The paper discusses a two-machine flow shop problem with minimization of the sum of tardiness costs, being a generalization of the popular NP-hard single-machine problem with this criterion. We propose the introduction of new elimination block properties allowing for accelerating the operation of approximate algorithms of local searches, solving this problem and improving the quality of solutions determined by them.

This paper presents the results of experimental testing of parameters of the flow of an agitated liquid in a stirred tank with an eccentrically positioned shaft and with a Rushton turbine. The investigations were focused on the impact of the stirrer shaft shift in relation to the stirred tank vertical axis on the agitated liquid mean velocities and the liquid turbulent velocity fluctuations, as well as on the turbulence intensity in the tank. All the experiments were carried out in a stirred tank with the inner diameter of 286 mm and a flat bottom. The adopted values of the shaft eccentricity were zero (central position) and half the tank radius. The liquid flow instantaneous velocities were measured using laser Doppler anemometry.

This article presents results of the numerical analysis of the interaction between heavy caterpillar tracks system and subsoil. The main goal of the article is to present an algorithm to design working platforms - temporary structures enabling the work of heavy construction equipment on weak subsoils. A semi-analytical method is based on the results of the numerical analysis performed with use of the finite element method (FE software ZSoil.PC [12]). The calculations were carried out for the piling rig machine - Bauer BH20H (BT60). Three ground models were adopted: Model 1: one layer - weak cohesive soil (clay); Model 2: two layers: weak cohesive soil (clay) and cohesionless working platform (medium sand); Model 3: one layer: strong cohesionless subsoil (medium sand). The following problems were solved: I) entry of the machine on the ground with various geotechnical parameters under each caterpillar tracks II) detection of the maximum permissible angle of ground slope.

This is a modest endeavour written from an engineering perspective by a nonphilosopher to set things straight if somewhat roughly: What does artificial intelligence boil down to? What are its merits and why some dangers may stem from its development in this time of confusion when, to quote Rémi Brague: “From the point of view of technology, man appears as outdated, or at least superfluous”?

The availability of cheap and widely applicable person identification techniques is essential due to a wide-spread usage of online services. The dynamics of typing is characteristic to particular users, and users are hardly able to mimic the dynamics of typing of others. State-of-the-art solutions for person identification from the dynamics of typing are based on machine learning. The presence of hubs, i.e., few instances that appear as nearest neighbours of surprisingly many other instances, have been observed in various domains recently and hubness-aware machine learning approaches have been shown to work well in those domains. However, hubness has not been studied in the context of person identification yet, and hubnessaware techniques have not been applied to this task. In this paper, we examine hubness in typing data and propose to use ECkNN, a recent hubness-aware regression technique together with dynamic time warping for person identification. We collected time-series data describing the dynamics of typing and used it to evaluate our approach. Experimental results show that hubness-aware techniques outperform state-of-the-art time-series classifiers.