Remote-Controlled Ambidextrous Robot Hand Concept

In the development of robotic limbs, the side of members is of importance to define the shape of artificial limbs and the range of movements. It is mainly significant tbr biomedical applications concerning patients suffering arms or legs injuries, fn this paper, the concept of an ambidextrous design lbr robot hands is introduced. The fingers can curl in one xvay or another, to imitate either a right hand or a left hand. The advantages and inconveniences of different models have been investigated to optimise the range and the maximum force applied by fingers. Besides, a remote control interthce is integrated to the system, allowing both to send comrnands through internet and to display a video streaming of the ambidextrous hand as feedback. Therefore, a robotic prosthesis could be used for the first time in telerehabilitation. The main application areas targeted are physiotherapy alter strokes or management of phantom pains/br amputees by/earning to control the ambidextrous hand. A client application is also accessible on Facehook social network, making the robotic limb easily reachable for the patients. Additionally the ambidextrous hand can be used tbr robotics research as well as artistic performances.     

Lower bounds on lengths of checking sequences

Lower bounds on the lengths of checking sequences constructed for testing from Finite State Machine-based specifications are established. These bounds consider the case where a distinguishing sequence is used in forming state recognition and transition verification subsequences and identify the effects of overlapping among such subsequences. Empirical results show that the existing methods for construction of checking sequences provide checking sequences with lengths that are within acceptable distance to these lower bounds.     

A Scalable Toolkit for Designing Multimedia Authoring Environments

This paper introduces Kaomi, a scalable toolkit for designing authoring environments of multimedia documents. The underlying concept is to provide the designer of multimedia applications with a fast method to get an authoring system based on a set of synchronized views (the presentation view for displaying the document, the scenario view for showing the temporal organization of the document, ...) so that each view is the support of editing actions. Kaomi is flexible enough to support a variety of multimedia documents declarative formats. It is indeed a scalable toolkit since it provides facilities for extending and/or for modifying the resulting authoring environment. In addition, cross-platform portability is provided which allows operation in the heterogenous Internet environment. The use of Kaomi is mainly described through the design of two authoring environments: one for authoring a sub-set of the Smil standard of the W3C and the other one for Madeus, a constraint based multimedia language.     

Optical investigation of the behavior of the electric arc and the metal transfer during vacuum remelting of a Ti alloy

High-speed camera imaging and optical emission spectroscopy have been used for investigating the structure of the electric arc and the transfer mechanisms of the liquid metal during vacuum arc remelting (VAR) of Ti alloys. The arc exhibited a similar operating regime to that described in the previous literature for the case of Inconel 718 and zirconium alloy electrodes. The arc behaved in a diffuse mode with many separate and rapidly moving cathode spots. Several parameters of the cathode spots, including their current, size and apparent velocity were evaluated. The application of an external axial magnetic field tended to encourage the cathode spots to locate themselves on the base of the electrode. A large density ratio of Ti⁺ ions and Ti atoms in the interelectrode plasma was evaluated, suggesting that the plasma was strongly ionized. The calculated excitation temperature of Ti⁺ ions (1–1.2 eV) was about 1.5–2 times greater than that obtained for Ti atoms. The transfer mechanisms of the drops of liquid metal might be classified into three main modes depending on the gap length: drop falling, drip short and drop erosion induced by the cathode spots. The importance of the influence of the arc on the metal transfer mechanisms was inversely related to the gap length.     

Sensitivity and specificity based multiobjective approach for feature selection: Application to cancer diagnosis

The study of the sensitivity and the specificity of a classification test constitute a powerful kind of analysis since it provides specialists with very detailed information useful for cancer diagnosis. In this work, we propose the use of a multiobjective genetic algorithm for gene selection of Microarray datasets. This algorithm performs gene selection from the point of view of the sensitivity and the specificity, both used as quality indicators of the classification test applied to the previously selected genes. In this algorithm, the classification task is accomplished by Support Vector Machines; in addition a 10-Fold Cross-Validation is applied to the resulting subsets. The emerging behavior of all these techniques used together is noticeable, since this approach is able to offer, in an original and easy way, a wide range of accurate solutions to professionals in this area. The effectiveness of this approach is proved on public cancer datasets by working out new and promising results. A comparative analysis of our approach using two and three objectives, and with other existing algorithms, suggest that our proposal is highly appropriate for solving this problem.     

Vancomycin dimerization and chiral recognition studied by high-performance liquid chromatography

The retention and separation of D,L-dansylvaline enantiomers (used as test solutes) were investigated using silica gel as stationary phase and vancomycin as chiral mobile-phase additive. A retention model was developed to describe the mechanistic aspects of the interaction between solute and vancomycin in the chromatographic system. It considered the formation of vancomycin dimers both "free" in the mobile phase and adsorbed on silica. By fitting the model equation to experimental data, it appeared clearly that the approach taking into account the vancomycin dimerization described accurately the retention behavior of the compounds. The examination of the model equation parameters showed that the glycopeptide dimerization increased the enantioselectivity by a factor of approximately 3.7. This study demonstrated the preponderant role of the vancomycin dimerization on the chiral recognition process of D,L-dansylvaline. Also, an additional analysis on a vancomycin chiral stationary phase indicated that the addition of vancomycin in the mobile phase promoted a greater enantioselectivity mediated by the formation of dimers in the stationary phase.     

Immobilized DNA aptamers as target-specific chiral stationary phases for resolution of nucleoside and amino acid derivative enantiomers

Recently, we described the use of a DNA aptamer as a new target-specific chiral stationary phase (CSP) for the separation of oligopeptide enantiomers (Michaud, M.; Jourdan, E.; Villet, A.; Ravel, A.; Grosset, C.; Peyrin, E. J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2003, 125, 8672). However, from a practical point of view, it was fundamental to extend the applicability of such target-specific aptamer CSP to the resolution of small (bioactive) molecule enantiomers. In this paper, immobilized DNA aptamers specifically selected against D-adenosine and L-tyrosinamide were used to resolve the enantiomers by HPLC, using microbore columns. At 20 degrees C, the adenosine enantioseparation was similar to that classically reported with imprinted CSPs (approximately 3.5) while a very high enantioselectivity was observed for the tyrosinamide enantiomers (the nontarget enantiomer was essentially nonretained on the CSP). The influence of temperature on solute binding and chiral discrimination was analyzed. The binding enthalpic contributions were determined from linear van't Hoff plots. Very large DeltaH values were obtained for the target enantiomers (-71.4 +/- 0.7 kJ/mol for D-adenosine and -139.4 +/- 2.0 kJ/mol for L-tyrosinamide). Such values were consistent with the formation of a tight complex between these analytes and the aptamer CSPs. This work demonstrates that target-specific aptamer CSPs constitute a powerful tool for the resolution of small (bioactive) molecule enantiomers.     

Centralized Web Proxy Services: Security and Privacy Considerations

The widespread use of centrally controlled, externally run Web proxy services has several potential security issues related to privacy and deception, intranet information disclosure, and the creation of a single point of failure for widespread attacks. The author evaluates the security implications of such a Web proxy service from the viewpoints of users, organizations, and content providers. The discussion is illustrated with an analysis of Google's Web Accelerator, a free Web proxy service.     

Multi-environmental cooperative parallel metaheuristics for solving dynamic optimization problems

In dynamic optimization problems, changes occur over time. These changes could be related to the optimization objective, the problem instance, or involve problem constraints. In most cases, they are seen as an ordered sequence of sub-problems or environments that must be solved during a certain time interval. The usual approaches tend to solve each sub-problem when a change happens, dealing always with one single environment at each time instant. In this paper, we propose a multi-environmental cooperative model for parallel meta-heuristics to tackle dynamic optimization problems. It consists in dealing with different environments at the same time, using different algorithms that exchange information coming from these environments. A parallel multi-swarm approach is presented for solving the Dynamic Vehicle Routing Problem. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is tested on a well-known set of benchmarks, and compared with other meta-heuristics from the literature. Experimental results show that our multi-environmental approach outperforms conventional meta-heuristics on this problem.