Telepresent Agents are software Agents that are instantiated simultaneously within two or more distinct computer applications (called Locales) which are operating at distinct nodes of a computer network. Agents are composed of Capabilities—often a separate Capability for each Locale in which the Agent operates. As an Agent exchanges information among and within its Capabilities, information pas...

Mammography is the most effective procedure for an early diagnosis of the breast cancer. Nowadays, people are trying to find a way or method to support as much as possible to the radiologists in diagnosis process. The most popular way is now being developed is using Computer-Aided Detection (CAD) system to process the digital mammograms and prompt the suspicious region to radiologist. In this p...

Online fault diagnosis is a task of critical importance for maintaining a high level of operational safety in many chemical plants. The Petri-net models are adopted in this work for describing the fault propagation behaviors in batch processes. A systematic method has been developed to synthesize a timed Petri-net hierarchically structured according to any given piping and instrumentation diagr...

A hearing screening test is a method to determine human ear disorders and conventional audiometers and audiologists are required to perform the test. However, this procedure is difficult to implement, especially in a remote site such as a factory or a school due to the ambient noise that may cause test inaccuracy. In this work, the application of active noise control (ANC) is proposed to reduce...

Existing approaches to artificial intelligence problems such as sequence induction, automatic programming, machine learning, planning, and pattern recognition typically require specification in advance of the size and shape of the solution to the problem (often in a unnatural and difficult way). This paper reports on a new approach in which the size and shape of the solution to such problems is...

This report describes our approach towards providing quality of service (QoS) guarantees for network communication within the endsystems to support multimedia applications. We first address the problem of QoS specification by identifying a set of application classes and their QoS parameters that cover the communication requirements of most applications. We then describe the QoS mapping problem,...

Image fusion is fundamental to several modern day image processing applications. It is often a vital preprocessing procedure to many computer vision and image processing tasks which are dependent on the acquisition of imaging data via sensors, such as infrared and visible. One such task is that of human detection. In this paper, we present improvements to our shape and heat flow-based technique...

We report a retrospective review of all patients undergoing both open and laparoscopic Nissen fundoplication from January 1990 through December 1993. Computer data were reviewed to determine the length of hospital stay, hospital costs, and perioperative complications. Questionnaires were sent to patients undergoing Nissen fundoplication. During the study period, 232 patients underwent Nissen fu...