Information Technology

What is the future direction for agent-based systems, one of the most important software R&D areas in recent years? Drawing from a body of some 200 industry and academic organisations, a European project has released a strategic roadmap that hopes to guide evolution of the field over the next decade.

AgentLink III, as its name suggests, was the third project in the series and author of the roadmap. Funded by the IST programme, it addressed the current state-of-the-art and postul

Big manufacturing jobs, especially those in the defense industry that involve management of extensive supply chains, often require resources and expertise that many believe are beyond the capacity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Recent work by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and colleagues at Pittsburgh’s Doyle Center for Manufacturing Technology, however, demonstrates the capabilities of simulation and visualization technologies for

As nanoscale circuits continue to shrink, electrical resistivity increases in the wiring and limits the maximum circuit speed. A new simulation program developed by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and George Washington University (GWU) can be used to predict such increases with greater input flexibility and model accuracy than other methods. The software program is expected to help the semiconductor industry design and test devices more efficiently and wi

Marotta UK Ltd is pleased to announce that it has designed, developed and qualified equipment for the cold gas propulsion systems on board the Galileo GIOVE-A, part of Europe’s Galileo navigation program, successfully launched by Surrey Satellite Technology, Ltd (SSTL).

The launch of the Galileo GIOVE-A, the first in a constellation of 30 satellites, marks Europe’s maiden entry into civilian-owned global positioning systems. The complete Galileo constellation (27 operational and 3 acti

For a robot to identify objects in a particular image, it is first necessary that it can “see” them. With this aim, in artificial vision, edge detectors are normally used, i.e. computer programmes that delimit the objects in an image and define the limits between them and the background, and between the different objects themselves. Edurne Barrenechea Tartas from Pamplona has designed one of these edge detectors and, after trials with a wide-ranging set of photographs, she has shown that the re

Traditionally, research works related to quality in telecommunication services have consisted of a series of analysis over a set of critical-to-quality technical parameters and a resulting enhancement proposal. However, in this Phd. Thesis we aim to face the quality issue from an overall point of view: Not only analysing the objective performance of those agents involved in service provision but also by trying to assess which is their effect in final users’ satisfaction, since this must be the fi