Many enhancements to the alpha-beta algorithm have been proposed to help reduce the size of minimax trees. A recent enhancement, the history heuristic, is described that improves the order in which branches are considered at interior nodes. A comprehensive set of experiments is reported which tries all combinations of enhancements to determine which one yields the best performance. Previous wor...

The support of doctors and public authorities was not just a necessity for public acceptance and popularity; it was a prerequisite for the development of hydrological science. Several contributors make the point that much writing on waters was a form of publicity for a specific water and the relative lack of hydrological research in Britain until late in the nineteenth century is quite striking...

A fundamental problem in sponsored search advertising is the estimation of probability of click for ads displayed in response to search queries. The historical click-through rate (CTR) is one of the most important predictors of the click, and extracted at multiple resolutions of the query-ad hierarchy. However, the new ads do not have any click history, and even the existing ads might miss hist...

Personalization involves the process of gathering user-specific information during interaction with the user, which is then used to deliver appropriate results to the user’s needs. This paper presents a statistical method that learns the user interests by collecting evidence from his search history. The method focuses on the use of both user relevance point of view on familiar words in order to...

The term information overload was already used back in the 1970s by Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock, and refers to the difficulty to understand and make decisions when too much information is available. In the era of Big Data, this problem becomes much more dramatic, since users may be literally overwhelmed by the cataract of data accessible in the most varied forms. With context-aware d...

Recent research on moral dynamics (the processes and phenomena collective or individual by which moral behaviour and moral attitudes emerge, evolve, spread, erode or disappear) shows that an individual’s ethical mind-set (i.e. outcome-based vs. rule-based) moderates the impact of an initial ethical or unethical act on the likelihood of behaving ethically on a subsequent occasion. More specifica...

This work reports some reflections about the European and Italian regulation on sewage sludge. In Europe, the progressive augment of the production of sludge from municipal wastewater treatment plants has recently led to a growing attention about management of this type of solid matrix. European Directives and Italian guidelines stimulated reuse of sewage sludge on agricultural soils or in comp...

This paper describes the current state of the art in computer shogi. Shogi (Japanese chess) promises to be a good vehicle for future research into game-playing programs that are based on tree-searching paradigms. This paper shows where chess and shogi are similar, and details the important areas that make shogi programming of particular interest. A crucial difference is the game-tree complexity...

BACKGROUND Hypertension is a significant public health concern of world-wide distribution and is also the most common cardiovascular disease risk factor. Adequate control of blood pressure is a critical element in the prevention of hypertension induced-organ damage and life-threatening complications. Prevention of hypertension is possible and early detection and effective treatment can signific...