The Pervasive Computing Laboratory at the University of Florida is dedicated to creating smart environments and assistants to enable elderly persons to live a longer and a more independent life at home. By achieving this goal, technology will increase the chances of successful aging despite an ailing health care system (e.g. Medicaid). One of the essential services required to maximize the intelligence of a smart environment is an indoor precision tracking system. Such system allows the smart home to make proactive decisions to better serve its occupants by enabling context-awareness instead of being solely reactive to their commands. This paper presents our hands-on experience and lessons learnt from our first phase work to build up a smart home infrastructure for the elderly. We review location tracking technology and describe the rationale behind our choice of the emerging ultrasonic sensor technology. We give an overview of the House of Matilda (an in-laboratory mock up house) and describe our design of a precision in-door tracking system. We also describe an OSGi-based robust framework that abstracts the ultrasonic technology into a standard service to enable the creation of tracking based applications by third party, and to facilitate the collaboration among various devices and other OSGi services. Finally, we describe three pervasive computing applications that use the location-tracking system which we have implemented in Matilda's house.

Text generation programs need to be designed around a theory of text organization. This paper introduces Rhetorical Structure Theory, a theory of text structure in which each region of text has a central nuclear part and a number of satellites related to it. A natural text is analyzed as an example, the mechanisms of the theory are identified, and their formalization is discussed. In a comparison, Rhetorical Structure Theory is found to be more comprehensive and more informative about text function than the text organization parts of previous text generation systems.

Research on the text generation task has led to creation of a large systemic grammar of English, Nigel, which is embedded in a computer program. The grammar and the systemic framework have been extended by addition of a semantic stratum. The grammar generates sentences and other units under several kinds of experimental control.This paper describes augmentations of various precedents in the systemic framework. The emphasis is on developments which control the text to fulfill a purpose, and on characteristics which make Nigel relatively easy to embed in a larger experimental program.

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Americanae nace como un proyecto conjunto que surge dentro de la Red Europea de Información y Documentación sobre América Latina (REDIAL), y que ha afrontado la Biblioteca de la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID). Esta nueva biblioteca virtual hace más accesibles los libros digitales de tema americanista a los investigadores y usuarios interesados de cualquier parte del mundo.

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