Oxidation of thin Cd,Cu and Te films under continuous laser irradiation

Thin films of Cd, Cu and Te are irradiated in air by means of a continuous, unfocused laser beam. The diameter of the oxidized zone varies empirically with time like: $\text{d = d}{}_0\text{exp}\text{[}\text{?(t ? t}{}_1\text{)}\text{t}{}_2\text{]}$, where t₁ and t₂depend on the power of the laser beam. Temperature calculations indicate that melting of the elemental constituents is probably involved in the transformation.     

Developing a multi-agent platform supporting patient hospital stays following a socio-technical approach: Management and governance benefits

Most of the caregivers working in hospitals are highly skilled and educated work force. Even if they are supported by administrative staff, part of their time still consists of administrative procedures or trying to empirically fill or retrieve agendas on the basis of real-time constraints. Similarly, patients waste time waiting for adequate treatments so they occupy slots (beds) in hospitals while their hospitalization is not a necessity. This leads to huge wastes of resources for the hospital that has to hospitalize and prioritize patients in more effective need of care and monitoring. In order to ensure real-time patient support during its entire stay in the hospital (in terms of bed occupancy, appointments with doctors and/or for medico-technical exams) as well as to furnish a central solution open for future IT integration we propose, in this paper, to build a Multi-Agent System (MAS) based software solution. The latter has been built following a socio-technical approach; it maps, at runtime, the working processes of a Belgian hospital. Processes have been modeled in a patient-centric way in order to identify most relevant stages and bottlenecks in bed, cares and medico-technical exams management; real-time data transmission allows to update and re-optimize slots statuses as well as schedules. Also, data analysis (i.e., business intelligence) functions are supported by the MAS implementation for decision making/taking. Further than the proof of concept that shows the managerial support of the software solution, the MAS modules’ benefits to the overall hospital strategy is studied. The latter shows the relevance of the solution to the hospital’s governance.     

Agile MERODE: a model-driven software engineering method for user-centric and value-based development

Agile is often associated with a lack of architectural thinking causing technical debt but has the advantage of user centricity and a strong focus on value. Model-driven software engineering (MDSE) strongly performs for building a quality architecture and code, but lacks focus on user requirements and tends to consider development as a monolithic whole. The combination of Agile and MDSE has been explored, but a convincing integrated method has not been proposed yet. This paper addresses this gap by exploring the specific combination of MERODE—as an example of a proven MDSE method—with Scrum, a reference agile method offering a concrete (sprint-based) life cycle management on the basis of user stories. The method resulting of this integration is called Agile MERODE; it is driven by user stories, themselves associated with behavior-driven development scenarios. It allows for domain-driven design and permits fast development from domain models by means of code generation. An illustrative example further clarifies the practical application of Agile MERODE, while a case study shows the planning game application in the case’s context. While the approach, in its entirety, allows reducing technical debt by building the architecture in a logical, consistent and complete manner, introducing MDSE involves a trade-off with pure value-driven development. Agile MERODE contributes to the state of the art by showing how to increase user centricity in MDSE, how to align model-driven engineering with the Scrum cycle, and how to reduce the technical debt of agile developments yet remaining value-focused.

     

Designing an MOOC as an agent-platform aggregating heterogeneous virtual learning environments

ABSTRACT

With the emergence of cloud technologies, on the one hand, and social networks, on the other hand, the possibilities for e-learning have been drastically enhanced in the latest years. Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) can now indeed contain a huge amount of learning resources; in parallel, large user communities are available in social networks. These nevertheless remain different systems but, by using these heterogeneous software environments together, the possibilities for interaction could be multiplied. That is why, this paper suggests to build a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) environment through a Multi-Agent System (MAS) working as a virtual abstraction layer over heterogeneous software platforms. The idea is to aggregate different traditional VLE to dispose of the learning objects they own as well as other platforms such as social networks to furnish an easy access to the MOOC of their large user communities. The MAS design has been architectured around a real-life organisational pattern – the joint venture – allowing one to deal with the complexity of heterogeneous software environments in a manner that real-life companies set up joint governance. Communication scenarios issued of a field analysis are pointed out in the paper; these are supported by the MOOC platform in the native environment as well as in Facebook. The proposal is indeed validated through the development of a prototype using Facebook as a case study for third-party platform interfacing. We finally highlight the benefits for the user experience.     

Electronic structure of RuO2 films

We report on the preparation and characterization of RuO₂ films. This work demontrates that it is possible to obtain single-phase RuO₂ films by d.c. reactive sputtering of ruthenium in an oxygen atmosphere via control of the parameters of the sputtering process. Photoemission, Auger spectroscopy and optical absorption measurements performed on these films are compared with results obtained for RuO₂ single crystals. This procedure is shown to provide a valuable and realistic characterization of such Ru-O films.