Mobile agent middleware for mobile computing

Mobile computing requires an advanced infrastructure that integrates suitable support protocols, mechanisms, and tools. This mobility middleware should dynamically reallocate and trace mobile users and terminals and permit communication and coordination of mobile entities. In addition, open and untrusted environments must overcome system heterogeneity and grant the appropriate security level. Solutions to these issues require compliance with standards to interoperate with different systems and legacy components and a reliable security infrastructure based on standard cryptographic mechanisms and tools. Many proposals suggest using mobile agent technology middleware to address these issues. A mobile agent moves entities in execution together with code and achieved state, making it possible to upgrade distributed computing environments without suspending service. We propose three mobile computing services: user virtual environment (UVE), mobile virtual terminal (MVT), and virtual resource management (VRM). UVE provides users with a uniform view of their working environments independent of current locations and specific terminals. MVT extends traditional terminal mobility by preserving the terminal execution state for restoration at new locations, including active processes and subscribed services. VRM permits mobile users and terminals to maintain access to resources and services by automatically requalifying the bindings and moving specific resources or services to permit load balancing and replication     

Is Melanoma Progression Affected by Thyroid Diseases?

Clinical and epidemiological evidence indicate a relationship between thyroid diseases and melanoma. In particular, the hypothyroidism condition appears to promote melanoma spread, which suggests a protective role of thyroid hormones against disease progression. In addition, experimental data suggest that, in addition to thyroid hormones, other hormonal players of the hypothalamic–pituitary–thyroid (HPT) axis, namely the thyrotropin releasing hormone and the thyrotropin, are likely to affect melanoma cells behavior. This information warrants further clinical and experimental studies in order to build a precise pattern of action of the HPT hormones on melanoma cells. An improved knowledge of the involved molecular mechanism(s) could lead to a better and possibly personalized clinical management of these patients.     

ANEMIA: an expert consultation system

Anemia is a knowledge-based consultation program for anemic states. It has been built using an artificial intelligence programming scheme, called EXPERT, which was developed at Rutgers University. At present, ANEMIA is able to provide assistance in the diagnosis and management of 64 disease entities. They include iron deficiency anemias, anemias due to chronic disorders, thalassemias, hemolytic anemias, arigenerative anemias, and a few other miscellaneous conditions. ANEMIA was tested against a data base of 220 retrospective and 100 new cases and the overall accuracy in the diagnostic performance was pretty good. Our intent is that ANEMIA ultimately will be able to serve as surrogate for the hematologist with the nonhematologist physician-user.     

A very low-noise CMOS preamplifier for capacitive sensors

A CMOS preamplifier optimized for piezoelectric transducers is presented. The extensive use of CMOS-compatible lateral bipolar transistors (CLBTs) and careful layout leads to a very low noise along with good untrimmed DC and AC characteristics. These features make it competitive with bipolar and JFET realizations. In addition, long coaxial lines can be driven without significant alteration of performance using the two uncommitted on-chip buffers. This circuit was fabricated in a standard 3-μm p-well CMOS technology, opening perspectives to monolithic integration of data acquisition subsystems     

A Distributed Model of Iron Kinetics for Clinical Assessment of Normal?Abnormal Erythropoietic Activity

The use of mathematical models of iron metabolism has been recognized as an essential tool for analyzing ferrokinetic data. Multicompartment models, however, did not make it possible to describe marrow iron kinetics, taking into account that marrow erythroid cells uptake iron from the plasma according to their maturity.     

A 2-μm CMOS fifth-order low-pass continuous-time filter forvideo-frequency applications

A fifth-order elliptic low-pass continuous-time filter based on triode transconductors for applications in the video frequency range is presented. Fabricated in a standard 2-μm CMOS technology, the circuit occupies 6 mm² of silicon area including the automatic tuning circuitry. The filter achieves a 7-MHz cutoff frequency using a parasitic pole compensation scheme. The dynamic range is 40 dB and power consumption is 30 mW for a 5-V supply. A transconductor biasing strategy which allows a continuous tuning range for the cutoff frequency of one decade is presented     

Une caractérisation de technologie CMOS à l’usage d’étudiants en cycle d’ingénieur

This product is a part of a practical work set intended for students in the second year of engineering school. During the work, the student has to put into practice theoretical considerations (from courses and tutorials), as well as measurement methods in order to extract a set of parameters for theMOS transistor and theCMOS inverter. Finally, these results are analyzed in order to show the limitations of the first order graphical model used (Memelink’s model).     

Distributed logic objects

This paper presents a language based on the logic programming paradigm that supports objects, messages and inheritance. The object-oriented extension is fairly simple: objects are clusters of processes, objects' state is represented by logical variables, message-passing communication between objects is performed via multi-head clauses, and inheritance is mapped into clause union. The language implementation is obtained by translating logic objects into a concurrent logic language based on multi-head clauses, taking advantage of its distributed implementation on a massively parallel architecture. The runtime support realizes some interesting features such as intensional messages and the transparency of object allocation, object migration and parallelism.