A phosphorus analogue of Bis(eta(4)-cyclobutadiene)iron(0)

P makes it possible: The convenient oxidative synthesis of the 16-electron organophosphorus iron sandwich complex [Fe(4-P2C2tBu2)2] suggests that the elusive all-carbon complex [Fe(4-C4H4)2] is a viable synthetic target.

Effects of calcium-chelating agents and pasteurisation on certain properties of calcium-fortified soy milk

Addition of 25 mM calcium chloride to soy milk reduced pH, increased ionic calcium and caused it to coagulate. The effects of different chelating agents were investigated on selected physicochemical properties of soy milk and on preventing coagulation. The soy milks were then pasteurised to examine how heat treatment changed some of these properties as well as to evaluate their effects on heat stability. Sediment formation and susceptibility to coagulation could be reduced by decreasing ionic calcium and increasing pH. To achieve this, the most effective chelating agents were tri-sodium citrate and disodium hydrogen phosphate. These chelating agents also reduce absolute viscosity and particle size. Sodium hexa meta phosphate was also effective, but less so; it reduced ionic calcium but had a less noticeable effect on pH. The disodium salt of ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid was not effective, as it decreased the pH of soy milk. Ionic calcium and pH are useful indicators of heat stability of calcium-fortified soy beverages. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Evaluating a realistic agent in an advice-giving task

The aim of this study was to empirically evaluate an embodied conversational agent called GRETA in an effort to answer two main questions: (1) What are the benefits (and costs) of presenting information via an animated agent, with certain characteristics, in a 'persuasion' task, compared to other forms of display? (2) How important is it that emotional expressions are added in a way that is consistent with the content of the message, in animated agents? To address these questions, a positively framed healthy eating message was created which was variously presented via GRETA, a matched human actor, GRETA's voice only (no face) or as text only. Furthermore, versions of GRETA were created which displayed additional emotional facial expressions in a way that was either consistent or inconsistent with the content of the message. Overall, it was found that although GRETA received significantly higher ratings for helpfulness and likability, presenting the message via GRETA led to the poorest memory performance among users. Importantly, however, when GRETA's additional emotional expressions were consistent with the content of the verbal message, the negative effect on memory performance disappeared. Overall, the findings point to the importance of achieving consistency in animated agents. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Multi-agent building control in shared environment

Multi-agent systems have been adopted to build intelligent environment in recent years. It was claimed that energy efficiency and occupants' comfort were the most important factors for evaluating the performance of modem work environment, and multi-agent systems presented a viable solution to handling the complexity of dynamic building environment. While previous research has made significant advance in some aspects, the proposed systems or models were often not applicable in a "shared environment". This paper introduces an ongoing project on multi-agent for building control, which aims to achieve both energy efficiency and occupants' comfort in a shared environment.

Landscape of intelligent cores: An autonomic multi-agent approach for space application

Space applications are challenged by the reliability of parallel computing systems (FPGAs) employed in space crafts due to Single-Event Upsets. The work reported in this paper aims to achieve self-managing systems which are reliable for space applications by applying autonomic computing constructs to parallel computing systems. A novel technique, 'Swarm-Array Computing' inspired by swarm robotics, and built on the foundations of autonomic and parallel computing is proposed as a path to achieve autonomy. The constitution of swarm-array computing comprising for constituents, namely the computing system, the problem / task, the swarm and the landscape is considered. Three approaches that bind these constituents together are proposed. The feasibility of one among the three proposed approaches is validated on the SeSAm multi-agent simulator and landscapes representing the computing space and problem are generated using the MATLAB.

An Agent Based Education Resource Purvey System

Most current education organizations use books and CDs as the main media, which takes a long time for knowledge updating between education resource providers and the users. The rapid development of the Internet has brought with it the possibility of improving the resource purveying mechanisms. Therefore, we designed an agent based system to purvey education resources from the resource centre to schools through the Internet. Agent technology helps to improve system performance and flexibility. This paper describes the design of our system, details the functions of the main parts of the system, shows the communication methods between agents and finally evaluates the system by experiments.

A Mobile Agent Based Spam Filter System

A new distributed spam filter system based on mobile agent is proposed in this paper. We introduce the application of mobile agent technology to the spam filter system. The system architecture, the work process, the pivotal technology of the distributed spam filter system based on mobile agent, and the Naive Bayesian filter method are described in detail. The experiment results indicate that the system can prevent spam emails effectively.

A multi-agent architect for CSCW systems: from organisational semiotics perspective

This paper describes a multi-agent architecture to support CSCW systems modelling. Since CSCW involves different organizations, it can be seen as a social model. From this point of view, we investigate the possibility of modelling CSCW by agent technology, and then based on organizational semiotics method a multi-agent architecture is proposed via using EDA agent model. We explain the components of this multi-agent architecture and design process. It is argued that this approach provides a new perspective for modelling CSCW systems.