This research began with a question about addressing a broader range of accessibility issues in voting than the standards in the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG) require. The VVSG standards cover accessibility for low vision, blindness, and cognitive disabilities. But what if anyone could mark their ballot anywhere, any time, on any device? While the likelihood of voters voting on thei...

Standards have had much importance in different fields of research in order to assure a certain quality of service in bilateral contracts. More specifically, in multi-agent systems performance standards may be used in order to articulate contracts among partners in environments dealing with uncertainty. However, little effort has been made on how to ensure standards compliance over time. In thi...

Quality assessment of audiovisual files is an important tool in many steps of the preservation workflow, as well as for use and access of archive material. Today mainly technical properties of the files can be checked, e.g. file integrity or standards compliance of file wrappers and encoded streams. Checking the audiovisual quality manually results in extremely high labor costs. In this work we...

Java has been described as a simple, object-oriented, distributed, interpreted, robust, secure, architectural neutral, portable, high-performance, multithreaded and dynamic language, prompting some to describe it as the rst buzzword-compliant programming language. We submit that to deserve full certi cation|and in the process establish itself as the natural choice for developing large-scale dis...

An automated design synthesis method is developed to design an airfoil with a reconfigurable shape, which can change from one type of geometry to another. A design synthesis method using unit truss approach and particle swarm optimization is presented. In the unit truss approach, unit truss is used as a new unit cell for mechanics analysis of cellular structures, including lightweight structure...

The UNICORE Grid system has been developed since the late 1990s to support distributed computing applications and emerging Grid infrastructures. Over the years, UNICORE has evolved to a full-grown and well-tested Grid middleware system, which today is used in daily production at many supercomputing centers worldwide. Also, the UNICORE technology serves as a solid basis in many European and Inte...

When compliant samples such as polymer films are scanned with an atomic force microscope (AFM) in contact mode, a periodic ripple pattern can be induced on the sample. In present paper, friction and mechanical properties of structures polystyrene (PS) poly-n-(butyl methacrylate) (PnBMA) investigated. Force volume measurements allow quantitative analysis elastic moduli nanometer resolution, show...

Traditional swash plates generally have numerous parts, which may result in the abrasion of key parts. In this paper, to avoid problems traditional plates, a low-cost and high-reliability rotor micro-aerial vehicle integrated attitude-adjustment mechanism (IAAM) is designed based on compliant theory. The composed series curved connecting convex plates. context, relationship loads deformations c...