An Application Platform for the Development and Experimental Validation of Mobile Robots for Health Care Purposes

This paper describes an Application Platform for the development and testing of mobile robot units. Within this platform, various applications addressing different aspects of robot development are composed into an experimental environment. The Application Platform comprises modules such as a Neural Networks Simulator, a simulation and off-line programming system, optical sensor components, a rapid prototyping system, and an experimental workcell. Each of these modules is described in detail including its integration with the other modules. In conclusion, the potential use of this platform for health care tasks is indicated.     

School leaders, ICT competence and championing innovations

The implementation of new technology is becoming more important to schools and the success of such implementations is often due to the presence of ICT champions. This article examines ICT champions to determine whether the intention to champion ICT is determined by the ICT competence of school leaders. This article, based on responses from 64 school leaders in New Zealand, reports that professional development and ICT usage are antecedents of ICT competency and that school leaders are ICT competent and willing ICT champions. These findings are contrary to existing research which has found that school leaders have poor ICT competency.     

Die Verantwortung der Wirtschaftsinformatik für unseren Planeten

Ohne Zusammenfassung This article is also available in English via http://www.springerlink.com and http://www.bise-journal.org: Buhl HU, Jetter M (2009) BISE’s Responsibility for our Planet. Bus. Inf. Syst. Eng. doi: 10.1007/s12599-009-0058-z.     

WI – In eigener Sache

Ohne Zusammenfassung This article is also available in English via http://www.springerlink.com and http://www.bise-journal.org: Buhl HU (2008) BISE – Editorial Notes. BISE. doi: .     

Kinetics of TmHU binding to DNA as observed by optical tweezers

The kinetics of binding for the histone-like protein TmHU (from Thermotoga maritima) to DNA is analyzed on a single molecule level by use of optical tweezers. For the reaction rate a pronounced concentration-dependence is found with an "all or nothing"-limit which suggests the cooperative nature of the binding-reaction. By analyzing the statistics of mechanically induced dissociation-events of TmHU from DNA multiple reaction sites are observed to become more likely with increasing TmHU concentration. This is interpreted as a hint for a secondary organizational level of the TmHU/DNA complex. The reaction rate of TmHU binding to DNA is remarkably higher than that of the HU protein from Escherichia coli which will be discussed.     

Designing for Semantic Access: A Video Browsing System

Users of browsing applications often have vague information needs which can only be described in conceptual terms. Therefore, a video browsing system must accept conceptual queries for preselection and offer mechanisms for interactive inspection of the result set by the user. In this paper, we describe a MM-DBMS that we extended with the following components: Our retrieval engine calculates relevance values for the results of a conceptual query by feature aggregation on video shot granularity to offer conceptual, content-based access. To reduce startup delays within sessions, our admission control module admits only complete browsing sessions, if required resources, which are heuristically predicted from query results, are available. In addition, our intelligent client buffer strategy employs the retrieval relevance values to enable flexible user interactions during browsing.     

Bounds for the quality and the number of steps in Bellman's value iteration algorithm

We consider a discounted Markovian decision process (MDP) with finite state space and infinite horizon. For an arbitrary action space, we derive estimates for the (finite stage) value functions and suboptimality bounds for policies consisting of sub-optimal decisions on every stage. From this, using a slightly generalized result obtained by Holzbaur and Meister [2], we give a bound for the number of steps taken to determine an optimal or an-optimal policy. This improves the results given in Holzbaur and Meister [3].     

Model elimination without contrapositives and its application to PTTP

We give modifications of model elimination that do not necessitate the use of contrapositives. These restart model elimination calculi are proven sound and complete, and their implementation by PTTP is depicted. The corresponding proof procedures are evaluated by a number of runtime experiments, and they are compared to other well-known provers. We relate our results to other calculi, namely, the connection method, modified problem reduction format, and near-Horn Prolog.A shorter version will appear under the title Model Elimination Without Contrapositives inProc. of the CADE'94.