ABSTRACT:
Software development has rapidly moved toward collaborative development models where multiple partners collaborate in creating and evolving software intensive systems or components of sophisticated ubiquitous socio-technical-ecosystems. In this paper we extend the concept of software interface to a flexible high-level interface as means for accommodating change and localizing, controlling and managing the exchange of knowledge and functional, behavioral, quality, project and business related information between the partners and between the developed components.

ABSTRACT:
Enterprise interoperability and collaborative work are two aspects to involve in knowledge oriented enterprise collaboration. The first one implies a rather systemic view, the second one a rather activity related view on collaboration of enterprises within their ecosystems. For example, manufacturing or distribution are often dealt with by applying an input-output perspective. Product development or supply maintenance are increasingly organized as a set of networked activities performed by different actors inside and outside the enterprise, and therefore are to be dealt with by applying the perspective of composite practices. Information technology is challenged to support both aspects. However, the predominant approaches in modelling and engineering of systems still permit instantiations with low adaptivity. This interferes with easy take-up in business practice. On this background, the paper suggests enhancing existing structure with additional features to ease adaptivity of enterprise collaboration systems. It reflects work that was done on the subjects of enterprise interoperability and collaborative working environments.

ABSTRACT:
The purpose of the study was to examine how globalization has affected the small business sector of the Virgin Islands (BVI). Globalization refers to the extension of production and distribution of goods and services on a vastly greater international scale [10] . Overall, the paper has determined that a legal definition of small businesses should be sought in the form of legislation to provide a legal framework to improve the direction of the sector. In the same vein, the eligibility and classification guidelines should be revisited in an effort to make them more practical in their application to small businesses in the territory. It was also found that the contribution of small businesses within the territory may be undervalued because of limitations to data collection in this sector; thus minimizing the decision making, information sharing and support for the sector. The research used interviews and questionnaires conducted among small business stakeholders within the BVI, to validate this claim. In addition, newspaper and other documentary sources were accessed. On ethical grounds, direct reference to a number of the persons interviewed or surveyed has been avoided.

ABSTRACT:
The Triwizard program with Israel brought together students from three different communities: an Israeli Arab school, an Israeli Jewish school, and an American public school with few Jews and even fewer Muslims. The two Israeli groups met in Israel to find common ground and overcome their differences through dialogue and understanding. They communicated with the American school via technology such as video-conferencing, Skype, and emails. The program culminated with a visit to the U.S. The goal of the program was to embark upon a process that would bring about intercultural awareness and acceptance at the subjective level, guiding all involved to develop empathy and an insider’s view of the other’s culture. It was an attempt to have a group of Israeli high school students and a group of Arab Israeli students who had a fearful, distrustful perception of each other find common ground and become friends. TriWizard was designed to have participants begin a dialogue about issues, beliefs, and emotions based on the premise that cross-cultural training strategies that are effective in changing knowledge are those that engage the emotions, and actively develop empathy and an insider’s views of another culture focused on what they have in common. Participants learned that they could become friends despite their cultural differences.

ABSTRACT:
Public health education is a key component in the variety of services provided by local health departments, particularly for the low-income demographic. In addition to helping the participants to live a healthier lifestyle, nutrition education sessions are a required component of a specific program for low-income mothers and children, entitled the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). However, some women in the Utah County WIC program were not receiving the sessions because the inconvenient class times and scheduling difficulty. With the increasing availability of the internet access by WIC participants, we can increase the availability and effectiveness of the nutrition education by providing courses online via the Utah County’s WIC website. We are designing a system consisting of a web interface and a database backend, where health workers can author and publish interactive content, track users’ progress, and evaluate the outcome of the courses taken.

ABSTRACT:
The integration of advanced virtual engineering methods into 3D-CAD based development processes leads to increased requirements, concerning the software packages as well as regarding the applied procedures and strategies. Modern IT- based engineering tools offer much more than the conventional development methodologies in component creation and digital mock-up processes. The trend definitely goes into the direction of simultaneous CAE - support during the layout and design phases, attendant quality and structural management and the implementation of external data sources and receivers into the product development. It is up to the engineers to tap the full potential of virtual engineering processes regarding time reduction, error prevention in early phases and through technical modifications, whereas the applied methods and strategies represent a key factor on the way to efficient progresses. The present publication includes an assessment and evaluation of modern 3D-CAD based development processes and discusses future prospects in the field of virtual engineering. On the basis of parametric geometry generation, different methods and tools, which are able to increase the efficiency in virtual development processes, will be introduced and compared.

ABSTRACT:
The aim of this paper is to review current achievements relating to the theory of innovative activity and innovation including concept of ‘triple helix’ and its extension by adding customer. A concept of horizontal and vertical product differentiation and access to sources of knowledge has been linked to product quality and innovative activity. Access to knowledge depends on the type of research and development (R&D) activity and network governance between firms.

ABSTRACT:
This paper presents the design and testing of a system for autonomous tracking, pickup, and delivery of cargo via an unmanned helicopter. The tracking system uses a visual servoing algorithm and is tested using open loop velocity control of a six degree of freedom gantry system with a camera mounted via a pan-tilt unit on the end effecter. The pickup system uses vision to direct the camera pan tilt unit to track the target, and uses a hook attached to a second pan tilt unit to pick up the cargo. The ability of the pickup system to hook a target is tested by mounting it on the Systems Integrated Sensor Test Rig gantry system while recorded helicopter velocities are played back by the test rig.

ABSTRACT:
The development of sustainable urban transport networks is a present priority for world leaders, national governors and local authorities. The challenge is to increase mobility reducing the adverse impacts of transport. The potential of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) to provide solutions for the 21 st century sustainable urban transport system has already been demonstrated in several piecewise applications. An integrated framework that addresses the needs of municipal authorities, that integrates the data spread through different sources, that supports the intelligent traffic & environment operations, and that provides information to the citizens steering their involvement and commitment is of critical importance and can be the enabler towards the creation of more efficient, safety, and environmental-friendly transport networks that promote the citizens’ quality of life. This work describes an integrated GPS (Global Positioning System) / PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) / GIS (Geographical Information System) system which is part of the mentioned framework. The system includes prototypes for mobile urban traffic data acquisition, with a GPS -equipped vehicle, a PDA application and wireless communications, and for a geodatabase with a related Web application for urban traffic & environment. Their integrated operation is exemplified for a real urban transport system.

ABSTRACT:
For guaranteed quality of service (QoS) and sufficient bandwidth in a communication network which provides an integrated multimedia service, it is important to obtain an analytical and tractable model of the compressed MPEG data. This paper presents a statistical approach to a group of picture (GOP) MPEG frame size model to increase network traffic performance in a communication network. We extract MPEG frame data from commercial DVD movies and make probability histograms to analyze the statistical characteristics of MPEG frame data. Six candidates of probability distributions are considered here and their parameters are obtained from the empirical data using the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). This paper shows that the lognormal distribution is the best fitting model of MPEG-2 total frame data.

ABSTRACT:
This paper provides continuation and extensions of previous research by Segall and Pierce (2009a) that discussed data mining for micro-array databases of Leukemia cells for primarily self-organized maps (SOM). As Segall and Pierce (2009a) and Segall and Pierce (2009b) the results of applying data mining are shown and discussed for the data categories of microarray databases of HL60, Jurkat, NB4 and U937 Leukemia cells that are also described in this article. First, a background section is provided on the work of others pertaining to the applications of data mining to micro-array databases of Leukemia cells and micro-array databases in general. As noted in predecessor article by Segall and Pierce (2009a), micro-array databases are one of the most popular functional genomics tools in use today. This research in this paper is intended to use advanced data mining technologies for better interpretations and knowledge discovery as generated by the patterns of gene expressions of HL60, Jurkat, NB4 and U937 Leukemia cells. The advanced data mining performed entailed using other data mining tools such as cubic clustering criterion, variable importance rankings, decision trees, and more detailed examinations of data mining statistics and study of other self-organized maps (SOM) clustering regions of workspace as generated by SAS Enterprise Miner version 4. Conclusions and future directions of the research are also presented.

ABSTRACT:
While growing attention has been paid to the idea of resilience of social-ecological systems, it seems that there still are a number of gaps to bridge before we could really use this concept for practical purposes. The main problem is that the most of the works in the field are unclear on how to unequivocally measure the degree of resilience of particular social-ecological systems. In this paper, we suggest to be possible identifying the loss of resilience of social-ecological systems as a process of loop dominance shift. In order to illustrate the argument, we use a very stylized system dynamics model for irrigation systems developed by scholars associated to the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University.

ABSTRACT:
Previous work has shown that robot navigation systems that employ an architecture based upon the idiotypic network theory of the immune system have an advantage over control techniques that rely on reinforcement learning only. This is thought to be a result of intelligent behaviour selection on the part of the idiotypic robot. In this paper an attempt is made to imitate idiotypic dynamics by creating controllers that use reinforcement with a number of different probabilistic schemes to select robot behaviour. The aims are to show that the idiotypic system is not merely performing some kind of periodic random behaviour selection, and to try to gain further insight into the processes that govern the idiotypic mechanism. Trials are carried out using simulated Pioneer robots that undertake navigation exercises. Results show that a scheme that boosts the probability of selecting highly-ranked alternative behaviours to 50% during stall conditions comes closest to achieving the properties of the idiotypic system, but remains unable to match it in terms of all round performance.

ABSTRACT:
An automatic method for building a semantic dictionary from existing questions in a pattern-based question answering system is proposed for question categorization. This dictionary consists of two main parts: Semantic Domain Terms (SDT), which is a domain specific term list, and Semantic Labeled Terms (SLT), which contain common terms tagged with semantic labels. The semantic dictionary is built using the proposed method on a set of 2509 questions with semantic patterns in our system. 3390 questions without semantic patterns are used as ground truth to test its performance. Experimental results show that the precision of question classification is improved by 7.5% in average after using the constructed semantic dictionary compared with the baseline method.

ABSTRACT:
The operation of modern commercial buildings uses digital control systems which monitor a vast amount of sensors. These sensors in turn produce data that is available for building control but also can be mission-critical for effective emergency response. First responders can be notified of designated building alerts in real-time so that actions can be performed promptly. The capability to monitor building devices and to keep the first responder community updated with the latest building information during emergency situations, as well as the ability to remotely control certain building devices and processes, can be realized. This paper presents a framework for standards-based communication of real-time building alerts, via public safety networks, to 9-1-1 dispatch and into the hands of emergency responders. This research will assist in the development and deployment of commercial products with new levels of capability for situational awareness to help save lives and properties in emergency situations.