Practical optimization problems such as job-shop scheduling often involve optimization criteria that change over time. Repair-based frameworks have been identi ed as exible computational paradigms for di cult combinatorial optimization problems. Since the control problem of repair-based optimization is severe, Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques can be potentially helpful. However, some of t...

W hen an innocent search for a local auto-body repair shop lands someone on a page that promotes great mortgage rates, inexpensive prescription drugs, legal assistance, or pain-free cosmetic surgery, that person has been Web spammed. This practice undermines the trustworthiness people have come to expect from search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN have built their reputation on providing reliab...

PURPOSE Despite the importance of skin exposure, studies of skin symptoms in relation to exposure and respiratory symptoms are rare. The goals of this study were to describe exposure-response relationships for skin symptoms, and to investigate associations between skin and respiratory symptoms in bakery and auto body shop workers. METHODS Data from previous studies of bakery and auto body sho...

A cross sectional study to evaluate symptom reporting and neuropsychological test performance among a cohort of car body repair workers (n = 124) was performed using a computer-administered test system. Subjects with high and medium current exposures to solvent and paint (n = 39 and 32), and low exposure subjects who formerly painted (n = 29) reported significantly more acute and chronic neurol...

In this video paper we present the Talking Assistant and the STAIRS project, and how the two interact. The Talking Assistant is a device for interacting in ubiquitous computing environments. It features sensors, wireless communications and simple local speech recognition. The STAIRS project concerns browsing of structured hypertext documents in audio. One key feature of STAIRS is, that beside s...