Multiscale Curvature Analysis of Asphaltic Aggregate Particles

A new method for characterization and analysis of asphaltic mixtures aggregate particles is reported. By relying on multiscale representation of the particles, curvature estimation, and discriminant analysis for optimal separation of the categories of mixtures, a particularly effective and comprehensive methodology is obtained. The potential of the methodology is illustrated with respect to three important types of particles used in asphaltic mixtures, namely basalt, gabbro, and gravel. The obtained results show that gravel particles are markedly distinct from the other two types of particles, with the gabbro category resulting with intermediate geometrical properties. The importance of each considered measurement in the discrimination between the three categories of particles was also quantified in terms of the adopted discriminant analysis.

Perfect Simulation of a Coupling Achieving the (d)over-bar-distance Between Ordered Pairs of Binary Chains of Infinite Order

We explicitly construct a stationary coupling attaining Ornstein`s (d) over bar -distance between ordered pairs of binary chains of infinite order. Our main tool is a representation of the transition probabilities of the coupled bivariate chain of infinite order as a countable mixture of Markov transition probabilities of increasing order. Under suitable conditions on the loss of memory of the chains, this representation implies that the coupled chain can be represented as a concatenation of i.i.d. sequences of bivariate finite random strings of symbols. The perfect simulation algorithm is based on the fact that we can identify the first regeneration point to the left of the origin almost surely.

Polar orthogonal representations of real reductive algebraic groups

We prove that a polar orthogonal representation of a real reductive algebraic group has the same closed orbits as the isotropy representation of a pseudo-Riemannian symmetric space. We also develop a partial structural theory of polar orthogonal representations of real reductive algebraic groups which slightly generalizes some results of the structural theory of real reductive Lie algebras. (c) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Exploration of the idea of the horse in graphics and sculpture

The exploration of the idea of the horse is a very complex and open quest. Primarily it entails some conception of what the idea of the horse is. In choosing to title the project as such, I was attempting to indicate that what was of major interest to me was the representation of those qualities of the horse which are abstract and intangible as well as the physical qualities of the horse. Because of this interest, much of my work is concerned with movement, gesture, and the effects of structure, or lack thereof, on movement and gesture.

A Visibility Analysis of the Cape Wind Project

Cape Wind has proposed a wind farm of 130 turbines on Horseshoe Shoal in the center of Nantucket Sound. A prominent concern about the project is the impact the visibility of the turbines will have on the region's tourism industry and property values. It is feared that their presence will diminish the value of the pristine coastline that has attracted vacationers to Cape Cod for generations. In this project, we assess the extent to which Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket will be visually affected by the wind farm. It was completed using a Viewshed Analysis in the GIS program, ArcMap, from the surface, mean, and maximum height of the towers. These Viewsheds were combined to give a comprehensive perspective of which areas are able to see the highest percent of the wind farm. Finally, a weighted land use value was applied to the Viewshed to account for the impact of land use on the ability to see the project. The objective of this analysis is to provide a visual representation of how great an influence the wind farm will in fact have on Cape Cod.

A BDI-based approach for the assessment of driver's decision-making in commuter scenarios

The rapid growth of urban areas has a significant impact on traffic and transportation systems. New management policies and planning strategies are clearly necessary to cope with the more than ever limited capacity of existing road networks. The concept of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) arises in this scenario; rather than attempting to increase road capacity by means of physical modifications to the infrastructure, the premise of ITS relies on the use of advanced communication and computer technologies to handle today’s traffic and transportation facilities. Influencing users’ behaviour patterns is a challenge that has stimulated much research in the ITS field, where human factors start gaining great importance to modelling, simulating, and assessing such an innovative approach. This work is aimed at using Multi-agent Systems (MAS) to represent the traffic and transportation systems in the light of the new performance measures brought about by ITS technologies. Agent features have good potentialities to represent those components of a system that are geographically and functionally distributed, such as most components in traffic and transportation. A BDI (beliefs, desires, and intentions) architecture is presented as an alternative to traditional models used to represent the driver behaviour within microscopic simulation allowing for an explicit representation of users’ mental states. Basic concepts of ITS and MAS are presented, as well as some application examples related to the subject. This has motivated the extension of an existing microscopic simulation framework to incorporate MAS features to enhance the representation of drivers. This way demand is generated from a population of agents as the result of their decisions on route and departure time, on a daily basis. The extended simulation model that now supports the interaction of BDI driver agents was effectively implemented, and different experiments were performed to test this approach in commuter scenarios. MAS provides a process-driven approach that fosters the easy construction of modular, robust, and scalable models, characteristics that lack in former result-driven approaches. Its abstraction premises allow for a closer association between the model and its practical implementation. Uncertainty and variability are addressed in a straightforward manner, as an easier representation of humanlike behaviours within the driver structure is provided by cognitive architectures, such as the BDI approach used in this work. This way MAS extends microscopic simulation of traffic to better address the complexity inherent in ITS technologies.

Studies in non-Gaussian analysis

This thesis presents general methods in non-Gaussian analysis in infinite dimensional spaces. As main applications we study Poisson and compound Poisson spaces. Given a probability measure μ on a co-nuclear space, we develop an abstract theory based on the generalized Appell systems which are bi-orthogonal. We study its properties as well as the generated Gelfand triples. As an example we consider the important case of Poisson measures. The product and Wick calculus are developed on this context. We provide formulas for the change of the generalized Appell system under a transformation of the measure. The L² structure for the Poisson measure, compound Poisson and Gamma measures are elaborated. We exhibit the chaos decomposition using the Fock isomorphism. We obtain the representation of the creation, annihilation operators. We construct two types of differential geometry on the configuration space over a differentiable manifold. These two geometries are related through the Dirichlet forms for Poisson measures as well as for its perturbations. Finally, we construct the internal geometry on the compound configurations space. In particular, the intrinsic gradient, the divergence and the Laplace-Beltrami operator. As a result, we may define the Dirichlet forms which are associated to a diffusion process. Consequently, we obtain the representation of the Lie algebra of vector fields with compact support. All these results extends directly for the marked Poisson spaces.

Enzymatic inhibitory activity of hydroxycinnamates (HCs): in silico studies

Diabetes is a worldwide health issue that has been expanding mainly in developed countries. It is characterized by abnormal levels of blood sugar due to several factors. The most common are resistance to insulin and the production of defective insulin which exerts little or no effect. Its most common symptoms include tissue damage to several systems due to elevated levels of blood sugar. One of the key enzymes in hydrocarbon metabolism is α-glucosidase (EC 3.2.1.20). It catalyzes the breakdown of complex carbohydrates into their respective monomers (glucose) which allows them to be absorbed. In this work, caffeoyl quinic acids and their metabolites were analyzed as potential inhibitors for α-glucosidase. The search for the best inhibitor was conducted using molecular docking. The affinity of each compound was compared to the inhibitor present in the crystal structure of the protein. As no inhibitor with a similar affinity was´found, a new approach was used, in situ drug design. It was not possible to achieve an inhibitor capable of competing with the one present in the crystal structure of the enzyme, which is also its current commercial inhibitor. It is possible to draw some conclusions as to which functional groups interact best with certain residues of the active site. This work was divided into three main sections. The first section, Diabetes, serves as an introduction to what is Diabetes, its symptoms and/or side effects and how caffeoyl quinic acids could be used as a treatment. The second section, Caffeoylquinic acids and their metabolites as inhibitors for Alfa-glucosidase, corresponds to the search through molecular docking of caffeoyl quinic acids as inhibitors for α-glucosidase and what was possible to draw from this search. The last section, In situ design of an inhibitor for α-glucosidase (EC 3.2.1.20), corresponds to the in situ drug design study and what it achieved. The representation of each of the molecules used as a ligand can be found in the Annexes.

The contribution of 700,000 ORF sequence tags to the definition of the human transcriptome

open reading frame expressed sequences tags (ORESTES) differ from conventional ESTs by providing sequence data from the central protein coding portion of transcripts. We generated a total of 696,745 ORESTES sequences from 24 human tissues and used a subset of the data that correspond to a set of 15,095 full-length mRNAs as a means of assessing the efficiency of the strategy and its potential contribution to the definition of the human transcriptome. We estimate that ORESTES sampled over 80% of all highly and moderately expressed, and between 40% and 50% of rarely expressed, human genes. In our most thoroughly sequenced tissue, the breast, the 130,000 ORESTES generated are derived from transcripts from an estimated 70% of all genes expressed in that tissue, with an equally efficient representation of both highly and poorly expressed genes. In this respect, we find that the capacity of the ORESTES strategy both for gene discovery and shotgun transcript sequence generation significantly exceeds that of conventional ESTs. The distribution of ORESTES is such that many human transcripts are now represented by a scaffold of partial sequences distributed along the length of each gene product. The experimental joining of the scaffold components, by reverse transcription-PCR, represents a direct route to transcript finishing that may represent a useful alternative to full-length cDNA cloning.

GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATIONS of MESSAGE EXCHANGES INTO WEB SERVICE-BASED APPLICATIONS

Web service-based application is an architectural style, where a collection of Web services communicate to each other to execute processes. With the popularity increase of Web service-based applications and since messages exchanged inside of this applications can be complex, we need tools to simplify the understanding of interrelationship among Web services. This work present a description of a graphical representation of Web service-based applications and the mechanisms inserted among Web service requesters and providers to catch information to represent an application. The major contribution of this paper is to discus and use HTTP and SOAP information to show a graphical representation similar to a UML sequence diagram of Web service-based applications.

Notes on Newton-Euler formulation of robotic manipulators

The equations corresponding to Newton-Euler iterative method for the determination of forces and moments acting on the rigid links of a robotic manipulator are given a new treatment using composed vectors for the representation of both kinematical and dynamical quantities. It is shown that Lagrange equations for the motion of a holonomic system are easily found from the composed vectors defined in this note. Application to a simple model of an industrial robot shows that the method developed in these notes is efficient in solving the dynamics of a robotic manipulator. An example is developed, where it is seen that with the application of appropriate control moments applied to each arm of the robot, starting from a given initial position, it is possible to reach equilibrium in a final pre-assigned position.

Interior point method for long-term generation scheduling of large-scale hydrothermal systems

This paper presents an interior point method for the long-term generation scheduling of large-scale hydrothermal systems. The problem is formulated as a nonlinear programming one due to the nonlinear representation of hydropower production and thermal fuel cost functions. Sparsity exploitation techniques and an heuristic procedure for computing the interior point method search directions have been developed. Numerical tests in case studies with systems of different dimensions and inflow scenarios have been carried out in order to evaluate the proposed method. Three systems were tested, with the largest being the Brazilian hydropower system with 74 hydro plants distributed in several cascades. Results show that the proposed method is an efficient and robust tool for solving the long-term generation scheduling problem.

Alternative Model of Three-Phase Transmission Line Theory-Based Modal Decomposition

In this paper is shown the development of a transmission line, based on discrete circuit elements that provide responses directly in the time domain and phase. This model is valid for ideally transposed rows represent the phases of each of the small line segments are separated in their modes of propagation and the voltage and current are calculated at the modal field. However, the conversion phase-mode-phase is inserted in the state equations which describe the currents and voltages along the line of which there is no need to know the user of the model representation of the theory in the field lines modal.

The Interval Constructor on classes of ML-algebras

Monoidal logic, ML for short, which formalized the fuzzy logics of continuous t-norms and their residua, has arisen great interest, since it has been applied to fuzzy mathematics, artificial intelligence, and other areas. It is clear that fuzzy logics basically try to represent imperfect or fuzzy information aiming to model the natural human reasoning. On the other hand, in order to deal with imprecision in the computational representation of real numbers, the use of intervals have been proposed, as it can guarantee that the results of numerical computation are in a bounded interval, controlling, in this way, the numerical errors produced by successive roundings. There are several ways to connect both areas; the most usual one is to consider interval membership degrees. The algebraic counterpart of ML is ML-algebra, an interesting structure due to the fact that by adding some properties it is possible to reach different classes of residuated lattices. We propose to apply an interval constructor to ML-algebras and some of their subclasses, to verify some properties within these algebras, in addition to the analysis of the algebraic aspects of them

Dimensioning the fear of dermatologic diseases

The symbolic representation of a disease is related to personal perceptions and cultural background. In the present study, the authors evaluate the population knowledge and fears related to skin and other prevalent or severe diseases. This survey was based on a semi-structured form to investigate demographic aspects, dermatologic consultations, fears and knowledge of 19 dermatoses and 11 prevalent or severe diseases. We interviewed 302 people, of which 54% were women and the mean age was 39 years. Some fears of dermatoses surpass those of severe diseases. Skin cancer and total alopecia disclosed fears similar to that of myocardial infarction. - fundament, fundamentals - objective, objectives - method, methods - result, results - conclusion, conclusions