Smart home environments require tight coupling between different types of sensors, actuators, and computer algorithms. To address the challenges in building a robust and effective smart home environment, it is essential to develop a systematic approach to handling a large number of components and their interactions. We describe a holistic, multi-layered, and service oriented approach to smart h...

While the mainstream approach to environmental management (EM) has tended to be centralized, adopting a narrow conception of 'environment', there is a growing body of literature supporting a participatory approach which is decentralized, community oriented and holistic in its view of the environment. This paper examines the main principles underlying this development and assesses the opportunit...

Cloud environment is a complex system which includes the matching between computation resources and data resources. Efficient predicting services execution time is a key component of successful tasks scheduling and resource allocation in cloud computing environment. In this paper, we propose a framework for supporting knowledge discovery application running in cloud environment as well as a hol...

The reference library plays a valuable role in a print environment for at least two purposes: direct ready reference, the seeking or verification of basic facts; and finding contextual aspects of a person, place, event, period, or other topic. For the first task, one needs an appropriate single source; for the second, a well-selected range of different reference resources, such as dictionaries,...

Arctic Options: Holistic Integration for Arctic Coastal-Marine Sustainability is a new three-year research project to assess future infrastructure associated with the Arctic Ocean regarding: (1) natural and living environment; (2) built environment; (3) natural resource development; and (4) governance. For the assessments, Arctic Options will generate objective relational schema from numeric da...

he cities of the developing world are the engines of economic growth, but they also face and cause multiple and pressing environmental issues. Those highlighted at the 1992 “Earth Summit” included water supply, sanitation, and pollution, and shaped the “brown agenda.” A decade later, this agenda includes the interactions between cities and the regional and global environment. This note reviews ...

In this paper, we describe our previous and current work on people’s everyday photography, or more broadly: snapshot media. The digital revolution, wide availability of internet connections, and mobile phones as media creation devices are changing the way people create and use media. We identify three phenomena that will shape the future of snapshot media: the heterogeneity of current technical...

Increasing health and economic costs of overweight and obesity underscore the urgency of finding effective means of addressing the problem. There is broad support within the public health community for approaches that are holistic in nature, taking into account a host of factors that make up the food environment and ultimately influence individual behaviours. Policies with the power to support ...

in assessing foreign language writing, holistic and analytic scoring can be used to measure a variety of discourse and linguistic features. this study aimed to investigate the possible significant effect of analyt- ic and holistic assessments on improving writing skill among iranian efl learners. for this purpose, two groups of intermediate efl learners, after being homogenized, were divided in...

Background: Organizational architecture is a holistic approach to design of humane organizations and studies an organization from five perspectives: structure, culture, procsses, strategy and individuals. In this paper the concept of organizational architecture is firstly formalized using the fractal principle and then applied to multi-agent systems’ (MAS) organizations. Objectives: Providing a...