A study of the optimal use period and number of minimal repairs of a repairable product after the warranty expires The two-phase warranty models for repairable products are considered. We define the time interval [0, W] as the first phase and the time interval (W, T+W] as the second phase. The products have two types of failures: type I failures (minor failures) and type II failures (catastrophic failures). In the model, type I failures are removed by minimal repairs in the first and the second phases, and type II failures are removed by the replacements in the first phase. If type II failures take place in the second phase, because the type II failures (catastrophic failures) occur in the second phase, catastrophic failures will incur a very large repair cost for the buyer. So, we suppose that the life of products will be ended, that is the buyer will buy another new product. The process of buying a new product is conducted at time T+W, upon type II failures, or the nth of type I failures, whichever occurs first. Whenever each replacement takes place, the spare is ordered, and then delivered. Therefore, the lead time is considered. In this paper, we consider three warranty and maintenance models for setter, buyer and the society. Our objective here is to obtain the optimal minimal repairs n* and use time limit T* when the long-run average cost of society is the smallest. A numerical example is provided.

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


locality preserving clustering for image database It is important and challenging to make the growing image repositories easy to search and browse. Image clustering is a technique that helps in several ways, including image data preprocessing, user interface designing, and search result representation. Spectral clustering method has been one of the most promising clustering methods in the last few years, because it can cluster data with complex structure, and the (near) global optimum is guaranteed. However, existing spectral clustering algorithms, like Normalized Cut, are difficult to handle data points out of training set. In this paper, we propose a clustering algorithm named Locality Preserving Clustering (LPC), which shares many of the data representation properties of nonlinear spectral method. Yet LPC provides an explicit mapping function which is defined everywhere, both on training data points and testing points. Experimental results show that LPC is more accurate than both "direct Kmeans" and "PCA + Kmeans". We also show that LPC produces in general comparable results with Normalized Cut, yet is more efficient than Normalized Cut.

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

spectral clustering
locality preserving clustering
direct
general
browse
representation
paper
search
image database
training
method
structure
data
user interface
image
algorithm
repositories
global
cluster

locality preserving projections
point
efficiency
map
locality
data representation
experimentation
test
functional
image clustering
complexity


network-centric architecture for crisis management system The paper regards scientific, technical, and organization problems in the crisis management. It is dedicated to a technological implementation of the network-centric approach (NCA) for management of complex heterogeneous systems. The publication presents a software architecture that provides structural methodology and instruments for the integration of separate software applications for crisis management scattered over the national territory in a common information and communication environment.

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

distributed information architectures
network-centric operation


Markov-Chain modeling for-multicast signaling delay analysis Feedback signaling plays a key role in flow control because the traffic source relies on the signaling information to make correct and timely flow-control decisions. However, it is difficult to design an efficient signaling algorithm since a signaling message can tolerate neither error nor latency. Multicast flow-control signaling imposes two additional challenges: scalability and feedback synchronization. Previous research on multicast signaling has mainly focused on the development of algorithms without analyzing their delay performance. To remedy this deficiency, we have previously developed a binary-tree model and an independent-marking statistical model for multicast-signaling delay analysis. This paper considers a general scenario where the congestion markings at different links are dependent-a more accurate but complex case. Specifically, we develop a Markov-chain model defined,by the link-marking state on each path in the multicast tree. The Markov chain can not only capture link-marking dependencies, but also yield a tractable analytical model. We also develop 4 Markov-chain dependency-degree model to evaluate all possible Markov-chain dependency degrees' without any prior knowledge of them. Using the above two models, we derive the general probability distributions of each path becoming the multicast-tree bottleneck. Also derived are the first and second moments of multicast signaling delays., The proposed Markov chain is also shown to asymptotically reach an equilibrium, and its limiting distribution converges to the marginal link-marking probabilities when the Markov chain is irreducible. Applying the two models, we analyze and contrast the delay scalability of two representative multicast signaling protocols: Soft-Synchronization Protocol (SSP) and Hop-By-Hop (HBH) algorithms.

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


Testing trivializing maps in the Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm We test a recent proposal to use approximate trivializing maps in a field theory to speed up Hybrid Monte Carlo simulations. Simulating the CPN?1 CP N ? 1 model, we find a small improvement with the leading order transformation, which is however compensated by the additional computational overhead. The scaling of the algorithm towards the continuum is not changed. In particular, the effect of the topological modes on the autocorrelation times is studied.

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 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

cpn?1 cp n ? 1 cpn?1 cp n ? 1 cpn?1 cp n ? 1 cp n ? 1


Learning a tensor subspace for semi-supervised dimensionality reduction The high-dimensional data is frequently encountered and processed in real-world applications and unlabeled samples are readily available, but labeled or pairwise constrained ones are fairly expensive to capture. Traditionally, when a pattern itself is an n 1n 2 image, the image first has to be vectorized to the vector pattern in \( \Re^{{n_{1} \times n_{2} }} \) by concatenating its pixels. However, such a vector representation fails to take into account the spatial locality of pixels in the images, which are intrinsically matrices. In this paper, we propose a tensor subspace learning-based semi-supervised dimensionality reduction algorithm (TS2DR), in which an image is naturally represented as a second-order tensor in \( \Re^{{n_{1} }} \otimes \Re^{{n_{2} }} \) and domain knowledge in the forms of pairwise similarity and dissimilarity constraints is used to specify whether pairs of instances belong to the same class or different classes. TS2DR has an analytic form of the global structure preserving embedding transformation, which can be easily computed based on eigen-decomposition. We also verify the efficiency of TS2DR by conducting unbalanced data classification experiments based on the benchmark real-word databases. Numerical results show that TS2DR tends to capture the intrinsic structure characteristics of the given data and achieves better classification accuracy, while being much more efficient.

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

semi-supervised learning
tensor representation
image recognition


Thermocapillary Migration of a Drop: An Exact Solution with Newtonian Interfacial Rheology and Stretching/Shrinkage of Interfacial Area Elements for Small Marangoni Numbers In this paper we analyze the effects of the following phenomena associated with the thermocapillary migration of a drop. The first is the influence of Newtonian surface rheology of the interface and the second is that of the energy changes associated with stretching and shrinkage of the interfacial area elements, when the drop is in motion. The former occurs because of dissipative processes in the interfacial region, such as when surfactant molecules are adsorbed at the interface in sufficient concentration. The interface is typically modeled in this instance by ascribing to it a surface viscosity. This is a different effect from that of interfacial tension gradients arising from surfactant concentration gradients. The stretching and shrinkage of interfacial area elements leads to changes in the internal energy of these elements that affects the transport of energy in the fluids adjoining the interface. When an element on the interface is stretched, its internal energy increases because of the increase in its area. This energy is supplied by the neighboring fluids that are cooled as a consequence. Conversely, when an element on the interface shrinks, the adjoining fluids are warmed. In the case of a moving drop, elements of interfacial area are stretched in the forward half of the drop, and are shrunk in the rear half. Consequently, the temperature variation on the surface of the drop and its migration speed are modified. The analysis of the motion of a drop including these effects was first performed by LeVan in 1981, in the limit when convective transport of momentum and energy are negligible. We extend the analysis of LeVan to include the convective transport of momentum by demonstrating that an exact solution of the momentum equation is obtained for an arbitrary value of the Reynolds number. This solution is then used to calculate the slightly deformed shape of the drop from a sphere.

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

thermocapillary migration
newtonian interfacial rheology
small marangoni numbers
drop


On the descriptional complexity of metalinear CD grammar systems Metalinear CD grammar systems are context-free CD grammar systems where each component consists of metalinear productions. The maximal number of nonterminals in all starting productions is referred to as the width of a CD grammar system. It is shown that between the class of CD grammar systems of width m + 1 and of width m there are savings concerning the size of the grammar system not bounded by any recursive function. This is called a non-recursive trade-off. Furthermore, it is proven that there are non-recursive trade-offs between the class of metalinear CD grammar systems of width m and the class of (2m - 1)-linear context-free grammars. In addition, some decidability results axe presented.

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

cd grammar systems
descriptional complexity


Challenge of design exploration for small blended wing body using unstructured flow solver In this study, the conceptual design and the aerodynamic shape optimization of a 150 PAX class blended wing body type aircraft, which was named as Novel-Wing-Body (NWB), is discussed. The modified geometry parameterization is developed based on authors' previous study for the planform design. The airfoil is defined to obtain better aerodynamic performance based on NASA-SC(2)0711. In addition, double-tapered wing is employed for outboard wing to arrow of higher sweepback angle without increasing the structured weight. The aerodynamic design exploration is carried out with this modified geometry representation. According to the design exploration result, it is found that the most solutions show better performance than that of the best solution obtained by previous study, and it is also suggests that the promising designs has large sweep back and, the sharp fuselage-nose. (C) 2012 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

blended-wing-body
computational fluid dynamics
efficient global optimization


fld-based detection of re-compressed speech signals Prior works on re-quantization detection were mainly focused on still images and videos, implying that the involved quantization is uniform. In this paper, we examine non-uniform re-quantization, and then investigate the automatic detection of re-compressed speech signals. Based on Fisher Linear Discriminant (FLD), two detection algorithms are described in the time-domain and in the DFT-domain respectively. Comparative experiments indicate that both detection algorithms produce reliable results with AUC values higher than 0.9744 for a set of different experimental setups. In general, time-domain detection performs slightly better than DFT-domain detection. However, the latter is superior in the less dimensionality of input vectors.

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

non-uniform quantization
re-quantization detection
speech forensics


Generalized dynamic spectrum access: An order statistics design perspective A new adaptive multiple access scheme based on the theory of order statistics is introduced. The proposed algorithm employs a semi-random allocation mechanism that limits subchannel selection to the highest-gain subchannels. Because the proposed low-complexity method requires relatively small channel information overhead and processing delays, it can be feasible for higher data rates where the bit duration approaches the channel coherence time. Since by its nature this method is non-iterative, it is suitable for networks with large number of users. Numerical results reveal significant system performance improvement over conventional approaches.

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

diversity
fading channels
general order selection
spectrum allocation


Online text prediction with recurrent neural networks Arithmetic coding is one of the most outstanding techniques for lossless data compression. It attains its good performance with the help of a probability model which indicates at each step the probability of occurrence of each possible input symbol given the current context. The better this model, the greater the compression ratio achieved. This work analyses the use of discrete-time recurrent neural networks and their capability for predicting the next symbol in a sequence in order to implement that model. The focus of this study is on online prediction, a task much harder than the classical offline grammatical inference with neural networks. The results obtained show that recurrent neural networks have no problem when the sequences come from the output of a finite-state machine, easily giving high compression ratios. When compressing real texts, however, the dynamics of the sequences seem to be too complex to be learned online correctly by the net.

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

arithmetic coding
recurrent neural networks

online nonlinear prediction
text compression


AutoGen: Easing model management through two levels of abstraction Due to its extensive potential applications, model management has attracted many research interests and gained great progress. To provide easy-to-use interfaces, we have proposed a graph transformation-based model management approach that provides intuitive interfaces for manipulation of graphical data models. The approach consists of two levels of graphical operators: low-level customizable operators and high-level generic operators, both of which consist of a set of graph transformation rules. Users need to program or tune the low-level operators for desirable results. To further improve the ease-of-use of the graphical model management, automatic generation of low level of operators is highly desirable. The paper formalizes specifications of low- and high-level operators and proposes a generator to automatically transform high-level operators into low-level operators upon specific input data models. Based on graph transformation theoretical foundation, we design an algorithm for the generator to automatically produce low-level operators from input data models and mappings according to a high-level operator. The generator, called AutoGen, therefore eliminates many tedious specifications and thus eases the use of the graphical model management system. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

graph grammar
visual programming
schema interoperation


A framework for testing DBMS features Testing a specific feature of a DBMS requires controlling the inputs and outputs of the operators in the query execution plan. However, that is practically difficult to achieve because the inputs/outputs of a query depend on the content of the test database. In this paper, we propose a framework to test DBMS features. The framework includes a database generator called QAGen so that the generated test databases are able to meet the test requirements defined on the test queries. The framework also includes a set of tools to automate test case constructions and test executions. A wide range of DBMS feature testing tasks can be facilitated by the proposed framework.

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

database testing
data generation
symbolic query processing
symbolic execution


Stratified analysis of AOL query log Characterizing users intent and behaviour while using a retrieval information tool (e.g. a search engine) is a key question on web research, as it hold the keys to know how the users interact, what they are expecting and how we can provide them information in the most beneficial way. Previous research has focused on identifying the average characteristics of user interactions. This paper proposes a stratified method for analyzing query logs that groups queries and sessions according to their hit frequency and analyzes the characteristics of each group in order to find how representative the average values are. Findings show that behaviours typically associated with the average user do not fit in most of the aforementioned groups.

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

query log analysis
user behaviour
user intent
user profiling


Argumentation-based negotiation planning for autonomous agents When we negotiate, the arguments uttered to persuade the opponent are not the result of an isolated analysis, but of an integral view of the problem that we want to agree about. Before the negotiation starts, we have in mind what arguments we can utter, what opponent we can persuade, which negotiation can finish successfully and which cannot. Thus, we plan the negotiation, and in particular, the argumentation. This fact allows us to take decisions in advance and to start the negotiation more confidently. With this in mind, we claim that this planning can be exploited by an autonomous agent. Agents plan the actions that they should execute to achieve their goals. In these plans, some actions are under the agent's control, while some others are not. The latter must be negotiated with other agents. Negotiation is usually carried out during the plan execution. In our opinion, however, negotiation can be considered during the planning stage, as in real life. In this paper, we present a novel approach to integrate argumentation-based negotiation planning into the general planning process of an autonomous agent. This integration allows the agent to take key decisions in advance. We evaluated this proposal in a multiagent scenario by comparing the performance of agents that plan the argumentation and agents that do not. These evaluations demonstrated that performance improves when the argumentation is planned, specially, when the negotiation alternatives increase. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

argumentation-based negotiation
multiagent systems
conflict resolution


Guidelines for the effective use of entity-attribute-value modeling for biomedical databases Purpose: To introduce the goals of EAV database modeling, to describe the situations where entity-attribute-value (EAV) modeling is a useful alternative to conventional relational methods of database modeling, and to describe the fine points of implementation in production systems. Methods: We analyze the following circumstances: (1) data are sparse and have a large number of applicable attributes, but only a small fraction will apply to a given entity; (2) numerous classes of data need to be represented, each class has a limited number of attributes, but the number of instances of each class is very small. We also consider situations calling for a mixed approach where both conventional and EAV design are used for appropriate data classes. Results and conclusions: In robust production systems, EAV-modeled databases trade a modest data sub-schema for a complex metadata sub-schema. The need to design the metadata effectively makes EAV design potentially more challenging than conventional design. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

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 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 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

entity-attribute-value
clinical patient record systems
clinical study data management


Multiresolution approximation scale and time-shift subspaces Multiresolution Approximation subspaces are L-2(R)-subspaces defined for each scale over all time shifts, i.e., "scale subspaces", while with respect to a given wavelet, the signal space L-2(R) not only admits orthogonal scale subspaces basis, but orthogonal "time shift subspaces" basis as well. It is therefore natural to expect both scale subspaces and time shift subspaces to play a role in Wavelet Theory and, in particular, in Multiresolution Approximation as well. This is what will be discussed in the paper.

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 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 O O O

wavelet
multiresolution approximation scale


smart rebinning for compression of concentric mosaics Concentric mosaics offer a quick solution to construct a virtual copy of a real environment, and navigate in the virtual environment. However, the huge amount of data associated with concentric mosaics is a heavy burden for its application. A 3D wavelet transform-based compressor has been proposed in previous work to compress the concentric mosaics. In this paper, we greatly improve the performance of the 3D wavelet coder with a data rearrangement mechanism called smart rebinning. The proposed scheme first aligns the concentric mosaic image shots along the horizontal direction and then rebins the shots into multi-perspective panoramas. Smart rebinning greatly improves the cross shot correlation and enables the coder to better explore the redundancy among shots. Experimental results show that the performance of the 3D wavelet coder improves an average of 4.3dB with the use of smart rebinning. The proposed coder outperforms MPEG-2 coding of concentric mosaics by an average of 3.7dB.

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

3d wavelet
concentric mosaics
compression
rebinning

image based rendering
multi-perspective panorama


A product management challenge: Creating software product value through requirements selection It is important for a software company to maximize value creation for a given investment. The purpose of requirements engineering activities is to add business value that is accounted for in terms of return on investment of a software product. This paper provides insight into the release planning processes used in the software industry to create software product value, by presenting three case studies. It examines how IT professionals perceive value creation through requirements engineering and how the release planning process is conducted to create software product value. It also presents to what degree the major stakeholders perspectives are represented in the decision-making process. Our findings show that the client and market base of the software product represents the most influential group in the decision to implement specific requirements. This is reflected both in terms of deciding the processes followed and the decision-making criteria applied when selecting requirements for the product. Furthermore, the management of software product value is dependant on the context in which the product exists. Factors, such as the maturity of the product, the marketplace in which it exists, and the development tools and methods available, influence the criteria that decide whether a requirement is included in a specific project or release.

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

value-based requirements engineering
project value
customers perceived value
software release
requirements prioritization


implementing and testing dynamic timeout adjustment as a dos counter-measure In this paper we experimentally analyse various dynamic timeout adjustment strategies in server queues as potential counter-measures against degradation of service attacks. Previous theoretical work studied the relative performance of both coarse-grained threshold-based timeout and fine-grained adjusment strategies where the timeout value is adjusted as the number of connections in the queue varies. In addition, two methods for removing timed-out connections were explored: the deterministic method where the expiry time is determined at connection arrival depending on the timeout value at that moment, and the deferred method where connections are continuously polled and flushed when the time-in-queue is larger than the current timeout value.We report on experiments performed on a lab network where these strategies were tested against various configuration and attack parameters. The experimental results confirm the conclusions previously obtained from mathematical modelling and simulation, i.e. that a) finer-grained dynamic adjustment performs better than coarse-grained or no adjustment, and b) that the deferred method performs better than the deterministic one. Furthermore, our implementation of these counter-measures is very efficient and transparent with respect to the servers and applications it tries to protect. It could therefore be easily integrated into existing OS and applications or implemented in separate network devices, either on dedicated machines or network appliances.

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


Cryptanalyzing a chaos-based image encryption algorithm using alternate structure Recently, a chaos-based image encryption algorithm with an alternate structure (IEAS) was proposed. This paper applies the differential cryptanalysis on the IEAS and finds that some of its properties favor the differential attack which can recover an equivalent secret key with only a few number of chosen plain-images. Detailed procedures for cryptanalyzing IEAS with a lower round number are presented. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results are provided to show the vulnerability of IEAS against differential attack. In addition, some other security defects of IEAS, including insensitivity with respect to changes of plain-images and insufficient size of the key space, are also pointed out and verified.

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 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 O O O 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

cryptanalysis
differential attack
image encryption


A CONCEPT VECTOR SPACE MODEL FOR SEMANTIC KERNELS Kernels are widely used in Natural Language Processing as similarity measures within inner-product based learning methods like the Support Vector Machine. The Vector Space Model (VSM) is extensively used for the spatial representation of the documents. However, it is purely a statistical representation. In this paper, we present a Concept Vector Space Model (CVSM) representation which uses linguistic prior knowledge to capture the meanings of the documents. We also propose a linear kernel and a latent kernel for this space. The linear kernel takes advantage of the linguistic concepts whereas the latent kernel combines statistical and linguistic concepts. Indeed, the latter kernel uses latent concepts extracted by the Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) in the CVSM. The kernels were evaluated on a text categorization task in the biomedical domain. The Ohsumed corpus, well known for being difficult to categorize, was used. The results have shown that the CVSM improves performance compared to the VSM.

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

kernel
support vector machine
text categorization


REGION SIMILARITY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WATERSHED AND PENALIZED FUZZY HOPFIELD NEURAL NETWORK ALGORITHMS FOR BRAIN IMAGE SEGMENTATION A robust image segmentation method that combines the watershed segmentation and penalized fuzzy Hopfield neural network (PFHNN) algorithms to minimize undesirable over-segmentation is described in this paper. This method incorporates spatial graph representation derived from the watershed segmented regions and cluster analysis information obtained from the PFHNN algorithm to achieve efficient image segmentation. The proposed scheme employs the Markov random field (MRF) model on the region adjacency graph (RAG) to improve the quality of watershed segmentation. Here, the fusion criterion is according to the correlation coefficient, which uses inter-region similarities to determine the merging of regions. Analysis of the performance of the proposed technique is presented through quantitative and qualitative validation experiments on benchmark images, and significant and promising segmentation results are presented using brain phantom simulated data.

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

correlation coefficient
penalized fuzzy hopfield neural network
markov random field
region adjacency graph
watershed


Using templates to distinguish multiplications from squaring operations Since side channel analysis was introduced as a method to recover secret information from an otherwise secure cryptosystem, many countermeasures have been proposed to prevent leakage from secure devices. Among these countermeasures is side channel atomicity that makes operations indistinguishable using side channel analysis. In this paper, we present practical results of an attack on RSA signature generation, protected in this manner, based on the expected difference in Hamming weight between the result of a multiplication and a squaring operation. This work presents the first attack that we are aware of where template analysis can be used without requiring an open device to characterize an implementation of a given cryptographic algorithm. Moreover, an attacker does not need to know the plaintexts being operated on and, therefore, blinding and padding countermeasures applied to the plaintext do not hinder the attack in anyway.

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 B I I 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 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

side channel analysis
hamming weight
rsa


Bare bones artificial bee colony algorithm with parameter adaptation and fitness-based neighborhood Concerning this issue that the solution search equation of artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) does well in exploration but badly in exploitation, a bare bones ABC with parameter adaptation and fitness-based neighborhood is proposed, BABC for short reference. The proposed method employs a Gaussian search equation to produce a new candidate individual at the onlooker phase which exploits the valuable information hidden in the best individual to improve the exploitation, while, at the employed bee phase, a parameter adaptation strategy and a fitness-based neighborhood mechanism are integrated into the search equation which can take advantage of the information from the previous search and better individuals to enhance the search ability. The proposed framework can be applied to any ABC with minimal changes. Furthermore, the proposed framework is applied to the original ABC and several highly regarded ABC variants. The comparison results demonstrate that the proposed framework is able to significantly improve the performance of the original ABC and the modified ABC variants.

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

artificial bee colony algorithm
gaussian search equation
parameter adaptation strategy


A cortical framework for invariant object categorization and recognition In this paper we present a new model for invariant object categorization and recognition. It is based on explicit multi-scale features: lines, edges and keypoints are extracted from responses of simple, complex and end-stopped cells in cortical area V1, and keypoints are used to construct saliency maps for Focus-of-Attention. The model is a functional but dichotomous one, because keypoints are employed to model the where data stream, with dynamic routing of features from V1 to higher areas to obtain translation, rotation and size invariance, whereas lines and edges are employed in the what stream for object categorization and recognition. Furthermore, both the where and what pathways are dynamic in that information at coarse scales is employed first, after which information at progressively finer scales is added in order to refine the processes, i.e., both the dynamic feature routing and the categorization level. The construction of group and object templates, which are thought to be available in the prefrontal cortex with what and where components in PF46d and PF46v, is also illustrated. The model was tested in the framework of an integrated and biologically plausible architecture.

O O O O O O B 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 O O 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 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

categorization
recognition
dynamic routing


image collection taxonomies for photo-book auto-population with intuitive interaction We demonstrate a system for automatic image selection for photobook creation, along with an intuitive user interface for fine tuning of the selection results. A versatile image collection representation is introduced, which allows for automatic scalable selection in order to target a specific image count for a predetermined size photobook. The images are selected based on their relevance, while preserving a good coverage of the event (time plus people) in order to maintain the storytelling potential of the selection. The selected images are laid out and presented to the user through an Adobe Flex user interface, which allows them to select images and swap them by semantically related ones, in an intuitive manner. The final result is output to a PDF file.

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

image appeal
hierarchy
automatic photo selection
time clustering
near-duplicate detection
scalability


Multiple View Geometry for Curvilinear Motion Cameras This paper introduces a tensorial representation of multiple cameras with arbitrary curvilinear motions. It enables us to define a multilinear relationship among image points derived from non-rigid object motions viewed from multiple cameras with arbitrary curvilinear motions. We show the new multilinear relationship is useful for generating images and reconstructing 3D non-rigid object motions viewed from cameras with arbitrary curvilinear motions. The method is tested in real image sequences.

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

multiple view geometry
curvilinear motion
multiple cameras

spline curve
multifocal tensor
camera calibration


Spatial filtering using the active-space indexing method Traditionally most camera-based position estimation systems use only a few points to calibrate cameras. In this paper, we investigate a novel and alternate approach for 3D position estimation by using a larger number of points arranged in a 3D grid. We present an implementation of the active-space indexing mechanism which uses three cameras. Given the corresponding points in camera images, a precise estimation of the position can be obtained. The active-space indexing method can be also used as a spatial filter to eliminate the large number of possible corresponding pairs from consideration. This capability, unique only to the active-space indexing method, provides a tractable algorithm to the otherwise intractable situation. (C) 2001 Academic Press.

O O O O O O O O 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

camera calibration for multiple camera images

computer vision techniques for 3d model building.


A survey on statistical disclosure control and micro-aggregation techniques for secure statistical databases This paper surveys the fields of Statistical Disclosure Control (SDC) and Micro-Aggregation Techniques (MATs), which are both areas fundamental to the science of secure Statistical DataBases (SDBs). The paper is written from the perspective of a computer scientist with the hope that it will prove to be a source of reference material useful to researchers and practitioners in the field. The paper first introduces the concept of SDC and describes the domain of its applications and the various data types that are currently used in SDBs. It then proceeds to focus on the family of micro-data types in SDBs. At this juncture, we introduce the importance of the relevant measures, namely the metrics termed as the Information Loss (IL) and the Disclosure Risk (DR), after which we survey the various methods of resolving the conflicting goals that these metrics represent. Thereafter, the paper summarizes the perturbative and non-perturbative SDC methods for micro-data protection, and it focuses on the families of MATs by formally stating the Micro-Aggregation Problem and surveying it in a comprehensive manner. Apart from the paper including a historical view of the field of MATs, it describes a broad selection of work that has been reported more recently. Indeed, we believe that this paper represents a complete overview of the state-of-the-art techniques. Copyright 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

O O O B I I O O O O B I I O O O O O O B I I 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 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 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 statistical databases
statistical disclosure control
disclosure risk
information loss

micro-aggregation techniques
micro-aggregation problem


Street environment change detection from mobile laser scanning point clouds Mobile laser scanning (MLS) has become a popular technique for road inventory, building modelling, infrastructure management, mobility assessment, etc. Meanwhile, due to the high mobility of MLS systems, it is easy to revisit interested areas. However, change detection using MLS data of street environment has seldom been studied. In this paper, an approach that combines occupancy grids and a distance-based method for change detection from MLS point clouds is proposed. Unlike conventional occupancy grids, our occupancy-based method models space based on scanning rays and local point distributions in 3D without voxelization. A local cylindrical reference frame is presented for the interpolation of occupancy between rays according to the scanning geometry. The DempsterShafer theory (DST) is utilized for both intra-data evidence fusion and inter-data consistency assessment. Occupancy of reference point cloud is fused at the location of target points and then the consistency is evaluated directly on the points. A point-to-triangle (PTT) distance-based method is combined to improve the occupancy-based method. Because it is robust to penetrable objects, e.g. vegetation, which cause self-conflicts when modelling occupancy. The combined method tackles irregular point density and occlusion problems, also eliminates false detections on penetrable objects.

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

change detection
occupancy grids
dempstershafer theory

lidar
k-d tree
point-to-triangle distance


optimization techniques for two-dimensional placement Present VLSI synthesis programs typically characterized as silicon compilers employ a predefined floorplan and fixed placement of functional elements. Significant broadening of the areas of application and more effective utilization of silicon space can be obtained by using a general placement of functionally clustered elements rather than a fixed floorplan. In this paper we present a new mathematical optimization technique to achieve a two-dimensional placement. The two-dimensional placement problem is the most important part of the hierarchical placement approach being considered by GTE Laboratories for its SilC Silicon Compiler. This paper describes a method of solving the placement problem in a mathematical form and an algorithm for optimization. The construction of a mathematical model and the use of optimization techniques represent the main distinction from heuristic placement procedures. The optimization technique guarantees a feasible placement at each iteration. It is also possible to determine at each stage how close the solution is to the optimum, and therefore the process may be stopped when the result is sufficiently close to optimum. A small, illustrative example of a two-dimensional placement problem was considered.

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

use method space functional process placement general synthesis algorithm paper

program
hierarchic
applications
examples
mathematical modeling
optimality
procedure
compilation
heuristics
laboratory
floorplanning
effect
iter
cluster


Sketch guided solid texturing ? Compared to 2D textures, solid textures can represent not only the bounding surfaces, but also their interiors. Existing solid texture synthesis methods pay little attention to the generation of conforming textures that capture geometric structures or reflect the artists design intentions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to synthesizing solid textures using 2D exemplars. The generated textures locally agree with a tensor field derived from user sketching curves. We use a deterministic approach and only a small portion of the voxels needs to be synthesized on demand. Correction is fundamental in deterministic texture synthesis. We propose a history windows representation, which is general enough to unifiedly represent various previous correction schemes, and a dual grid scheme based on it to significantly reduce the dependent voxels while still producing high quality results. Experiments demonstrate that our method produces significantly improved solid textures with a small amount of user interaction.

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


Concepts and Validation of a Small-Scale Rotorcraft Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) Controller in a Unique Simulation Environment At the current time, the U. S. Army Research Laboratory's (ARL's) Vehicle Technology Directorate is interested in expanding its Unmanned Vehicles Division to include rotary wing and micro-systems control. The intent is to research unmanned aircraft systems not only for reconnaissance missions but also for targeting and lethal attacks. This project documents ongoing work expanding ARL's program in research and simulation of autonomous control systems. A proportional integral derivative control algorithm was modeled in Simulink (Simulink is a trademark of The MathWorks) and communicates to a flight simulator modeling a physical radio-controlled helicopter. Waypoint navigation and flight envelope testing were then systematically evaluated to the final goal of a feasible autopilot design. Conclusions are made on how to perhaps make this environment more dynamic in the future.

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


Serum-Dependence of LPS-Induced Neurotoxicity in Rat Cortical Neurons Previous studies have shown that the bacterial endotoxin, lipopolysaccharide (LPS), is neurotoxic both in vitro and in vivo. The rate of binding of LPS to a target cell is greatly enhanced by serum in general and by LPS binding protein (LBP) in particular. The purpose of the study described in this paper was to determine if microglia activation and LPS-induced neurotoxicity is serum or LBP dependent. A murine microglial cell line, BV2, was used to assess the serum dependence of nitric oxide production and tumor necrosis factor a release in microglia. Embryonic rat cortical neuron/glia mixed cultures were used to determine the serum dependence of LPS-induced neurotoxicity. Our results from both cell culture systems show that LPS-induced inflammatory responses are serum dependent at lower doses of LPS and progressively become serum independent above 10 ng/ml. Purified human recombinant LBP reconstitutes the lost LPS-induced inflammatory responses in primary and immortalized cell cultures treated with heat-denatured serum and appears to account for the serum dependence. These data suggest that the cell surface signaling receptor for LPS at the low and high concentrations are likely to differ, consistent with the existence of a variety of LPS receptors.

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


Fast heating and cooling in nanoimprint using a spring-loaded adapter in a preheated press By using a spring-loaded adapter, instant heating and cooling of wafer-type substrates was implemented in standard hot embossing equipment. This was possible by using the well-known concept of a clamped stack of stamp and substrate, pre-assembled in an alignment fixture. A number of thermoplastic and thermocurable resists were molded in an isothermal process with total press occupancy of one cycle of less than 5min. By further reducing overhead time for mounting and press closing, sub-minute imprint cycles seem possible.

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

nanoimprint lithography
thermal imprint
thermoplast
thermocuring


Weak CCP bisimilarity with strong procedures ? We show that the standard saturation method for reducing weak bisimilarity to strong bisimilarity does not work for CCP. We provide a new saturation method for reducing weak bisimilarity to strong bisimilarity for CCP. We prove that due to distinctive nature of CCP, the new method does not introduce infinitely-branching in the resulting transition systems. We then derive an algorithm to automatically verify the notion of weak bisimilarity in CCP.

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 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 B I O O

concurrent constraint programming
partition refinement


Concatenated codes: Serial and parallel An analogy is examined between serially concatenated codes and parallel concatenations whose interleavers; are described by bipartite graphs with good expanding properties. In particular, a modified expander code construction is shown to behave very much like Forney's classical concatenated codes, though with improved decoding complexity. It is proved that these new codes achieve the Zyablov bound delta(Z) on the minimum distance. For these codes, a soft-decision, reliability-based, linear-time decoding algorithm is introduced, that corrects any fraction of errors up to almost delta(Z)/2. For the binary-symmetric channel, this algorithm's error exponent attains the Forney bound previously known only for classical (serial) concatenations.

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

concatenated codes
forney bound
zyablov bound

bipartite-graph codes
expander codes
min-sum algorithm
soft-decision decoding


doodle: a visual language for object-oriented databases In this paper we introduce DOODLE, a new visual and declarative language for object-oriented databases. The main principle behind the language is that it is possible to display and query the database with arbitrary pictures . We allow the user to tailor the display of the data to suit the application at hand or her preferences. We want the user-defined visualizations to be stored in the database, and the language to express all kinds of visual manipulations. For extendibility reasons, the language is object-oriented. The semantics of the language is given by a well-known deductive query language for object-oriented databases. We hope that the formal basis of our language will contribute to the theoretical study of database visualizations and visual query languages, a subject that we believe is of great interest, but largely left unexplored.

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

visual language
language
query languages
tailor
data
paper
database
user
query

applications
reasoning
visualization
formalism
semantic
object-oriented database
object-oriented
preference


Mapping between acoustic and articulatory gestures This paper proposes a definition for articulatory as well as acoustic gestures along with a method to segment the measured articulatory trajectories and acoustic waveforms into gestures. Using a simultaneously recorded acoustic-articulatory database, the gestures are detected based on finding critical points in the utterance, both in the acoustic and articulatory representations. The acoustic gestures are parameterized using 2-D cepstral coefficients. The articulatory trajectories are essentially the horizontal and vertical movements of Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) coils placed on the tongue, jaw and lips along the midsagittal plane. The articulatory movements are parameterized using 2D-DCT using the same transformation that is applied on the acoustics. The relationship between the detected acoustic and articulatory gestures in terms of the timing as well as the shape is studied. In order to study this relationship further, acoustic-to-articulatory inversion is performed using GMM-based regression. The accuracy of predicting the articulatory trajectories from the acoustic waveforms are at par with state-of-the-art frame-based methods with dynamical constraints (with an average error of 1.451.55mm for the two speakers in the database). In order to evaluate the acoustic-to-articulatory inversion in a more intuitive manner, a method based on the error in estimated critical points is suggested. Using this method, it was noted that the estimated articulatory trajectories using the acoustic-to-articulatory inversion methods were still not accurate enough to be within the perceptual tolerance of audio-visual asynchrony.

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

acoustic-to-articulatory inversion
critical trajectory error


SPEED-INDEPENDENT GAIT IDENTIFICATION FOR MOBILE DEVICES Due to the intensive use of mobile phones for different purposes, these devices usually contain confidential information which must not be accessed by another person apart from the owner of the device. Furthermore, the new generation phones commonly incorporate an accelerometer which may be used to capture the acceleration signals produced as a result of owner's gait. Nowadays, gait identification in basis of acceleration signals is being considered as a new biometric technique which allows blocking the device when another person is carrying it. Although distance based approaches as Euclidean distance or dynamic time warping have been applied to solve this identification problem, they show difficulties when dealing with gaits at different speeds. For this reason, in this paper, a method to extract an average template from instances of the gait at different velocities is presented. This method has been tested with the gait signals of 34 subjects while walking at different motion speeds (slow, normal and fast) and it has shown to improve the performance of Euclidean distance and classical dynamic time warping.

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


Multiple scale eigendeformation-based reduced order homogenization Multiple scale eigendeformation-based reduced order homogenization method, which provides considerable computational cost saving in comparison to the direct homogenization method, has been developed, verified against the direct homogenization method, and validated against experimental data. The salient feature of the method is in the formulation of the unit cell problem in terms of residual-free stresses, and therefore eliminating the need for costly equilibrium calculations required by the direct homogenization method. This is accomplished by introducing discretized eigendeformation fields at different scales, which are collectively referred to as eigenstrains and eigenseparations, and then precomputing a sequence of elasticity solutions of the unit cell problem subjected to the eigendeformation fields prior to nonlinear analysis.

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


SRTM-based morphotectonic analysis of the Poos de Caldas Alkaline Massif, southeastern Brazil An evaluation of SRTM 03? data applicability in geomorphology and morphotectonic analysis is proposed, considering the morphometric parameters slope, aspect, surface roughness and isobase surface. The study area, in southeastern Brazil, comprises the Poos de Caldas Alkaline Massif, a 33km-diameter Late Cretaceous collapsed volcanic caldera. Morphometric indices evaluated showed the correlation of landscape within the massif with NESW and NWSE structures, as well as landforms related with recent tectonic influence. DEM-derived drainage presented satisfactory results when compared to a 1:50,000 topographic map. SRTM 03? proved to be a good resource for geomorphological analysis, up to the semi-detail scale.

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

srtm
geomorphology
poos de caldas
alkaline massif


Smale's point estimate theory for Newton's method on Lie groups We introduce the notion of the (one-parameter subgroup) gamma-condition for a map f from a Lie group to its Lie algebra and establish alpha-theory and gamma-theory for Newton's method for a map f satisfying this condition. Applications to analytic maps are provided, and Smale's alpha-theory and gamma-theory are extended and developed. Examples arising from initial value problems on Lie group are presented to illustrate applications of our results. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. 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 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

newton's method
the gamma-condition
smale's point estimate theory


Robust Process Discovery with Artificial Negative Events Process discovery is the automated construction of structured process models from information system event logs. Such event logs often contain positive examples only. Without negative examples, it is a challenge to strike the right balance between recall and specificity, and to deal with problems such as expressiveness, noise, incomplete event logs, or the inclusion of prior knowledge. In this paper, we present a configurable technique that deals with these challenges by representing process discovery as a multi-relational classification problem on event logs supplemented with Artificially Generated Negative Events (AGNEs). This problem formulation allows using learning algorithms and evaluation techniques that are well-know in the machine learning community. Moreover, it allows users to have a declarative control over the inductive bias and language bias.

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

graph pattern discovery
inductive logic programming
petri net
positive data only


relevance-index size tradeoff in contextual advertising In Contextual advertising, textual ads relevant to the content in a webpage are embedded in the page. Content keywords are extracted offline by crawling webpages and then stored in an index for fast serving. Given a page, ad selection involves index lookup, computing similarity between the keywords of the page and those of candidate ads and returning the top- k scoring ads. In this approach, there is a tradeoff between relevance and index size where better relevance can be achieved if there are no limits on the index size. However, the assumption of unlimited index size is not practical due to the large number of pages on the Web and stringent requirements on the serving latency. Secondly, page visits on the web follows power-law distribution where a significant proportion of the pages are visited infrequently, also called the tail pages. Indexing tail pages is not efficient given that these pages are accessed very infrequently. We propose a novel mechanism to mitigate these problems in the same framework. The basic idea is to index the same keyword vector for a set of similar pages. The scheme involves learning a website specific hierarchy from (page, URL) pairs of the website. Next, keywords are populated on the nodes via bottom-up traversal over the hierarchy. We evaluate our approach on a human labeled dataset where our approach has higher nDCG compared to a recent approach even though the index size of our approach is 7 times less than index size of the recent approach.

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

relevance
index size
contextual advertising


A multi-resolution method for 3D multi-material topology optimization This paper presents a multi-resolution implementation in 3D for multi-material topology optimization problem. An alternating active-phase algorithm where the problem at hand is divided into a series of the traditional materialvoid phase topology optimization is employed for the multi-material problem. Different levels of discretization are used for the displacement mesh, design variable mesh and density mesh which provides higher resolution designs for the solutions. A projection scheme is employed to compute the element densities from design variables and control the length scale of the material density. Simple block coordinate descent method similar to the GaussSeidel technique is used to solve the subproblems. Several 3D numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the ease and the effectiveness of the proposed implementation. Incorporating the multi-resolution method into the multi-material approach, robust designs with improved resolution can be achieved for real life problems with complex geometries.

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 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

multi-material
multi-phase topology optimization
multi-resolution
multiple discretization
alternating active phase algorithm


A mathematical model of medial collateral ligament repair: migration, fibroblast proliferation and collagen formation The partial rupture of ligament fibres leads to an injury known as grade 2 sprain. Wound healing after injury consists of four general stages: swelling, release of platelet-derived growth factor (PDGF), fibroblast migration and proliferation and collagen production. The aim of this paper is to present a mathematical model based on reaction-diffusion equations for describing the repair of the medial collateral ligament when it has suffered a grade 2 sprain. We have used the finite element method to solve the equations of this. The results have simulated the tissue swelling at the time of injury, predicted PDGF influence, the concentration of fibroblasts migrating towards the place of injury and reproduced the random orientation of immature collagen fibres. These results agree with experimental data reported by other authors. The model describes wound healing during the 9 days following such injury.

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

ligament repair
mathematical model
fibroblast migration
growth factor
collagen formation


Learning Latent Tree Graphical Models We study the problem of learning a latent tree graphical model where samples are available only from a subset of variables. We propose two consistent and computationally efficient algorithms for learning minimal latent trees, that is, trees without any redundant hidden nodes. Unlike many existing methods, the observed nodes (or variables) are not constrained to be leaf nodes. Our algorithms can be applied to both discrete and Gaussian random variables and our learned models are such that all the observed and latent variables have the same domain (state space). Our first algorithm, recursive grouping, builds the latent tree recursively by identifying sibling groups using so-called information distances. One of the main contributions of this work is our second algorithm, which we refer to as CLGrouping. CLGrouping starts with a pre-processing procedure in which a tree over the observed variables is constructed. This global step groups the observed nodes that are likely to be close to each other in the true latent tree, thereby guiding subsequent recursive grouping (or equivalent procedures such as neighbor-joining) on much smaller subsets of variables. This results in more accurate and efficient learning of latent trees. We also present regularized versions of our algorithms that learn latent tree approximations of arbitrary distributions. We compare the proposed algorithms to other methods by performing extensive numerical experiments on various latent tree graphical models such as hidden Markov models and star graphs. In addition, we demonstrate the applicability of our methods on real-world data sets by modeling the dependency structure of monthly stock returns in the S&P index and of the words in the 20 newsgroups data set.

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

markov random fields
hidden variables
latent tree models
structure learning


Real-time EEG-based emotion recognition for music therapy Music could change our emotions, could have an influence on our mood, and finally could affect our health. Music therapy is one of the oldest methods used for treating some diseases. Since music therapy is proved to be the helpful approach, we proposed to combine music therapy process with the real-time EEG-based human emotion recognition algorithm. By this, we could identify the user's current emotional state, and based on such neurofeedback we could adjust the music therapy to the patient's needs. The proposed emotion recognition algorithm could recognize in real-time six emotions such as fear, frustrated, sad, happy, pleasant, and satisfied. As the algorithm is based on an Arousal-Valence emotion model, it has a potential to recognize all emotions that could be defined by the 2-dimensional model. The experiments on emotion induction with sound stimuli from International Affective Digitized Sounds (IADS) database and with music stimuli and implemented questionnaire were proposed and realized. In this paper, we proposed a general EEG-enabled music therapy algorithm. It allows us to adapt the therapy to the predefined time of the treatment and adjust the music therapy session to the current emotional state of the user in a way as an experienced music therapist works.

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 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 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 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 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 O O O O O

real-time emotion recognition
eeg
fractal dimension
hci
bci


Extending technology usage to work settings: The role of perceived work compatibility in ERP implementation Spanning over three decades and hundreds of studies, researchers have generated models, that examined user perceptions of technological attributes presumed to influence intention to use IT and consequent usage behavior. While these theories have provided reasonable explanations of IT usage across a broad range of technological and task settings, they did not address the role of IT in organizations, though they have been tested in organizational contexts, the models have not been modified to fit the context of organizational work. Current models are good at explaining IT usage in personal-settings, but they have not adequately examined the role of IT in organizations and thus have limited explanatory power in such settings. Furthermore, organizations deploy IT both to maximize its usage and to derive performance benefits from it. However, current IT usage models generally only consider IT usage as the dependent variable, without examining its performance impact. We extended IT usage models to include the role of IT's perceived work compatibility in shaping users IT usage intention, usage, and performance in work settings. The model was empirically validated using a field survey of 138 users of ERP systems in 62 firms in China.

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

information technology usage
enterprise resource planning
performance effect
survey research


A comparison of academics' attitudes towards the rights protection of their research and teaching materials This paper compares two JISC-funded surveys. The first was undertaken by the Rights MEtadata for Open Archiving (RoMEO) project and focused on the rights protection required by academic authors sharing their research outputs in an open-access environment. The second was carried out by the Rights and Rewards project and focused on the rights protection required by authors sharing their teaching materials in the same way. The data are compared. The study reports confusion amongst both researchers and teachers as to copyright ownership in the materials they produced. Researchers were more restrictive about the permissions they would allow, but were liberal about terms and conditions. Teachers would allow many permissions, but under stricter terms and conditions. The study concludes that a single rights solution could not be used for both research and teaching materials.

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

repositories
institutional repositories
intellectual property rights (ipr)
author attitudes


A gateway for time-triggered control networks The automotive industry is now incorporating control-by-wire features into vehicles, to control the most safety-critical systems such as braking and steering. Such systems are referred to as X-by-wire systems, where X refers to the specific type of system that is being controlled. The requirements for the multiplexed control network in X-by-wire systems demand the use of fast, safe, fault-tolerant, in-vehicle control networks. Research has established the time-triggered architecture as the most suitable approach for X-by-wire applications. In the time-triggered architecture, all activity of message exchange is synchronized to a global timebase and all nodes in the network perform their tasks based on a message schedule, which is strictly synchronized to this global timebase. A number of different types of control network protocols are emerging, based on the time-triggered architecture. The industry will soon decide on which of these networks will become the de-facto standards for X-by-wire applications. Other future network protocols will also find use in the automotive systems and there will be a need to communicate control message data across different types of time-triggered networks, with different specifications and protocols; realizing the need for a new type of real-time gateway for time-triggered control networks. Such a gateway concept is proposed in this paper and its design architecture is described at an early prototype level. A FPGA based digital IC is developed to demonstrate the concept. The prototype has been evaluated and the results are presented to show the deterministic real-time behaviour of the gateway. Four types of state-of-the-art time-triggered networks are supported in the prototype design, i.e., FlexRay, Byteflight, TTP/C and TTCAN. The core gateway architecture has been adopted from state-of-the-art packet switching techniques as used in ATM networks. Special purpose Network Host Processors (NHP) implement the protocol conversion routines to convert frames from network to gateway core format and vice versa.

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


Usefulness of a Midcurricular Examination for Identifying At-Risk Nursing Students The purpose of this study was to investigate the usefulness of the Health Education Systems, Inc, midcurricular examination in identifying at-risk students earlier in their nursing career. This study used quantitative measures to examine the relationship between the Health Education Systems, Inc, midcurricular examination and the students' success in the nursing program and their performance on the HESI exit examination and the NCLEX-RN. Statistically significant correlations were found between the score attained on the Health Education Systems, Inc, midcurricular examination and the students' admission grade point average and the grade point average at the time of the Health Education Systems, Inc, midcurricular examination, the students' score on the HESI exit examination, and their performance in the capstone nursing courses. An analysis of the data supported the belief that the Health Education Systems, Inc, midcurricular examination was a useful predictive tool that can identify students at risk for nonsuccess prior to the senior year of nursing so that measures to ensure success can be implemented.

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

health education systems, inc (hesi)
midcurricular examinations
predictive factors
remediation
student success


A novel Doppler-tolerant polyphase codes for pulse compression based on hyperbolic frequency modulation The conventional polyphase pulse compression codes including Frank code, P1, P2, P3, and P4 code suffer severe signal loss in performance under Doppler environment. This paper proposed a new polyphase pulse compression codes which are conceptually derived from the step approximation of the phase curve of the hyperbolic frequency modulated chirp signal. Comparing with the above conventional codes and the sidelobe-optimized polyphase P(n,k n , k ) code, the peak value of this new polyphase codes degrades much slower and the range solution as well as maximum sidelobe level are almost constant when Doppler frequency increases. The main disadvantage of this polyphase code is the relatively high sidelobe level without Doppler effect, which can be addressed by applying the proper window function. The desired Doppler-tolerant property of this new polyphase codes is very attractive for radars employing digital signal processing.

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


Optimal sn s n factorial designs when observations within-blocks are correlated In this article, we characterize D-optimal designs for sn s n symmetric factorial experiments when observations within blocks are correlated. The motivation to this problem lies in a pharmaceutical experiment where the experimenter needed to develop a once-daily tablet using a factorial design. These experiments are usually conducted in healthy human volunteers and the bioavailability is estimated. Since each subject is administered more than one formulation, the observations within subjects are correlated. We provide an explicit construction of D D -optimal designs for sn s n factorial experiment with blocks of size s or multiples of s , where observations within blocks are correlated. We discuss in detail the construction of optimal designs for 2n 2 n factorial experiments. We also provide an analytical proof of the D D -optimality when there exist a pair of blocks of odd size and remaining blocks are of even size.

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

correlated data
optimal design
intraclass correlation


A model for the integration of e-financial services questionnaires with SERVQUAL scales under fuzzy linguistic modeling Although it is habitual to measure human perceptions with quite accurate instruments, perceptions are characterized by uncertainty and fuzziness. Furthermore, variations in individual perceptions and personality mean that the same words can indicate very different perceptions. In this context, the fuzzy linguistic approach seems to be an appropriate framework for modeling information. In this paper we explore the problem of integrating semantically heterogeneous data (natural language included) from various websites with opinions about e-financial services. We develop an extension of the fuzzy model based on semantic translation (FMST) under the perspective of the service quality (SERVQUAL) stream of research. The model permits us to obtain a more precise representation of the opinions using each type of customers. By integrating all customers into different subsets, a financial entity can easily analyze the SERVQUAL characteristics over time or other dimensions owing to the easy linguistic interpretability and high precision of the results of the model.

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

servqual scale
data summarization
opinion aggregation
heterogeneous data integration
e-financial services


Distance-based tree models for ranking data Ranking data has applications in different fields of studies, like marketing, psychology and politics. Over the years, many models for ranking data have been developed. Among them, distance-based ranking models, which originate from the classical rank correlations, postulate that the probability of observing a ranking of items depends on the distance between the observed ranking and a modal ranking. The closer to the modal ranking, the higher the ranking probability is. However, such a model basically assumes a homogeneous population and does not incorporate the presence of covariates. To overcome these limitations, we combine the strength of a tree model and the existing distance-based models to build a model that can handle more complexity and improve prediction accuracy. We will introduce a recursive partitioning algorithm for building a tree model with a distance-based ranking model fitted at each leaf. We will also consider new weighted distance measures which allow different weights for different ranks in formulating more flexible distance-based tree models. Finally, we will apply the proposed methodology to analyze a ranking dataset of Ingleharts items collected in the 1999 European Values Studies.

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


Super-efficiency infeasibility and zero data in DEA Lee et al. (2011) and Chen and Liang (2011) develop a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to address the infeasibility issue in super-efficiency models. In this paper, we point out that their model is feasible when input data are positive but can be infeasible when some of input is zero. Their model is modified so that the new super-efficiency DEA model is always feasible when data are non-negative. Note that zero data can make the super-efficiency model under constant returns to scale (CRS) infeasible. Our discussion is based upon variable returns to scale (VRS) and can be applied to CRS super-efficiency models.

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

data envelopment analysis (dea)
super-efficiency


A review and computer code for assessing the structural dimension of a regression model: uncorrelated 2D views The general goal of a regression analysis is to understand how the conditional cdf F(y|x) of a response variable y varies as a set of predictors varies. The process of knowledge may gain advantage from the use of graphical data representations. Unfortunately, the so-called curse of dimensionality can make the use of graphics difficult. Nevertheless, many regression problems may have a relatively simple structural dimension, thus, it is possible to draw a plot in lower dimensions that contains all the essential information. Several graphical and non-graphical methodologies have been proposed in order to reduce the dimensionality of a regression problem. In this article we review a graphical method based on dynamic graphics, and present a computer implementation in the Xlisp-Stat programming language. Examples and a case study are given as an outline for performing a regression analysis.

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

graphical regression
slicing a plot
linked plots
linear projection
uncorrelated direction


Improving GP generalization: a variance-based layered learning approach This paper introduces a new method that improves the generalization ability of genetic programming (GP) for symbolic regression problems, named variance-based layered learning GP. In this approach, several datasets, called primitive training sets, are derived from the original training data. They are generated from less complex to more complex, for a suitable complexity measure. The last primitive dataset is still less complex than the original training set. The approach decomposes the evolution process into several hierarchical layers. The first layer of the evolution starts using the least complex (smoothest) primitive training set. In the next layers, more complex primitive sets are given to the GP engine. Finally, the original training data is given to the algorithm. We use the variance of the output values of a function as a measure of the functional complexity. This measure is utilized in order to generate smoother training data, and controlling the functional complexity of the solutions to reduce the overfitting. The experiments, conducted on four real-world and three artificial symbolic regression problems, demonstrate that the approach enhances the generalization ability of the GP, and reduces the complexity of the obtained solutions.

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

genetic programming
generalization
layered learning
overfitting
variance


Learning Full Pairwise Affinities for Spectral Segmentation Segmenting a single image into multiple coherent groups remains a challenging task in the field of computer vision. Particularly, spectral segmentation which uses the global information embedded in the spectrum of a given image's affinity matrix is a major trend in image segmentation. This paper focuses on the problem of efficiently learning a full range of pairwise affinities gained by integrating local grouping cues for spectral segmentation. We first construct a sparse multilayer graph whose nodes are both the pixels and the oversegmented regions obtained by an unsupervised segmentation algorithm. By applying the semi-supervised learning strategy to this graph, the intra and interlayer affinities between all pairs of nodes can be estimated without iteration. These pairwise affinities are then applied into the spectral segmentation algorithms. In this paper, two types of spectral segmentation algorithms are introduced: K-way segmentation and hierarchical segmentation. Our algorithms provide high-quality segmentations which preserve object details by directly incorporating the full-range connections. Moreover, since our full affinity matrix is defined by the inverse of a sparse matrix, its eigendecomposition can be efficiently computed. The experimental results on the BSDS and MSRC image databases demonstrate the superiority of our segmentation algorithms in terms of relevance and accuracy compared with existing popular methods.

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 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 B I 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

spectral segmentation
hierarchical segmentation

affinity estimation
semi-supervised learning


Overflow and loss probabilities in a finite ATM buffer fed by self-similar traffic In [13], real-time measurements from LANs, variable-bit-rate video sources, ISDN control-channels, the World Wide Web and other communication systems have shown that traffic exhibits a behaviour of self-similar nature. In this paper, we give new lower bounds to buffer-overflow and cell-loss probabilities for an ATM queue system with a self-similar cell input traffic and finite buffer. The bounds are better than those obtained in [20], in an important region of parameters. As in [20], they decay hyperbolically with buffer size, when the latter goes to infinity. However, in some region, a factor which accompanies the decay is higher in this paper than in [20].

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


Linearized Motion Estimation for Articulated Planes In this paper, we describe the explicit application of articulation constraints for estimating the motion of a system of articulated planes. We relate articulations to the relative homography between planes and show that these articulations translate into linearized equality constraints on a linear least-squares system, which can be solved efficiently using a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker system. The articulation constraints can be applied for both gradient-based and feature-based motion estimation algorithms and to illustrate this, we describe a gradient-based motion estimation algorithm for an affine camera and a feature-based motion estimation algorithm for a projective camera that explicitly enforces articulation constraints. We show that explicit application of articulation constraints leads to numerically stable estimates of motion. The simultaneous computation of motion estimates for all of the articulated planes in a scene allows us to handle scene areas where there is limited texture information and areas that leave the field of view. Our results demonstrate the wide applicability of the algorithm in a variety of challenging real-world cases such as human body tracking, motion estimation of rigid, piecewise planar scenes, and motion estimation of triangulated meshes.

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