SPADE is a project carried out at CEFRIEL and Politecnico di Milano. It aims at deening a process modeling language (called SLANG) and a Process-centered Software Engineering Environment (PSEE) based on this language. PSEEs support software activities through the execution of the model of the software process. Such a model integrates the description of human activities and of the interaction be...

Background: While there has been considerable focus on the school environment in the context of childhood obesity, less is known about the environments around the school, particularly in low-income, urban neighborhoods. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to assess students’ corner store and commuting habits before and after school in a low-income, urban environment. Design: This was a cross...

Selectively perceiving systems explore their environment by fixating on and analyzing potentially interesting parts of a scene in a continual manner. During this process, a sequence of snapshots each containing visual data with distinct spatio-temporal properties is collected. In this paper, we propose a visual memory model that enables the integration of this spatio-temporal data. This memory ...

The worldwide annual expenditures for cosmetics is estimated at U.S. $18 billion, and many players in the field are competing aggressively to capture more and more markets. The purpose of this article is to investigate the influence of brand loyalty on cosmetics buying behavior of female consumers in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in the UAE. The seven factors of brand loyalty are brand name, product...

Supermarkets might influence food choices, and more distal outcomes like obesity, by increasing the availability of healthy foods. However, recent evidence about their effects is ambiguous, perhaps because supermarkets also increase the availability of unhealthy options. We develop an alternative measure of food environment quality that characterizes urban neighborhoods by the relative amounts ...

Marketing-mix plays an essential role in the competitive business environment. Marketing decision makers constantly need to monitor changes in the environment and organization to make necessary changes. Therefore, a knowledge management system is required to acquire, store, retrieve and use up-to-dated knowledge. Corporations also tend to look for systems assisting them in knowledge management....

Store segmentation aims to divide a network of stores into meaningful groups, typically based on a combination of operational, site and trading environment characteristics. It is an increasingly important component within network planning activities of major retail chains due to the significant capital investment that is physically grounded in their large store networks. The paper outlines find...

We discuss the types of functional knowledge about an environment an agent can use in order to act effectively. We demonstrate (1) the use of structural regularities for acting efficiently, and (2) the use of physical regularities for designing effective sensors. These ideas are described in the context of an everyday task: grocery store shopping. We discuss how SHOPPER, a program, uses regular...

As is the case with traditional markets, the sellers on the Internet do not usually know the demand functions of their customers. However, in such a digital environment, a seller can experiment different prices in order to maximize his profits. In this paper, we fit the dynamic pricing model of Rothschild [11] to match the pricing problem of a Web-store. In this setting, we define the optimizat...