii) efficient basis sets for the standards of accuracy of density-functional methods, (iii) new implementations, and (iv) extensions beyond ground-state calculations.

It is possible to increase the speed and throughput of an algorithm using parallelization techniques. Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) is a parallel computation model, which has already employed by most of the current processor families. In this paper we will analyze four SHA algorithms and determine possible performance gains that can be achieved using SIMD parallelism. We will point ou...

In an attempt to unify two hot trends in the research community, this project explores distributed data mining. The idea of taking big data and processing it to extract information on a large number of nodes has many applications for many sectors outside of computer science. This project explores Apache Mahout and attempts to quantify its modifiability, accuracy, and performance. To determine t...

The utility of including loops in plans has been long recognized by the planning community. Loops in a plan help increase both its applicability and the compactness of representation. However, progress in finding such plans has been limited largely due to lack of methods for reasoning about the correctness and safety properties of loops of actions. We present novel algorithms for determining th...

The Semantic Web is one of the fastest developing fields within the Information and Communication Technology sector and, as such, under constant examination by scientists and IT professionals. This article aims to provide a better understanding of the applicability of Semantic Web tools and technologies in practice. This aim will be achieved by surveying the recommended and emerging W3C standar...

Pre-congestion notification (PCN) marks packets when the PCN traffic rate exceeds an admissible link rate and this marking information is used as feedback from the network to take admission decisions for new flows. This idea is currently under standardization in the IETF. Different marking algorithms are discussed and various admission control (AC) algorithms are proposed that decide based on t...

CSSR algorithm learns automata representing the patterns of a process from sequential data. This paper studies the applicability of CSSR to some Noun Phrase detection. The ability of the algorithm to capture the patterns behind this tasks and the conditions under which it performs better are studied. Also, an approach to use the acquired models to annotate new sentences is pointed out and, at t...

Following the thread of the paper Evaluation of Investments in Portuguese Firms [1], which presents a survey instrument applied to firms in the district of Guarda (Portugal) in the period March to May of 1998. The authors intend to analyze the development of the methodologies used in the evaluation of investment projects, focusing on the universe of firms previously studied, using the same inqu...

Introduction: Crater counting has historically been used to establish relative and absolute chronologies on planetary surfaces and to develop global stratigraphies. Typically, craters in the size range >1 km have been used. This diameter was chosen as a convenient balance between image resolution and a diameter that would indicate a formation age. Craters at larger diameters might be craters pr...