Consecutive staffing solution using simulation in the contact center Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to develop an enhanced framework for workforce management in a modern call center environment, called the consecutive staffing using simulation (CSS) approach. The paper aims to investigate the value of a time-dependent approach to determine staffing levels without making an assumption that call centers to be a queuing model in a steady state. Design/methodology/approach - Staffing is usually accomplished through the use of simple queuing models, Erlang-C (M/M/c). It is common to adopt a stationary independent period by period (SIPP) approach. However, staffing based on SIPP does not consider uncompleted calls and each planning interval cannot achieve a steady state in most cases, since the lengths of planning intervals are short in fact. In this context, the CSS approach considers uncompleted calls and determines staffing levels by using simulation. Findings - Staffing based on the CSS approach needed fewer agents, compared with staffing based on the SIPP approach. Hiring less agents during a single planning horizon lead to a decrease in total operational costs for the call center. Staffing based on SIPP became less accurate when the average service duration became longer or the arrival rate fluctuation was large, which often occurred in the morning and around lunch break. Originality/value - The CSS approach is based on the dynamic staffing proposed by Whitt. However, CSS extends the basic idea of dynamic staffing to combine a simulation experiment with a number of repetitions and the same run length of planning intervals. In a call center with shorter planning intervals, management should adopt staffing based on CSS for accurate planning and updating of staffing levels during a single planning horizon.

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

customer services quality
operational research
human resource management
call centres
manpower planning


Optical modes of chiral photonic composites We report on the eigenmodes of photonic crystals consisting of submicron homogeneous chiral spheres in a nonchiral isotropic medium, by means of full electrodynamic calculations using the layer-multiple-scattering method. It is shown that resonant modes of the individual spheres give rise to narrow bands that hybridize with the extended bands of the appropriate symmetry associated with light propagation in an underlying effective chiral medium. The resulting photonic dispersion diagram exhibits remarkable features, such as strong band bending away from the Bragg points with consequent negative-slope dispersion inside the first Brillouin zone and sizable frequency gaps specific to each polarization mode. We present a rigorous group-theory analysis to explain features of the calculated photonic band structure, peculiar to a system which possesses time-reversal but not space-inversion symmetry, and discuss some interesting aspects of the underlying physics.

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


Motion identification from image sequences: Information theory and pixel selection The paper deals with the issue of (possibly nonrigid) motion identification from a sequence of degraded images. In particular the central problem is the one of proper pixel selection: the information content of each pixel is the basis of the pixel selection procedure. After the general setting of the problem we give some identifiability conditions. Then the pixel selection procedure is presented. Finally, the procedure is validated against simulated images of moving objects. It appears, that is enough to process few percent of the total pixel number without any significant decrease of the estimation accuracy.

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 B I 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 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

degraded images
information theory
pixel selection

image sequence processing
nonrigid motion estimation


A PEER-TO-PEER COMMUNICATION INFRASTRUCTURE FOR GROUPWARE APPLICATIONS Many advances have been done to allow groups of people to work together and collaborate in the Internet. Collaborative systems are characterized by the way participants interact. In many cases, equal standing members should cooperate in a non-authoritative environment, where no entity or authority is or should be in charge of regulating the group. Therefore, decentralized communication infrastructures have been hailed as promising alternatives. Recently, decentralized infrastructures based on P2P approaches have drawn the attention of the research community because of their benefits in terms of scalability, robustness, availability and potentials for leveraging computational resources distributed across the Internet. In this paper, a scalable peer-to-peer ( P2P) communication Infrastructure for groupware applications is presented. It enables a large number of people to join and cooperate in a robust, decentralized and easy deployable way, without requiring high capacity servers or any other special network infrastructure. The communication infrastructure is based on a binary tree as overlay structure, which implements all groupware communication functionality, including membership management and packet forwarding, at application level, making it an inexpensive and fast deployable solution for equal standing members, such as home users with a domestic connection to the Internet. Two applications, one for synchronous groupware and the other for asynchronous collaboration, have been developed to validate the approach. Comparisons with other communication infrastructures in aspects such as end-to-end propagation delay, group latency, throughput, protocol overhead, failure recovery and link stress, show that our approach is a scalable and robust alternative.

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

overlay networks
application level multicast


Optimization of web newspaper layout in real time The web newspaper pagination problem consists in optimizing the layout of a set of articles extracted from several web newspapers and sending it to the user as the result of a previous query. This layout should be as similar as possible to that of real newspapers and should be adapted to the user's web browser configuration in real time. Previous approaches to the problem took rather a long time or suffered the constraint of all the articles having the same width. This paper presents an improved approach based on simulated annealing (SA) that solves the problem online, adapts itself to the client's computer configuration and also supports articles with different widths, so that long articles can now be laid out in more than one column, producing a squarer shape. With this new feature, the layouts obtained look more like a real newspaper, where important or long articles occupy more than one column.

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


On ear-based human identification in the mid-wave infrared spectrum In this paper the problem of human ear recognition in the Mid-wave infrared (MWIR) spectrum is studied in order to illustrate the advantages and limitations of the ear-based biometrics that can operate in day and night time environments. The main contributions of this work are two-fold: First, a dual-band database is assembled that consists of visible (baseline) and mid-wave IR left and right profile face images. Profile face images were collected using a high definition mid-wave IR camera that is capable of acquiring thermal imprints of human skin. Second, a fully automated, thermal imaging based, ear recognition system is proposed that is designed and developed to perform real-time human identification. The proposed system tests several feature extraction methods, namely: (i) intensity-based such as independent component analysis (ICA), principal component analysis (PCA), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA); (ii) shape-based such as scale invariant feature transform (SIFT); as well as (iii) texture-based such as local binary patterns (LBP), and local ternary patterns (LTP). Experimental results suggest that LIP (followed by LBP) yields the best performance (Rank1 = 80:68%) on manually segmented ears and (Rank1 = 68:18%) on ear images that are automatically detected and segmented. By fusing the matching scores obtained by LBP and LTP, the identification performance increases by about 5%. Although these results are promising, the outcomes of our study suggest that the design and development of automated ear-based recognition systems that can operate efficiently in the lower part of the passive IR spectrum are very challenging tasks. (C) 2013 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 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

thermal infrared imaging
thermal ear features
score level fusion and multi-biometrics


Testing content-addressable memories using functional fault models and march-like algorithms Functional tests for content-addressable memories (CAM's) are presented in this paper. In addition to several traditional functional fault models for RAM's, we also consider the fault models based on physical defects, such as shorts between two circuit nodes and transistor stuck-on and stuck-open faults. Accordingly, several functional fault models are proposed. In order to make our approach suited to various application-specific CAM's, we propose tests which require only three fundamental types of operation (i.e., write, erase, and compare), and the test results can be observed entirely from the single-bit Hit output. A complete, compact test is also proposed, which has low complexity and is suitable for modern high-density and large-capacity CAMs-it requires only 2N + 3w + 2 compare operations and 8N write operations to cover the functional fault models discussed, where N is the number of words and w is the word length.

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

associative memory
content-addressable memory
fault modeling
functional testing
logic circuit testing
march algorithm
semiconductor memories


Soft computing tools for transient classification Any action taken on a process, for example in response to an abnormal situation or in reaction to unsafe conditions, relies on the ability to identify the state of operation or the events that are occurring. Although there might be hundreds or even thousands of measurements in a process, there are generally few events occurring. The data from these measurements must then be mapped into appropriate descriptions of the occurring event(s), which in most cases is a difficult task. A systematic study was carried out with the aim of comparing alternative neural network designs and models for performing this mapping task. Four main approaches have been investigated. Radial basis function (RBF) neural networks and cascade-RBF neural networks combined with fuzzy clustering, self-organizing map neural networks, and recurrent neural networks. The main evaluation criteria adopted were identification accuracy, reliability (i.e., correct recognition of an unknown event as such), robustness (to noise and to changing initial conditions), and real-time performance. Additionally, in this paper we describe how ensembles of recurrent neural networks can overcome some of the limitations encountered in these early prototypes, and give an example involving the identification of anomalous events in a PWR 900 MW nuclear power plant.

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

event identification
fault diagnosis
process industry


Biometric identification through hand geometry measurements A work in defining and implementing a biometric system based on hand geometry identification is presented here. Hand features are extracted from a color photograph taken when the user has placed his hand on a platform designed for such a task. Different pattern recognition techniques have been tested to be used in classification and/or verification from Euclidean distance to neural networks. Experimental results, up to a 97 percent rate of success in classification. will show the possibility of using this system in medium/high security environments with full acceptance from all users.

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

hand geometry
classification
verification
euclidean distance

biometric systems
hamming distance
gaussian mixture models
radial basis functions


A GMDH-based fuzzy modeling approach for constructing TS model In this paper, a new learning algorithm based on group method of data handling (GMDH) is proposed for the identification of Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy model. Different from existing methods, the new approach, called TS-GMDH, starts from simple elementary TS fuzzy models, and then uses the mechanism of GMDH to produce candidate fuzzy models of growing complexity until the TS model of optimal complexity has been created. The main characteristic of the new approach is its ability to identify the structure of TS model automatically. Experiments on Box-Jenkins gas furnace data and UCI datasets have shown that the proposed method can achieve satisfactory results and is more robust to noise in comparison with other TS modeling techniques such as ANFIS. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

takagi-sugeno model
group method of data handling (gmdh)
noise immunity


Insensitivity in processor-sharing networks We consider an open network of processor-sharing nodes with state-dependent service capacities, i.e., the speed of each node may depend on the number of customers at any node. We demonstrate that the stationary distribution of the network state is insensitive to the distribution of service times if and only if the service capacities are balanced, i.e., the considered network is a Whittle network. The stationary distribution then has a closed-form expression and the expected sojourn time of a customer at any node is proportional to its required quantity of service. These results are extended to the cases of closed networks and state-dependent arrival rates and routing. Two simple examples illustrate the practical interest of these results in the context of communication networks.

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

processor-sharing queue
whittle networks
balance


Simulation of the quasi-static electric field by an electric current vector potential approximated by edge elements Purpose - The aim of the present work is to find an efficient solution concerning the computational effort of quasi-static electric field (QSEF) problems involving anisotropic conductivity and permittivity in the frequency domain. Design/methodology/approach - Numerical simulations are carried out with tetrahedral nodal finite elements of first- and second-order and with Withney elements. The solution of the boundary value problem with the aid of the electric scalar potential approximated by nodal finite elements is compared with those by the electric current vector potential represented by edge finite elements. Findings - The simulation with an electric current vector potential approximated by the edge elements of first-order prevail over that by the electric scalar potential approximated by nodal elements of second-order concerning the memory requirements and the computation time at comparable accuracy. Originality/value - The application of edge finite elements to solve QSEF problems considering an anisotropic complex conductivity in 3D.

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

electric fields
finite element analysis
electrical conductivity


Low-cost broadband microstrip antenna array for 24 GHz FMCW radar applications Two designs of microstrip antenna arrays consisting of eight radiating elements and operating within a broad frequency range having the center frequency of 24 GHz are presented. One of the proposed antenna arrays uses a single laminate layer with a ground plane on one side and radiating elements on the other side, the other one is a double layer structure, where the radiating elements with beam-forming network are placed on the top layer and are fed with the use of the slot coupler. The application of U-slot radiating elements with enlarged inner parasitic patch allows us to achieve reflection coefficient better than 10 dB within the assumed bandwidth of currently developed FMCW radars, which is 2325 GHz frequency range. The theoretical analysis as well as experimental results of the manufactured 2 4 antenna arrays is shown. 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2013.

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 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

single layer antennas
broadband antennas


Some results on analyticity with applications The aim of our study is to obtain a criterion of analyticity In fact we have obtained the conditions for what a complex continuous function, defined on the closed unit disc, is an analytic function on the open unit disc. As a consequence, we have deduced, in a new manner, the Schwartz-Villat formula and the Joukowski function.

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

analytic function
criterion of analyticity

complex function
schwartz-villat's formula
joukowski's function


Weight Distributions of Non-binary LDPC Codes In this paper, we study the average symbol and bit-weight distributions for ensembles of non-binary low-density parity-check codes defined on GF(2(P)). Moreover, we derive the asymptotic exponential growth rate of the weight distributions in the limit of large codelength. Interestingly, we show that the normalized typical minimum distance does not monotonically increase with the size of the field.

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


All digital dividing ratio changeable PLL using delay clock pulse with low jitter This paper proposes a new all digital. dividing ratio changeable phase locked loop (D-DCPLL) using delay clock pulse that exhibits low output jitter characteristics compared with the conventional DCPLL. This is achieved by employing the delay clock pulse generated from the ring oscillator for the standard clock controlling the loop. This output jitter is always constant regardless of the frequency fluctuation of the delay clock, and the fluctuation coefficient has little effect on the output jitter. This circuit can expand the upper bound frequency of the lock-in range compared with conventional DCPLL when the permissible output jitter is identical. Furthermore, the proposed D-DCPLL can obtain an initial pull-in in one period of the input signal and the multiplication output signal of the constant pulse interval can be obtained by using the remainder control circuit.

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


Software-Based Cache Coherence with Hardware-Assisted Selective Self-Invalidations Using Bloom Filters Implementing shared memory consistency models on top of hardware caches gives rise to the well-known cache coherence problem. The standard solution involves implementing coherence protocols in hardware, an approach with some design complexity, hardware costs, and restrictions on interconnect behavior. However, for some memory consistency models, an alternative is to enforce coherence in the software implementation of synchronization primitives, using software controlled invalidations and forced writebacks. This requires minimal hardware support but gives less selective enforcement, which affects performance. This paper proposes a novel hybrid software-hardware coherence mechanism. In this scheme, software is responsible for triggering the coherence actions-self-invalidations and writebacks-at appropriate times while hardware uses Bloom filters to perform more selective self-invalidations. We evaluate the proposed scheme on applications from two different domains: the SPLASH-2 scientific and ALP multimedia benchmarks. Experimental results show that while the software-only coherence scheme shows less performance degradation than expected, it still unacceptably degrades performance for some of the benchmarks. Filtering out unnecessary invalidations improves the worst-case performance by as much as 93 percent, and brings the performance of the hybrid scheme within five percent of full hardware coherence for 10 out of 13 benchmarks, on a 32-core CMP with a shared L2 cache.

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


Enhancing Learning Using Modular Wireless Sensor Networking (WSN) Hands-On Experiments This paper presents the use of WSN in educational research as a platform for enhanced learning through hands-on modular experiments to illustrate abstract theoretical concepts in diverse courses in Electrical Engineering. The WSN consists of Mica2 motes with on-board sensors, wireless communication antennas, and processors that are programmed using NesC. Three sets of experiments feeding into different courses (e.g., wireless embedded networks, detection and estimation, stochastic processes, probability theory, statistical pattern recognition, and digital signal processing) and illustrating different theoretical concepts are presented in details. These experiments can be used as demos in those courses and/or can be incorporated as hands-on laboratory projects to go hand in hand with the course. Assessment of the experiments as pedagogical tools are also presented through well designed evaluation questionnaires given to the students. Assessment survey shows that both the sensor network platform and the novel experiments built on them are pedagogically successful tools.

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 O O O

receiver operating characteristics (roc) curve


Source/drain optimization of underlapped lightly doped nanoscale double-gate MOSFETs The impact of the spacer length at the source (Ls) and drain (Ld) on the performance of symmetrical lightly-doped double-gate (DG) MOSFET with gate length L=20nm is analyzed, with the type and doping concentration of the spacers kept the same as in the channel material. Using the transport parameters extracted from experimental data of a double-gate FinFET, simulations were performed for optimization of the underlapped gate-source/drain structure. The simulation results show that the subthreshold leakage current is significantly suppressed without sacrificing the on-state current for devices designed with asymmetrical source/drain extension regions, satisfying the relations Ls=L/2 and Ld=L. In independent drive configuration, the top-gate response can be altered by application of a control voltage on the bottom-gate. In devices with asymmetrical source/drain extension regions, simulations demonstrate that the threshold voltage controllability is improved when the drain extension region length is increased.

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

double-gate mosfets
source/drain optimization


Ontology-driven middleware for next-generation train backbones The current evolution in the railway management software domain heads in the direction of highly modular systems with many different smaller components working together, tuned towards the operator's needs. In order to create an integrated management system for the train and railway domain in general, many different applications from both operators and manufacturers have to cooperate. To create a robust integrated system, a good supporting middleware infrastructure is needed. To the authors' knowledge, very few integrated or standardized techniques for creating higher-level intelligent middleware in the railway domain are publicly defined to date. The solution today towards establishing connectivity through the train makes use of a messaging bus. A service layer, providing mechanisms for e.g. life-cycle management, discovery and information aggregation, is however not provided in this current approach. Therefore, a distributed and modular architecture using ontologies, and widely used standards, such as Ethernet and IP, is detailed in this paper. The architecture provides the required intelligence needed for monitoring distributed applications in the train environment. The middleware allows information to be aggregated and analysed on different levels. Information querying, based on the ontology in the middleware is also discussed. By means of directory functionality, the ontology-driven middleware provides intelligent discovery as well. Finally, the ontologies used in the middleware to structure the domain and corresponding methods for creating such ontologies are presented. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Expression of Neuropeptide Y Family Peptides in the Brain and Gut during Stages of the Life Cycle of a Parasitic Lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) and a Nonparasitic Lamprey (Ichthyomyzon gagei) Abstract: The long-term objective of our research is to show that internal factors may be key to triggering metamorphosis and directing the life history types in lampreys (parasitism versus nonparasitism). Since neuropeptide Y family peptides are key players in the endocrine-mediated feeding and reproductive events in mammals, a role for these peptides in the control of feeding behavior and development can be predicted for lampreys. We have investigated the expression pattern of these peptides in the brain and in the gut during different stages of the life cycle of the parasitic lamprey, Petromyzon marinus, and the nonparasitic lamprey, Ichthyomyzon gagei. We provide a description of the cloning and sequencing of P. marinus and I. gagei cDNA for neuropeptide Y (NPY), peptide tyrosine-tyrosine (PYY), and peptide methionine-tyrosine (PMY). Using sequence-specific primers, the mRNA expression patterns for these peptides in brain and gut of larval (ammocoete) and adult (juvenile, prespawning) lampreys were examined by semiquantitative RT-PCR. The observations extend a potential role of neuropeptide Y family peptides in the modulation of feeding behavior and reproductive maturity in lampreys.

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

npy
pyy
pmy
metamorphosis
feeding behavior
brain
gut

sea lamprey
brook lamprey
obesity factor
rt-pcr


the influence of multiple artifacts on the effectiveness of software testing The effectiveness of the software testing process is determined by artifacts used in testing, including the program, the set of tests, and the test oracle. However, in evaluating software testing techniques, including automated software testing techniques, the influence of these testing artifacts is often overlooked. In my upcoming dissertation, we intend to explore the interrelationship between these three testing artifacts, with the goal of establishing a solid scientific foundation for understanding how they interact. We plan to provide two contributions towards this goal. First, we propose a theoretical framework for discussing testing based on previous work in the theory of testing. Second, we intend to perform a rigorous empirical study controlling for program structure, test coverage criteria, and oracle selection in the domain of safety critical avionics software.

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


toward universal mobile interaction for shared displays Researchers have noted conflicting trends in collaboration technologies between delivering more information on larger displays and exploiting mobility on smaller devices. Large, shared displays provide greater choice in the presentation of information, but mobile devices offer greater flexibility in the access of information. We describe a platform that leverages the best of both worlds by allowing multiple users to access and interact with a large, shared display using their own personal mobile devices, such as a cell phone, laptop, or wireless PDA. We highlight three applications built on top of the platform that demonstrate its generality and utility in a variety of group settings: namely, web browsing, polling, and entertainment.

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

applications
entertainment
cell phone
platform
mobility
shared displays
mobile interaction
flexibility
mobile devices
group
access
wireless
collaboration
pda
technologies
users
laptop
web browsing
demonstrate
display
utility

present personality general informal sharing device


Fuzzy state automata and applications to mobile robot control This paper introduces Fuzzy State Automata for control applications. They derive from the integration of traditional Finite State Automata and neuro-fuzzy systems, where a finite state automaton tracks, in a Fuzzy way, the state of the plant under control and modifies the characteristic of the controller. The main difference with respect to existing systems is that the states of the automata are identified by fuzzy, instead of crisp, variables therefore state transitions and the corresponding controller characteristic are smoother and easier to train or time. This paper presents an application to legged robot control.

B I I 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

hexapod walking machine
intelligent control
legged locomotion
gait control
fuzzy control


Adaptive perceptual color-texture image segmentation We propose a new approach for image segmentation that is based on low-level features for color and texture. It is aimed at segmentation of natural scenes, in which the color and texture of each segment does not typically exhibit uniform statistical characteristics. The proposed approach combines knowledge of human perception with an understanding of signal characteristics in order to segment natural scenes into perceptually/semantically. uniform regions. The proposed approach is based on two types of spatially adaptive low-level features. The first describes the local color composition in terms of spatially adaptive dominant colors, and the second describes the spatial characteristics of the grayscale component of the texture. Together, they provide a simple and effective characterization of texture that the proposed algorithm uses to obtain robust and, at the same time, accurate and precise segmentations. The resulting segmentations convey semantic information that can be used for content-based retrieval. The performance of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated in the domain of photographic images, including low-resolution, degraded, and compressed images.

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

optimal color composition distance (occd)


A local and online sifting process for the empirical mode decomposition and its application in aircraft damage detection The Variable-Span Smoothing Sifting (VSSS) is introduced for the EMD. The VSSS extract the local mean of the signal by utilizing smoothing filters. The VSSS is direct, local and online. The VSSS can be employed for the real-time detection of aircraft damages.

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

empirical mode decomposition
sifting process
smoothing filters
aircraft damage detection


An HMM-based approach for off-line unconstrained handwritten word modeling and recognition This paper describes a hidden Markov model-based approach designed to recognize off-line unconstrained handwritten words for large vocabularies. After preprocessing, a word image is segmented into letters or pseudoletters and represented by two feature sequences of equal length, each consisting of an alternating sequence of shape-symbols and segmentation-symbols, which are both explicitly modeled. The word model is made up of the concatenation of appropriate letter models consisting of elementary HMMs and an HMM-based interpolation technique is used to optimally combine the two feature sets. Two rejection mechanisms are considered depending on whether or not the word image is guaranteed to belong to the lexicon. Experiments carried out on real-life data show that the proposed approach can be successfully used for handwritten word recognition.

O O O O O O 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 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 I

preprocessing
word recognition
rejection

handwriting modeling
segmentation
feature extraction
hidden markov models


Effective product assignment based on association rule mining in retail Much academic research has been conducted about the process of association rule mining. More effort is now required for practical application of association rules in various commercial fields. A potential application of association rule mining is the problem of product assignment in retail. The product assignment problem involves how to most effectively assign items to sites in retail stores to grow sales. Effective product assignment facilitates cross-selling and convenient shopping for customers to promote maximum sales for retailers. However, little practical research has been done to address the issue. The current study approaches the product assignment problem using association rule mining for retail environments. There are some barriers to overcome in applying association rule mining to the product assignment problem for retail. This study conducts some generalizing to overcome drawbacks caused by the short lifecycles of current products. As a measure of cross-selling, lift is used to compare the effectiveness of various assignments for products. The proposed algorithm consists of three processes, which include mining associations among items, nearest neighbor assignments, and updating assignments. The algorithm was tested on synthetic databases. The results show very effective product assignment in terms of the potential for cross-selling to drive maximum sales for retailers.

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


Free global ID against collusion attack on multi-authority attribute-based encryption In order to resolve the problem that collusion attack on attribute-based encryption (ABE) with multi-authority, we firstly formulize user action of making request for key into legality and collusion by the relationship between user's attributes and decryption threshold. Furthermore, we propose an ABE scheme without presenting user's global ID (GID). In our first system, a trusted central authority assists each attribute authority (AA) to independently run a security check for users' requests, such that only legal users have power to decrypt a message. In order to prevent a malicious user from passing security check by submitting duplication request to AA, we improve the first system by our second system, where the same requests of different users are transformed into different ones associated with the subset of attributes indexes. Finally, in order to adapt this transformation to ABE, discrete Fourier transform and inverse discrete Fourier transform are used to share and recover secret key, respectively. As shown in the results of security and performance evaluation, our scheme not only improves user's privacy but also is more efficient than existing ABE schemes. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

free gid
attribute-based encryption
multi-authority
privacy protection


Practical attacks on a mutual authentication scheme under the EPC Class-1 Generation-2 standard The EPC Class-1 Generation-2 RFID standard provides little security, as has been shown in previous works such as [S. Karthikeyan, M. Nesterenko, RFID security without extensive cryptography, in: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Security of Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks, 2005, pp. 63-67; D.N. Duc, J. Park, H. Lee, K. Kim, Enhancing security of EPCglobal Gen-2 RFID tag against traceability and cloning, in: The 2006 Symposium on Cryptography and Information Security, 2006; H.Y. Chien, C.H. Chen, Mutual authentication protocol for RFID conforming to EPC Class I Generation 2 standards, Computer Standards & Interfaces 29 (2007) 254-259; P. Peris-Lopez, J.C. Hernandez-Castro, J.M. Estevez-Tapiador, A. Ribagorda, Cryptanalysis of a novel authentication protocol conforming to EPC-C1G2 standard, in: Proceedings of Int'l Conference on RFID Security (RFIDSec)'07, Jul 2007; T.L. Lim, T. Li, Addressing the weakness in a lightweight RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme, in Proceedings of the IEEE Int'l Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM) 2007, Nov 2007, pp. 59-63]. In particular, the security of an RFID tag's access and kill passwords is almost non-existent. Konidala and Kim recently proposed a new mutual authentication scheme [D.M. Konidala, Z. Kim, K. Kim, A simple and cost-effective RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme, in: Proceedings of Int'l Conference on RFID Security (RFIDSec)'07, Jul 2007, pp. 141-152] - an improved version of their first attempt [D.M. Konidala, K. Kim, RFID tag-reader mutual authentication scheme utilizing tag's access password, Auto-ID Labs White Paper WP-HARDWARE-033, Jan 2007] - in which a tag's access and kill passwords are used for authentication. In this paper, we show that the new scheme continues to present serious security flaws. The 16 least significant bits of the access password can be obtained with probability 2(-2), and the 16 most significant bits with a probability greater than 2(-5). Finally, we show how an attacker can recover the entire kill password with probability 2(-2). (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Secure Network Coding on a Wiretap Network In the paradigm of network coding, the nodes in a network are allowed to encode the information received from the input links. With network coding, the full capacity of the network can be utilized. In this paper, we propose a model, call the wiretap network, that incorporates information security with network coding. In this model, a collection of subsets of the channels in the network is given, and a wiretapper is allowed to access any one (but not more than one) of these subsets without being able to obtain any information about the message transmitted. Our model includes secret sharing in classical cryptography as a special case. We present a construction of secure linear network codes that can be used provided a certain graph-theoretic condition is satisfied. We also prove the necessity of this condition for the special case that the wiretapper may choose to access any subset of channels of a fixed size. The optimality of our code construction is established for this special case. Finally, we extend our results to the scenario when the wiretapper is allowed to obtain a controlled amount of information about the message.

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 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 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 B I 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

cryptography
network coding
secret sharing

algebraic coding
multicast
wiretap channel


A study of three-dimensional optical code-division multiple-access for optical fiber sensor networks ? The OFS network using 3-D wavelength/time/spatial optical CDMA scheme. OFS have advantages of high bandwidth and resist electromagnetic interference. The 3-D codes by extending modified quadratic congruence and M-matrix codes. Overcoming the restriction of single pulse per row in traditional technology. The noises of PIIN and MAI can be suppressed by balance-detection scheme.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 code-division multiple-access (ocdma)


a virtual university as a distributed computing network The idea of a virtual university, making use of the world-wide-web as an instructional medium, has taken hold as the "wave of the future" in higher education. We have in mind a model that taps one of the most under-utilized yet most skilled of the U.S. intellectual resources, its retired professors. It is anticipated that a sizeable fraction of these individuals would welcome the opportunity to participate part-time in a challenging and most ambitious venture -- a Retired Professors University (RPU), based in the world-wide-web of cyberspace. In its functionality, RPU would replicate the traditional university in all important aspects, a full range of academic departments, Deans, baccalaureate programs, registrar, bookstore, etc., all accessible from the student's internet browser. The structure of such a university is described as a three-tiered (student-faculty-administration) distributed computing network in a client/server architecture. Critical issues relating to security and privacy are addressed.

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

retired professors
distributed computing
security and privacy
virtual university


mirroring an oai archive on the i2-dsi channel The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) promotes interoperability among digital libraries and has created a protocol for data providers to easily export their metadata. One problem with this approach is that some of the more popular servers quickly become heavily loaded. The obvious solution is replication. Fortunately, the Internet-2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure (I2-DSI) has begun to develop technology for highly distributed transparent replication of servers. This paper presents our solution for transparent mirroring of OAI repositories within the I2-DSI.

B 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 B O B O O O O


Predicting mill load using partial least squares and extreme learning machines Online prediction of mill load is useful to control system design in the grinding process. It is a challenging problem to estimate the parameters of the load inside the ball mill using measurable signals. This paper aims to develop a computational intelligence approach for predicting the mill load. Extreme learning machines (ELMs) are employed as learner models to implement the map between frequency spectral features and the mill load parameters. The inputs of the ELM model are reduced features, which are extracted and selected from the vibration frequency spectrum of the mill shell using partial least squares (PLS) algorithm. Experiments are carried out in the laboratory with comparisons on the well-known back-propagation learning algorithm, the original ELM and an optimization-based ELM (OELM). Results indicate that the reduced feature-based OELM can perform reasonably well at mill load parameter estimation, and it outperforms other learner models in terms of generalization capability.

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

back-propagation neural networks (bpnns)


Automated bone landmarks prediction on the femur using anatomical deformation technique Anatomical landmarks on bones play important roles in musculoskeletal simulations and surgical planning. This study develops an anatomically deformable model of the femur to predict bone landmarks automatically and quantifies its prediction accuracy. Forty-three angiographic computed tomography (CT) images of femurs were collected and 14 bone landmarks were manually marked on these images by experts. Surface mesh models of the femur were extracted from the CT images and combined with the bone landmark information to create an anatomical deformable model. The anatomical deformation technique developed in this study predicted bone landmarks automatically as the surface of a deformable model was matched to the surface of a given femur model. The prediction accuracy was quantified using the leave-one-out cross-validation method. The average prediction error for the 14 landmarks ranged from 2.80 to 5.93 mm. While the prediction accuracies of anterior and posterior cruciate ligaments and lateral epicondyle sites were high with averages (standard deviation) of 3.00 (1.55), 2.80 (1.76) and 2.97 (1.87)mm, respectively, those of gluteus minimus, ligament of head of femur and piriformis sites were low with averages of 5.93 (3.77), 4.89 (3.49) and 4.87 (2.70)mm, respectively. Accuracy can be expected to increase with the use of more population data as is the nature of a population-based statistical deformable model.

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

bone landmarks
anatomical deformation technique
femur

statistical shape analysis
joint biomechanics


Enhanced client polling with multilevel pre-fetching algorithm for wireless networks The implementation of client polling as a weak cache coherence mechanism has two major drawbacks: Firstly, the cache may return a stale copy if the object is changed in the origin server while the cached copy is considered valid. Secondly, the cache can invalidate at cached copy that is still valid in the server. Therefore, we propose a multilevel pre-fetching (MLP) in conjunction with the client polling to refine these drawbacks. MLP is introduced to improve the level of freshness among the cached objects. The simulation results presented in this paper show that the proposed MLP significantly minimizes the number of stale objects and reduces the invalidation messages sent out to the server, i.e., increase the cache HIT rate.

O B I O O O O O B I 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 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

cache coherence
client polling
wireless networks

cache effectiveness
pre-fetching
world wide web


Multi-directional local search This paper introduces multi-directional local search, a metaheuristic for multi-objective optimization. We first motivate the method and present an algorithmic framework for it. We then apply it to several known multi-objective problems such as the multi-objective multi-dimensional knapsack problem, the bi-objective set packing problem and the bi-objective orienteering problem. Experimental results show that our method systematically provides solution sets of comparable quality with state-of-the-art methods applied to benchmark instances of these problems, within reasonable CPU effort. We conclude that the proposed algorithmic framework is a viable option when solving multi-objective optimization problems.

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


Reliability-oriented ant colony optimization-based mobile peer-to-peer VoD solution in MANETs Mobile peer-to-peer (MP2P) has emerged as a state-of-the-art technology for video resource sharing in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs), building on the advantages of P2P data exchange and providing a feasible solution for large-scale deployment of media streaming services. Fast search for video resources and low maintenance overhead of overlay networks to support the mobility of nodes are key factors in MP2P video on demand solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel reliability-oriented ant colony optimization (ACO)-based MP2P solution to support interactivity for video streaming in MANETs (RACOM). RACOM makes use of highly innovative algorithms such as the peer status-aware mechanism and peer-centric overlay maintenance mechanism to support high-efficiency video resource sharing. The peer status-aware mechanism includes the user reliability measure model which is used to identify the peers having reliable playback status in order to find stable potential resource suppliers and a new ACO-based prediction model of playback behavior which provides the accurate prediction of playback content in the future to ensure the smooth experience and optimize the distribution of resources. In order to balance the fast supplier discovery and low maintenance overhead, RACOM makes use of peer-centric overlay maintenance mechanism composed of the time window-based detection strategy and encounter-based synchronization strategy to reduce the maintenance overhead of reliable peers, obtain quasi real-time status of peers and support the mobility of mobile nodes. Simulation results show how RACOM achieves higher hit ratio, lower seek delay, lower server stress, lower peer load and less overlay maintenance overhead in comparison with another state of the art solution.

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

mobile peer-to-peer (mp2p)
peer-centric
aco


Affine model of inflation-indexed derivatives and inflation risk premium Propose affine model capturing inflation premium, nominal and real interest rates. Pricing of zero-coupon inflation-indexed swaps. Pricing of year-on-year inflation-indexed swaps. Pricing of inflation-indexed swaptions. Pricing of inflation-indexed caps and floors.

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

inflation-indexed derivatives
affine models


validity and reliability of web accessibility guidelines Although widely used,Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have not been studied from the viewpoint of their validity and reliability. WCAG 2.0 explicitly claim that they are based on "testable" criteria, but no scientific evidence exists that this is actually the case. Validity (how well all and only the true problems can be identified) and reliability (the extent to which different evaluations of the same page lead to same results) are key factors for quality of accessibility evaluation methods. They need to be well studied and understood for methods, and guidelines, that are expected to have a major impact. This paper presents an experiment aimed at finding out what is the validity and reliability of different checkpoints taken from WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0. The experiment employed 35 young web developers with some knowledge on web accessibility. Although this is a small-scale experiment, unlikely to provide definite and general answers, results un-equivocally show that with respect to the kind of evaluators chosen in the experiment, checkpoints in general fare very low in terms of reliability, and that from this perspective WCAG 2.0 are not an improvement over WCAG 1.0.

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


Spectral discrimination of giant reed (Arundo donax L.): A seasonal study in riparian areas The giant reed (Arundo donax L.) is amongst the one hundred worst invasive alien species of the world, and it is responsible for biodiversity loss and failure of ecosystem functions in riparian habitats. In this work, field spectroradiometry was used to assess the spectral separability of the giant reed from the adjacent vegetation and from the common reed, a native similar species. The study was conducted at different phenological periods and also for the giant reed stands regenerated after mechanical cutting (giant reed_RAC). A hierarchical procedure using KruskalWallis test followed by Classification and Regression Trees (CART) was used to select the minimum number of optimal bands that discriminate the giant reed from the adjacent vegetation. A new approach was used to identify sets of wavelengths wavezones that maximize the spectral separability beyond the minimum number of optimal bands. Jeffries Matusita and Bhattacharya distance were used to evaluate the spectral separability using the minimum optimal bands and in three simulated satellite images, namely Landsat, IKONOS and SPOT. Giant reed was spectrally separable from the adjacent vegetation, both at the vegetative and the senescent period, exception made to the common reed at the vegetative period. The red edge region was repeatedly selected, although the visible region was also important to separate the giant reed from the herbaceous vegetation and the mid infrared region to the discrimination from the woody vegetation. The highest separability was obtained for the giant reed_RAC stands, due to its highly homogeneous, dense and dark-green stands. Results are discussed by relating the phenological, morphological and structural features of the giant reed stands and the adjacent vegetation with their optical traits. Weaknesses and strengths of the giant reed spectral discrimination are highlighted and implications of imagery selection for mapping purposes are argued based on present results.

O O O B I 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 B I 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 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 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 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 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 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

giant reed
common reed
field spectroradiometry

phenological period
riparian vegetation
invasive plant species


Managing the software process with a software process improvement tool in a small enterprise Top-down process improvement approaches provide a high-level model of what the process of a software development organization should be. Such models are based on the consensus of a designated working group on how software should be developed or maintained. They are very useful in that they provide general guidelines on where to start improving, and in which order. However, the majority of them have only worked in scenarios within large companies. We aim to help small software development organizations to adopt an iterative approach by providing a Process Improvement Web-based Tool (SysProVal). This paper presents research into the proposal that a small organization may use this tool to define and implement a set of project management practices that can be strengthened using the CMMI-DEV 1.2 model as reference. Copyright (c) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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 O O O O O O O O O O O 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 tools
assessment
questionnaire
improvement plan
small software enterprises


Intra-operative augmented reality in distal locking To design an augmented reality solution that assists surgeons during the distal locking of intramedullary nailing procedures.

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

medical augmented reality
c-arm fluoroscopy
video guidance
orthopedic surgery


RCSoS: An IEC 61508 Compatible Server Model for Reliable Communication In most cases of safety-related systems, the network is an indispensable part. At this point, the system reliability is as important as the system communication quality. With the emergence of multi-core architectures, the first generation usually aims to provide reliable and deterministic computing resources. Therefore, with the boost requirement of reliability and throughput that cannot be satisfied by general single-core processors, the deployment of safety-related systems is transferred and processed in multi-core environments. This paper proposes Reliable Communication Server on SPU (RCSoS), which is a server model for reliable communication utilizing SPU (Synergistic Processor Unit) in Cell/B.E. (Cell Broadband Engine). It simulates SPU as a communication server and guarantees the reliability and determinacy by the isolation mode of SPU and contract model. RCSoS has been implemented in PlayStation 3. It could dynamically adjust parameters, and inform applications on contract violations. The building process conforms IEC 61508, which guarantees the reliability of the life cycle. Besides, experiments show that the performance of this model is acceptable for the application requirements of network communication. And also the formal verification on the model theoretically guarantees the functional safety of the system.

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


how lock contention affects energy use in a cmp server A server application running on a chip multiprocessor with many hardware threads often requires extra processor speed (and energy) because of lock contention. We show that boosting the processor speed for frequently contended critical sections in a Java VM can save more energy on a DVFS-enabled server.

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 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


Three-dimensional simulation of the rolling of a saturated fibro-porous media This paper describes recent advances made in computational modelling of the sugar cane liquid extraction process. The saturated fibro-porous material is rolled between circumferentially grooved rolls, which enhance frictional grip and provide a low-resistance path for liquid flow during the extraction process. Previously reported two-dimensional (2D) computational models, account for the large deformation of the porous material by solving the fully coupled governing fibre stress and fluid-flow equations using finite element techniques. While the 2D simulations provide much insight into the overarching cause-effect relationships, predictions of mechanical quantities such as roll separating force and particularly torque as a function of roll speed and degree of compression are not satisfactory for industrial use. It is considered that the unsatisfactory response in roll torque prediction may be due to the stress levels that exist between the groove tips and roots which have been largely neglected in the geometrically simplified 2D model. This paper gives results for both two- and three-dimensional finite element models and highlights their strengths and weaknesses in predicting key milling parameters.

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

constitutive laws
plane strain model
grooving effects
3d modelling


High-quality vertex clustering for surface mesh segmentation using Student-t t mixture model We propose a method for high-quality vertex clustering using Student-t t mixture model. Less redundant clusters, which have no small isolated fragments, have been obtained. High-quality clusters have been obtained which correspond to the underlying surfaces.

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

underlying surface extraction
student-t t mixture model t t t t t
variational bayes approximation


Reentry vehicle tracking in a cluttered environment Recently, reentry vehicle (RV) tracking has become an important issue because of its high speed and high-elevation angle. The extended Kalman filter (EKF) with input estimation (IE) was developed for an RV tracking in a clear environment. However, radar tracking suffers from clutters in the form of unwanted, unavoidable and unpredictable signal echoes from sea, land and weather. The Hough transform is a well-known technique for identifying a straight line in noisy environments. This technique can be utilised to design a clutter elimination algorithm for clutters censoring. This study presents a novel tracking algorithm by integrating the EKF, IE and clutter elimination algorithm to track the RVs in cluttered environments. To ensure an RV to be tracked continuously, the estimation errors between the predicted and the real trajectories should be within a range cell. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm can provide an acceptable accuracy to maintain the track. Although clutters cannot be totally censored, the effects of resting clutters can be reduced to an acceptable range. The proposed algorithm may thus help radars in achieving continuous tracking. In conclusion, this algorithm deserves further study and application.

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

input estimation
hough transform
tracking algorithm
reentry vehicle
tracking

trajectory estimation
state estimation
parameter estimation


a high-parallelism distributed scheduling mechanism for multi-core instruction-set simulation Ideally, multi-core instruction-set simulation should run in parallel to improve simulation performance. However, the conventional low-parallelism centralized scheduler greatly constrains simulation performance. To resolve this issue, we propose a high-parallelism distributed scheduling mechanism. The experimental results show that our proposed approach accelerates simulation by 6 to 20 times, depending on the number of cores.

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

parallel simulation
multi-core simulation
timing synchronization
instruction-set simulator


A non-biased form of least squares support vector classifier and its fast online learning As an effective learning technique based on structural risk minimization, SVM has been confirmed an useful tool in many machine learning fields. With the increase in application requirement for some real-time cases, such as fast prediction and pattern recognition, the online learning based on SVM gradually becomes a focus. But the common SVM has disadvantages in classifiers bias and the computational complexity of online modeling, resulting in the reduction in classifiers generality and the low learning speed. Therefore, an non-biased least square support vector classifier(LSSVC) model is proposed in this paper by improving the form of structure risk. Also, a fast online learning algorithm using Cholesky factorization is designed based on this model according to the characteristic of the non-biased kernel extended matrix in the models dynamic change process. In this way, the calculation of Lagrange multipliers is simplified, and the time of online learning is greatly reduced. Simulation results testify that the non-biased LSSVC has good universal applicability and better generalization capability, at the same time, the algorithm has a great improvement on learning speed.

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

svm
online learning
cholesky factorization


Optimal two-stage algorithms for group testing problems Group testing refers to the situation in which one is given a set of objects O, an unknown subset P subset of O, and the task of determining P by asking queries of the type "does P intersect Q?", where Q is a subset of O. Group testing is a basic search paradigm that occurs in a variety of situations such as quality control testing, searching in storage systems, multiple access communications, and data compression, among others. Group testing procedures have been recently applied in computational molecular biology, where they are used for screening libraries of clones with hybridization probes and sequencing by hybridization. Motivated by particular features of group testing algorithms used in biological screening, we study the efficiency of two-stage group testing procedures. Our main result is the first optimal two-stage algorithm that uses a number of tests of the same order as the information-theoretic lower bound on the problem. We also provide efficient algorithms for the case in which there is a Bernoulli probability distribution on the possible sets P, and an optimal algorithm for the case in which the outcome of tests may be unreliable because of the presence of "inhibitory" items in O. Our results depend on a combinatorial structure introduced in this paper. We believe that it will prove useful in other contexts, too.

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 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 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 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


Salient object detection based on regions Salient object detection aims to automatically localize the attractive objects with respect to surrounding background in an image. It can be applied to image browsing, image cropping, image compression, content-based image retrieval, and etc. In the literature, the low-level (pixel-based) features (e.g., color and gradient) were usually adopted for modeling and computing visual attention; these methods are straightforward and efficient but limited by performance, due to losing global organization and inference. Some recent works attempt to use the region-based features but often lead to incomplete object detection. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach of salient object detection using region-based representation, in which two novel region-based features are extracted for proposing salient map and the salient object are localized with a region growing algorithm. Its brief procedure includes: 1) image segmentation to get disjoint regions with characteristic consistency; 2) region clustering; 3) computation of the region-based center-surround feature and color-distribution feature; 4) combination of the two features to propose the saliency map; 5) region growing for detecting salient object. In the experiments, we evaluate our method with the public dataset provided by Microsoft Research Asia. The experimental results show that the new approach outperforms other four state-of-the-arts methods with regard to precision, recall and F-measure.

B I I 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 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

saliency features
center-surround
color-distribution
region growing and combination


The logarithmic image processing model: Connections with human brightness perception and contrast estimators The logarithmic image processing (LIP) model is a mathematical framework based on abstract linear mathematics which provides a set of specific algebraic and functional operations that can be applied to the processing of intensity images valued in a bounded range. The LIP model has been proved to be physically justified in the setting of transmitted light and to be consistent with several laws and characteristics of the human visual system. Successful application examples have also been reported in several image processing areas, e.g., image enhancement, image restoration, three-dimensional image reconstruction, edge detection and image segmentation. The aim of this article is to show that the LIP model is a tractable mathematical framework for image processing which is consistent with several laws and characteristics of human brightness perception. This is a survey article in the sense that it presents (almost) previously published results in a revised, refined and self-contained form. First, an introduction to the LIP model is exposed. Emphasis will be especially placed on the initial motivation and goal, and on the scope of the model. Then, an introductory summary of mathematical fundamentals of the LTP model is detailed. Next, the article aims at surveying the connections of the LIP model with several laws and characteristics of human brightness perception, namely the brightness scale inversion, saturation characteristic, Weber's and Fechner's laws, and the psychophysical contrast notion. Finally, it is shown that the LIP model is a powerful and tractable framework for handling the contrast notion. This is done through a survey of several LIP-model-based contrast estimators associated with special subparts (point, pair of points, boundary, region) of intensity images, that are justified both from a physical and mathematical point of view.

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

logarithmic image processing
abstract linear mathematics
contrast estimators
human brightness perception


Intelligent backstepping control for wheeled inverted pendulum The adaptive output recurrent cerebellar model articulation control (AORCMAC) is an adaptive system with simple computation, good generalization capability and fast learning property. The proposed AORCMAC has superior capability to the conventional cerebellar model articulation controller (CMAC) in efficient learning mechanism and dynamic response. In this study, an intelligent backstepping tracking control system is proposed for wheeled inverted pendulums (WIPs) with unknown system dynamics and external disturbance. In this control system, an ABORCMAC is used to copy an ideal backstepping control (IBC), and a compensated controller is designed to compensate for difference between the IBC law and AORCMAC. Moreover, all adaptation laws of the proposed system are derived based on the Lyapunov stability analysis, the Taylor linearization technique, so that the stability of the closed-loop system can be guaranteed.

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


Design and verification of the SFC program for sequential Control A programmable controller (PC) programming technique using SFC (sequential function chart) has been adopted in sequential control system design because SFC can graphically represent the sequence how of control logic. However, when we design an SFC program, we must verify the program with the design specifications. For this purpose, we can use scenario simulation and exhaustive simulation. In this paper, we propose to model both the controlled object and the SFC program by a Petri net for verification by both types of simulations. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

sfc program
verification
petri net
simulation


Approximation algorithms for multicoloring planar graphs and powers of square and triangular meshes A multicoloring of a weighted graph G is an assignment of sets of colors to the vertices of G so that two adjacent vertices receive two disjoint sets of colors. A multicoloring problem on G is to find a multicoloring of G. In particular, we are interested in a minimum multicoloring that uses the least total number of colors. The main focus of this work is to obtain upper bounds on the weighted chromatic number of some classes of graphs in terms of the weighted clique number. We first propose an 11/6-approximation algorithm for multicoloring any weighted planar graph. We then study the multicoloring problem on powers of square and triangular meshes. Among other results, we show that the infinite triangular mesh is an induced subgraph of the fourth power of the infinite square mesh and we present 2-approximation algorithms for multicoloring a power square mesh and the second power of a triangular mesh, 3-approximation algorithms for multicoloring powers of semi-toroidal meshes and of triangular meshes and 4-approximation algorithm for multicoloring the power of a toroidal mesh. We also give similar algorithms for the Cartesian product of powers of paths and of cycles.

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

graph theory
coloring
power graph
product graph
approximation algorithm
greedy algorithm


Approximating the longest paths in grid graphs In this paper, we consider the problem of approximating the longest path in a grid graph that possesses a square-free 2-factor. By (1) analyzing several characteristics of four types of cross cells and (2) presenting three cycle-merging operations and one extension operation, we propose an algorithm that finds in an n-vertex grid graph C. a long path of length at least 5/6 n + 2. Our approximation algorithm runs in quadratic time. In addition to its theoretical value, our work has also an interesting application in image-guided maze generation. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Measuring technical efficiency in the presence of pesticide spillovers and production uncertainty: The case of Dutch arable farms Pesticides dynamic effects and production uncertainty play an important role in farmers production decisions. Pesticides have a current production impact through reducing crop damage in the current period and a future impact through impacting the farm biodiversity which alters the future production environment. This study presents the difference in inefficiency arising from models that ignore the dynamic effects of pesticides in production decisions and the impact of production uncertainty. A dynamic data envelopment analysis (DEA) model is applied to outputs, inputs, and undesirables of Dutch arable farms over the period 20032007. A bootstrap approach is used to explain farmers performance, providing empirical representations of the impact of stochastic elements on production. These empirical representations are used to adjust firms inefficiency scores to incorporate production uncertainty in efficiency evaluation. We find that efficiency increased dramatically when a production technology representation that considers both pesticides dynamic impacts, and production uncertainty is adopted.

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

data envelopment analysis
pesticides
production uncertainty


A vision-based analysis system for gait recognition in patients with Parkinson's disease Recognition of specific Parkinsonian gait patterns is helpful in the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease (PD). However, there are few computer-aided methods to identify the specific gait patterns of PD. We propose a vision-based diagnostic system to aid in recognition of the gait patterns of Parkinson's disease. The proposed system utilizes an algorithm combining principal component analysis (PCA) with linear discriminant analysis (LDA). This scheme not only addresses the high data dimensionality problem during image processing but also distinguishes different gait categories simultaneously. The feasibility of the proposed system for the recognition of PD gait was tested by using gait videos of PD and normal subjects. The efficiency of feature extraction using PCA and LDA coefficients are also compared. Experimental results showed that LDA had a recognition rate for Parkinsonian gait of 95.49%, which is higher than the conventional PCA feature extraction method. The proposed system is a promising aid in identifying the gait of Parkinson's disease patients and can discriminate the gait patterns of PD patients and normal people with a very high classification rate. Crown Copyright (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

parkinson's disease
gait analysis
linear discriminant analysis (lda)
principal component analysis (pca)
vision-based


Sensitivity testing of a model for exploring water resources utilisation and management options This paper investigates the model sensitivities to input parameter values in a Biophysical Toolbox for integrated catchment assessment and management of land and water resources. The toolbox was developed for application in the highland regions of northern Thailand. It incorporates the IHACRES rainfall-runoff model, a crop model (CATCHCROP), and an erosion model (a Universal Soil Loss Equation [USLE], modified for application to northern Thailand). In developing the individual models in the Biophysical Toolbox, emphasis was placed on limiting model complexity. The toolbox was developed and tested using data from the Mae Chaem catchment in northern Thailand. Due to the short duration and sparse distribution of the available data, the complexity of the model structure is constrained to consider only the key processes of interest. Despite the relative simplicity of the individual models, linkages between the models encompassed in the Biophysical Toolbox increase the complexity of the modelling system. This paper explores sensitivities in the Biophysical Toolbox to the parameters of CATCHCROP as this component has the greatest potential for propagating errors though the Toolbox. A simple sensitivity analysis was undertaken, whereby parameter values were perturbed to ascertain the effect of these perturbations on output indicators. The hydrologic component showed strong non-linearity to the infiltration parameters of the CATCHCROP model, although this did not greatly impact estimates of total annual discharge. Additionally, a number of CATCHCROP parameters did not greatly impact some output indicators of the toolbox. While the CATCHCROP model is relatively parsimonious when compared with many crop models, there are still 19 model parameters that must be determined from the field or prescribed from the literature. There is potential for the model to be further simplified although more extensive model testing is required to ensure that such simplifications would not adversely impact on the utility of the toolbox.

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

water resources
catchcrop
ihacres
northern thailand
sensitivity analysis


transistor sizing issues and tool for multi-threshold cmos technology Multi-threshold CMOS is an increasingly popular circuitapproach that enables high performance and low power operation.However, no methodologies have been developed to size the highV{t} sleep transistor in an intelligent manner that trades off area andperformance. In fact, many attempts at sizing the sleep transistorwithout close consideration of input vector patterns or internalstructures can lead to large overestimates or large underestimatesin sleep transistor sizing. This paper describes some of the issuesinvolved in sizing transistors for MTCMOS and also introduces avariable breakpoint switch level simulator that can rapidly calculatedelay in MTCMOS circuits as functions of design variablessuch as V{dd}, V{t}, and sleep transistor sizing.

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

input
size
design
tool
low power
switch
paper
circuits

threshold vectorization simulation technologies methodology intelligence high-performance pattern


Compact fuzzy association rule-based classifier Classification is one of the most popular data mining techniques applied to many scientific and industrial problems. The efficiency of a classification model is evaluated by two parameters, namely the accuracy and the interpretability of the model. While most of the existing methods claim their accurate superiority over others, their models are usually complex and hardly understandable for the users. In this paper, we propose a novel classification model that is based on easily interpretable fuzzy association rules and fulfils both efficiency criteria. Since the accuracy of a classification model can be largely affected by the partitioning of numerical attributes, this paper discusses several fuzzy and crisp partitioning techniques. The proposed classification method is compared to 15 previously published association rule-based classifiers by testing them on five benchmark data sets. The results show that the fuzzy association rule-based classifier presented in this paper, offers a compact, understandable and accurate classification model.

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

input partitioning
fuzzy clustering
associative classification


A multiple criteria active learning method for support vector regression We present an active learning method in the context of ?-insensitive SVR. The proposed method exploits relevancy, diversity and density criteria. The three criteria are implemented according to the SVR properties. All three criteria are applied in two consecutive steps. Experimental results show the robustness of the proposed technique.

O O O B I O O O O B 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

parameters estimation
support vector regression


Testing the hypothesis of preferential attachment in social network formation The hypothesis of preferential attachment (PA) - whereby better connected individuals make more connections - is hotly debated, particularly in the context of epidemiological networks. The simplest models of PA, for example, are incompatible with the eradication of any disease through population-level control measures such as random vaccination. Typically, evidence has been sought for the presence or absence of preferential attachment via asymptotic power-law behaviour. Here, we present a general statistical method to test directly for evidence of PA in count data and apply this to data for contacts relevant to the spread of respiratory diseases. We find that while standard methods for model selection prefer a form of PA, careful analysis of the best fitting PA models allows for a level of contact heterogeneity that in fact allows control of respiratory diseases. Our approach is based on a flexible but numerically cheap likelihood-based model that could in principle be applied to other integer data where the hypothesis of PA is of interest.

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

mle
phase-type distribution
spectral methods


The meaning of negative premises in transition system specifications II This paper reviews several methods to associate transition relations to transition system specifications with negative premises in Plotkin's structural operational style. Besides a formal comparison on generality and relative consistency, the methods are also evaluated on their taste in determining which specifications are meaningful and which are not. Additionally. this paper contributes a proof theoretic characterisation of the well-founded semantics for logic programs. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

O O O B I 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

structural operational semantics
logic programming
negation as failure


A non-linear redesign methodology for manufacturing systems in SMEs SMEs often have to adapt their manufacturing systems to changing circumstances such as technology advances and business growth. This paper presents a new methodology for the redesign of manufacturing systems within SMEs. This paper will show that most approaches to manufacturing systems redesign are linear and it will explain why this is not the best option for SMEs. Foremost among these reasons is the uncertainty of the SME environment. Redesign planning that is conducted at the outset of a change episode may be superseded by events that are impossible to foresee. A further issue for conventional redesign approaches is the resource poverty that is a widely reported feature of SMEs. The most obvious impact is on the financial support available for costly technology-led solutions. Resource poverty also includes the available expertise and managerial time to implement complex methodologies. The alternative approach proposed uses an iterative model as its basis for change. The basic helical model is extended to provide four perspectives on systems change. These perspectives focus on structural, people, technology and process issues. It is these perspectives that make the difference between continuous improvement and systems redesign. The model has been developed through action research in manufacturing SMEs. Validation was achieved through a longitudinal case study that provided empirical evidence to support the methodology. A single case was used for validation to provide depth over breadth. The development of the methodology had been broad through action research into several diverse SMEs and it was considered that more detailed case study would add balance to the research. The depth afforded by a single longitudinal study also allowed for greater scrutiny of the methodology under real world conditions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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