Entering the Ambient

Contract-Based Cooperation for Ambient Intelligence: Proposing, Entering and Executing Contracts Autonomously

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) describes environments that sense and react to the humans in time to improve their living quality. Software agents are important in realizing such environments. While existing work has focused on individual agent’s reactions, more interesting applications will take place when the agents cooperate to provide composed services to humans. When cooperation is required, th...

Entering the Extranet Era

Combinatorics entering the third millennium

In the later part of the century, attitudes changed. When the 1998 film Good Will Hunting featured a famous mathematician at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who had won a Fields Medal for combinatorics, many found this somewhat unbelievable.2 However, life followed art in this case when, later in the same year, Fields Medals were awarded to Richard Borcherds and Tim Gowers for work mu...

Women Entering the Legal Profession

Surgery cancellations after entering the operating room

Background Surgery cancellation results in unavailability of the operating room and loss time. We identified the frequency of and reasons for operation cancellations after patients entered the operating room and assessed the preventability of such cancellations. Findings A retrospective chart review of all scheduled surgical procedures proposed under general anesthesia in a period spanning 20...