Context-aware trust negotiation in peer-to-peer service collaborations Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS) are the latest hot topics to software manufacturing and delivering, and attempt to provide a dynamic cross-organisational business integration solution. In a dynamic cross-organisational collaboration environment, services involved in a business process are generally provided by different organisations, and lack supports of common security mechanisms and centralized management middleware. On such occasions, services may have to achieve middleware functionalities and achieve business objectives in a pure peer-to-peer fashion. As the participating services involved in a business process may be selected and combined at run time, a participating service may have to collaborate with multiple participating services which it has no pre-existing knowledge in prior. This introduces some new challenges to traditional trust management mechanisms. Automated Trust Negotiation (ATN) is a practical approach which helps to generate mutual trust relationship for collaborating principals which may have no pre-existing knowledge about each other without in a peer-to-peer way. Because credentials often contain sensitive attributes, ATN defines an iterative and bilateral negotiation process for credentials exchange and specifies security policies that regulate the disclosure of sensitive credentials. Credentials disclosure in the iterative process may follow different orders and combinations, each of which forms a credential chain. It is practically desirable to identify the optimal credential chain that satisfies certain objectives such as minimum release of sensitive information and minimum performance penalty. In this paper we present a heuristic and context-aware algorithm for identifying the optimal chain that uses context-related knowledge to minimize 1) the release of sensitive information including both credentials and policies and 2) the cost of credentials retrieving. Moreover, our solution offers a hierarchical method for protecting sensitive policies and provides a risk-based strategy for handling credential circular dependency. We have implemented the ATN mechanisms based on our algorithm and incorporated them into the CROWN Grid middleware. Experimental results demonstrate their performance-related advantages over other existing solutions.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

peer-to-peer access control
privacy preservation
security policy
trust establishment


Project selection criteria by strategic orientation One information planning decision involves project selection from among a portfolio of options. This involves multiple steps, including selection and weighting of alternatives. Choice and weighting on criteria become crucial in the selection of the projects to pursue. A survey conducted by the authors found that organizations with an expectation of future IS importance rely heavily on organizational goals, management support and environmental factors. Organizations with low strategic expectations of IS rely more heavily on management support, political considerations, and risk. The results allow managers to position selection criteria according to their strategic use of information technology.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

project management
strategic grid
information system selection


Formulation of the static frame problem This report describes a static framework validation challenge problem used in the SANDIA Validation Challenge Workshop, May 2123, 2006. The challenge problem has clear engineering character, is simple to state and allows many different approaches to solve it. The regulatory assessment problem is to estimate the probability of a given vertical displacement to exceed a prescribed threshold.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

model validation
uncertainty quantification
failure probability


Application and performance analysis of neural networks for decision support in conceptual design This paper analyzes the use of feedforward multilayer perceptron neural networks in the support of the decision process during the conceptual design phase of engineering systems. A user friendly software tool is proposed in order to increase the quality of the designers decisions by offering intuitive insights during the early design phase. The performance gain is evaluated through controlled experiments performed with non-experienced users. This paper proposes using the prediction capabilities of Artificial Neural Networks to recommend design solutions based on earlier successful designs. It implements a feedforward multilayer perceptron architecture with sigmoid activation functions, and uses the LevenbergMarquardt training algorithm for weight matrix update. The network complexity was abstracted to ease the utilization by non-expert users. Different stopping conditions were developed including one where the training and testing error divergence is monitored to tackle the bias/variance dilemma. The advantages of this approach for decision support were measured through a set of six different case studies such as gaseous automobile emissions prediction based on institutional data, or the choice of a launcher for a specific space mission. The decision support tool generated quality performance gains between 13% and 88% for examples ranging from simple continuous single variable to complex discrete multivariate problems.

O O O O O B I O B I O B I O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

conceptual design
decision support
neural networks


motion-aware temporal coherence for video resizing Temporal coherence is crucial in content-aware video retargeting. To date, this problem has been addressed by constraining temporally adjacent pixels to be transformed coherently. However, due to the motion-oblivious nature of this simple constraint, the retargeted videos often exhibit flickering or waving artifacts, especially when significant camera or object motions are involved. Since the feature correspondence across frames varies spatially with both camera and object motion, motion-aware treatment of features is required for video resizing. This motivated us to align consecutive frames by estimating interframe camera motion and to constrain relative positions in the aligned frames. To preserve object motion, we detect distinct moving areas of objects across multiple frames and constrain each of them to be resized consistently. We build a complete video resizing framework by incorporating our motion-aware constraints with an adaptation of the scale-and-stretch optimization recently proposed by Wang and colleagues. Our streaming implementation of the framework allows efficient resizing of long video sequences with low memory cost. Experiments demonstrate that our method produces spatiotemporally coherent retargeting results even for challenging examples with complex camera and object motion, which are difficult to handle with previous techniques.

O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


sifting micro-blogging stream for events of user interest Micro-blogging is a new form of social communication that encourages users to share information about anything they are seeing or doing, the motivation facilitated by the ability to post brief text messages through a variety of devices. Twitter, the most popular micro-blogging tool, is exhibiting rapid growth [3]: up to 11\% of online Americans are using Twitter by December 2008, compared to 6\% in May 2008. Due to its nature, micro-blogosphere has unique features: (i) It is a source of extremely up-to-date information about what is happening in the world; (ii) It captures the wisdom of millions of people and covers a broad range of domains. These features make micro-blogosphere more than a popular medium of social communication: we believe that it has additionally become a valuable source of extremely up-to-date news on virtually any subject of user interest. Making use of micro-blogosphere in this new role we meet the following challenges: (A) Since any given subject is generally mentioned in the micro-blogging stream on the continuous basis, a method is needed for locating periods of news on this subject. (B) Additionally, even for such periods, stream filtering is required for removing noise and for extracting messages that best describe the news. To address these challenges we make and exploit the following observations: (A) For an arbitrary subject, events that catch user interest gain distinguishably more attention than the average mentioning of the subject resulting in message activity bursts for it. (B) Most of the messages in an activity burst describe common event in close variations - either rephrased or "retweeted" between the users. We demonstrate TweetSieve - a system that allows obtaining news on any given subject by sifting the Twitter stream. Our work is related to frequecy-based analysis applied to blogs [1], but higher latency and lower coverage in blogs makes the analysis less effective than in case of micro-blogs. In TweetSieve demo, the user is able to express the subject of her interest by an arbitrary search string. The system shows the period of events occuring for the subject and outputs tweets that best describe each of the events. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the system for "Semantic search" as a sample subject. The underlying process consists of two steps: Identifying activity bursts. Counting the messages matching the search string in the stream over time, the frequency curve is constructed. Activity bursts in the curve are identified by taking the periods of frequency exceeding the standard deviation from the average. Selecting messages that best describe news events. For the set of all messages matching the search string in an activity burst, we apply the message-granular variation of our keyphrase extraction algorithm [2] that is specifically suited to efficiently filtering noisy data. The algorithm clusters messages with respect to their similarity to each other and chooses central messages from the most dense clusters. As the similarity measure we use Jaccard coefficient for the "bag of words" representation of messages. The demonstration illustrates the potential of our approach in bringing news acquisition to a new level of promptness and coverage range.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O


An extension of the GaussNewton algorithm for estimation under asymmetric loss Estimators obtained by the use of the relevant loss function lead to forecasts with good properties when the same loss function is used to evaluate the forecasts. The provided extension of the GaussNewton algorithm is tailored for the associated optimization problem. Due to an approximation of the second derivative of the loss function, it can be viewed as a succession of linear generalized least-squares regressions and is easy to implement. Smoothing loss functions which do not possess derivatives has asymptotic validity. The extension performs well compared to the Newton (with exact Hessian) and BFGS algorithms in a Monte Carlo study employing different loss functions and several autoregressive models.

O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

loss function
estimation
optimization
smoothing

forecasting
newton-like method
iteratively reweighted least squares


Evaluating chi-squared automatic interaction detection We propose a method to compute confidence bounds around the predictions from chi-squared automatic interaction detection (CHAID). These bounds are useful for ex ante target selection as some clusters may or may not overlap. They are also useful for ex post evaluation of the predictive quality of CHAID. The method is illustrated using simulated data. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Scalable synchronization of clocks in wireless sensor networks In many sensor-based applications, identifying the sequence of event occurrence is useful. When local clocks lack synchronizations, it is difficult or time-consuming to determine the order of event occurrence. In this paper, we first describe a centralized method for pseudo-synchronizing non-base clocks to a base clock. The pseudo-shift between a pair of non-base/base clocks is estimated by the difference of the occurrence times of pairs of events included in direct happened-before relations that only involve this pair of sensors. Evaluation results suggest that this method can closely make non-base clocks synchronized with a base clock without violating the direct happened-before relations. The centralized pseudo-synchronization method demands a O(N3) O ( N 3 ) computational overhead on the base sensor in a network of N sensors. Then, in order to distribute the computational overhead across all sensors, a localized pseudo-synchronization method is proposed by taking advantage of the topologies of wireless sensor networks.

O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I

timer synchronization
happened-before relations
transmission delays


design of a high performance fft processor based on fpga The design method of a real-time FFT processor is presented. By optimizing algorithm of memory mapping and generation of twiddle factors, a radix-4 butterfly can be calculated in one clock cycle. An approach to adaptive overflow control is also introduced to avoid overflow without interrupting the computing pipeline. The design is implemented on a FPGA chip and achieves the operating frequency at 127 MHz. It can complete a complex 1024-point FFT within 10.1 ?s.

O O O O O B I O O B O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


rendering implicit flow volumes Traditional flow volumes construct an explicit geometrical or parametrical representation from the vector field. The geometry is updated interactively and then rendered using an unstructured volume rendering technique. Unless a detailed refinement of the flow volume is specified for the interior, information inside the underlying flow volume is lost in the linear interpolation. These disadvantages can be avoided and/or alleviated using an implicit flow model. An implicit flow is a scalar field constructed such that any point in the field is associated with a termination surface using an advection operator on the flow. We present two techniques, a slice-based three-dimensional texture mapping and an interval volume segmentation coupled with a tetrahedron projection-based renderer, to render implicit stream flows. In the first method, the implicit flow representation is loaded as a 3D texture and manipulated using a dynamic texture operation that allows the flow to be investigated interactively. In our second method, a geometric flow volume is extracted from the implicit flow using a high dimensional iso-contouring or interval volume routine. This provides a very detailed flow volume or set of flow volumes that can easily change topology, while retaining accurate characteristics within the flow volume. The advantages and disadvantages of these two techniques are compared with traditional explicit flow volumes.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

graphics hardware
flow visualization
interval volume rendering
implicit stream flow


Co-evolutionary particle swarm optimization to solve constrained optimization problems ? This paper presents a co-evolutionary particle swarm optimization (CPSO) algorithm to solve global nonlinear optimization problems. A new co-evolutionary PSO (CPSO) is constructed. In the algorithm, a deterministic selection strategy is proposed to ensure the diversity of population. Meanwhile, based on the theory of extrapolation, the induction of evolving direction is enhanced by adding a co-evolutionary strategy, in which the particles make full use of the information each other by using gene-adjusting and adaptive focus-varied tuning operator. Infeasible degree selection mechanism is used to handle the constraints. A new selection criterion is adopted as tournament rules to select individuals. Also, the infeasible solution is properly accepted as the feasible solution based on a defined threshold of the infeasible degree. This diversity mechanism is helpful to guide the search direction towards the feasible region. Our approach was tested on six problems commonly used in the literature. The results obtained are repeatedly closer to the true optimum solution than the other techniques.

O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

global nonlinear optimization
particle swarm optimization
extrapolation
infeasible degree
diversity mechanism


A beneficial analysis of deployment knowledge for key distribution in wireless sensor networks Because of the resource constraints on sensor networks, many recent key management schemes exploit the location of nodes in order to establish pairwise keys. Despite these efforts, location discovery for sensor networks is very difficult because existing schemes have failed to consider changes in the signal range and the deployment error. As a result, network performance may accidentally decrease, whereas costs increase. In this paper, we used the theory of the signal range and deployment error knowledge to analyze sensor nodes location information. Combining with the probabilistic pre-distribution method, we proposed a scheme that provides high connectivity and secure communication with better communication overhead by defining an efficient number of adjacent cells and determining the adequate length of the cell. With such optimistic results, novel deployment knowledge is also expected to provide superior performance with different types of key distribution schemes. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

polynomial pre-distribution
key pre-distribution
wireless sensor network


Verification of non-monotonic knowledge bases Non-monotonic Knowledge-Based Systems (KBSs) must undergo quality assurance procedures for the following two reasons: (i) belief revision (if such is provided) cannot always guarantee the structural correctness of the knowledge base, and in certain cases may introduce new semantic errors in the revised theory; (ii) non-monotonic theories may have multiple extensions, and some types of functional errors which do not violate structural properties of a given extension are hard to detect without testing the overall performance of the KBS. This paper presents an extension of the distributed verification method, which is meant to reveal structural and functional anomalies in non-monotonic KBSs. Two classes of anomalies are considered: (i) structural anomalies which manifest themselves within a given extension (such as logical inconsistencies, structural incompleteness, and intractabilities caused by circular rule chains), and (ii) functional anomalies related to the overall performance of the KBS (such as the existence of complementary rules and some types of rule subsumptions). The corresponding verification tests are presented and illustrated on an extended example.

B O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O

performance evaluation
validation
anomaly detection
non-monotonic theories
knowledge-based systems
expert systems
truth maintenance systems
default reasoning


a fragile color image watermarking framework focusing a new invisible domain Authentication of multimedia contents attended a broad attention due to illegal copying of digital contents and unauthorized recording and distribution that leads cyber crime in a massive form. Our focused area is digital color image and its authentication. For this purpose we've already proposed and reported different fragile color image authentication frameworks that authenticate an image through embedding color watermarks into color host images in a secured way with the help of a secret key and a hash function. According to our LSB scheme which was proven efficient, we have distributed the watermark information into the LSB of 'Blue' value of the host image which is perceptually invisible to watermarked image. Presently our research encounters a new invisible zone within the bit pattern of color images. In this paper we are proposing a technique which will embed watermark information into the 'Green' value of host image. It will ensure the ownership authentication of the host image with the help of a user specific secret key to verify the authenticity, integrity and ownership of the image. At the watermark extraction end, we've used blind extraction method, i.e., neither the host image nor the watermark image is required at the time of watermark extraction.

O B O B I O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

authentication
invisible
image watermarking
blind extraction
fragile
lsb scheme
ownership


text mining for bone biology Osteoporosis, which is characterized by reduced bone mass and debilitating fractures, may reach epidemic proportions with the aging of the US population. The intensity of research in this field of study is reflected by the facts that The American Society of Bone and Mineral Research has a membership of nearly 4,000 physicians, clinical investigators, and basic research scientists from over fifty countries and that NIH is expected to spend over 200 million dollars on osteoporosis research alone in 2010. Bone biologists may be overwhelmed by the amount of literature constantly being generated, thus the identification and extraction of existing and novel relationships among biological entities or terms appearing in the biological literature is an ongoing problem. The problem has become more pressing with the development of large online publicly available databases of biological literature. Extraction and visualization of relationships between biological entities appearing in these databases offers the opportunity of keeping researchers up-to-date in their research domain. This may be achieved through helping them visualize possible biological pathways and by generating likely new hypotheses concerning novel interactions through methods such as transitive closure network flow. All generated predictions can be verified against already existing data, and possible new relationships can be verified against experiment. This paper presents a method for the extraction and visualization of potentially meaningful relationships.

B I O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

network flow
bone biology
biological literature
transitive closure
text mining


A new method to help diagnose cancers for small sample size For many years, scientists have engaged in profiling altered genes to help diagnose related cancers. However, the size of the sample to develop a new profile of cancer genes in the beginning stage is usually small because of costly procedure. Researchers are often disturbed by the analytical method because there has been no effective technique to deal with such small sample size situations in cancer genes diagnosis. The purpose of the study was to employ a new method, mega-trend-diffusion technique, to improve the accuracy of gene diagnosis for bladder cancer on a very limited number of samples. The modeling results showed that when the number of training data increased, the learning accuracy of the bladder cancer diagnosis was enhanced stably, from 82% to 100%. Compared with traditional methods, this study provides a new approach of a reliable model for small dataset analysis. Although the study treats bladder cancer as an example, it is believed that the findings can be generalized to other diseases with limited sample size.

O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

artificial neural network
machine learning
molecular prognostication


Real-time 2D+3D facial action and expression recognition This paper presents a completely automated facial action and facial expression recognition system using 2D+3D 2 D + 3 D images recorded in real-time by a structured light sensor. It is based on local feature tracking and rule-based classification of geometric, appearance and surface curvature measurements. Several experiments conducted under relatively non-controlled conditions demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the approach.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

3d face tracking
facial action unit detection
facial expression classification


The learner characteristics, features of desktop 3D virtual reality environments, and college chemistry instruction: A structural equation modeling analysis We examined a model of the impact of a 3D desktop virtual reality environment on the learner characteristics (i.e. perceptual and psychological variables) that can enhance chemistry-related learning achievements in an introductory college chemistry class. The relationships between the 3D virtual reality features and the chemistry learning test as it relates to the selected perceptual (spatial orientation and usability) and psychological (self-efficacy and presence) variables were analyzed using the structural equation modeling approach. The results supported all the hypothesized relationships except one. Usability strongly mediated the relationship between 3D virtual reality features, spatial orientation, self-efficacy, and presence. Spatial orientation and self-efficacy had statistically significant, positive impact on the chemistry learning test. The results indicate that 3D virtual reality-based instruction is effective for enhancing students' chemistry achievement. Overall, this study contributed a research model that can help increase the effectiveness of desktop virtual reality environments for enhancing spatial ability and science achievement. Moreover, this study provides insight to science educators, instructional designers, and multimedia developers who are interested in designing science-based instruction using instructional design principles. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

spatial ability
structural equation modeling

second life (r)
science/chemistry achievement
self-efficacy


Impact of parameter imbalances on transmit diversity OFDM system performance In this letter, the effect of an imperfect channel estimation and carrier frequency offset on the performance of transmit diversity OFDM systems is investigated. For the performance evaluation, the average bit error rate (BER) expression is derived in the presence of the imperfect channel information including both the inherent estimation error and the imperfect windowing error derived in a mismatched channel separation.

O O O O O B I B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O B I B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

ofdm
transmit diversity
frequency offset


Solving a multiresponse simulation problem using a dual-response system and scatter search method This research solves a multiresponse simulation problem by using a dual-response system and scatter-search method. The proposed dual-response system constructs a response surface for each response. It then transforms the dual-response problem into a standard non-linear programming formulation. The transformation treats the secondary response as a constraint. In addition, the sample variance from simulation replications is considered simultaneously by adding search area constraints to variance. The proposed scatter-search method uses the scatter-search algorithms as an embedded mechanism in a simulation program to guide the solution-search process. This is an iterative process between the scatter-search algorithms and the simulation program. A practical case study is adopted for empirical illustration. Both the proposed methods are efficient and effective in solving the case-study problem. Finally, the paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed methods, and suggests future research opportunities.

O O B O O O O O O O B I O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

simulation optimization
dual-response system
integrated circuit packaging
integrated circuit ink-marking


Design of parallel conversion multichannel analog to digital converter for scan time reduction of programmable logic controller using FPGA Programmable logic controller deals with analog signals using analog input module. Its scan time depends on the number of analog signal to be processed. Reduction in conversion time of analog to digital converter reduces scan time. Field programmable gate array based analog input module reduces conversion time. Reduction in conversion time reduces scan time.

O O O O O B I I I O B I O O B I I O O B I I O O O O O B I I O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I I O B I B I I I O B I I O O O O O O O O B I

programmable logic controller
analog to digital converter
analog input module
field programmable gate array
scan time


On recovering syntenic blocks from comparative maps A genomic map is represented by a sequence of gene markers, and a gene marker can appear in several different genomic maps, in either positive or negative form. A strip (syntenic block) is a sequence of distinct markers that appears as subsequences in two or more maps, either directly or in reversed and negated form. Given two genomic maps G and H, the problem Maximal Strip Recovery (MSR) is to find two subsequences G' and H' of G and H, respectively, such that the total length of disjoint strips in G' and H' is maximized. Previously only a heuristic was provided for this problem, which does not guarantee finding the optimal solution, and it was unknown whether the problem is NP-hard or polynomially solvable. In this paper, we develop a factor-4 polynomial-time approximation algorithm for the problem, and show that several close variants of the problem are intractable.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

np-completeness
approximation algorithms
bioinformatics


A low-noise front-end for multiplexed ENG recording using CMOS technology Multi-electrode cuffs have been proposed as a means for the parallel recording of naturally-occurring neural signals. Compared to a conventional tripole cuff providing a single channel signal, additional information about the velocity and direction of nerve signals can be extracted from the multi-electrode recordings. Moreover, interference suppression is improved and overall power consumption reduced, as the analysis shows. In this paper a new recording system is proposed, each channel of which consists of a low-noise preamplifier employing lateral bipolar transistors to provide an impedance match to the tissue and a path to ground for the switching currents of a single high-gain amplifier, which is multiplexed between the channels. The proposed system provides low-noise, low-power operation and practically identical channel gains and is suitable for integration in a larger CMOS-based system.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

multielectrode cuff (mec)
nerve cuff
velocity selective recording (vsr)
eng amplifier
multi-channel recording
cmos design
bipolar design
switched-capacitor circuit


Optical switch emulation in programmable software router testbed A programmable optical router is a key enabler for dynamic service provisioning in Future Internet scenarios. It is equipped with optical switching hardware to forward information at hundreds of Gigabits/s rates and above, controlled and managed through modular and flexible procedures according to emerging standards. The possibility to test such costly optical architectures in terms of logical and physical performance, without implementing complex and expensive testbeds, is crucial to speed-up the development process of high-performance routers. To this purpose, this paper introduces the software-based emulation testbed of a programmable optical router, which is here developed and applied to test optical switching fabrics. Accurate characterization of the optical devices and physical layer aspects is implemented with the Click software router environment. Power loss and optical signal-to-noise-ratio evaluation are provided through accurate software representation of the physical characteristics of the optical devices employed. The scalability of the proposed emulation testbed is also assessed on standard PC hardware. All the obtained results prove the effectiveness of the proposed tool to emulate an optical router at different levels of granularity.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

optical networks
network programmability
optical components
software-defined networking


Multiview Image Coding Using Depth Layers and an Optimized Bit Allocation In this paper, we present a novel wavelet-based compression algorithm for multiview images. This method uses a layer-based representation, where the 3-D scene is approximated by a set of depth planes with their associated constant disparities. The layers are extracted from a collection of images captured at multiple viewpoints and transformed using the 3-D discrete wavelet transform (DWT). The DWT consists of the 1-D disparity compensated DWT across the viewpoints and the 2-D shape-adaptive DWT across the spatial dimensions. Finally, the wavelet coefficients are quantized and entropy coded along with the layer contours. To improve the rate-distortion performance of the entire coding method, we develop a bit allocation strategy for the distribution of the available bit budget between encoding the layer contours and the wavelet coefficients. The achieved performance of our proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art codecs for several data sets of varying complexity.

B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Downregulation of Glial Scarring after Brain Injury: The Effect of Purine Nucleoside Analogue Ribavirin Abstract: The weak regenerative capacity of self-repair after injury to the adult brain is caused by the formation of glial scar due to reactive astrogliosis. In the present study the beginning of reactive astrogliosis in the adult, as shown immunocytochemically by upregulation of glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP) and vimentin, was seen two days after the left sensorimotor cortex lesion, being maximal during the first two weeks and declining by 30 days after the lesion. This was accompanied by intensive glial scarring. Conversely, after the neonatal lesion a lack of gliotic scar was seen until 30 days postsurgery, although the pattern of GFAP and vimentin expression during recovery period was the same. The aim of the study was to define an appropriate therapeutic intervention that could modulate astrocyte proliferation and diminish glial scar formation after adult brain lesion. For this purpose the effects of an antiproliferative agent, the purine nucleoside analogue ribavirin was examined. It was shown that daily injection of ribavirin for 5 and 10 days considerably decreased the number of reactive astrocytes, while slight GFAP labeling was restricted to the lesion site. Obtained results show that ribavirin treatment downregulates the process of reactive astrogliosis after adult brain injury, and thus may be a useful approach for improving neurological recovery from brain damage.

O O O O O B I O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

reactive astrocytes
glial scar
brain injury
ribavirin


Histogram of Template for Pedestrian Detection In this paper, we propose a novel feature named histogram of template (HOT) for human detection in still images. For every pixel of an image, various templates are defined, each of which contains the pixel itself and two of its neighboring pixels. If the texture and gradient values of the three pixels satisfy a pre-defined formula, the central pixel is regarded to meet the corresponding template for this formula. Histograms of pixels meeting various templates are calculated for a set of formulas, and combined to be the feature for detection. Compared to the other features, the proposed feature takes texture as well as the gradient information into consideration. Besides, it reflects the relationship between 3 pixels, instead of focusing on only one. Experiments for human detection are performed on INRIA dataset, which shows the proposed HOT feature is more discriminative than histogram of orientated gradient (HOG) feature, under the same training method.

B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Coupled field models in electromagnetic solids Purpose - To develop new and existing coupled thermal and mechanical models of electromagnetic solids for the simulation of coupled field problems based on a consistent theoretical and computational framework. Design/methodology/approach - The finite element computational models we describe involve the combination of classical electrodynamics, continuum mechanics, and thermodynamics. In order to create consistent coupled models, we employ the fundamental principles of thermodynamics as a common framework. Findings - Our procedure requires the necessary thermodynamical considerations for building consistent multiphysics models and develops some novel implementation issues that are important from the designers' point of view. Additionally, efficient numerical algorithms for solving the arising static and dynamic nonlinearities are discussed. Research limitations/implications - The paper targets the simulation of coupled problems in macroscopic electromagnetic continua. Practical implication - The application areas of the coupled field models are identified and illustrated by the solution of complex industrial problems. Originality/value - We introduce new computational models and techniques for the solution of some coupled field problems in electromagnetic solids. While some elements of these computational models and techniques have been used for decades, the complete theoretical and computational framework is presented for the first time here.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

finite element analysis
differential equations
electromechanical devices


Spoken language interaction with model uncertainty: an adaptive human-robot interaction system Spoken language is one of the most intuitive forms of interaction between humans and agents. Unfortunately, agents that interact with people using natural language often experience communication errors and do not correctly understand the user's intentions. Recent systems have successfully used probabilistic models of speech, language and user behaviour to generate robust dialogue performance in the presence of noisy speech recognition and ambiguous language choices, but decisions made using these probabilistic models are still prone to errors owing to the complexity of acquiring and maintaining a complete model of human language and behaviour. In this paper, a decision-theoretic model for human-robot interaction using natural language is described. The algorithm is based on the Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), which allows agents to choose actions that are robust not only to uncertainty from noisy or ambiguous speech recognition but also unknown user models. Like most dialogue systems, a POMDP is defined by a large number of parameters that may be difficult to specify a priori from domain knowledge, and learning these parameters from the user may require an unacceptably long training period. An extension to the POMDP model is described that allows the agent to acquire a linguistic model of the user online, including new vocabulary and word choice preferences. The approach not only avoids a training period of constant questioning as the agent learns, but also allows the agent actively to query for additional information when its uncertainty suggests a high risk of mistakes. The approach is demonstrated both in simulation and on a natural language interaction system for a robotic wheelchair application.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

partially observable markov decision processes


Multiverse: Efficiently Supporting Distributed High-Level Speculation Algorithmic speculation or high-level speculation is a promising programming paradigm which allows programmers to speculatively branch an execution into multiple independent parallel sections and then choose the best (perhaps fastest) amongst them. The continuing execution after the speculatively branched section sees only the modifications made by the best one. This programming paradigm allows programmers to harness parallelism and can provide dramatic performance improvements. In this paper we present the Multiverse speculative programming model. Multiverse allows programmers to exploit parallelism through high-level speculation. It can effectively harness large amounts of parallelism by speculating across an entire cluster and is not bound by the parallelism available in a single machine. We present abstractions and a runtime which allow programmers to introduce large scale high-level speculative parallelism into applications with minimal effort. We introduce a novel on-demand address space sharing mechanism which provide speculations efficient transparent access to the original address space of the application (including the use of pointers) across machine boundaries. Multiverse provides single commit semantics across speculations while guaranteeing isolation between them. We also introduce novel mechanisms to deal with scalability bottlenecks when there are a large number of speculations. We demonstrate that for several benchmarks, Multiverse achieves impressive speedups and good scalability across entire clusters. We study the overheads of the runtime and demonstrate how our special scalability mechanisms are crucial in scaling cluster wide.

B O O O O B O B O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O B O O O O B O O B O O O O O O O B O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O

speculation parallelism cluster multiverse

algorithmic speculation
function speculation


mobility, digital libraries and a rural indian village Millions of people in developed countries routinely create and share digital content; but what about the billions of others in on the wrong side of what has been called the 'global digital divide'? This paper considers three mobile platforms to illustrate their potential in enabling rural Indian villagers to make and share digital stories. We describe our experiences in creating prototypes using mobile phones; high-end media-players; and, paper. Interaction designs are discussed along with findings from various trials within the village and elsewhere. Our approach has been to develop prototypes that can work together in an integrated fashion so that content can flow freely and in interesting ways through the village. While our work has particular relevance to those users in emerging world contexts, we see it also informing needs and practices in the developed world for user-generated content.

B B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

information ecologies
user-generated content
digital-divide


Handling mobility in future publish-subscribe information-centric networks Future information-oriented Internet architectures are expected to effectively support mobility. PSIRP, an EU FP7 research project, designed, prototyped, and investigated a clean-slate architecture for the future Internet based on the publish-subscribe paradigm. PURSUIT, another EU FP7 research project, is further developing this architecture, which we refer to as ?, the Publish Subscribe Internet (PSI) architecture, extending it in various directions, including a deeper investigation of higher (transport and application) and lower layers (e.g., various link technologies, such as wireless and optical). In this paper we present the basics of the ? architecture, including the built-in multicast and caching mechanisms, with particular focus on mobility support. We discuss how the native, clean-slate, ? instantiation of the information-centric model can support mobility and also present an overlay variant of ? we have developed in order to provide an evolutionary path to adoption. Based on analysis and simulation we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed architecture compared to well established solutions such as Mobile IPv6.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


so you want brooks in your classroom? Fred Brooks' seminal book, "The Mythical Man-Month" (MMM) is a firmly established classic in software engineering. Many of us feel compelled to use this work to help our students appreciate and put into practice the fundamental software engineering concepts contained between its covers. This often amounts to using "passive" lesson plans such as required readings followed by lectures and exams; these rarely fully satisfy our learning objectives. Rather, students often have mixed reactions to MMM with the result that it has little impact on their attitudes and practices, both in and out of the classroom. This paper outlines a more active approach to incorporating MMM into the classroom, one that we have refined over 6 years, at multiple universities and in both graduate and undergraduate courses. It includes learning objectives, a lesson plan, sample materials, an implementation discussion, and an evaluation of the approach's impact.

O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

software development process
mythical man month


Mathematical modeling of bioremediation of trichloroethylene in aquifers Trichloroethylene (TCE) is a very common contaminant of groundwater. It is used as an industrial solvent and is frequently poured into the soil. There exist bacteria that can degrade TCE. In contrast with most cases of bioremediation, the bacteria that degrade TCE do not use it as a carbon source. Instead the bacteria produce an enzyme to metabolize methane. This enzyme can degrade other organics including TCE. In this paper we model in situ bioremediation of TCE in an aquifer by using two species of bacteria: one that forms biobarriers to restrict the movement of TCE and the second one to reduce TCE. The model includes flow of water, transport of TCE and the nutrients, bacterial growth and degradation of TCE. Nonstandard numerical methods are used to discretize the equations. Some results are presented.

O O O B O B O O B B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Quality-efficient demosaicing for digital time delay and integration images using edge-sensing scheme in color difference domain ? In this paper, we present a novel edge sensing-based demosaicing algorithm for digital time delay and integration (DTDI) mosaic images, which are captured by DTDI line-scan cameras and suitable for industrial print inspection. We propose to use Sobel- and interpolation-based masks to extract more accurate gradient information in the color difference domain. The extracted gradient information is utilized to assist the design of the proposed demosaicing algorithm. By experimenting on more than one thousand and three hundred test DTDI mosaic images, the results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed demosaicing algorithm in terms of demosaiced image quality.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O

demosaicing algorithm
industrial print inspection
mosaic images

digital time delay and integration (dtdi)


Live path: adaptive agent navigation in the interactive virtual world We present a novel approach to adaptive navigation in the interactive virtual world by using data from the user. Our method constructs automatically a navigation mesh that provides new paths for agents by referencing the user movements. To acquire accurate data samples from all the user data in the interactive world, we use the following techniques: an agent of interest (AOI), a region of interest (ROI) map, and a discretized path graph (DPG). Our method enables adaptive changes to the virtual world over time and provides user-preferred path weights for smart-agent path planning. We have tested the usefulness of our algorithm with several example scenarios from interactive worlds such as video games. In practice, our framework can be applied easily to any type of navigation in an interactive world. In addition, it may prove useful for solving previous pathfinding problems in static navigation planning.

O O O B I O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O

agent navigation
virtual world
pathfinding
navigation mesh


a survey of cordic algorithms for fpga based computers The current trend back toward hardware intensive signal processing has uncovered a relative lack of understanding of hardware signal processing architectures. Many hardware efficient algorithms exist, but these are generally not well known due to the dominance of software systems over the past quarter century. Among these algorithms is a set of shift-add algorithms collectively known as CORDIC for computing a wide range of functions including certain trigonometric, hyperbolic, linear and logarithmic functions. While there are numerous articles covering various aspects of CORDIC algorithms, very few survey more than one or two, and even fewer concentrate on implementation in FPGAs. This paper attempts to survey commonly used functions that may be accomplished using a CORDIC architecture, explain how the algorithms work, and explore implementation specific to FPGAs.

O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O

vector magnitude
cosine
polar conversion
sine


Visual object tracking using spatial Context Information and Global tracking skills ? This paper proposes a novel color cue called CIG. CIG computes weights based on spatial Context Information and Global tracking skills. CIG is effective and can be computed pixel by pixel efficiently. Weights by CIG have high stability and precision under low-contrast scenes with complex motions.

O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B B O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O

mean shift
weight image
spatial context model


Th2 Dominance of T Helper Cell Response to Preproinsulin in Individuals with Preclinical Type 1 Diabetes In human type 1 diabetes (T1D) autoantibodies to insulin precede clinical disease, while little is known about the contribution of insulin-specific T lymphocytesin particular, T helper (Th) subsets. Here we have studied the in vivo primed cytokine response to preproinsulin in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) and two major Th cell subsetsCD45RO+ memory cells and CD45RA+ naive/resting cellsin 35 individuals with HLA-DRB1*04, DQB1*0302 diabetes risk marker

O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

cd45ro+ memory and cd45ra+ naive/resting th cells


Learning to recommend with social contextual information from implicit feedback Recommender systems with social networks have been well studied in recent years. However, most of these methods ignore the social contextual information among users and items, which is significant and useful for predicting users preferences in many recommendation problems. Moreover, most existing social recommendation methods have been proposed for the scenarios where users can provide explicit ratings. But in fact, the explicit feedback is not always available, most of the feedback in real social networks is not explicit but implicit. Motivated by above observations, we propose a unified ranking framework fusing social contextual information and common social relations for implicit feedback. Specifically, we first extend the user latent features by the implicit interest deduced from social context, and then we integrate the common social relations as factorization terms to further improve recommendation quality. Finally, we optimize our model in a Bayesian personalized ranking framework. The experiments on real-world dataset show that our approach outperforms the other state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of AUC, NDCG and Pre@3. This result demonstrates the importance of social context and common social relations for the formation of the implicit ratings.

O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O

social context
implicit feedback
social recommendation
bayesian personalized ranking


Noise tolerant variants of the Perceptron algorithm A large number of variants of the Perceptron algorithm have been proposed and partially evaluated in recent work. One type of algorithm aims for noise tolerance by replacing the last hypothesis of the perceptron with another hypothesis or a vote among hypotheses. Another type simply adds a margin term to the perceptron in order to increase robustness and accuracy, as done in support vector machines. A third type borrows further from support vector machines and constrains the update function of the perceptron in ways that mimic soft-margin techniques. The performance of these algorithms, and the potential for combining different techniques, has not been studied in depth. This paper provides such an experimental study and reveals some interesting facts about the algorithms. In particular the perceptron with margin is an effective method for tolerating noise and stabilizing the algorithm. This is surprising since the margin in itself is not designed or used for noise tolerance, and there are no known guarantees for such performance. In most cases, similar performance is obtained by the voted-perceptron which has the advantage that it does not require parameter selection. Techniques using soft margin ideas are run-time intensive and do not give additional performance benefits. The results also highlight the difficulty with automatic parameter selection which is required with some of these variants.

O O O O O B I O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Novel Tensor Product Models for Automatic Transmission System Control This paper discusses novel tensor product (TP) models for the control of two complex components of the vehicle automatic transmission systems, namely the drive line without clutch and, the valve-clutch. The TP models are obtained by a transformation of the linear parameter-varying models derived from the first principle nonlinear mathematical models of the controlled processes. Experimental results validate the performance of the proposed TP models.

O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

control systems
tensor product (tp) models
valve-clutch


Connectionist interaction information retrieval ? Connectionist views for adaptive clustering in information retrieval (IR) have proved to be viable approaches, and have yielded a number of models and techniques. However there has never been any exhaustive and methodicali.e., theoretical, formal, practical, simulation- and user-basedevaluation of such a retrieval method and system. The aim of the paper is therefore just this. It suggests a connectionist clustering technique and activation spreading-based IR model using the interaction information retrieval (I2R) method. Theoretical as well as simulation results as regards computational complexity of this method are presented and discussed. Evaluations of relevance effectiveness are also given using standard test collections. Two applications were designed, developed and implemented based on this method. Their relevance effectiveness was evaluated in vivo in experiments carried out with human subjects. The results obtained show that I2R based on a connectionist approach proves useful when emphasis is on high precision.

O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

information search and retrieval
retrieval models
connectionist models
experimentation


Bioavailability of iron, vitamin A, zinc, and folic acid when added to condiments and seasonings Seasonings and condiments can be candidate vehicles for micronutrient fortification if consumed consistently and if dietary practices ensure bioavailability of the nutrient. In this review, we identify factors that may affect the bioavailability of iron, vitamin A, zinc, and folic acid when added to seasonings and condiments and evaluate their effects on micronutrient status. We take into consideration the chemical and physical properties of different forms of the micronutrients, the influence of the physical and chemical properties of foods and meals to which fortified seasonings and condiments are typically added, and interactions between micronutrients and the physiological and nutritional status of the target population. Bioavailable fortificants of iron have been developed for use in dry or fluid vehicles. For example, sodium iron ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (NaFeEDTA) and ferrous sulfate with citric acid are options for iron fortification of fish and soy sauce. Furthermore, NaFeEDTA, microencapsulated ferrous fumarate, and micronized elemental iron are potential fortificants in curry powder and salt. Dry forms of retinyl acetate or palmitate are bioavailable fortificants of vitamin A in dry candidate vehicles, but there are no published studies of these fortificants in fluid vehicles. Studies of zinc and folic acid bioavailability in seasonings and condiments are also lacking.

B O B B I B O B I O O O B O B B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B B I B O B I O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O B I B O B O B O O O

seasonings
condiments
bioavailability
iron
zinc
folic acid
vitamin a


A fast K nearest neighbors classification algorithm A novel fast KNN classification algorithm is proposed for pattern recognition. The technique uses one important feature, mean of the vector, to reduce the search space in the wavelet domain. Since the proposed algorithm rejects those vectors that are impossible to be the k closest vectors in the design set, it largely reduces the classification time and holds the classification performance as that of the original classification algorithm. The simulation on texture image classification confirms the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O

k nearest neighbors
texture image classification


Distributed H? filtering for a class of sensor networks with uncertain rates of packet losses In this paper, the distributed H? filtering problem is discussed for a class of sensor networks with uncertain rates of packet losses. The packet losses occur randomly in measurements from local sensor and in transmission from the neighbor sensors are mutually independent but obey Bernoulli distribution. Different from the most results on packet losses, the rates of packet losses are assumed to be uncertain and norm-bounded. We aim to design a linear full-order filter such that the estimation error converges to zero asymptotically in the mean square while the disturbance rejection attenuation is constrained to a given level by means of the H? performance index. By using the parameter-dependent Lyapunov function method, the sufficient conditions are obtained for ensuring the stochastic stability as well as prescribed H? performance for the overall filtering error dynamics. These conditions are characterized in terms of the feasibility of a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), and then the explicit expression is given for the desired filter parameters. Finally, one simulation example is employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter design technique in this paper.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

distributed h? filtering
sensor network
packet loss
parameter-dependent lyapunov function
linear matrix inequality


The Na+/Ca2+ Exchanger Isoform 3 (NCX3) but Not Isoform 2 (NCX2) and 1 (NCX1) Singly Transfected in BHK Cells Plays a Protective Role in a Model of in Vitro Hypoxia Chemical hypoxia produces depletion of ATP, intracellular Ca2+ overload, and cell death. The role of Na+/Ca2+ exchanger (NCX), the major plasma membrane Ca2+ extruding system, has been explored in chemical hypoxia using BHK cells stably transfected with the three mammalian NCX isoform

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O

na+/ca2+ exchanger
neuroprotection
[ca2+]i homeostasis


An efficient novel online shopping mechanism based on quantum communication We propose a controlled quantum secure direct communication protocol which can be used for online shopping. The online shopping mall is able to control the shopping process, so the customers shopping information can be more secure. In this paper, single photons are used to carry customers information, so the cost of our protocol is less than others using entangled qubits. If any eavesdropper tries to steal the shopping information, the lawful participants will perceive it and abort their transaction. This protocol can be used to provide advanced applications and services for intelligent ubiquitous environments.

O O O B I O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

e-commerce
secure communication
digital wallet


the sisterhood of the traveling packets From a cyber-security perspective, attribution is considered to be the ability to determine the originating location for an attack. However, should such an attribution system be developed and deployed, it would provide attribution for all traffic, not just attack traffic. This has several implications for both the senders and receivers of traffic, as well as the intervening organizations, Internet service providers and nation-states. In this paper we examine the requirements for an attribution system, identifying all of the actors, their potential interests, and the resulting policies they might therefore have. We provide a general framework that represents the attribution problem, and outline the technical and policy requirements for a solution. We discuss the inevitable policy conflicts due to the social, legal and cultural issues that would surround such a system.

O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

authentication security traceback economics trust


Hypothesis testing in the unrestricted and restricted parametric spaces of structural models Hypothesis for testing the equality of slopes in measurement error models, incorporating the additional assumption that the slopes lie in a closed interval is considered. Wald type statistics based on the maximum likelihood estimators are considered under both, restricted and unrestricted parametric spaces. Their asymptotic behaviors are analyzed through different simulation studies. The statistics performance is analyzed in terms of power. Analysis of the results suggests that the statistics considered under the restricted parametric space has shown a better performance since the tests based on these statistics are more powerful. An example illustrates the proposal.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

structural model
restricted parameter spaces
orthogonal parametrization


A numerical scheme for particle-laden thin film flow in two dimensions The physics of particle-laden thin film flow is not fully understood, and recent experiments have raised questions with current theory. There is a need for fully two-dimensional simulations to compare with experimental data. To this end, a numerical scheme is presented for a lubrication model derived for particle-laden thin film flow in two dimensions with surface tension. The scheme relies on an ADI process to handle the higher-order terms, and an iterative procedure to improve the solution at each timestep. This is the first paper to simulate the two-dimensional particle-laden thin film lubrication model. Several aspects of the scheme are examined for a test problem, such as the timestep, runtime, and number of iterations. The results from the simulation are compared to experimental data. The simulation shows good qualitative agreement. It also suggests further lines of inquiry for the physical model.

O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

adaptive timestepping
alternating direction implicit
coupled system
particle-laden


Preservation of properties of fuzzy relations during aggregation processes Diverse classes of fuzzy relations such as reflexive, irreflexive, symmetric, asymmetric, antisymmetric, connected, and transitive fuzzy relations are studied. Moreover, intersections of basic relation classes such as tolerances, tournaments, equivalences, and orders are regarded and the problem of preservation of these properties by n-ary operations is considered. Namely, with the use of fuzzy relations R-1,..., R,, and n-argument operation F on the interval [0, 1], a new fuzzy relation R-F = F(R-1,..., R-n) is created. Characterization theorems concerning the problem of preservation of fuzzy relations properties are given. Some conditions on aggregation functions are weakened in comparison to those previously given by other authors.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O

fuzzy relation properties
fuzzy relation classes
*-transitivity
transitivity
relation aggregation
triangular norms


On termination and invariance for faulty channel machines A channel machine consists of a finite controller together with several fifo channels; the controller can read messages from the head of a channel and write messages to the tail of a channel. In this paper we focus on channel machines with insertion errors, i.e., machines in whose channels messages can spontaneously appear. We consider the invariance problem: does a given insertion channel machine have an infinite computation all of whose configurations satisfy a given predicate? We show that this problem is primitive-recursive if the predicate is closed under message losses. We also give a non-elementary lower bound for the invariance problem under this restriction. Finally, using the previous result, we show that the satisfiability problem for the safety fragment of Metric Temporal Logic is non-elementary.

O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O

computational complexity
primitive recursive
well-structured systems


distinguishing defaults and second-line conceptualization in reasoning about humans, robots, and computers In previous research, we demonstrated that people distinguish between human and nonhuman intelligence by assuming that humans are more likely to engage in intentional goal-directed behaviors than computers or robots. In the present study, we tested whether participants who respond relatively quickly when making predictions about an entity are more or less likely to distinguish between human and nonhuman agents on the dimension of intentionality. Participants responded to a series of five scenarios in which they chose between intentional and nonintentional actions for a human, a computer, and a robot. Results indicated that participants who chose quickly were more likely to distinguish human and nonhuman agents than participants who deliberated more over their responses. We suggest that the short-RT participants were employing a first-line default to distinguish between human intentionality and more mechanical nonhuman behavior, and that the slower, more deliberative participants engaged in deeper second-line reasoning that led them to change their predictions for the behavior of a human agent.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


An optimization platform for Poland's power sector considering airpollution and health effects ? An optimization platform has been developed for the power sector in Poland. It allows for assessment of health impact of energy scenarios. Carbon prices have strong impact on fuel and technology transitions. Future PM emissions from power sector are comparable in all scenarios considered.

O B O O O O O O O O B O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

energy system
integrated impact assessment
modelling


Participation of the Endocannabinoid System in the Effect of TNF-? on Hypothalamic Release of Gonadotropin-Releasing Hormone It is known that ?9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the major active ingredient of marijuana, can suppress reproductive function. Also, we reported previously that the endocannabinoid, anandamide (AEA), inhibited gonadotropin-releasing hormone (LHRH) release from medial basal hypothalamus (MBH) of male rats incubated in vitro as well as reduced plasma LH levels after i.c.v. AEA injections into the cerebral lateral ventricle. On the other hand, it is known that during endotoxemia the hypothalamic gonadotropin axis is inhibited. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to determine whether the effect of TNF-?, a proinflammatory cytokine induced by lipopolysaccharide (LPS) that inhibits LHRH release, is mediated by the activation of the endocannabinoid system. The intraperitoneal injection of LPS (5 mg/kg) as well as the i.c.v. injection of tumor necrosis factor-? (TNF-?) (100 ng/rat) increased significantly the AEA synthesis measured ex vivo in MBHs removed 3 h after the treatments. To examine the possibility that TNF-? also acted by increasing the synthesis of AEA that was released and activated the CB1-r followed by inhibition of LHRH release, we measured the effect of TNF-? on the AEA synthase activity in MBHs incubated in vitro. As expected, we found that TNF-? (2.9 10?9 M) increased the AEA synthesis. Second, we showed that TNF-? reduced significantly the forskolin-stimulated LHRH release and that the CB1-r antagonist AM251 (10?5 M) blocked that inhibition, supporting the hypothesis that TNF-? inhibits LHRH release, acting at least in part by activating the endocannabinoid system. Therefore, our data demonstrate a key role for the endocannabinoid system in the response of the reproductive system to inflammatory signals

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Extending twin support vector machine classifier for multi-category classification problems Twin support vector machine classifier (TWSVM) was proposed by Jayadeva et al., which was used for binary classification problems. TWSVM not only overcomes the difficulties in handling the problem of exemplar unbalance in binary classification problems, but also it is four times faster in training a classifier than classical support vector machines. This paper proposes one-versus-all twin support vector machine classifiers (OVA-TWSVM) for multi-category classification problems by utilizing the strengths of TWSVM. OVA-TWSVM extends TWSVM to solve k-category classification problems by developing k TWSVM where in the ith TWSVM, we only solve the Quadratic Programming Problems (QPPs) for the ith class, and get the ith nonparallel hyperplane corresponding to the ith class data. OVA-TWSVM uses the well known one-versus-all (OVA) approach to construct a corresponding twin support vector machine classifier. We analyze the efficiency of the OVA-TWSVM theoretically, and perform experiments to test its efficiency on both synthetic data sets and several benchmark data sets from the UCI machine learning repository. Both the theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that OVA-TWSVM can outperform the traditional OVA-SVMs classifier. Further experimental comparisons with other multiclass classifiers demonstrated that comparable performance could be achieved.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

support vector machines
machine learning

multicategory twin support machine classifiers


Delegation by object composition Class inheritance and method overriding, as provided by standard class-based languages, are often not flexible enough to represent objects with some dynamic behavior. In this respect, object composition equipped with different forms of method body lookup is often advocated as a more flexible alternative to class inheritance since it takes place at run time, thus permitting the behavior of objects to be specialized dynamically. In this paper, we illustrate Incomplete Featherweight Java (IFJ), an extension of Featherweight Java with a novel linguistic construct, the incomplete object. Incomplete objects require some missing methods which can be provided at run time by composition with another (complete) object. Furthermore, we present two mechanisms for the method body lookup on (composed) objects, one based on delegation and the other based on consultation. Thanks to the design of the language, the consultation-based lookup is a simple extension of the delegation-based one. Both mechanisms are disciplined by static typing, therefore the language enjoys type safety (which implies no "message-not-understood" run-time errors) and avoids possible accidental overrides due to method name clashes. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

B O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

featherweight java
object composition
delegation
consultation


Joint multi-person detection and tracking from overlapping cameras ? Joint person detection and tracking in overlapping camera views. Novel two-step likelihood optimization using preprocessing and evaluation step. Occlusions taken into account when measuring features, using 3D scene reconstruction. Presenting new challenging indoor and outdoor multi-person surveillance datasets. Outperformance of state-of-the-art detection and tracking methods.

O O O O O O B I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


Microsoft C#.NET program and electromagnetic depth sounding for large loop source ? A program, in the C# (C Sharp) language with Microsoft.NET Framework, is developed to compute the normalized vertical magnetic field of a horizontal rectangular loop source placed on the surface of an n-layered earth. The field can be calculated either inside or outside the loop. Five C# classes with member functions in each class are, designed to compute the kernel, Hankel transform integral, coefficients for cubic spline interpolation between computed values and the normalized vertical magnetic field. The program computes the vertical magnetic field in the frequency domain using the integral expressions evaluated by a combination of straightforward numerical integration and the digital filter technique. The code utilizes different object-oriented programming (OOP) features. It finally computes the amplitude and phase of the normalized vertical magnetic field. The computed results are presented for geometric and parametric soundings. The code is developed in Microsoft.NET visual studio 2003 and uses various system class libraries.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

oop
rectangular loop source
frequency domain

c# (c sharp) language classes
n-layered earth
electromagnetic modeling


On topologies defined by irreducible sets ? We introduce a new kind of derived topology a l Scott topology. We systematically replace directed sets with irreducible sets. Results which generalize existing ones are proven, with applications to posets. SI-compactness is invented and related results are also obtained.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

t0 t 0 -space t0 t 0 t0 t 0 t 0
sober space
k-bounded sober space
irreducibly-derived topology
si-open


verifying the correctness of fpga logic synthesis algorithms Though verification is significantly easier for FPGA-based digital systems than for ASIC or full-custom hardware, there are nonetheless many places for errors to occur.In this paper we discuss the verification problem for FPGAs and describe several methods for verifying end-to-end correctness of synthesis algorithms, a particularly complex portion of the CAD flow. Though the primary contribution of this paper is the analysis of the overall problem, we also give an algorithm for the automatic generation of test-vectors for simulation using information from the synthesis tool, and describe a second testing method that generates purposefully difficult designs in combination with input vectors to test them. We will show the validity of these methods by standard metrics such as simulation node-coverage and through the ability for the method to locate forced errors introduced by the synthesis tool.

O O O O B O B O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O


Visualization of high-dimensional data via orthogonal curves Computers are still much less useful than the ability of the human eye for pattern matching. This ability can be used quite straightforwardly to identify structure in a data set when it is two or three dimensional. With data sets with more than 3 dimensions some kind of transformation is always necessary. In this paper we review in depth and present and extension of one of these mechanisms : Andrews' curves. With the Andrews' curves we use a curve to represent each data point. A human can run his eye along a set of curves (representing the members of the data set) and identify particular regions of the curves which are optimal for identifying clusters in the data set. Of interest in this context, is our extension in which a moving three-dimensional image is created in which we can see clouds of data points moving as we move along the curves; in a very real sense, the data which dance together are members of the same cluster.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

grand tour methods
andrew's curves
exploratory data analysis
visual clustering


Enabling fuzzy technologies in high performance networking via an open FPGA-based development platform Soft computing techniques and particularly fuzzy inference systems are gaining momentum as tools for network traffic modeling, analysis and control. Efficient hardware implementations of these techniques that can achieve real-time operation in high-speed networking equipment as well as other highly time-constrained application fields is however an open problem. We introduce a development platform for fuzzy inference systems with applications to network traffic analysis and control. The platform addresses the current requirements and constraints of high performance networking equipment. For the development process, we set up a methodology and a CAD tool chain that span the entire design process from initial specification in a high-level language to implementation on FPGA devices. An FPGA development board with PCI/PCIe interface is employed to support an open platform that comprises CAD tools as well as IP cores. PCI compatible fuzzy inference modules are implemented as System-on-Programmable-Chip (SoPC). We present satisfactory experimental results from the implementation of fuzzy systems for a number of applications in analysis and control of Internet traffic. These systems are shown to satisfy operational and architectural requirements of current and future high performance routing equipment. The platform proposed allows for the development of prototypes while avoiding large investments and complicated management procedures which constrain the testing and adoption of soft computing techniques in high performance networking.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

field programmable gate arrays
computer networks
network traffic control
congestion control
queuing control
network performance


Intelligent optimal design of spatial structures The evolutionary and swarm tools for topology optimization are proposed. The approaches are free from limitations connected with gradient optimization methods. The use of interpolation surface reduces the number of design variables. The level set surface is controlled by the chromosome or the particle. The numerical examples confirm the efficiency of proposed optimization methods.

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evolutionary algorithms
particle swarm optimizer
finite element method
level set method


Reasoning about safety properties in a JVM-like environment Type-based protection mechanisms in a JVM-like environment must be administrated by the code consumer at the bytecode level. Unfortunately, formulating a sound static type system for the full JVM bytecode language can be a daunting task. It is therefore counter-productive for the designer of a bytecode-level type system to address the full complexity of the VM environment in the early stage of design. In this work, a lightweight modelling tool, Featherweight JVM, is proposed to facilitate the early evaluation of bytecode-level, type-based protection mechanisms and, specifically, their ability to enforce security-motivated stack invariants and confinement properties. Rather than modelling the execution of a specific bytecode stream, Featherweight JVM is a nondeterministic event model that captures all the possible access event sequences that may be generated by a JVM-like environment when well-typed bytecode programs are executed. The effect of deploying a type-based protection mechanism can be modelled by a safety policy that constrains the event sequences produced by the VM model. To evaluate the effectiveness of the protection mechanism, security theorems in the form of state invariants can then be proved in the policy-guarded VM model. To demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach, Vitek et al.'s Confined Types has been formulated as a safety policy for the Featherweight JVM, and a corresponding confinement theorem has been established. To reduce class loading overhead, a capability-based reformulation of Confined Types is then studied, and is shown to preserve the confinement theorem. This paper thus provides first evidence on the utility of Featherweight JVM in providing early feedback to the designer of type-based protection mechanisms for JVM-like environments. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

java virtual machine
type-based protection mechanism
formal verification
access control
stack invariant