This text attempts to describe an imagined future of ambient intelligence. It assumes that one day most of the current issues within ambient intelligence will be solved and that a second order ambient intelligence will be formulated, one with new research agendas. It describes several topics and ideas that might be part of this agenda and surmises on the prerequisites for this change.

The aim of the present work was to investigate the ability of Cocopeat to remove of lead (II) from aqueous solutions. The effects of different parameters such as particle size, adsorbent dosage, pH, contact time, agitation speed and concentration on the removal process has been investigated. The maximum removal of lead ion (92.5%) took place in the pH range of 4 contact time in 30 minutes a...

Background: Considering the severe health and environmental hazards caused by the entry of diazinon toxin into water resources, its removal is very important. Given the high costs of imported adsorbents, this research attempted to evaluate, for the first time, the efficiency of Iranian activated carbon in removing diazinon from aqueous solutions. Methods: In this batch experimental study, the ...

In this paper we use the method of upper and lower solutions to study multivalued Sturm{Liouville and periodic boundary value problems , with Caratheodory orientor eld. We prove two existence theorems. One when the orientor eld F (t; x; y) is convex{valued and the other when F (t; x; y) is nonconvex valued. Finally we show that the \convex" problem has extremal solutions in the order interval d...

We consider second-order linear time-invariant systems. The objective of this paper is to present a new method for constructing a reduced system by preserving the second-order structure of the original system. This new model reduction method uses a variant of the well-known balanced truncation technique applied to second-order gramians. We also compare it with another existing technique. © 2004...

An artificial Ant Colony System (ACS) algorithm to solve generalpurpose combinatorial Optimization Problems (COP) that extends previous AC models [21] by the inclusion of a negative pheromone, is here described. Several Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) were used as benchmark. We show that by using two different sets of pheromones, a second-order coevolved compromise between positive and negativ...

In a first-order reversed-phi motion stimulus (Anstis, 1970), the black-white contrast of successive frames is reversed, and the direction of apparent motion may, under some conditions, appear to be reversed. It is demonstrated here that, for many classes of stimuli, this reversal is a mathematical property of the stimuli themselves, and the real problem is in perceiving forward motion, which i...

Second-order cone programming (SOCP) problems are convex optimization problems in which a linear function is minimized over the intersection of an affine linear manifold with the Cartesian product of second-order (Lorentz) cones. Linear programs, convex quadratic programs and quadratically constrained convex quadratic programs can all be formulated as SOCP problems, as can many other problems t...

We investigate the extent of second order characterizable structures by extending Shelah’s Main Gap dichotomy to second order logic. For this end we consider a countable complete first order theory T . We show that all sufficiently large models of T have a characterization up to isomorphism in the extension of second order logic obtained by adding a little bit of infinitary logic if and only if...