in this work, the mechanism for fracture of brittle substances such as rocks under a uniform normal tension is considered. the oriented straight micro-cracks are mostly created in all the polycrystalline materials resulting from the stress concentrations. the present work focuses on the interactions of the pre-existing micro-cracks, which can grow and propagate within a rock-like specimen. the ...

Micro-payments are payments too small in amount to warrant the overhead costs of current nancial clearing networks. Furthermore one can expect that content servers for the global information infrastructure (GII) will have to process so many of these low value transactions that computationally complex and costly cryptographic protocols will be impractical. This report proposes a micro-payment sc...

................................................................................................................................ vii CHAPTER 1. GENERAL INTRODUCTION ............................................................................ 1 1.1 Motivation .................................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Thesis Organizati...

Current mobile phones provide GSM cell information and many devices also support GPS or WiFi-based location information. A problem with raw location data is that it does not provide semantic information, which makes it hard to integrate location-awareness into applications. Moreover, to understand what kind of location information is important to users, researchers currently need to perform tim...

Computational mechanism design (CMD) seeks to understand how to design game forms that induce desirable outcomes in multiagent systems despite private information, self-interest and limited computational resources. CMD finds application in many settings, in the public sector for wireless spectrum and airport landing rights, to Internet advertising, to expressive sourcing in the supply chain, to...

The Web-based education methodology provides new chances and challenges to adopt interdisciplinary expertise needed for mastering the design processes in key technologies as electronics and micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Simulation should be an integral part in teaching, understanding and design of complex systems. In this paper four courses are presented which include Web-based simul...

This paper reports on the state-of-the-art of technologies for the design and fabrication of MEMS micro-mirrors. We discuss the major design issues, considerations, calculations and restrictions of micro mirrors. The materials employed for the reflective surfaces are described along with their properties. The materials used for the static and dynamic MEMS micro structures as well as the differe...