GlobData is a project that aims to design and implement a middleware tool offering the abstraction of a global object database repository. This tool, called Copla, supports transactional access to geographically distributed persistent objects independent of their location. Additionally, it supports replication of data according to different consistency criteria. For this purpose, Copla implemen...

BACKGROUND Individuals with cervical spinal cord injury usually sustain impairments to the trunk and upper and lower limbs, resulting in compromised sitting balance. The objectives of this study were to: 1) compare postural control of individuals with cervical spinal cord injury and able-bodied individuals; and 2) investigate the effects of foot support and trunk fluctuations on postural contro...

Semantic treatment of multimedia content, as well as of user preferences and interests, forms one of the most important topics in modern audiovisual content providing systems and opens a great variety of discussions among the research community. In this framework, extracting and combining profiling information about users and content is a challenging problem. This paper is part of our ongoing w...

For over a year, the market for initial public offerings (IPO) for promising private companies has been slow. In 2007, there were just 234 IPOs, down from a decade high of 486 in 1999. As a result, private companies and their investors (including venture capital and private equity backed companies) have been left without a crucial exit strategy. More importantly, these private companies that mi...

We consider strategic arrivals to a FCFS service system that starts service at a fixed time and has to serve a fixed number of customers, e.g., an airplane boarding system. Arriving early induces a higher waiting cost (waiting before service begins) while arriving late induces a cost because earlier arrivals take the better seats. We first consider arrivals of heterogeneous customers that choos...