Head Up Games: combining the best of both worlds by merging traditional and digital play

Current pervasive games are mostly location-aware applications, played on handheld computing devices. Considering pervasive games for children, it is argued that the interaction paradigm existing games support limits essential aspects of outdoor play like spontaneous social interaction, physical movement, and rich face-to-face communication. We present a new genre of pervasive games conceived to address this problem, that we call “Head Up Games” (HUGs) to underline that they liberate players from facing down to attend to screen-based interactions. The article discusses characteristics of HUG and relates them to existing genres of pervasive games. We present lessons learned during the design and evaluation of three HUG and chart future challenges.     

A survey on the applications of variable neighborhood search algorithm in healthcare management

Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence - This paper reviews the papers on the applications of VNS in the health care area by analyzing the characteristics of VNS in different problems....     

Integrated inventory and production policy for manufacturing with perishable raw materials

Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence - This research investigates an integrated inventory and production scheduling problem (IIPSP) in a manufacturer that deals with the perishable...     

Surgical Tool Datasets for Machine Learning Research: A Survey

International Journal of Computer Vision - This paper is a comprehensive survey of datasets for surgical tool detection and related surgical data science and machine learning techniques and...     

Recent Progress in Photonic Processing of Metal‐Oxide Transistors

Over the past few decades, significant progress has been made in the field of photonic processing of electronic materials using a variety of light sources. Several of these technologies have now been exploited in conjunction with emerging electronic materials as alternatives to conventional high‐temperature thermal annealing, offering rapid manufacturing times and compatibility with temperature‐sensitive substrate materials among other potential advantages. Herein, recent advances in photonic processing paradigms of metal‐oxide thin‐film transistors (TFTs) are presented with particular emphasis on the use of various light source technologies for the photochemical and thermochemical conversion of precursor materials or postdeposition treatment of metal oxides and their application in thin‐film electronics. The pros and cons of the different technologies are discussed in light of recent developments and prospective research in the field of modern large‐area electronics is highlighted.     

Digital Image Processing Applied to Scintillation Images from Biomedical Systems

Several nonlinear filtering methods have been developed for two-dimensional image signals obtained from an Anger Scintillation camera. The first method termed "pruning" is implemented in the frequency domain and filters out certain components of the two-dimensional amplitude spectrum. The other methods called "E-filtering" and "P-filtering" utilize a nonlinear transformation of the spatial coordinates which is proportional to the two-dimensional signal amplitude and energy spectrum, respectively. These nonlinear filtering techniques have been applied to phantom scintigrams as well as brain and heart scans of normal and abnormal patients. In addition, the detection of boundaries using the hexagonal Golay transform on filtered and unfiltered images is included. Finally, these filtering and edge detection techniques were for the first time applied to a new technique for the detection of acute myocardial infarcts.     

Exploring the Leidenfrost Effect for the Deposition of High‐Quality In2O3 Layers via Spray Pyrolysis at Low Temperatures and Their Application in High Electron Mobility Transistors

The growth mechanism of indium oxide (In₂O₃) layers processed via spray pyrolysis of an aqueous precursor solution in the temperature range of 100–300 °C and the impact on their electron transporting properties are studied. Analysis of the droplet impingement sites on the substrate's surface as a function of its temperature reveals that Leidenfrost effect dominated boiling plays a crucial role in the growth of smooth, continuous, and highly crystalline In₂O₃ layers via a vapor phase‐like process. By careful optimization of the precursor formulation, deposition conditions, and choice of substrate, this effect is exploited and ultrathin and exceptionally smooth layers of In₂O₃ are grown over large area substrates at temperatures as low as 252 °C. Thin‐film transistors (TFTs) fabricated using these optimized In₂O₃ layers exhibit superior electron transport characteristics with the electron mobility reaching up to 40 cm² V^?1 s^?1, a value amongst the highest reported to date for solution‐processed In₂O₃ TFTs. The present work contributes enormously to the basic understanding of spray pyrolysis and highlights its tremendous potential for large‐volume manufacturing of high‐performance metal oxide thin‐film transistor electronics.     

Subspace based blind identification of LTI FIR MIMO systems and equalization of finite memory SIMO Volterra systems

In this paper a novel algorithm based on subspace projections is developed for the blind kernel identification of LTI FIR multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems, as well as blind equalization of finite memory SIMO Volterra systems. In addition, for Volterra systems, the algorithm computes the memory lengths of the nonlinearities involved. Simulations in the context of blind channel equalization and identification demonstrate good performance in comparison to existing schemes.     

On Chaos and Neural Networks: The Backpropagation Paradigm

In training feed-forward neural networks using the backpropagation algorithm, a sensitivity to the values of the parameters of the algorithm hasbeen observed. In particular, it has been observed that this sensitivity with respect to the values of the parameters, such as thelearning rate, plays an important role in the final outcome. In thistutorial paper, we will look at neural networks from a dynamical systemspoint of view andexamine its properties. To this purpose, we collect results regarding chaostheory as well as the backpropagation algorithmand establish a relationship between them. We study in detail as an example the learning of the exclusive OR,an elementary Boolean function. The following conclusions hold for our XOR neural network: no chaos appears for learning rates lower than 5, when chaosoccurs, it disappears as learning progresses. For non-chaotic learning rates, the network learns faster than for other learning rates for which chaos occurs.     

Vertical buoyancy preserving and non-preserving fountains,in a homogeneous calm ambient

Experiments were conducted on the maximum and terminal penetration depths of fountains of light fluid, issuing vertically downwards into quiescent denser fluid. Fresh water jets into saltwater, and hot water jets into fresh cold water were investigated. The source Richardson numbers extended from 0.01 (jets) to 1 (plumes). Circular and three other different shape nozzles have been employed. The normalized penetration depth is constant for jets, while it decays exponentially in plumes. Numerical evaluation of the penetration depth has indicated the need for reevaluation of the entrainment coefficient, in negatively buoyant jets.