Abstract
The large amount of pages in Websites is a problem for users who waste time looking for the information they really want. Knowledge about users' previous visits may provide patterns that allow the customization of the Website. This concept is known as Adaptive Website: a Website that adapts itself for the purpose of improving the user's experience. Some Web Mining algorithms have been proposed for adapting a Website. In this paper, a recommender system using agents with two different algorithms (associative rules and collaborative filtering) is described. Both algorithms are incremental and work with binary data. Results show that this multi-agent approach combining different algorithms is capable of improving user's satisfaction.

Abstract
Very few studies on the assessment and evolution of Chinese economics research draw on quantitative methods, namely bibliometrics. Bibliometrics is a powerful tool that helps to explore, organize and analyze large amounts of information in a quantitative manner. Selecting the most important economic journal focusing on the Chinese economy - the China Economic Review (CER) - we classified and assessed all the (512) articles that have been published in CER from its founding (1989) to December 2010. Based on these articles, and undertaking an exploratory statistical analysis on three databases - a 'bibliographic' database (512 articles), a 'roots' database (over 10 thousand citations), and an 'influence' database (over 3 thousand citations), we concluded that: 1) 'Economic Development, Technological Change, and Growth': 'Economic Systems', and 'International economics' are the most important topics for Chinese economics literature; 2) there is a trend in Chinese economics research for growing 'rigor', associated to a noticeable rise in the weight of formal/mathematical-based articles; 3) the 'International economics' topic does not influence nor is it influenced by Chinese economics literature; and 4) Chinese economics literature is characterized by a certain level of endogamy, given that its range of influence is rather concentrated (geographically) in China and the USA.

Abstract
An interferometer based on a D-shape chaotic optical fiber for measurement of multiparameters was proposed. The sensing structure relied on a D-shape fiber section spliced in between two singlemode fibers and interrogated in transmission. The optical spectrum was composed by multiple interference loss peaks, which were sensitive to the refractive index, temperature and strain-maximum sensitivities of 95.2 nm/RIU, 10.5 pm/ and -3.51 pm/µe, respectively, could be achieved. © The Author(s) 2012.

Abstract

Abstract
In the last decade multi-agent systems (MAS) have been thoroughly investigated as a suitable paradigm for process control. Despite the difficulties in designing and maintaining a MAS architecture for real production scenarios, several EU research projects have been financed and many companies are looking at the improvement in the production efficiency of such systems. The EU FP7 GRACE project aims at the integration of process and quality control in a multi-agent environment. This paper discusses the integration of quality control stations into the GRACE MAS. The stations themselves will become autonomous agents, capable of self-reconfiguration according to the needs of the production to improve shop floor efficiency while maintaining the same (and possibly higher) quality level for the manufactured products. Details about the quality control agent behaviour, its integration with the physical hardware and communication with the other agents will be given. All the concepts have been tested in an experimental environment where a vision inspection station behaves as one of the agents of the MAS platform, communicating and exchanging data with the other agents and optimizing its operations over time.

Abstract
Aggregation of data values plays an important role on distributed computations, in particular, over peer-to-peer and sensor networks, as it can provide a summary of some global system property and direct the actions of self-adaptive distributed algorithms. Examples include using estimates of the network size to dimension distributed hash tables or estimates of the average system load to direct load balancing. Distributed aggregation using nonidempotent functions, like sums, is not trivial as it is not easy to prevent a given value from being accounted for multiple times; this is especially the case if no centralized algorithms or global identifiers can be used. This paper introduces Extrema Propagation, a probabilistic technique for distributed estimation of the sum of positive real numbers. The technique relies on the exchange of duplicate insensitive messages and can be applied in flood and/or epidemic settings, where multipath routing occurs; it is tolerant of message loss; it is fast, as the number of message exchange steps can be made just slightly above the theoretical minimum; and it is fully distributed, with no single point of failure and the result produced at every node.