The growing proportion of elderly people in society, together with recent advances in robotics, makes the use of robots in elder care increasingly likely. We outline developments in the areas of robot applications for assisting the elderly and their carers, for monitoring their health and safety, and for providing them with companionship. Despite the possible benefits, we raise and discuss six ...

Coupled human balancing tasks are investigated based on both pseudoneural controllers characterized by time-delayed feedback with random gain and natural human balancing tasks. It is shown numerically that, compared to single balancing tasks, balancing tasks coupled by mechanical structures exhibit enhanced stability against balancing errors in terms of both amplitude and velocity and also impr...

We consider the direct application of balancing techniques to unstable periodic systems by extending the balancing concepts to arbitrary periodic systems. We extend first the balancing concepts to unstable discrete-time systems by defining the reachability and observability grammians from appropriate right and left coprime factorizations with inner denominators. Further, we extend this new bala...

We study a problem of dynamic pricing faced by a vendor with limited inventory, uncertain about demand, aiming to maximize expected discounted revenue over an infinite time horizon. The vendor learns from purchase data, so his strategy must take into account the impact of price on both revenue and future observations. We focus on a model in which customers arrive according to a Poisson process ...

Multiple-GPU systems have become ubiquitously available due to their support of massive parallel computing and more device memory for large scale problems. Such systems are ideal for In-Situ visualization applications, which require significant computational power for concurrent execution of simulation and visualization. While pipelining based parallel computing scheme overlaps the execution of...

Homogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are organized using identical sensor nodes, but the nature of WSNs operations results in an imbalanced workload on gateway sensor nodes which may lead to a hot-spot or routing hole problem. The routing hole problem can be considered as a natural result of the tree-based routing schemes that are widely used in WSNs, where all nodes construct a multi-ho...

Natural selection is expected to leave distinctive signatures on patterns of neutral variation that are tightly linked to a site carrying an advantageous mutation. This notion is the basis for molecular population genetics approaches to the analysis of adaptations in the human genome. In principle, this is an attractive prospect; in practice, several complications and challenges make it difficu...

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a wireless network which has dynamic nature with infrastructure less without a central administration. In MANETs link failure occurs due to topological changes of mobile node which causes high data loss and delay, so the performance is enhanced by predicting the link break in prior. The most challenging fact in the routing process is affording the energy profici...

Techniques for scheduling parallel tasks on to the processors of a multiprocessor architecture must tradeoff three interrelated factors: 1) scheduling and synchronization costs, 2) load balancing, and 3) memory locality. Current scheduling techniques typically consider only one or two of these three factors at a time. We propose a novel SelfAdjusting Scheduling (SAS) algorithm that addresses al...