HealthAgents: distributed multi-agent brain tumor diagnosis and prognosis

We present an agent-based distributed decision support system for the diagnosis and prognosis of brain tumors developed by the HealthAgents project. HealthAgents is a European Union funded research project, which aims to enhance the classification of brain tumors using such a decision support system based on intelligent agents to securely connect a network of clinical centers. The HealthAgents system is implementing novel pattern recognition discrimination methods, in order to analyze in vivo Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS) and ex vivo/in vitro High Resolution Magic Angle Spinning Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (HR-MAS) and DNA micro-array data. HealthAgents intends not only to apply forefront agent technology to the biomedical field, but also develop the HealthAgents network, a globally distributed information and knowledge repository for brain tumor diagnosis and prognosis.     

The wartime kitchen: Food advice and cooking tips in Belgium during the First World War

This article addresses a special aspect of daily life in occupied Belgium during the First World War. It examines and compares the nutritional advice and the cooking tips which were given by private and public organizations, physicians, nutritional experts, and home economic teachers. Furthermore, the article compares these recommendations with actual practices, through the personal testimonies of diaries and wartime memories. This analysis results in three main conclusions. Firstly, it is clear that during the war, the diet (and the advice given on food) had to be adjusted on a regular basis, depending on the availability of foodstuffs. As the war progressed, fewer animal products were consumed; more expensive calories were gradually substituted by cheaper ones. The import of American foodstuffs and the search for ersatz products became increasingly important, especially during the “hunger winter” of 1916–1917. Secondly, this article underlines the influential role of experts in promoting the latest nutritional science (such as the concept of calories) in light of the war situation. It demonstrates that at the beginning of the war, experts such as agronomists and physicians published relatively technical brochures, written in a language that was very far removed from the general population. From 1916 onwards, female authors especially published cookery booklets in an easily understandable language in which they presented recipes and menus that were nutritious, cheap, and easy to prepare. Thirdly, it emphasizes the importance of women in shaping and defining the eating experience during the war. Housewives were most especially faced with the daily price increases and with the limited supply of both familiar and unfamiliar foodstuffs; hence it was they to whom the food recommendations within these wartime cookery booklets were primarily aimed.     

The effects of current-concern- and nonconcern-related waking suggestions on nocturnal dream content

In previous research, presleep suggestions influenced nocturnal dream content. It was hypothesized that suggesting topics associated with participants' current concerns would influence dream content more than suggesting other topics. Ten students spent 4 nights in a sleep laboratory: an adaptation night, a baseline night, and 2 nights under suggestions to dream about a concern-related or other topic. Concern-related suggestions influenced dream content--largely its central imagery--more than did other suggestions, which did not differ from nonsuggestion. Number of transformations within dreams was uncorrelated with dream vividness, contrary to extended activation-synthesis theory. Thus, the concern-related status of suggestions moderates their effectiveness and, inconsistent with extended activation-synthesis theory but consistent with current-concerns and distributed-activation theories, motivational and volitional processes actively influence dream content.     

Charge carrier mobility,bimolecular recombination and trapping in polycarbazole copolymer:fullerene (PCDTBT:PCBM) bulk heterojunction solar cells

Organic photovoltaic devices based on the donor:acceptor blend of poly[N-9″-heptadecanyl-2,7-carbazole-alt-5,5-(4′,7′-di-2-thienyl-2′,1′,3′-benzothiadiazole)] (PCDTBT) and [6,6]-phenyl C₆₁ butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM) have received considerable attention in recent years due to their high power conversion efficiencies and the ability to achieve close to 100% internal quantum efficiency. However, the highest efficiencies were all attained using active layers of less than 100 nm, which is not ideal for either maximised potential performance or commercial viability. Furthermore, more recent reports have documented significant charge carrier trapping in these devices. In this paper two charge extraction techniques (photo-CELIV and time-of-flight) have been used to investigate the mobility and recombination behaviour in a series of PCDTBT:PCBM devices. The results not only confirm significant charge carrier trapping in this system, but also reveal close to Langevin-type bimolecular recombination. The Langevin recombination causes a short charge carrier lifetime that results in a short drift length. The combination of these two characteristics (trapping and fast bimolecular recombination) has a detrimental effect on the charge extraction efficiency when active layers greater than ∼100 nm are used. This accounts for the pronounced decrease in fill factor with increasing active layer thickness that is typically observed in PCDTBT:PCBM devices.     

Delivering scalable video with QoS to the home

User satisfaction is a key factor in the success of novel multimedia services. Yet, to enable service providers and network operators to control and maximize the quality (QoS, QoE) of delivered video streams, quite some challenges remain. In this paper, we particularly focus on three of them. First of all, objectively measuring video quality requires appropriate quality metrics and methods of assessing them in a real-time fashion. Secondly, the recent Scalable Video Coding (SVC) format opens opportunities for adapting video to the available (network) resources, yet the appropriate configuration of video encoding as well as real-time streaming adaptation are largely unaddressed research areas. Thirdly, while bandwidth reservation mechanisms in access/core networks do exist, service providers lack a means for guaranteeing QoS in the increasingly complex home networks (which they are not in full control of). In this paper we offer a broad view on these interrelated issues, by presenting the developments originating in a Flemish research project (including proof-of-concept demonstrations). From a developmental perspective, we propose an architecture combining a real-time video quality monitoring platform, on-the-fly adaptation (optimizing the video quality) and QoS reservation in a heterogeneous home network based on UPnP QoS?v3. From a research perspective, we propose a new subjective test procedure that revealed user preference for temporal scalability over quality scalability. In addition, an extensive study on optimizing HD SVC encoding in IPTV scenarios with fluctuating bandwidth showed that under certain bandwidth constraints (prohibiting sufficient fidelity) spatial scalability is a better option than quality scalability.     

Non-Clairvoyant Multiprocessor Scheduling of Jobs with Changing Execution Characteristics

This work theoretically proves that Equi-partition efficiently schedules multiprocessor batch jobs with different execution characteristics. Motwani, Phillips, and Torng (Proc. 4th Annu. ACM/SIAM Symp. on Discrete Algorithms, pp. 422–431, Austin, 1993) show that the mean response time of jobs is within two of optimal for fully parallelizable jobs. We extend this result by considering jobs with multiple phases of arbitrary nondecreasing and sublinear speedup functions. Having no knowledge of the jobs being scheduled (non-clairvoyant) one would not expect it to perform well. However, our main result shows that the mean response time obtained with Equi-partition is no more than times the optimal. The paper also considers schedulers with different numbers of preemptions and jobs with more general classes of speedup functions. Matching lower bounds are also proved.