In this paper, we study the closed pattern mining problem for a class of spatio-temporal patterns, called closed (k, r)-flock patterns in trajectory databases. A (k, r)-flock pattern (Gudmundsson and van Kreveld, 2006) represents a set of moving objects traveling close each other within radius r during time period of length k. Based on the notion of the envelope for a flock pattern, we introduc...

Scrapie control in Great Britain (GB) was originally based on the National Scrapie Plan's Ram Genotyping scheme aimed at reducing the susceptibility of the national flock. The current official strategy to control scrapie in the national flock involves culling susceptible genotypes in individual, known affected flocks (compulsory scrapie flock scheme or CSFS). However, the recent development of ...

Flocking is a fascinating collective behavior exhibited by many different animals including birds and fish. As understood by biologists, the overall flocking behavior emerges from relatively simple local control rules by which each individual adjusts its own trajectory based on those of its closest neighbors. We consider the possibility of adding a small set of influencing agents, that are unde...

rangeland health assessment provides qualitative information on ecosystemattributes. we examined changes in rangeland health in the zagros semi-arid rangelands ofiran at fixed sites between 2001 and 2011, over the 10-year period. the rangelandfragments significantly declines in the quality of the vegetation, and changes in plantspecies were driven largely by seasonality, and to a lesser extent,...

Coxiella burnetii infection (Q fever) is a widespread zoonosis with low endemicity in Switzerland, therefore no mandatory public report was required. A cluster of initially ten human cases of acute Q fever infections characterized by prolonged fever, asthenia and mild hepatitis occurred in 2012 in the terraced vineyard of Lavaux. Epidemiological investigations based on patients' interviews and ...

The problem of herding a flock of birds is posed in a graph theoretic framework. A novel algorithm, called the n-wavefront algorithm, is developed for enabling a single unmanned aerial vehicle to herd a flock of birds to a desired point. The technique is applied to the problem of diverting a flock of birds approaching an airport away from a protected zone around the airport. The n-wavefront alg...

An airborne wireless sensor network (WSN) composed of bird-sized micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) enables low cost high granularity atmospheric sensing of toxic plume behavior and storm dynamics, and provides a unique threedimensional vantage for monitoring wildlife and ecological systems. This paper describes a complete implementation of our SensorFlock airborne WSN, spanning the development of ou...

Five species of Cyprinodon in Laguna Chichancanab, Yucatan, Mexico comprise a young species flock whose ecology and evolution has not been thoroughly studied, but whose existence is threatened with extinction. Species flocks evolve in isolated areas where predators and competitors are absent. Since the description of the Chichancanab flock, Oreochromis mossambicus, a species introduced into the...

We study monomial flocks of quadratic cones of PG(3, q), with emphasis on the case where the flock is semifield, providing some nonexistence and some uniqueness results. In addition, we give a computer-free proof of the existence of the sporadic semifield flock of the quadratic cone of PG(3, 35) (and hence of the sporadic translation ovoid of Q(4, 35)), and relate that flock to the sporadic sim...

This paper presents a distributed coordination methodology for multi-robot systems, based on nearest-neighbor interactions. Among many interesting tasks that may be performed using swarm robots, we propose a biologically-inspired control law for a shepherding task, whereby a group of external agents drives another group of agents to a desired location. First, we generated sheep-like robots that...