The effectiveness of conservation practices depends on their placement on the fields within the watershed. Cost-effective placement of these practices for maximum water quality benefits on each field requires comparing a very large number of possible land-use scenarios. To address this problem, we combine the tools of evolutionary algorithm with the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model a...

During a gathering ofhistorians at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner presented an essay titled “The Sign Ulcance of the Frontier in American Histoiy. “ Turner ‘s article, also known as the Frontier Thesis, argued that the settlement ofthe frontier made the American nation unique. Turner credited the frontier’s settlement as the primaryforce in shaping...

Sreedhar et al. [SGL98, Sre95] have presented an eliminationbased algorithm to solve data flow problems. A thorough analysis of the algorithm shows that the worst-case performance is at least quadratic in the number of nodes of the underlying graph. In contrast, Sreedhar reports a linear time behavior based on some practical applications. In this paper we prove that for goto-free programs, the ...

This paper presents a new method for multiobjective optimisation based on gradient projection and local region search. The gradient projection is conducted through the identi®cation of normal vectors of an ecient frontier. The projection of the gradient of a nonlinear utility function onto the tangent plane of the ecient frontier at a given ef®cient solution leads to the de®nition of a feasib...

Logconcave functions represent the current frontier of efficient algorithms for sampling, optimization and integration in Rn [LV06a]. Efficient sampling algorithms to sample according to a probability density (to which the other two problems can be reduced) relies on good isoperimetry which is known to hold for arbitrary logconcave densities. In this paper, we extend this frontier in two ways: ...

Flow shop problems as a typical manufacturing challenge have gained wide attention in academic fields. In this paper, we consider a bi-criteria permutation flow shop scheduling problem, where weighted mean completion time and weighted mean tardiness are to be minimized simultaneously. Since a flow shop scheduling problem has been proved to be NP-hard in strong sense, an effective multi-objectiv...

This thesis deals with high dimensional statistical analysis. We focus on three different problems motivated by medical applications : curve classification, pixel classification and clustering in hyperspectral images. Our approaches are deeply linked with statistical testing procedures (multiple testing, minimax testing, robust testing, and functional testing) and learning theory. Both are intr...

This paper simultaneously explores the determinants of the developing countries’ production frontier and their ‘efficiency’ in using the available resources and technology. In doing so it allows for the transfer of (industrial country) technology in determining the frontier and for international trade to influence absorptive capacity and national efficiency levels. Stochastic frontier analysis ...

The outcome of a production process might not only deviate from a theoretical maximum due to inefficiency, but also because of non-controllable influences. This raises the issue of reliability of Data Envelopment Analysis in noisy environments. I propose to assume an i.i.d. data generating process with bounded noise component, so that the following approach is feasible: Use DEA to estimate a ps...