Perfect failure detectors can correctly decide whether a computer is crashed. However; it is impossible to implement a perfect failure detector in purely asynchronous systems. We show how to enforce perfect failure detection in timed distributed systems with hardware watchdogs. The two main system model assumptions are ( I ) each computer can measure time intervals with a known maximum error, a...

A recurring topic concerning neural nets implemented in VLSI is chip-to-chip and chip-to-computer communication. One common approach is the asynchronous event protocol, where an asynchronous digital bus is transferring neural spikess as events. Since neural circuits are spiking randomly, a collision strategy must be adopted preserving the statistical properties of the neural representation. Thi...

The Community of Inquiry (COI) theoretical framework suggests that successful higher education experiences are supported by the presence and interaction of cognitive, social and teaching elements. Since the COI model has been widely used for examining quality of asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) educational interactions, its applicability to synchronous CMC interactions is rela...

Online learning is the latest in a long list of social technologies that have been introduced to improve distance learning by adding various augmentations, substitutions, or blending of new pedagogical approaches and technologies. Technologies utilized for distance and online learning include: correspondence courses, physical mail, and printed matter; telephone and/or audio recordings; televisi...

Email is the most common collaborative tool in use today. Although originally designed as an asynchronous communication tool, it is being used increasingly for information management, coordination and collaboration tasks. For effective collaborative work, email must be designed that meets users’ needs and their experience. The traditional approach to designing interfaces has been increasingly c...

Distributed Constraint Satisfaction (DCSP) has long been considered an important problem in multi-agent systems research. This is because many real-world problems can be represented as constraint satisfaction and these problems often present themselves in a distributed form. In this article, we present a new complete, distributed algorithm called asynchronous partial overlay (APO) for solving D...

Brain Computers Interfaces (BCI) are emerging as a new means of communication, aiming to make a direct link between the brain and an external device, bypassing conventional motor outputs, such as peripheral nerves and muscles. A BCI extracts features from a brain signal and classifies them in order to interpret them in terms of the user's volition. For communication to be effective, the compute...

Instructional media such as computer conferencing engender high levels of student-student and student-teacher interaction; therefore, they can support models of teaching and learning that are highly interactive and consonant with the communicative ideals of university education. This potential and the ubiquity of computer conferencing in higher education prompted three of the authors of the thi...