Rest areas have been built on the freeway to avoid traffic accidents and drowsiness so that road travelers can rest. These supplemental rest areas are very small-sized resting facilities located between the larger regular rest areas, which is a unique design. However, the management of rest areas and their accommodations need to be improved by considering the effective factors involved. In this...

INTRODUCTION Philadelphia enacted its Clean Indoor Air Act (CIAA) nearly 2 years before the statewide CIAA. In this study, we assessed the economic impact of CIAAs on 4 types of food services and drinking places and addressed the predominant limitation of previous pre-post ban studies, namely the lack of control for confounders and changes in secular trends over time. METHODS We analyzed data...

For a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) or Resource Allocation System (RAS) which can be decomposed into a number of synchronized choice nets interconnected by resource places, we propose to efficiently extract strict minimal siphons (SMS) in an incremental fashion rather than the traditional global approach. Only a subset of all SMS needs to be searched. The rest SMS can be found by adding a...

When people visit a certain city there are some particular places that strike to their tourist appeal and these places summarize the city, in some sense, for them. We want to automatically summarize the tourist appeal for cities by singling out these visually striking landmarks along with a brief verbal description for them. Earlier applications have looked at finding visual distinction between...

In the last decade, several authors have proposed edge preserving regularization (EPR) methods for solving ill posed problems in image processing and computer vision. These EPR techniques are based on the minimization of non quadratic and in some cases non–convex energy functionals. We introduce a new EPR technique that corresponds to an adaptive rest condition spring system, that meaning that ...

Rivers during floods bring a lot of fallen trees and debris. Video surveillance systems are installed on strategically important places on the rivers. To protect these places from destructions due to accumulation of wood, such systems must be able to automatically detect wood. Image segmentation is performed to separate wood and other moving elements from the rest of the water. Moving objects a...