Letter from Beirut

American University of Beirut

Oracles used for testing graphical user interface (GUI) programs are required to take into consideration complicating factors such as variations in screen resolution or color scheme when comparing observed GUI elements to expected GUI elements. Researchers proposed fuzzy comparison rules and computationally expensive image processing techniques to tame the comparison process since otherwise the...

American University of Beirut

Placing a certain number of sinks at appropriate locations in WSNs reduces the number of hops between a sensor and its sink resulting in less exchanged messages between nodes and consequently less energy consumption. Since finding the optimal number of the sinks to be added and their locations is an NP Hard problem, we propose in this paper, a topological level solution that uses a meta-heurist...

The Reconstructions of Beirut

Beirut has successively been seen as the icon of the war-destroyed city, the paradigmatic case of “urbicide” and then as the symbol of a city rebirth through the reconstruction of its city center, praised in real estate journals and sold as a booming touristic destination to natives of the Arabo-Persian Gulf. Both images place Beirut as a city out of compare, out of norm, defining it as a uniqu...

Letter from . . .

LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT Letter from the President

I have just come back from attending ECMI 2002 in Latvia. About 150 people took part in the conference which was held in the delightful resort town of Jurmala, about 20km south of Riga. The invited speakers covered a wide range of topics and all gave interesting talks as did the minisymposium speakers and the other contributors. The participants enjoyed the weather and surroundings in Jurmala a...