BACKGROUND Recently, activation-dependant structural brain plasticity in humans has been demonstrated in adults after three months of training a visio-motor skill. Learning three-ball cascade juggling was associated with a transient and highly selective increase in brain gray matter in the occipito-temporal cortex comprising the motion sensitive area hMT/V5 bilaterally. However, the exact time-...

Most of the research concerning production systems is so far limited to the assessment of the steady-state throughput despite the impact of the parameter variability on the overall performance of such systems. In this paper, we propose an analytical model to assess the variance of the throughput of homogeneous transfer lines subject to operation-dependant failures. The transfer lines subject of...

Nowadays in solving control problems the processing is performed typically by model-based computer systems, which contain a representation of our knowledge about the nature and the actual circumstances of the problem in hand. If the nature and/or the actual circumstances change, the corresponding model should also be changed. Anytime techniques are very flexible in this respect and can advantag...

In this paper we present a preliminary predictive model for a key biomedical imaging application in the UK e-Science IXI (Information eXtraction from Images) project [1]. This code represents a significant challenge for our existing performance prediction tools as it has internal structures that exhibit highly variable runtimes depending on qualities in the input data provided. Since the runtim...

In recent decades, aging population of most advanced countries has increased sharply, and elderly health care has become economically a big social issue. One way to cope with this problem is to introduce various service robots such as an arm-wrestling robot proposed in the article into our daily lives, which are able to promote elderly health and to save elderly welfare cost. For successful exe...

Sputum induction with nebulized hypertonic saline is increasingly being used to evaluate airway inflammation. We investigated the procedure-associated risk in 16 asthmatics that were still symptomatic despite on high doses of regular corticosteroid (CS) therapy (7 on daily inhaled CS > or = 800 microg budesonide or equivalent; 9 on additional daily oral CS) and their sputum cellular profile. Fo...

For the first time we have investigated the natural ecosystem engineering capacity of stromatolitic microbial assemblages. Stromatolites are laminated sedimentary structures formed by microbial activity and are considered to have dominated the shallows of the Precambrian oceans. Their fossilised remains are the most ancient unambiguous record of early life on earth. Stromatolites can therefore ...

The rate at which computers are becoming faster at sequential execution has dropped significantly. Instead parallel processing power is increasing, and multicore computers are becoming more common. Automatically parallelising programs is becoming much more desirable. Parallelising programs written in imperative programming languages is difficult and often leads to unreliable software. Paralleli...

This study was suggested by previous work on the simulation of evolution equations with scale-dependent processes, e.g., wave-propagation or heat-transfer, that are modeled by wave equations or heat equations. Here, we study both parabolic and hyperbolic equations. We focus on ADI (alternating direction implicit) methods and LOD (locally one-dimensional) methods, which are standard splitting me...

Context-aware recommender systems (CARS) aim at improving users’ satisfaction by tailoring recommendations to each particular context. In this work we propose a contextual pre-filtering technique based on implicit user feedback. We introduce a new context-aware recommendation approach called user micro-profiling. We split each single user profile into several possibly overlapping sub-profiles, ...