The Gaia satellite, planned for launch by the European Space Agency (ESA) in 2013, is the next generation astrometry mission following Hipparcos. While mapping the whole sky, the Gaia space mission is expected to discover thousands of Solar System Objects. These will include Near-Earth Asteroids and serve with ground-based telescopes. We present the results of simulations for the detection of T...

The uncertainties surrounding global climate change provide ample evidence, if any were necessary, of the need for a whole-system view of the Earth. Arguably the most visible – and controversial – attempt to understand Earth as a system has been Lovelock’s Gaia theory. Gaia has been a fruitful hypothesis generator, and has prompted many intriguing conjectures about how biological processes migh...

Gaia will provide parallaxes and proper motions with accuracy ranging from 10 to 1000 microarcsecond on up to one billion stars. Most of these will be disk stars: for an unreddened K giant at 6 kpc, it will measure the distance accurate to 2% and the transverse velocity to an accuracy of about 1 km/s. Gaia will observe tracers of Galactic structure, kinematics, star formation and chemical evolu...

This article presents Gaia: a methodology for agent-oriented analysis and design. The Gaia methodology is both general, in that it is applicable to a wide range of multi-agent systems, and comprehensive, in that it deals with both the macro-level (societal) and the micro-level (agent) aspects of systems. Gaia is founded on the view of a multi-agent system as a computational organisation consist...

New ideas to improve automatic speech recognition have been proposed that make use of context user information such as gender, age and dialect. To incorporate this information into a speech recognition system a new framework is being developed at the mmi department of the ewi faculty at the Delft University of Technology. This toolkit is called Gaia and makes use of Dynamic Bayesian networks. I...

ESA is supporting an industrial study aimed at preliminary assessment of some critical aspects of the GAIA mission implementation: hereafter, our study approach is presented. The Fizeau interferometer of GAIA features a strict correlation between the conventional telescope and interferometer concepts and problems. The wide angle measurement concept is based on the stability of the basic angle b...

The paper proposed a linguistic PROMETHEE approach for making investment portfolio decision. First, we both consider quantitative and qualitative information of each stock and use 2-tuple linguistic value for experts to express their opinions to obtain qualitative information with respect to all evaluation criteria. Then, the transformation method of 2-tuple linguistic variable is applied to ag...

This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the Preference Ranking Organisation MeTHod for Enrichment Evaluations (PROMETHEE) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methods. Building upon this analysis, recommendations are formulated to integrate into PROMETHEE a number of useful AHP features, especially as regards the design of the decision-making hierarchy (ordering of goals, sub-goals...