A decade of research and development in disability, virtual reality and associated technologies: review of ICDVRAT 1996−2006

The International Conference (series) on Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technologies (ICDVRAT) this year held its sixth biennial conference, celebrating ten years of research and development in this field. A total of 220 papers have been presented at the first six conferences, addressing potential, development, exploration and examination of how these technologies can be applied in disabilities research and practice. The research community is broad and multi-disciplined, comprising a variety of scientific and medical researchers, rehabilitation therapists, educators and practitioners. Likewise, technologies, their applications and target user populations are also broad, ranging from sensors positioned on real world objects to fully immersive interactive simulated environments. A common factor is the desire to identify what the technologies have to offer and how they can provide added value to existing methods of assessment, rehabilitation and support for individuals with disabilities. This paper presents a brief review of the first decade of research and development in the ICDVRAT community, defining technologies, applications and target user populations served.

A moving-mesh finite element method and its application to the numerical solution of phase-change problems

A distributed Lagrangian moving-mesh finite element method is applied to problems involving changes of phase. The algorithm uses a distributed conservation principle to determine nodal mesh velocities, which are then used to move the nodes. The nodal values are obtained from an ALE (Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian) equation, which represents a generalization of the original algorithm presented in Applied Numerical Mathematics, 54:450--469 (2005). Having described the details of the generalized algorithm it is validated on two test cases from the original paper and is then applied to one-phase and, for the first time, two-phase Stefan problems in one and two space dimensions, paying particular attention to the implementation of the interface boundary conditions. Results are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and the effectiveness of the method, including comparisons against analytical solutions where available.

The impact of large scale atmospheric circulation patterns on wind power generation and its potential predictability: a case study over the UK

Over recent years there has been an increasing deployment of renewable energy generation technologies, particularly large-scale wind farms. As wind farm deployment increases, it is vital to gain a good understanding of how the energy produced is affected by climate variations, over a wide range of time-scales, from short (hours to weeks) to long (months to decades) periods. By relating wind speed at specific sites in the UK to a large-scale climate pattern (the North Atlantic Oscillation or "NAO"), the power generated by a modelled wind turbine under three different NAO states is calculated. It was found that the wind conditions under these NAO states may yield a difference in the mean wind power output of up to 10%. A simple model is used to demonstrate that forecasts of future NAO states can potentially be used to improve month-ahead statistical forecasts of monthly-mean wind power generation. The results confirm that the NAO has a significant impact on the hourly-, daily- and monthly-mean power output distributions from the turbine with important implications for (a) the use of meteorological data (e.g. their relationship to large scale climate patterns) in wind farm site assessment and, (b) the utilisation of seasonal-to-decadal climate forecasts to estimate future wind farm power output. This suggests that further research into the links between large-scale climate variability and wind power generation is both necessary and valuable.

Gene-chip technology and its applications

Gene Chips are finding extensive use in animal and plant science. Generally microarrays are of two kind, cDNA or oligonucleotide. cDNA microarrays were developed at Stanford University, whereas oligonucleotide were developed by Affymetrix. The construction of cDNA or oligonucleotide on a glass slide helps to compare the gene expression level of treated and control samples by labeling mRNA with green (Cy3) and red (Cy5) dyes. The hybridized gene chip emit fluorescence whose intensity and colour can be measured. RNA labeling can be done directly or indirectly. Indirect method involves amino allyle modified dUTP instead of pre-labelled nucleotide. Hybridization of gene chip generally occurs in a minimum volume possible and to ensure the hetroduplex formation, a ten fold more DNA is spotted on slide than in the solutions. A confocal or semi confocal laser technologies coupled with CCD camera are used for image acquisition. For standardization, house keeping genes are used or cDNA are spotted in gene chip that are not present in treated or control samples. Moreover, statistical analysis (image analysis) and cluster analysis softwares have been developed by Stanford University. The gene-chip technology has many applications like expression analysis, gene expression signatures (molecular phenotypes) and promoter regulatory element co-expression.

Coincidence theorems and its applications to equilibrium problems

Given two maps h : X x K -> R and g : X -> K such that, for all x is an element of X, h(x, g(x)) = 0, we consider the equilibrium problem of finding (x) over tilde is an element of X such that h((x) over tilde, g(x)) >= 0 for every x is an element of X. This question is related to a coincidence problem.

A discontinuous-Galerkin-based immersed boundary method with non-homogeneous boundary conditions and its application to elasticity

We propose a discontinuous-Galerkin-based immersed boundary method for elasticity problems. The resulting numerical scheme does not require boundary fitting meshes and avoids boundary locking by switching the elements intersected by the boundary to a discontinuous Galerkin approximation. Special emphasis is placed on the construction of a method that retains an optimal convergence rate in the presence of non-homogeneous essential and natural boundary conditions. The role of each one of the approximations introduced is illustrated by analyzing an analog problem in one spatial dimension. Finally, extensive two- and three-dimensional numerical experiments on linear and nonlinear elasticity problems verify that the proposed method leads to optimal convergence rates under combinations of essential and natural boundary conditions. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A DISCRETIZATION SCHEME FOR AN ONE-DIMENSIONAL REACTION-DIFFUSION EQUATION WITH DELAY AND ITS DYNAMICS

The goal of this paper is to present an approximation scheme for a reaction-diffusion equation with finite delay, which has been used as a model to study the evolution of a population with density distribution u, in such a way that the resulting finite dimensional ordinary differential system contains the same asymptotic dynamics as the reaction-diffusion equation.

On a product formula for the Conley-Zelmder index of symplectic paths and its applications

Using invariance by fixed-endpoints homotopies and a generalized notion of symplectic Cayley transform, we prove a product formula for the Conley-Zehnder index of continuous paths with arbitrary endpoints in the symplectic group. We discuss two applications of the formula, to the metaplectic group and to periodic solutions of Hamiltonian systems.

On a formula for the spectral flow and its applications

We consider a continuous path of bounded symmetric Fredholm bilinear forms with arbitrary endpoints on a real Hilbert space, and we prove a formula that gives the spectral flow of the path in terms of the spectral flow of the restriction to a finite codimensional closed subspace. We also discuss the case of restrictions to a continuous path of finite codimensional closed subspaces. As an application of the formula, we introduce the notion of spectral flow for a periodic semi-Riemannian geodesic, and we compute its value in terms of the Maslov index. (C) 2010 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

On Approximate KKT Condition and its Extension to Continuous Variational Inequalities

In this work, we introduce a necessary sequential Approximate-Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (AKKT) condition for a point to be a solution of a continuous variational inequality, and we prove its relation with the Approximate Gradient Projection condition (AGP) of Garciga-Otero and Svaiter. We also prove that a slight variation of the AKKT condition is sufficient for a convex problem, either for variational inequalities or optimization. Sequential necessary conditions are more suitable to iterative methods than usual punctual conditions relying on constraint qualifications. The AKKT property holds at a solution independently of the fulfillment of a constraint qualification, but when a weak one holds, we can guarantee the validity of the KKT conditions.

Towards a Protocol for the Attachment of Metadata to Service Descriptions and its Use in Semantic Discovery

Service discovery in large scale, open distributed systems is difficult because of the need to filter out services suitable to the task at hand from a potentially huge pool of possibilities. Semantic descriptions have been advocated as the key to expressive service discovery, but the most commonly used service descriptions and registry protocols do not support such descriptions in a general manner. In this paper, we present a protocol, its implementation and an API for registering semantic service descriptions and other task/user-specific metadata, and for discovering services according to these. Our approach is based on a mechanism for attaching structured and unstructured metadata, which we show to be applicable to multiple registry technologies. The result is an extremely flexible service registry that can be the basis of a sophisticated semantically-enhanced service discovery engine, an essential component of a Semantic Grid.

Development Of Climate Change Information Database And Its Use In Civic Consciousness Enlightenment

GCM outputs such as CMIP3 are available via network access to PCMDI web site. Meteorological researchers are familiar with the usage of the GCM data, but the most of researchers other than meteorology such as agriculture, civil engineering, etc., and general people are not familiar with the GCM. There are some difficulties to use GCM; 1) to download the enormous quantity of data, 2) to understand the GCM methodology, parameters and grids. In order to provide a quick access way to GCM, Climate Change Information Database has been developed. The purpose of the database is to bridge the users and meteorological specialists and to facilitate the understanding the climate changes. The resolution of the data is unified, and climate change amount or factors for each meteorological element are provided from the database. All data in the database are interpolated on the same 80km mesh. Available data are the present-future projections of 27 GCMs, 16 meteorological elements (precipitation, temperature, etc.), 3 emission scenarios (A1B, A2, B1). We showed the summary of this database to residents in Toyama prefecture and measured the effect of showing and grasped the image for the climate change by using the Internet questionary survey. The persons who feel a climate change at the present tend to feel the additional changes in the future. It is important to show the monitoring results of climate change for a citizen and promote the understanding for the climate change that had already occurred. It has been shown that general images for the climate change promote to understand the need of the mitigation, and that it is important to explain about the climate change that might occur in the future even if it did not occur at the present in order to have people recognize widely the need of the adaptation.

On the existence of infinite heteroclinic cycles in polynomial systems and its dynamic consequences

In this work we consider the dynamic consequences of the existence of infinite heteroclinic cycle in planar polynomial vector fields, which is a trajectory connecting two saddle points at infinity. It is stated that, although the saddles which form the cycle belong to infinity, for certain types of nonautonomous perturbations the perturbed system may present a complex dynamic behavior of the solutions in a finite part of the phase plane, due to the existence of tangencies and transversal intersections of their stable and unstable manifolds. This phenomenon might be called the chaos arising from infinity. The global study at infinity is made via the Poincare Compactification and the argument used to prove the statement is the Birkhoff-Smale Theorem. (c) 2004 WILEY-NCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

The Mexican film industry and its participation in the global value chain

Includes bibliography

The international mobility of talent and its impact on global development: an overview

Includes bibliography