Reuse patterns in adaptation languages : creating a meta-level for the LAG adaptation language

A growing body of research targets authoring of content and adaptation strategies for adaptive systems. The driving force behind it is semantics-based reuse: the same strategy can be used for various domains, and vice versa. Whilst using an adaptation language (LAG e.g.) to express reusable adaptation strategies, we noticed, however, that: a) the created strategies have common patterns that, themselves, could be reused; b) templates based on these patterns could reduce the designers' work; c) there is a strong preference towards XML-based processing and interfacing. This has leaded us to define a new meta-language for LAG, extracting common design patterns. This paper provides more insight into some of the limitations of Adaptation Languages like LAG, as well as describes our meta-language, and shows how introducing the meta-level can overcome some redundancy issues

Development and validation of Triticum phytobiological method as an alternative procedure for investigating in vivo acute toxicity on mice

The goal of this study was to validate an alternative method for determining in vivo acute toxicity using vegetal material instead of laboratory animals, starting from the phytobiological method known also as the Triticum technique. We set out to demonstrate that vegetal cells have similar sensitivity to some toxic agents as animal cells, in which case a statistical correlation could be established. A series of new compounds synthesized by the Romanian National Institute for Chemical Pharmaceutical Research and Development as potential β3 adrenergic receptors agonists were tested for their acute toxicity using classic animal exposure models, before investigating possible anti-diabetic and anti-obesity effects. We then determined whether similar conclusions might be reached exposing vegetal material to the same agents. We successfully demonstrated that plants are affected in a very similar way as animals when exposed to some potentially toxic agents, providing new possibilities for ending unethical animal experiments

Meta-scheduling Issues in Interoperable HPCs, Grids and Clouds

Over the last years, interoperability among resources has been emerged as one of the most challenging research topics. However, the commonality of the complexity of the architectures (e.g., heterogeneity) and the targets that each computational paradigm including HPC, grids and clouds aims to achieve (e.g., flexibility) remain the same. This is to efficiently orchestrate resources in a distributed computing fashion by bridging the gap among local and remote participants. Initially, this is closely related with the scheduling concept which is one of the most important issues for designing a cooperative resource management system, especially in large scale settings such as in grids and clouds. Within this context, meta-scheduling offers additional functionalities in the area of interoperable resource management, this is because of its great agility to handle sudden variations and dynamic situations in user demands. Accordingly, the case of inter-infrastructures, including InterCloud, entitle that the decentralised meta-scheduling scheme overcome issues like consolidated administration management, bottleneck and local information exposition. In this work, we detail the fundamental issues for developing an effective interoperable meta-scheduler for e-infrastructures in general and InterCloud in particular. Finally, we describe a simulation and experimental configuration based on real grid workload traces to demonstrate the interoperable setting as well as provide experimental results as part of a strategic plan for integrating future meta-schedulers

On the number of solutions of a transcendental equation arising in the theory of gravitational lensing

The equation in the title describes the number of bright images of a point source under lensing by an elliptic object with isothermal density. We prove that this equation has at most 6 solutions. Any number of solutions from 1 to 6 can actually occur.Comment: 26 pages, 12 figure

Antioxidant activity in selected tomato genotypes cultivated in conventional and organic culture systems

The present study is a compilation of results obtained at the Vegetable Research and Development Station Bacau regarding the influence of the culture system on the quantitative and qualitative yield of tomatoes. The present study provides comparative information regarding yield achievements of tomato genotypes cultivated in two different culture systems (conventional and organic), in order to highlight the suitability of the cultivation system. The best yield results were obtained at a density of 30,000 plants per hectare in both culture systems. All studied genotypes resulted in quantitatively superior yield in the conventional system as opposed to the organic system. Another purpose of this study was to determine the difference in antioxidant activity of tomato genotypes cultivated in the ecological and the conventional culture systems. The results indicate the suitability of the tomato to organic cultivation, highlighting the potential of the tomato species to be utilized as a significant source of natural antioxidants, and also the influence of cultivation systems on the accumulation of antioxidant compounds.Keywords: Lycopersicon esculentum, polyphenols, flavones, yieldAfrican Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 12(20), pp. 2884-289

Adaptation to learning styles in a general-purpose system AHA! (Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture)

Abstract and article in Russian

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING THE EFFECTS OF ELECTRO-OSMOSIS ON DECREASING THE FORCES AND THE ENERGY NEEDED FOR TILLING THE SOIL

Electro-osmosis principle consists in the application of a direct current voltage for an anode-cathode system introduced into soil. The effect of this system consists of the mobilization of water particles from the soil and their transport, in a very short time, from the anode to cathode. The soil water transported from the anode to cathode, on the tool-soil contact surface, in consequence, will produce a lubrication of the active surface and thereby a considerable reduction of the friction forces and implicitly of the energy necessary to move the tool through the soil

Centralized micro-clouds: an infrastructure for service distribution in collaborative smart devices

In the current information-driven society, the massive use and impact of communications and mobile devices challenge the design of communication networks. This highlights the emergency of a new Internet structure namely the Internet of Things that refers to the transformation of physical objects to smart objects and their communication. Based on that the communication of such objects will offer an augmented infrastructure that is formed dynamically and on the fly based on transient links among objects. This is the concept behind cloud computing, to provide a computer-based environment where various services are available to be consumed by everyday users, anywhere and at anytime. Our vision encompasses a dynamic micro-cloud environment that is formed from devices that share computational power. This encompasses inter-linked smart objects and smart mobile devices available from a smart environment that can be formed dynamically. The proposed micro-cloud notion will be of apparent significance to maintain the required quality of service in dynamic scenarios such as those found in emergency and disaster situations. To represent such system we are focused on the development of such architecture into a novel simulation toolkit that allows the replication of Internet of Things scenarios

Performance evaluation of interoperable micro-clouds

The Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as a paradigm transforming physical objects to smart objects that are inter- connected via Internet. Today, IoT objects offer embedded intelligence that can be powerful in case of fully integration of a collective manner towards the satisfaction of user needs. This work is based on the micro-clouds that are a new proposing paradigm to highlight the collective intelligence of IoT objects. Specifically, a micro-cloud could be seen as a pool of cooperated devices and their resources that form transient smart environments. Further to this, we anticipate that the inter-cloud model can expand the micro-cloud capabilities by allowing multiple micro-clouds to communicate in order to achieve a common aim. This will further push the boundaries for studying the interaction and synergetic collaborative nature between micro-cloud systems in terms of their interoperability and performance. However as the size of the system is increased the complexity of performance is additionally increased. This emphasizes the need for decentralization where resources are changing over time without any notice. The vision of this work is that micro-clouds shall be linked together to enable a full network of usable IoT objects and at the same time maintain the required quality of service from an end-user's perspective. Specifically, the aim is to identify the specific criteria which are the most relevant to optimize performance when several micro-clouds collaborate (e.g. load-balancing, throughput, turn-around times, utilization level, etc.) as well as classify their functional requirements. So the focus is on the performance analysis and evaluation of results based on a simulated specific use case scenario