Using Intelligent Agents to Manage Business Processes

This paper describes work undertaken in the ADEPT (Advanced Decision Environment for Process Tasks) project towards developing an agent-based infrastructure for managing business processes. We describe how the key technology of negotiating, service providing, autonomous agents was realised and demonstrate how this was applied to the BT business process of providing a customer quote for network services

Black & White Response in a Gray Area: Faculty and Predatory Publishing

This study focuses on faculty knowledge, experiences, and attitudes regarding fraudulent journal operations. Many definitions presented to researchers contain two primary aspects to describe these intentional perpetra­tors: 1) the chief motivation to profit monetarily, and 2) the misleading promise of and failure to deliver on indicators of quality, such as peer review. While this definition is simple on its surface, when put into practice it often expands into discussions of poor or unethical practices by journal publishers. It is common to find lists of grievances clarifying acts that signal predatory or unethical practices, which are used to broadly classify jour­nals as either predatory (“blacklists”) or reputable (“whitelists”). Jeffrey Beall’s lists of “potential, possible, or probably predatory” publishers and standalone journals have been the popular method of combatting predatory journals. Beall relied on 28 indicators of predatory practices and 26 indicators of poor practices. Now, Cabell’s Blacklist Violations include 64 considerations when determining the status of a journal. These manifold criteria are indicative of the impossibility of binary journal evaluation, as many journals are neither black nor white, but somewhere in the gray between. The discussion of predatory journals thus expands from overt scams to include scam-like journals or those with lower provision of quality or service. Therefore, “predatory publishing” encompasses a far broader range of publishing practices than those that are completely fraudulent. The difficulty scholars encounter delineating between reputable and predatory practices, along with their disparate publication practices, prompted the present study to explore what publishing faculty know about the phenomenon and their attitudes toward it. This exploration began with broadly investigating the publishing practices of faculty through interviews, which revealed a benchmark from which to begin conversations with faculty on our campus. With the results from this study, we will develop a survey instrument that more specifically examines faculty interactions with predatory journals

Collaborating on Flipped Library Sessions: 8 Best Practices for Faculty & Librarians

Library instruction varies in format but often manifests in the librarian teaching a single, isolated class session—what librarians refer to as a “one-shot.” Many challenges accompany this traditional format, including time-constraints, disengaged audiences, and little understanding on the part of the student as to how the library instruction integrates with course content. Flipped Learning methods can help counter these challenges even when the overall course is not based on a flipped model. They liberate librarians and faculty from the one-shot model and expand opportunities for library instruction to occur at multiple times in a course, to be delivered virtually or in person, and to invoke a broader range of educational tools. We offer eight best practices for those who are interested in exploring flipped methods for incorporating library content into a course

A Predatory Primer: What Every Librarian Should Know About Problem Publishers

Researchers and faculty are talking about predatory publishers within the academic literature. How scholars come to know about and interact with deceptive publishers has evolved and matured since they first garnered attention a little over a decade ago, and thus, how we as information professionals approach this topic must adapt and mature. The issue of “predatory journals” is deceptively simplistic, but its underlying complexities extend the conversation into a variety of topical concerns in librarianship. Such conversations include questions about the consequences of journal labeling and categorization, the use of pejorative or racially-charged terminology in such labeling, the new challenges for open access and start-up publishers, the relationships between journal reputation and diversity, the unidentified consequences of publishing in low-quality journals, and the overall academic publication system

Methods of editing cloud and atmospheric layer affected pixels from satellite data

Subvisible cirrus clouds (SCi) were easily distinguished in mid-infrared (MIR) TIROS-N daytime data from south Texas and northeast Mexico. The MIR (3.55-3.93 micrometer) pixel digital count means of the SCi affected areas were more than 3.5 standard deviations on the cold side of the scene means. (These standard deviations were made free of the effects of unusual instrument error by factoring out the Ch 3 MIR noise on the basis of detailed examination of noisy and noise-free pixels). SCi affected areas in the IR Ch 4 (10.5-11.5 micrometer) appeared cooler than the general scene, but were not as prominent as in Ch 3, being less than 2 standard deviations from the scene mean. Ch 3 and 4 standard deviations and coefficients of variation are not reliable indicators, by themselves, of the presence of SCi because land features can have similar statistical properties

Flipped Library Sessions: Customized Instruction that Prioritizes Applied Information Literacy Learning

Time constraints often restrict the instruction of unique research skills required by a given subject area. By collaborating with instructors, librarians can offer flexible and efficient content that improves student information literacy skills. Meet librarians who have implemented various flipped methods and tools for distinct instructor and course needs

Soil, Water, and Vegetation Conditions in South Texas

The author has identified the following significant results. Reflectance differences between the dead leaves of six crops (corn, cotton, sorghum, sugar cane, citrus, and avocado) and the respective bare soils where the dead leaves were lying on the ground were determined from laboratory spectrophotometric measurements over the 0.5- to 2.5 micron wavelength interval. The largest differences were in the near infrared waveband 0.75- to 1.35 microns. Leaf area index was predicted from plant height, percent ground cover, and plant population for irrigated and nonirrigated grain sorghum fields for the 1975 growing season

Real-time detection of anomalous paths through networks

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014.The proliferation of increasingly inexpensive mobile devices capable of transmitting accurate positional information to other devices and servers has led to a variety of applications ranging from health situation monitoring to GPS-based offender monitoring. One of the resultant challenges is in understanding, in real-time, when incoming observations merit further examination. In this research, we investigate an approach for identifying anomalous paths through networks using real-time comparisons to a previously learned model. Our approach, the development of a series of “posterior weighted graphs” allows us to both determine which underlying model a particular path most closely represents as well as evaluate this relationship in real-time as more observations become available. Here we present the posterior weighted graph approach for examining path similarity and an extension for detecting anomalies in real-time. Our results illustrate how we can distinguish from among multiple candidate paths and, likewise, when observations no longer match an expected model

EFFICACY OF ELECTRON BEAM IRRADIATION OF PROCESSED PORK PRODUCTS

The research reported on in this paper was conducted as part of a larger project. That project is on-going and is focused on ascertaining if irradiation of processed meats would be effective and economical. It involved the examination, through modeling, of the irradiation of one of many currently produced ready-to-eat (RTE) convenience-oriented, value-added pork products, sliced boneless ham. The results and findings reported in this paper represent the initial estimates of the cost and potential profitability or economic viability of irradiation of processed meats. The results and findings in this paper should be considered preliminary with extension and verification to be reported in a later paper by the authors. The objective of the portion of that project reported on in this paper was to conduct cost analysis of alternative irradiation methods and to ascertain the cost of each of those methods. Three scenarios were considered for cost analysis. The first scenario was the installation of an X-ray irradiator at an existing meat processing plant. The second scenario was the installation of a Cobalt-60 irradiator at an existing meat processing plant. The third scenario assumed that the meat processor contracted for irradiation services from an off-site company providing such service to a number of clients. For purposes of this study it was assumed that irradiation of sliced boneless ham would result in either a $.06/pound reduction in costs from processor to consumer, a$.06/pound increase in willingness to pay [price] or an equivalent combination of reduced costs and increased price. Total cost per pound for the irradiation process applied to sliced boneless ham ranged from $0.008, at the 200 million pound annual throughput rate using Cobalt-60 irradiation, to$0.069 at the 50 million pound annual throughput rate when contracting with an off-site company.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Measurement of heavy-hole spin dephasing in (InGa)As quantum dots

We measure the spin dephasing of holes localized in self-assembled (InGa)As quantum dots by spin noise spectroscopy. The localized holes show a distinct hyperfine interaction with the nuclear spin bath despite the p-type symmetry of the valence band states. The experiments reveal a short spin relaxation time {\tau}_{fast}^{hh} of 27 ns and a second, long spin relaxation time {\tau}_{slow}^{hh} which exceeds the latter by more than one order of magnitude. The two times are attributed to heavy hole spins aligned perpendicular and parallel to the stochastic nuclear magnetic field. Intensity dependent measurements and numerical simulations reveal that the long relaxation time is still obscured by light absorption, despite low laser intensity and large detuning. Off-resonant light absorption causes a suppression of the spin noise signal due to the creation of a second hole entailing a vanishing hole spin polarization.Comment: accepted to be published in AP