I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor David Aldous, for being my undergraduate thesis advisor and for giving me the opportunity to apply the knowledge I have learned from a topic that is related to my future career. I have benefited from his guidance, great kindness and patience and I wish to give him a heartfelt thank you.

The scientific publishing process has during the past few years undergone considerable changes, due to the possibilities offered by the Internet for fast delivery and inter-linking of publications which refer to each other. The socio-economic structures have, however, not changed much, and many academics and librarians view the current situation as sub-optimal and highly unsatisfactory. This ha...

Web 2.0 is transforming the internet: Information consumers become information producers and consumers at the same time. In virtual places like Facebook, Youtube, discussion boards and weblogs diversificated topics, groups and issues are propagated and discussed. Today an internet user is a member of lots of communities at different virtual places. Real life group membership and group behavior ...

Imagine that you are in the market for some custom software. You’ve issued an RFP, prohibited any contact between bidders and your organization, and demanded a single price for the whole effort. In response, one of the prospective contractors pitches you the following scenario. “For US$35,000,” the contractor’s account executive says, “an cross-functional team of our best people will work with ...

We had proposed a biological hypothesis \programed self-decomposition (PSD) model" which assumes that a self-decomposition mechanism is programed in each cell of all creatures on the earth and contributes to the restoration of the original state of the terrestrial ecosystem[2{6]. In this article, the overview of the researches on PSD model and the newest results of both biochemical and computer...

Design decisions lead to future maintenance needs. In the past, these decisions were often taken implicitly. During the last decade there has been a development to make more explicit choices, based on the expected condition in time sometimes combined with life-cycle cost analysis. The inspection validation (IV) model is currently under development. This decision-support model can be used to eva...

Life cycles (discussed elsewhere regarding the informal and pragmatic aspects) can be formally defined as a process model with some un-conventional features, namely: multiplicity of events, a restricted visibility of parameters, and ‘negative prefixes’ to block an event set from happening. We show how to translate these aspects in terms of conventional process constructs. Several times we manag...

“Epigenetic Tracking” is the name of a model of cellular development that, coupled with an evolutionary technique, becomes an evo-devo method to generate arbitrary 2d or 3d shapes. The method evolves instructions contained in the genome inside cells, which guide the development of an artificial zygote into a mature phenotype: as such it belongs to the field of “artificial embryology”, or “compu...

This paper presents an artificial life model for image enhancement. The results of some traditional enhancement methods were analyzed and compared with the ones obtained by the model proposed. The qualitative and quantitative tests performed allowed to conclude that the new model is promising, as is able to enhance transitions of the objects presented in the original images and make them more v...