Current trends in computing include increases in both distribution and wireless connectivity, leading to highly dynamic, complex environments on top of which applications must be built. The task of designing and ensuring the correctness of applications in these environments is similarly becoming more complex. The unified goal of much of the research in distributed wireless systems is to provide...

China is a multi-ethnic developing country with a low level of natural resources per capita, and a rapid rate of resource depletion. Mineral resources are being over exploited and wastefully excavated. Often the rich deposits are taken and the poor deposits discarded. There are also many other problems concerning freshwater retraction, forest cutting, field irrigation, livestock grazing, and cu...

This White Paper is the first of a series of articles about the benefits of managing terminology in commercial settings. This first issue introduces some basic concepts about managing terminology in commercial settings and some high-level business case strategies. Subsequent issues will provide specific examples of business case metrics that justifies the implementation of a terminology managem...

The Region Connection Calculus (RCC) is one of the most widely referenced system of high-level (qualitative) spatial reasoning. RCC assumes a continuous representation of space. This contrasts sharply with the fact that spatial information obtained from physical recording devices is nowadays invariably digital in form and therefore implicitly uses a discrete representation of space. Recently, G...

In many applications, spatial observations must be segmented into homogeneous regions and the number, positions, and shapes of the regions are unknown a priori. Information about the underlying probability distributions for observations in the various regions can be useful in such a procedure, but these distributions are often unknown. Furthermore, while there may be a large number of observati...

This paper describes a new heuristic for the nesting problem based on a 2-exchange neighbourhood generation strategy. This mechanism guides the search through the solution space consisting of the sequences of pieces and relies on a low-level placement heuristic to actually convert one sequence in a feasible layout. The placement heuristic is based on a bottom-left greedy procedure with the abil...

Human perception tends to firstly pick attended regions, which correspond to prominent objects in an image. Visual attention region detection simulates the behavior of the human visual system (HVS) and detects regions of interest (ROIs) in the image. In this study, a visual attention region detection approach using low-level texture and object features is proposed. The new and improved (shifted...

Since its development, the multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) method has been widely used to study high-level cognitive function in the brain. The results of the MVPA indicate that the spatial pattern of functional MRI data contains useful information. In addition to the spatial pattern analysis of the brain functions, effective connectivity can also be analyzed between the spatial pattern-base...