One of the major strengths of a Geographic Information System (GIS) in geosciences is the ability to integrate and combine multiple layers into mineral potential maps showing areas which are favorable for mineral exploration. These capabilities make GIS an extremely useful tool for mineral exploration. Several spatial modeling techniques can be employed to produce potential maps. However, these...

Background & Aims: Surgeons are not willing to participate in thyroid surgeries due to dangerous, although rare, complications of the procedure. Post thyroidectomy complications are divided in early and late onset; hypocalcemia, bleeding, thyroid storm and recurrent laryngeal nerve (RLN) injury are the most important ones. This study was performed to compare the frequency of recurrent laryngeal...

Three of the major problems in qualitative spatial reasoning and robotics are localization, exploration, and navigation in known or unknown environments. This paper investigates how far different qualitative methods based on angle information, most of them originally invented for the representation of spatial knowledge only, are well-suited for these tasks. It turns out that with panoramas, whi...

Ants are among the most problematic invasive species. They displace numerous native species, alter ecosystem processes, and can have negative impacts on agriculture and human health. In part, their success might stem from a departure from the discovery-dominance trade-off that can promote co-existence in native ant communities, that is, invasive ants are thought to be at the same time behaviora...

Many possible solutions, differing in the assumptions and implementations of the components in use, are usually in competition during early design stages. Deciding which solution to adopt requires considering several trade-offs. Model checking represents a possible way of comparing such designs, however, when the number of designs is large, building and validating so many models may be intracta...

We motivate and study the synthesis of Petri nets. Petri net synthesis can avoid the state exploration problem by guaranteeing the correctness in the Petri net while incrementally expanding the net. For systems specified in Petri nets, this paper proposes a synthesis method. One major advantage of this synthesis technique is that the resultant ordinary Petri net is guaranteed to be structural l...

vi

This paper presents a metric-based approach for estimating the hardware implementation effort (in terms of time) for an application in relation to the number of linear-independent paths of its algorithms. We exploit the relation between the number of edges and linear-independent paths in an algorithm and the corresponding implementation effort. We propose an adaptation of the concept of cycloma...