One of the most important concerns for managing public health is the prevention of infectious diseases. Although vaccines provide the most effective means for preventing infectious diseases, there are two main reasons why it is often difficult to reach a socially optimal level of vaccine coverage: (i) the emergence of operational issues (such as yield uncertainty) on the supply side, and (ii) t...

BACKGROUND There is an urgent need to understand how the provision of information influences individual risk perception and how this in turn shapes the evolution of epidemics. Individuals are influenced by information in complex and unpredictable ways. Emerging infectious diseases, such as the recent swine flu epidemic, may be particular hotspots for a media-fueled rush to vaccination; converse...

We propose a new probabilistic coverage protocol (denoted by PCP) that considers probabilistic sensing models. PCP is fairly general and can be used with different sensing models. In particular, PCP requires the computation of a single parameter from the adopted sensing model, while everything else remains the same. We show how this parameter can be derived in general, and we actually do the ca...

Proceed 1089-35 IC diagnosis is the process of finding the defect causing a failure at IC test. But what do you do when you have a bad ASIC that does not fail IC test? When you are a systems manufacturer, this puts the quality of your products in jeopardy. Here is the all too common scenario. A board or system test fails, and an ASIC has been diagnosed as being faulty. It has been sent back to ...

The Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS) three-dimensional variational (3DVAR) system is enhanced to include the analysis of radar-derived refractivity measurements. These refractivity data are most sensitive to atmospheric moisture content and provide high-resolution information on near-surface moisture that is important to convective initiation (CI) and precipitation forecasting. Observ...

Since neurotransmitters significantly influence the brain activity, our understanding of the human brain will remain imperfect until all aspects relating to them become clear. One of the key challenges in neuroscience researches and therapies is elucidating the mechanisms by which the neurotransmitter release take place and is regulated in quantity and in time. Despite the enormous number of st...

Demining and unexploded ordnance (UXO) clearance are extremely tedious and dangerous tasks. The use of robots bypasses the hazards and potentially increases the efficiency of both tasks. A first crucial step towards robotic mine/UXO clearance is to locate all the targets. This requires a path planner that generates a path to pass a detector over all points of a mine/UXO field, i.e., a planner t...