Smart Plant Watering Patrollers

Security games with mobile patrollers

To optimally secure large and complex infrastructures against crime activities, a scalable model for optimal defender allocation is needed. Game theory is successfully used to formalize the problem as a two-player game between an attacker and a defender. We consider both player to be mobile, we focus on proper path intersection modeling and we observe the trade-off between fidelity and computat...

Watering CanMEDS flowers

We expand on the discourse related to nature surrounding Canadian medical training and the CanMEDS flower. We advance the notion that a major contributor to burnout is the increasing complexity and segregation of not only the medical profession, but society as a whole, leading to choice overload and an overemphasis on complex, data driven, rational decision making. We then propose that the key ...

The “smart” Plant: Economics and Technology

Advances in sensors, automation, and information technology have significantly changed the way process plants operate. High performance computing and high speed communication technology developments have been the foundation for many of these advances and advanced analytical and optimization methods based on this infrastructure can simultaneously lower costs, increase profitability and improve c...

Smart solutions from the plant kingdom.

How patrollers set foraging direction in harvester ants.

Recruitment to food or nest sites is well known in ants; the recruiting ants lay a chemical trail that other ants follow to the target site, or they walk with other ants to the target site. Here we report that a different process determines foraging direction in the harvester ant Pogonomyrmex barbatus. Each day, the colony chooses from among up to eight distinct foraging trails; colonies use di...