This paper describes our continued work of a unique robotics project, Comprehensive Access to Printed Materials (CAPM), within the context of libraries. As libraries provide a growing array of digital library services and resources, they continue to acquire large quantities of printed material. This combined pressure of providing electronic and print-based resources and services has led to seve...

We are grateful to many colleagues for discussions that have innuenced this paper. In particular, we would like to thank Philip Dart of DSTO, and members of the Army's Combat Development Directorate for sharing their knowledge and ideas on troop deployments. AI planning techniques were initially developed to solve problems that required the determination of a sequence of actions that could be t...

With the rapid development of Internet services, identity management (IdM) has got widely attraction as the credit agency between users and service providers. It facilitates users to use the Internet service, promotes service providers to enrich services, and makes Internet more security. Personally identifiable information (PII) is the most important information asset with which identity provi...

Intellectual property (IP) rights differ from ordinary property rights. Historically, societies have tolerated monopolistic inefficiency from IP protection to incentivize intellectual asset creation. This paper considers how competitive markets can optimally allocate resources, bypassing that monopolistic inefficiency. It departs from earlier related work in three ways: First, it allows economi...

This paper attempts to analyze the degree to which the telecommunications sector is regarded as a critical infrastructure at the European level. Taking into account a new categorization of telecommunications applications and infrastructure perspectives, a new matrix-based classification method is proposed to clarify the protection approaches of policy makers and telecommunications asset owners ...

Life cycle costing is an important consideration for new concrete structures. It is also an integral part of asset management and in achieving sustainable construction. Cost effectiveness is the key driver. This paper presents an overall approach to formulate a strategy for protection of reinforced concrete structures against steel corrosion. The objectives of the protection are to ensure the d...

Malpractice insurance provides for payments to patients so that a physician need not compensate harmed patients from personal assets. The bankruptcy system also protects a debtor's assets from seizure by creditors. In this paper, we estimate the e ect of personal asset protection on physician practice decisions. Variation in bankruptcy law provides exogenous variation in risk to physician perso...

We examine the early exercise policies and pricing behaviors of one-asset American options with lookback payoff structures. The classes of option models considered include floating strike lookback options, Russian options, fixed strike lookback options and pricing model of dynamic protection fund. For each class of the American lookback options, we analyze the optimal stopping region, in partic...

The need for effective safety nets and social security has been highlighted by the recent crisis in East-Asia. In other parts of the developing world or in transition economies, the large economic fluctuations, climatic shocks and natural disasters also demand further development of support systems during crises. In this paper, we discuss the role played by self-insurance (via savings) in the p...