A preparation of phenylacetone.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

A Semantic Framework for Priority-based Service Matching in Pervasive Environments

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. The existing approaches such as Jini [1], UPnP [8], etc., describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms in these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome the limitations in these approaches, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. This paper proposes a semantic matching approach which facilitates the discovery of device-based services in a pervasive environment; the approach provides a ranking facility that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request during the matching process. The evaluation studies have shown that the matcher results correlate reasonably well with human judgement

A Semantic Approach for Description and Ranked Matching of Services in Pervasive Environments

With the recent developments in technology, new and diverse devices are being introduced into the pervasive world. This has raised new challenges for the discovery of devices and their services in dynamic environments. The existing approaches such as Jini [AOSJ99], UPnP [UPnP06], etc., describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms in these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome the limitations of these approaches, there has been an increasing interest in the use of Semantic Web technologies to support the description and matching of services. This paper proposes a semantic matching framework to facilitate effective discovery of device based services in pervasive environments. This offers a ranking mechanism that will order the available services in the order of their suitability; the evaluation of the experimental results have indicated that the results correlate well with human perception

An Evaluation of Rational Choice Theory in the Criminal Justice System

According to the Rational Choice Theory, people commit crimes after carefully considering the advantages and disadvantages of their choices. The Rational Choice Theory\u27s basic principles include an evaluation of potential benefits and consequences, the consideration of alternative options, and the assumption of self-interest. This poster will provide a brief background of the theory, basic assumptions, shortcomings of this theory, and existing and suggested policy implications in the criminal justice system

Agent-Based Team Aiding in a Time Critical Task

In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of agent-based aiding in support of a time-critical team-planning task for teams of both humans and heterogeneous software agents. The team task consists of human subjects playing the role of military commanders and cooperatively planning to move their respective units to a common rendezvous point, given time and resource constraints. The objective of the experiment was to compare the effectiveness of agent-based aiding for individual and team tasks as opposed to the baseline condition of manual route planning. There were two experimental conditions: the Aided condition, where a Route Planning Agent (RPA) finds a least cost plan between the start and rendezvous points for a given composition of force units; and the Baseline condition, where the commanders determine initial routes manually, and receive basic feedback about the route. We demonstrate that the Aided condition provides significantly better assistance for individual route planning and team-based re-planning

Enhanced image annotations based on spatial information extraction and ontologies

Current research on image annotation often represents images in terms of labelled regions or objects, but pays little attention to the spatial positions or relationships between those regions or objects. To be effective, general purpose image retrieval systems require images with comprehensive annotations describing fully the content of the image. Much research is being done on automatic image annotation schemes but few authors address the issue of spatial annotations directly. This paper begins with a brief analysis of real picture queries to librarians showing how spatial terms are used to formulate queries. The paper is then concerned with the development of an enhanced automatic image annotation system, which extracts spatial information about objects in the image. The approach uses region boundaries and region labels to generate annotations describing absolute object positions and also relative positions between pairs of objects. A domain ontology and spatial information ontology are also used to extract more complex information about the relative closeness of objects to the viewer

Sowing the Seeds of Trouble: An Historical Analysis of Compliance Structures In Child Welfare

Anitai Etzioni\u27s concept of compliance structures is used as a focus for historical analysis of the organizational structures through which chld welfare services have been offered in the U. S. This article shows how a dual compliance structure arose, both normative and coercive, but with more emphasis on the coercive. The expansion of public child welfare services since 1935, especially foster care and placement services rather than in-home services, has drawn public attention to widespread ineffectiveness. Stress and strain are particularly intense at the service delivery level. Yet the problems and social polices have not been analyzed in terms of building and useing congruent or consistent organizational compliance structures and services to implement then. The authors suggest that Etzioni\u27s organizational compliance theory may be a useful starting point for studying specific organizational responses to parental failure in order to clarify the existing confusion about organizational goals, means, and ends in child welfare

A Pragmatic Approach for the Semantic Description and Matching of Pervasive Resources

The increasing popularity of personal wireless devices has raised new demands for the efficient discovery of heterogeneous devices and services in pervasive environments. With the advancement of the electronic world, the diversity of available services is increasing rapidly. %This raises new demands for the efficient discovery and location of heterogeneous services and resources in dynamically changing environments. Traditional approaches for service discovery describe services at a syntactic level and the matching mechanisms available for these approaches are limited to syntactic comparisons based on attributes or interfaces. In order to overcome these limitations, there has been an increased interest in the use of semantic description and matching techniques to support effective service discovery. In this paper, we present a semantic matching approach to facilitate the discovery of device-based services in pervasive environments. The approach includes a ranking mechanism that orders services according to their suitability and also considers priorities placed on individual requirements in a request during the matching process. The solution has been systematically evaluated for its retrieval effectiveness and the results have shown that the matcher results agree reasonably well with human judgement. Another important practical concern is the efficiency and the scalability of the semantic matching solution. Therefore, we have evaluated the scalability of the proposed solution by investigating the variation in matching time in response to increasing numbers of advertisements and increasing request sizes, and have presented the empirical results

Evaluation of Feather Meal as a Source of Sulfur Amino Acids for Growing Steers

In situ and digestion studies were conducted to evaluate feather meal (FTH), blood meal (BM), and meat and bone meal (MBM) for escape protein content, amino acid composition of the escape protein, true protein digestibility, and digestibility of the individual amino acids. Following 12 h of ruminal incubation, escape protein values were 73.5, 92.4, and 60.8% of CP for FTH, BM, and MBM, respectively. Blood meal and MBM were poor sources of sulfur amino acids (SAA), whereas FTH was a good source. Most of the SAA of FTH, however, was Cys, with very little Met. True protein digestibilities were not different for the protein sources (P \u3e .15), ranging from 86.7 to 94.0% of the CP. However, digestibilities of the individual amino acids were quite different. Two growth studies were conducted to evaluate FTH as a source of SAA for growing cattle. The first study used 120 steers (228 ± 15 kg) supplemented with urea, MBM, MBM plus 1% FTH, or MBM plus 2% FTH. Additionally, incremental amounts of rumen-protected Met were added to treatments containing MBM. Supplementation of MBM increased (P \u3c .05) ADG compared with the urea control. Addition of FTH to MBM resulted in a linear (P \u3c .01) increase in ADG. However, addition of rumen-protected Met to MBM plus FTH treatments further improved gains. Although FTH is an effective source of SAA, Met probably was first-limiting. The second study used 90 steers (243 ± 18 kg) supplemented with BM plus incremental amounts of SAA from either FTH or rumen-protected Met. Addition of SAA improved ADG compared with BM alone (P \u3c .05). Rumen-protected Met as a source of SAA improved ADG compared with FTH (P \u3c .05). The SAA from FTH promoted a gain response equal to 50% of the response obtained with rumen-protected Met. Formulation of ruminant diets for metabolizable amino acids must account for escape value and digestibility of each individual amino acid. Feather meal is an effective source of SAA; however, Cys supplies over five times the amount supplied by Met