A real-world environment is complex and non-uniform, varying over space and time. This thesis demonstrates the impact of such environmental heterogeneity upon the ways in which organisms acquire information about the world, via a series of individual-based computational models that apply progressively more detailed forms of environmental structure to understand the causal impact of four distinc...

Discovering social communities of web users through clustering analysis of heterogeneous link associations has drawn much attention. However, existing approaches typically require the number of clusters a prior, do not address the weighting problem for fusing heterogeneous types of links and have a heavy computational cost. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of a newly proposed heterogen...

Primary MgCl2.3.3EtOH adduct (PCT1) was prepared by melt quenching method and then submitted into a programmed thermal dealcoholation project using a fluidized bed reactor. During thermal dealcoholation program, different MgCl2.nEtOH support samples with n= 3.0, 2.7, 2.4, and 2.1 were selected and named as PCT2 to PCT5, respectively. Structural analysis of the support samples showed a significa...

1. Modern theories of species coexistence recognize the importance of environmental heterogeneity. 2. Despite the existence of many observational studies, few experimental studies have evaluated the extent to which, and mechanisms by which, fixed spatial heterogeneity increases community diversity and alters community structure. 3. In experimental protist communities, we found that non-spatial ...

We present a fully implemented system based on generic document knowledge for detecting the logical structure of documents for which only general layout information is assumed. In particular, we focus on detecting the reading order. Our system integrates components based on computer vision, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing techniques. The prominent feature of our framewo...

An approach of Green’s function is adopted to solve the inhomogeneous linear differential equations representing wave equations in piezo-composite materials. In particular, transference of horizontally polarised shear (SH) waves is considered in bedded structure comprising of porous-piezo electric layer lying over a heterogeneous half-space. Propagation of SH-waves is considered to be influence...

It is common to define the structure of interactions among a population of agents using the social network metaphor. Most agentbased models were shown to be highly sensitive to that network, so the relevance of simulation results depends directly on the descriptive power of that network. When studying social dynamics in large populations, this network cannot be collected, and is rather generate...

This paper studies a model of social contest between two large groups, in which individual agents can choose whether or not to actively support their group. They become active supporters if they expect their group to win with a sufficiently high probability. The identity of the winner is decided according to a deterministic social rule that is a function of the groups’ strengths and activity ra...