Playing with physical construction kits (Legos, Erector sets, Fischer-Technik, etc.) is a good way to build physical intuitions and spark interest in technical fields. Construction kits for virtual artifacts could have similar benefits, with complementary advantages and disadvantages. Yet we currently do not have construction kits for virtual analogs of physical artifacts that provide the same ...

Bipartite graphs appear in various scenes in the real world, and visualizing these graphs helps improve our understanding of network structures. The amount of information that is available to us has increased dramatically in recent years, and it is therefore necessary to develop a drawing technique that corresponds to large-scale graphs. In this paper, we describe drawing methods to make large-...

Since 2012, several national and international projects on ambient assisted living (AAL) active and healthy ageing gave insight into the different steps of development processes where the requirements of the target group were not met or just failed to be realized. This article shall provide a summary of terms and requirements from the experience of practice and project work on the topic. This a...

Digitized technical drawings are available for use at work, for education, and at home. They can be presented and edited on standard PCs with appropriate software installed. One of the most difficult problems of being blind is accessing and using such information. Access and use of graphic information for blind people is problematic. A solution is to produce a textual description of the graphic...

We provide a dual perspective on technical efficiency evaluation, in two respects. First, we build on the price assumptions implicitly associated with the notion of technical efficiency in a general equilibrium framework to characterize a set of appropriate references to be used in the technical efficiency evaluation of an inputoutput vector. Some existing evaluation methods always select an el...

metapost was created with 2D graphics in mind, and in spite of various extensions added during the last few years, it doesn’t seem well adapted for 3D technical graphics. However, there are cases where simple but realistic 3D graphics are needed, for instance for inclusion in an article, and there are also cases where 3D objects are mere 2D objects with added depth. In such cases, an approach c...

A s president of the IEEE Computer Society, I am going to ask each of you to take a moment to refl ect on what your membership in the Society has meant to you. I will also ask you to share your personal experience with someone in 2009. Many professionals do not understand the importance, contribution, and necessity of nonprofit technical organizations like the IEEE Computer Society. The Society...

The changing economic conditions have challenged many organizations to search for more effective performance measurement methods. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) is a widely used mathematical programming approach for comparing the inputs and outputs of a set of homogeneous decision making units (DMUs) by evaluating their relative efficiency. Performance measurement in the conventional DEA is ba...

At first reading, the Federal Circuit’s decision in AMP v USPTO, summarized in Part I of this four-partite paper appears to favor the biotechnological and pharmaceutical industry. Its practical impact seems moderate because clever claim drafting helps to avoid most patent eligibility traps. Yet, the split decision also contains elusive reasoning by each of the three judges that provides excelle...