The principal-agent theory has been successfully applied to the research of management of construction projects. It has focused on the relationship between the project owner as principal and the contractor as agent. Also, the relationship between the contractor as principal and subcontractors as agents has been explored. After introducing the literature in this field, this paper will present re...

The classical Young-Laplace equation relates capillary pressure to surface tension and the principal radii of curvature interface between two immiscible fluids. In this paper required properties space curves smooth surfaces are described by differential geometry linear algebra. equilibrium condition is formulated a force balance minimization energy. Cited as: Siqveland, L. M., Skjaeveland, S. M...

Shot boundary detection is an important for retrieval of visual media in multimedia system. Video temporal segmentation algorithms use thresholding techniques to identify both abrupt shot changes and gradual shot transitions. Thresholding methods frequently provide false positives due to large variations in gradual transition regions. The principal components decomposition and the progressive n...

We consider the problem of Adverse Selection and optimal derivative design within a Principal-Agent framework. The principal’s income is exposed to non-hedgeable risk factors arising, for instance, from weather or climate phenomena. She evaluates her risk using a coherent and law invariant risk measure and tries minimize her exposure by selling derivative securities on her income to individual ...

The similarity and diversity sampling problems are two challenging optimization tasks that arise in the analysis of chemical databases. As a first step to their solution, we propose an efficient projection/ refinement protocol based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and the truncated-Newton minimization method implemented by our package TNPACK (PCA/TNPACK). We show that PCA can provide ...

the method of entropy production minimization for finding energy efficient paths of operation of process equipment is first presented using an instructive example with optimal control theory. with refer-ence to the earlier investigations, the researchers present some design rules that relate to the designs’ en-tropy production. minimum entropy production is not obtained in special cases, not ge...

Background and Objectives: Hospitals usually generate large amounts of hazardous waste. If not managed properly, hospital waste can pose threats to public safety and damage the environment. Waste minimization is a waste management approach that focuses on reducing the amount and toxicity of hazardous wastes. This study pursues a two-fold purpose: 1) to gain insight into hospital waste minimizat...

We study the problem of learning a group of principal tasks using a group of auxiliary tasks, unrelated to the principal ones. In many applications, joint learning of unrelated tasks which use the same input data can be beneficial. The reason is that prior knowledge about which tasks are unrelated can lead to sparser and more informative representations for each task, essentially screening out ...

In this paper, we propose an alternating proximal gradient method that solves convex minimization problems with three or more separable blocks in the objective function. Our method is based on the framework of alternating direction method of multipliers. The main computational effort in each iteration of the proposed method is to compute the proximal mappings of the involved convex functions. T...

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is concerned basically with finding an optimal way to represent a random vector through a linear combination of a few uncorrelated random variables. In signal processing, multiresolution transforms are used to decompose a time signal into components of different resolutions. In this paper, we consider designing optimal multiresolution transforms such that comp...