Designing community care systems with AUML

This paper describes an approach to developing an appropriate agent environment appropriate for use in community care applications. Key to its success is that software designers collaborate with environment builders to provide the levels of cooperation and support required within an integrated agent–oriented community system. Agent-oriented Unified Modeling Language (AUML) is a practical approach to the analysis, design, implementation and management of such an agent-based system, whilst providing the power and expressiveness necessary to support the specification, design and organization of a health care service. The background of an agent-based community care application to support the elderly is described. Our approach to building agent–oriented software development solutions emphasizes the importance of AUML as a fundamental initial step in producing more general agent–based architectures. This approach aims to present an effective methodology for an agent software development process using a service oriented approach, by addressing the agent decomposition, abstraction, and organization characteristics, whilst reducing its complexity by exploiting AUML’s productivity potential. </p

On the uniform generation of modular diagrams

In this paper we present an algorithm that generates $k$-noncrossing, $\sigma$-modular diagrams with uniform probability. A diagram is a labeled graph of degree $\le 1$ over $n$ vertices drawn in a horizontal line with arcs $(i,j)$ in the upper half-plane. A $k$-crossing in a diagram is a set of $k$ distinct arcs $(i_1, j_1), (i_2, j_2),\ldots,(i_k, j_k)$ with the property $i_1 < i_2 < \ldots < i_k < j_1 < j_2 < \ldots< j_k$. A diagram without any $k$-crossings is called a $k$-noncrossing diagram and a stack of length $\sigma$ is a maximal sequence $((i,j),(i+1,j-1),\dots,(i+(\sigma-1),j-(\sigma-1)))$. A diagram is $\sigma$-modular if any arc is contained in a stack of length at least $\sigma$. Our algorithm generates after $O(n^k)$ preprocessing time, $k$-noncrossing, $\sigma$-modular diagrams in $O(n)$ time and space complexity.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure

Shapes of topological RNA structures

A topological RNA structure is derived from a diagram and its shape is obtained by collapsing the stacks of the structure into single arcs and by removing any arcs of length one. Shapes contain key topological, information and for fixed topological genus there exist only finitely many such shapes. We shall express topological RNA structures as unicellular maps, i.e. graphs together with a cyclic ordering of their half-edges. In this paper we prove a bijection of shapes of topological RNA structures. We furthermore derive a linear time algorithm generating shapes of fixed topological genus. We derive explicit expressions for the coefficients of the generating polynomial of these shapes and the generating function of RNA structures of genus $g$. Furthermore we outline how shapes can be used in order to extract essential information of RNA structure databases.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1304.739

Exploring the relative importance of crossing number and crossing angle

Recent research has indicated that human graph reading performance can be affected by the size of crossing angle. Crossing angle is closely related to another aesthetic criterion: number of edge crossings. Although crossing number has been previously identified as the most important aesthetic, its relative impact on performance of human graph reading is unknown, compared to crossing angle. In this paper, we present an exploratory user study investigating the relative importance between crossing number and crossing angle. This study also aims to further examine the effects of crossing number and crossing angle not only on task performance measured as response time and accuracy, but also on cognitive load and visualization efficiency. The experimental results reinforce the previous findings of the effects of the two aesthetics on graph comprehension. The study demonstrates that on average these two closely related aesthetics together explain 33% of variance in the four usability measures: time, accuracy, mental effort and visualization efficiency, with about 38% of the explained variance being attributed to the crossing angle. Copyright © 2010 ACM

Proton mass effects in wide-angle Compton scattering

We investigate proton mass effects in the handbag approach to wide-angle Compton scattering. We find that theoretical uncertainties due to the proton mass are significant for photon energies presently studied at Jefferson Lab. With the proposed energy upgrade such uncertainties will be clearly reduced.Comment: 4 pages, uses revtex, 3 figure