Firefly luciferase forms the basis of a wide range of analytical techniques. However, the enzyme is unstable and rapidly loses activity even at room temperature. This leads to losses in sensitivity and precision in analytical applications and also severely limits the fieldability of devices incorporating luciferase-based technologies. A number of point mutations have previously been identified ...

The firefly algorithm (FA), which is usually used in optimization problems, is a stochastic, population-based algorithm inspired by the intelligent, collective behavior of fireflies in nature. In the standard FA, each firefly in each neighborhood is compared with other fireflies, and the less-bright firefly moves toward the brighter one (in the maximization optimization). In fact, in the standa...

This paper describes an embedded computing and sensing system developed to serve the needs of the Autonomous Unmanned Systems Stream (AUSS), a two-semester sequence at the University of Maryland that provides first-year students with an inquiry-based introduction to concepts in engineering and autonomy. AUSS is part of the UMD First-year Innovation and Research Experience program (FIRE), a camp...

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a major and very interesting technology, which consists of small battery powered sensor nodes with limited power resources. The sensor nodes are inaccessible to the user once they are deployed. Replacing the battery is not possible every time. Hence in order to improve the lifetime of the network, energy efficiency of the network needs to be maximized by decreas...

might allow sister-sister discrimination. The locations of the cues used in discrimination are not known. Egg-stage switches indicated that eggs or the comb, or their combination, are adequate for discrimination of a sister's comb from a nonsister's. For several reasons (7) we suspect that discrimination cues reside in the comb, not in brood members themselves, and are odors applied by the foun...

In software project management there are several problems to deal, one of those is the Software Project Scheduling Problem (SPSP). This problem requires to assign a set of resources to tasks for a given project, trying to decrease the duration and cost of the whole project. The workers and their skills are the main resources in the project. In this paper we present the SPSP as a combinatorial o...

Global optimization is challenging to solve due to its nonlinearity and multimodality. Traditional algorithms such as the gradient-based methods often struggle to deal with such problems and one of the current trends is to use metaheuristic algorithms. In this paper, a novel hybrid population-based global optimization algorithm, called hybrid firefly algorithm (HFA), is proposed by combining th...