All intelligence relies on search — for example, the search for an intelligent agent’s next action. Search is only likely to succeed in resource-bounded agents if they have already been biased towards finding the right answer. In artificial agents, the primary source of bias is engineering. This dissertation describes an approach, Behavior-Oriented Design (BOD) for engineering complex agents. A...

Constructed wetlands have emerged as a viable alternative for secondary treatment of domestic wastewater in areas with landscape limitations, poor soil conditions, and high water tables, which limit installation of full-scale adsorption fields. Existing information on the effects of macrophytes on treatment performance is contradictory and mostly derived from greenhouse mesocosm experiments. Th...

Treatment process models are efficient tools to assure proper operation and better control of wastewater treatment systems. The current research was an effort to evaluate performance of a submerged membrane bioreactor (SMBR) treating combined municipal and industrial wastewater and to simulate effluent quality parameters of the SMBR using a radial basis function artificial neural network (RBFAN...

BACKGROUND Platelet-rich concentrates are the most widely used regenerative biomaterials. Stimulation and acceleration of soft and hard tissue healing are due to local and continuous delivery of growth factors and proteins, mimicking the needs of the physiological wound healing and reparative tissue processes. This article aims to evaluate the clinical efficacy of open flap debridement (OFD) wi...

The 5-day biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5) test has been used for over a century to evaluate the concentration of biodegradable organic matter in wastewater effluents. The BOD test is a simple batch test, but it is also time consuming, labor intensive, imprecise, and, due to the dilution of the wastewater, takes a relatively long time to complete. Advances in laboratory instruments and lab ware...

I examine the relationship between board of director’s (BoD) education and firm performance on a European dataset over the period from 1999 to 2013, employing a well-developed dynamic panel generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator to alleviate endogeneity issue in corporate governance study. I find no correlation between BoD education and firm’s return on asset, after accounting for endoge...

This paper focuses on the Call Control for the establishment and release of isochronous calls within the DAMS network (ESPRIT project #2146), a distributed ISDN PBX over an FDDI-II backbone optical ring that supports both isochronous and asynchronous traffic generated by ISDN terminals, LAN terminals, and Bandwidth On Demand (BOD) terminals. After a general overview of the DAMS network architec...