Over the past decade, various means of decentralizing authority and responsibility to local governments have been discussed. It was broadly recognized that local government capacity would need to be strengthened considerably if the central government were to lessen its role in the intergovernmental fiscal system. Most Thai local governments have limited capacity for financial management, planni...

In this paper we propose strategies for estimating performance of a classifier when labels cannot be obtained for the whole test set. The number of test instances which can be labeled is very small compared to the whole test data size. The goal then is to obtain a precise estimate of classifier performance using as little labeling resource as possible. Specifically, we try to answer, how to sel...

Several temporal planning systems (e.g. Allen & Koomen, Descartes , parcPLAN) divide the planning process into two distinct phases: action introduction and plan verification. This thesis develops a detailed model of these two phases and their “interface”, and shows how the model can be exploited to enhance the efficiency of plan generation. The main focus is on plan verification, and the contex...

This article describes how a small liberal arts college library created a digital library using existing staff and financial resources. The Hekman Digital Archive (HDA) was created using a digital media archive module of the library’s integrated library system, and is maintained by one library staff member with the help of numerous student assistants.

Pictures play an important role in the communication process. Communicative goals can be expressed for instance with the specific use of different levels of abstraction in pictures. Especially in textbooks and scientific publications, images are used where the level of detail of different objects is deliberately changed to express the importance of an object in the picture. In this paper we int...

The construction and operation of large-scale quantum information devices presents a grand challenge. A major issue is the effective control of coherent evolution, which requires accurate knowledge of the system dynamics that may vary from device to device. We review strategies for obtaining such knowledge from minimal initial resources and in an efficient manner, and apply these to the problem...

China today faces the rigorous aging problem. In the traditional sense, the government has the duty to take over all the public affairs including the social elderly care. However, the expanding demand of social elderly care and the limited social resources extremely restrict the process of social elderly care affairs, and in addition, the social elderly care in so-called governmental institutio...