Machine recognition of constrained hand printed devanagari

A method is presented for the machine recognition of constrained, hand printed Devanagari characters. A set of very simple primitives is used, and all the Devanagari characters are looked upon as a concatenation of these primitives. Most of the decisions are taken on the basis of the presence/absence or positional relationship of these primitives; and the decision process is a multistage process, where each stage of decision making narrows down the choice regarding the class membership of the input token.     

Identification of the antibiotic phomalactone from the entomopathogenic fungusHirsutella thompsonii var.synnematosa

Dichloromethane extracts of culture broth from three strains of the entomopathogenic fungusHirsutella thompsonii var.synnematosa were toxic to two species of tephritid fruit fly and inhibited conidial germination in vitro in several other entomopathogenic fungi includingBeauveria bassiana, Tolypocladium spp., andMetarhizium anisopliae. A major metabolite, toxic to apple maggot,Rhagoletis pomonella, and inhibitory to conidial germination inB. bassiana, was isolated and identified as the antibiotic (+)-phomalactone, 6-(1-propenyl)-5,-6-dihydro-5-hydroxypyran-2-one. This is the first biologically active compound of low molecular weight isolated from the genusHirsutella.Mention of a commercial or proprietary product does not constitute an endorsement by the USDA.     

Recursiveness, causality, and feedback

The various notions of recursiveness, causality, and feedback for stochastic processes are related and organized.     

Communication scheduling to minimize thermal effects of implanted biosensor networks in homogeneous tissue

A network of biosensors can be implanted in a human body for health monitoring, diagnostics, or as a prosthetic device. Biosensors can be organized into clusters where most of the communication takes place within the clusters, and long range transmissions to the base station are performed by the cluster leader to reduce the energy cost. In some applications, the tissues are sensitive to temperature increase and may be damaged by the heat resulting from normal operations and the recharging of sensor nodes. Our work is the first to consider rotating the cluster leadership to minimize the heating effects on human tissues. We explore the factors that lead to temperature increase, and the process for calculating the specific absorption rate (SAR) and temperature increase of implanted biosensors by using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. We improve performance by rotating the cluster leader based on the leadership history and the sensor locations. We propose a simplified scheme, temperature increase potential, to efficiently predict the temperature increase in tissues surrounding implanted sensors. Finally, a genetic algorithm is proposed to exploit the search for an optimal temperature increase sequence.     

Sequencing and Scheduling in Robotic Cells: Recent Developments

A great deal of work has been done to analyze the problem of robot move sequencing and part scheduling in robotic flowshop cells. We examine the recent developments in this literature. A robotic flowshop cell consists of a number of processing stages served by one or more robots. Each stage has one or more machines that perform that stage’s processing. Types of robotic cells are differentiated from one another by certain characteristics, including robot type, robot travel-time, number of robots, types of parts processed, and use of parallel machines within stages. We focus on cyclic production of parts. A cycle is specified by a repeatable sequence of robot moves designed to transfer a set of parts between the machines for their processing.We start by providing a classification scheme for robotic cell scheduling problems that is based on three characteristics: machine environment, processing restrictions, and objective function, and discuss the influence of these characteristics on the methods of analysis employed. In addition to reporting recent results on classical robotic cell scheduling problems, we include results on robotic cells with advanced features such as dual gripper robots, parallel machines, and multiple robots. Next, we examine implementation issues that have been addressed in the practice-oriented literature and detail the optimal policies to use under various combinations of conditions. We conclude by describing some important open problems in the field.     

Pulmonary hemorrhage associated with balloon flotation catheters: report of a case and review of the literature

The development of the flow-directed balloon catheter has greatly facilitated the monitoring of seriously ill patients. As the use of this catheter has increased, so have the reports of complications, the most serious of which is fatal pulmonary hemorrhage. Eleven cases of pulmonary hemorrhage have been described in the literature, and we have reported an additional case. The presenting symptom in 10 patients was hemoptysis, and the course of eight of these patients was rapidly fatal. The most frequent significant finding at autopsy was a laceration of a small peripheral pulmonary artery, usually at a bifurcation. The pathogenesis, prophylaxis, and management of this complication are discussed.     

Pebble games for studying storage sharing

Pebble games are played on a directed acyclic graph (dag). Placing a pebble on a vertex may be thought of as entering the value of the subexpression represented by the vertex into accessible storage. In some applications, there are types associated with vertices e.g. some vertices may represent functions, others may represent function values. We are interested in determining if vertices of the same type can share storage. The problem considered is as follows. We are given a labelled dag to be pebbled. A pebble may be placed on a vertex if all sons of the vertex have pebbles—in fact it is legal to move a pebble from a son to a father. Pebbles may be picked up at any time. The objective is to pebble each vertex exactly once. We will be interested in ‘one pebblings of l vertices’ in which there is at most one pebble on vertices with label l, at all times; and ‘stack pebblings of l vertices’ in which the pebbled vertices with label l are along a path, at all times. Results about the existence of such pebblings are presented. The results have applications to testing serializability of database updates, and potential applications to semantics directed compiler generation.