how socio-economic structure influences rural users' acceptance of mobile entertainment Mobile entertainment services are rapidly and widely developing. However, in emerging markets like Chinese rural area, entertainment related services are still not fully accepted by mobile phone users. This primary research aimed to study Chinese rural people's acceptance for mobile entertainment, to provide comprehensive models, and to explain the problem from its socio-economic roots. Interview and survey data were collected. Using explorative factor analysis method, two mobile entertainment acceptance models were built: one for rural people in North China and the other in East China. The models show that "social influence" is the most influential factor for north rural users while users' "self efficacy" carries the largest weight in East China. Both factors are more important than "product and service quality". The socio-economic roots of the results were analyzed from the differences between the traditional interdependent society in North China and the more independent society in East China. It primarily reveals the possibility to predict users' technology acceptance with socio-economic variables. Implications for mobile entertainment design were discussed.

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

mobile entertainment
explorative factor analysis
technology acceptance

socio-economic structure
chinese rural people


A novel eye movement detection algorithm for EOG driven human computer interface Bio-based human computer interface (HCI) has attracted more and more attention of researchers all over the world in recent years. The paper is concerned with eye movement detection algorithm and the EOG-based human computer interface. The linear predictive coding cepstrum (LPCC) coefficients of EOG pulses are extracted as feature vectors, which are used for eye movement pattern matching. Dynamic time warping (DTW) is adopted to solve the discrepancy in EOG pulses duration among different trials. Furthermore, spectral entropy algorithm is used to detect the endpoints of EOG pulses, which can improve the robustness and increase the recognition rate in noisy background. Experimental and simulation results based on real-life EOG signals show that the proposed algorithm has stable performance and can be used for online controlling and communication in EOG based HCI system.

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

electrooculogram (eog)
endpoint detecting
linear predictive coding (lpc)
dynamic time warping (dtw)


A scheduling framework for UWB & cellular networks The max-min fair scheduling problem in wireless ad-hoc networks is a non-convex optimization problem. A general framework is presented for this optimization problem and analyzed to obtain a dual problem, which involves solving a series of optimization sub-problems. In the limit of infinite bandwidth (W -> infinity), the scheduling solution reduces to simultaneous transmission (spread spectrum) on all links (Negi and Rajeswaran, INFOCOM '04 (March 2004)). This motivates the analysis of the scheduling problem in the Ultra Wide Band (UWB) regime (W >> 1, but finite), a model for certain practical radios. A quadratic (in 1/M lower bound to the single link capacity function is developed, which simplifies the dual sub-problem to a quadratic optimization (Negi and Rajeswaran, GLOBECOM '04, (Dec. 2004)). The solution to this sub-problem is then obtained under both total power and power spectral density constraints. This solution is utilized to iteratively construct the schedule (sub-band sizes) and power allocation, thus optimally solving the UWB max-min fair scheduling problem, to within any desired precision. Simulations on medium sized networks demonstrate the excellent performance of this scheme. A cellular architecture (not necessarily UWB) may also be considered in this framework. It is proved that Frequency Division Multiple Access is the optimal scheduling for a multi-band cellular architecture.

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

wireless communications
ad-hoc network
cross layer design
mac


Variables bounding based retiming algorithm Retiming is a technique for optimizing sequential circuits. In this paper, we discuss this problem and propose an improved retiming algorithm based on variables bounding. Through the computation of the lower and upper bounds on variables, the algorithm can significantly reduce the number of constraints and speed up the execution of retiming. Furthermore, the elements of matrixes D and W are computed in a demand-driven way, which can reduce the capacity of memory. It is shown through the experimental results on ISCAS89 benchmarks that our algorithm is very effective for large-scale sequential circuits.

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

linear program
digital integrated circuit
electronic design automation


Detection of artificial and scene text in images and video frames Textual information in images and video frames constitutes a valuable source of high-level semantics for multimedia indexing and retrieval systems. Text detection is the most crucial step in a multimedia text extraction system and although it has been extensively studied the past decade still, it does not exist a generic architecture that would work for artificial and scene text in multimedia content. In this paper we propose a system for text detection of both artificial and scene text in images and video frames. The system is based on a machine learning stage which uses an Random Forest classifier and a highly discriminative feature set produced by using a new texture operator called Multilevel Adaptive Color edge Local Binary Pattern (MACeLBP). MACeLBP describes the spatial distribution of color edges in multiple adaptive levels of contrast. Then, a gradient-based algorithm is applied to achieve distinction among text lines as well as refinement in the localization of the text lines. The whole algorithm is situated in a multiresolution framework to achieve invariance to scale for the detection of text lines. Finally, an optional connected-component step segments text lines into words based on the distances between the resulting components. The experimental results are produced by applying a concise evaluation methodology and prove the superior performance achieved by the proposed text detection system for artificial and scene text in images and video frames.

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

artificial text
natural scene images
video ocr
multimedia information retrieval


A web-based multi-agent system for distributed digital manufacturing A framework for a web-based multi-agent system (WebMAS) is proposed to facilitate collaborative product development and production among geographically distributed functional agents using digitalized information. Considering the complexity of products created in a distributed manufacturing scenario, this often requires close collaboration among a number of facilities. In this research, a prototype system where different distributed functional agents, namely, a manufacturability evaluation agent, manufacturing resource agent, process-planning agent, manufacturing scheduling agent, shop-floor agent, fault diagnosis agent, etc., interact coherently to realize the development of physical parts. With specific agents having unique functionalities, a manufacturing managing agent acts as the centre of the system thus coordinating the activities of the participating agents while ensuring seamless work flow and collaboration. This facilitates optimization of the part production cycle from product design to final manufacturing because all the production procedures are correlated and considered logically. The agents communicate through the knowledge query manipulation language, which includes many pre-defined performatives to aid the participating agents in carrying out their tasks intelligently by interpreting commands from one another. In this paper, a case study based on the developed prototype WebMAS system is discussed to illustrate the system.

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

distributed manufacturing
framework
prototype system
case study


Computer aided diagnosis of Alzheimers disease using component based SVM Alzheimers disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder first affecting memory functions and then gradually affecting all cognitive functions with behavioural impairments and eventually causing death. Functional brain imaging as single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is commonly used to guide the clinicians diagnosis. However, conventional evaluation of these scans often relies on manual reorientation, visual reading and semi-quantitative analysis of certain regions of the brain. These steps are time consuming, subjective and prone to error. This paper shows a fully automatic computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for improving the accuracy in the early diagnosis of the AD. The proposed approach is based on a first automatic feature selection, and secondly a combination of component-based support vector machine (SVM) classification and a pasting votes technique of assembling SVM classifiers.

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

computer aided diagnosis
alzheimers disease

single photon emission computed tomography


A comparison of heuristic best-first algorithms for bicriterion shortest path problems ? A variety of algorithms have been proposed to solve the bicriterion shortest path problem. This article analyzes and compares the performance of three best-first (label-setting) algorithms that accept heuristic information to improve efficiency. These are NAMOA?, MOA?, and Tung & Chews algorithm (TC). A set of experiments explores the impact of heuristic information in search efficiency, and the relative performance of the algorithms. The analysis reveals that NAMOA? is the best option for difficult problems. Its time performance can benefit considerably from heuristic information, though not in all cases. The performance of TC is similar but somewhat worse. However, the time performance of MOA? is found to degrade considerably with the use of heuristic information in most cases. Explanations are provided for these phenomena.

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

search theory
combinatorial optimization
multiobjective shortest path problem
best-first search
heuristic search
artificial intelligence


On texture and image interpolation using Markov models Markov-type models characterize the correlation among neighboring pixels in an image in many image processing applications. Specifically, a wide-sense Markov model, which is defined in terms of minimum linear mean-square error estimates, is applicable to image restoration, image compression, and texture classification and segmentation. In this work, we address first-order (auto-regressive) wide-sense Markov images with a separable autocorrelation function. We explore the effect of sampling in such images on their statistical features, such as histogram and the autocorrelation function. We show that the first-order wide-sense Markov property is preserved, and use this result to prove that, under mild conditions, the histogram of images that obey this model is invariant under sampling. Furthermore, we develop relations between the statistics of the image and its sampled version, in terms of moments and generating model noise characteristics. Motivated by these results, we propose a new method for texture interpolation, based on an orthogonal decomposition model for textures. In addition, we develop a novel fidelity criterion for texture reconstruction, which is based on the decomposition of an image texture into its deterministic and stochastic components. Experiments with natural texture images, as well as a subjective forced-choice test, demonstrate the advantages of the proposed interpolation method over presently available interpolation methods, both in terms of visual appearance and in terms of our novel fidelity criterion.

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 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 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 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

wide-sense markov
high resolution
low resolution
subjective forced-choice test


Integrating information retrieval and data mining to discover project team coordination patterns This study integrates information retrieval and data mining techniques to discover project team coordination patterns from project documents written in Chinese. The coordination pattern of a project team describes the project execution process, including task category, execution sequence and duration, as well as the team member cooperation. The integration comprises two phases. The first phase extracts the most relevant keywords describing tasks executed by projects from unstructured or semi-structured documents using the mutual information estimate and the term weighting system. A concept hierarchy tree generated using the hierarchical clustering technique represents multiple levels of task categories. The second phase discovers project team coordination patterns through sequential pattern analysis. The proposed approach obtains encouraging results by mining coordination patterns from information system development projects. In the present era of the knowledge economy, the application of groupware to facilitate team coordination and collaboration streamlines the collection and analysis of project documents throughout the project life cycle. A project manager can visualize the project execution process of a team, and can anticipate the project outcomes based on discovered team coordination patterns. Accordingly, the proposed approach can be adapted to team projects that share certain characteristics with information system development projects.

O B I O B I 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 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

information retrieval
data mining
sequential pattern analysis
coordination pattern


Evaluation of achievable registration accuracy of the femur during minimally invasive total hip replacement The aim of the paper was to investigate whether accurate, point-based registration of the intra-operative femur will be achieved within the context of minimally invasive surgery for total hip replacement Computer tomography images, collected for pre-operative planning purposes, were used to simulate the intra-operative registration procedure using algorithms for various levels of measurement noise, different small areas of the femur available to the surgeon, and a limited number of collected data points (20-60). This helped with the choice of design variables to perform in vitro registration on a plastic bone model to validate the procedure, which included a multistart algorithm developed for intra-operative registration. The algorithm minimised the distance between the measured and image-derived surfaces and was able to cope with the presence of multiple local minima given sufficient computational effort, even with realistically large measurement noise. It was found that if a small patch of the femur was used, accessible by a needle that could at times penetrate thin layers of soft tissue, errors in the order of 1.0 mm in translation and 0.5 degrees in rotation were achievable.

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


On positive periodic solutions of functional difference equations with forcing term and applications Consider the following non-autonomous first order functional difference equation Delta x(n) = a(n)x(n) - lambda h(n)f(n, x(n), x(n - tau(1)(n)),..., x(n - tau(m)(n))) + r(n), n is an element of Z. It is shown that, under certain assumptions, there exist positive periodic solutions. Applications are given to illustrate the main results. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

positive periodic solution
cone
fixed point theorem


generalized trade reduction mechanisms When designing a mechanism there are several desirable properties tomaintain such as incentive compatibility (IC), individual rationality (IR), and budget balance (BB). It is well known [15] that it is impossible for a mechanism to maximize social welfare whilst also being IR, IC, and BB. There have been several attempts to circumvent [15] by trading welfare for BB, e.g.,in domains such as double-sided auctions [13], distributed markets [3] and supply chain problems [2, 4]. In this paper we provide a procedure called a Generalized Trade Reduction (GTR) for single-value players , which given an IR and IC mechanism, outputs a mechanism which is IR, IC and BB with a loss of welfare. We bound the welfare achieved by our procedure for a wide range of domains. In particular, our resultsimprove on existing solutions for problems such as double sidedmarkets with homogenous goods, distributed markets and several kinds of supply chains. Furthermore, our solution provides budget balanced mechanisms for several open problems such as combinatorial double-sided auctions and distributed markets with strategic transportation edges.

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 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

external competition
internal competition


(alpha, beta)-intuitionistic fuzzy ideals of hemirings In this paper, we introduce the concept of (alpha, beta)-intuitionistic fuzzy sub-hemiring, (left, right, two sided) ideals of hemirings, where alpha, beta are any two of {is an element of, q, is an element of vq, is an element of boolean AND q} with alpha not equal is an element of boolean AND q, by using belongs to relation (is an element of) and quasi-coincidence with relation (q) between intuitionistic fuzzy points and intuitionistic fuzzy sets, and investigate related properties. Moreover, we define prime(semiprime) (alpha, beta)-intuitionistic fuzzy ideals of hemirings and investigate some different properties of these ideals. (C) 2011 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 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

(alpha, beta)-intuitionistic fuzzy left (right)


Changes in ligating abilities of the singlet and triplet states of normal, abnormal and remote N-heterocyclic carbenes depending on their aromaticities Quantum chemical calculations at B3LYP/aug-cc-pVTZ level about singlet N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) ligands, imidazol-2-ylidene, imidazol-4-ylidene, pyrazol-3-ylidene and pyrazol-4-ylidene, and their protonated analogues show that they are considerably aromatic except for pyrazol-3-ylidene. This result is experimentally verified by approximately five thousand NHC transition metal complexes retrieved from the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD). CSD search discloses that NHCs can participate in pi-stacking interactions, albeit scarce. Geometry-based HOMA and electronic aromaticity index FLU rather than NICS provide a satisfactory description of the bonding situations in NHC ligands. Singlet state of the normal NHC has electron-deficient aromaticity as compared to those of the abnormal and remote NHCs. Depending on the transition from the singlet to triplet state, NHCs become electron-deficient ligands except for remote NHC. Computational studies regarding electronic nature of free NHC ligands show that the pi-electronic population of the formally vacant p(pi) orbital on the carbene atoms in abnormal and remote NHC is occurred as a result of the aromaticity of NHCs, not as a result of the direct electron donation from LP-orbitals of N atoms to carbene atom according to putative push-pull effect used in understanding the electronic stabilization of normal NHC. Increase in the aromaticity raises sigma-donating ability of both imidazol-and pyrazol-based NHC ligands. Free abnormal and remote NHC ligands have higher sigma-donation ability than normal NHC ligands. The lack of sigma-donating ability of normal NHC is compensated by its relatively high pi-accepting ability, whereas pi-back donation abilities of abnormal and remote NHCs are prohibited by their almost fully occupied pi-orbitals. Aromaticities of the triplet NHC ligands are higher than that of the lowest-lying triplet state of benzene. Increase in the aromaticity of NHC ligands decreases van der Waals shortening in TM-NHC bonds mainly due to diminishing dative character of these bonds.

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

aromaticity
csd search
flu
homa
remote nhc
triplet state

abnormal nhc
n-heterocyclic carbene (nhc)


The adaptive distributed source coding of multi-view images in camera sensor networks We show that distributed source coding of multi-view images in camera sensor networks (CSNs) using adaptive modules can come close to the Slepian-Wolf bound. In a systematic scenario with limited node abilities, work by Slepian. and Wolf suggest that it is possible to encode statistically dependent signals in a distributed manner to the same rate as with a system where the signals are jointly encoded. We considered three nodes (PN, CN and CNs), which are statistically depended. Different distributed architecture solutions are proposed based on a parent node and child node framework. A PN sends the whole image whereas a CNs/CN only partially, using an adaptive coding based on adaptive module-operation at a rate close to theoretical bound - H(CNs vertical bar PN)/H(CN vertical bar PN,CNs). CNs sends sub-sampled image and encodes the rest of image, however CN encodes all image. In other words, the proposed scheme allows independent encoding and jointly decoding of views. Experimental results show performance close to the information-theoretic limit. Furthermore, good performance of the proposed architecture with adaptive scheme shows significant improvement over previous work.

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

distributed source coding
camera sensor networks
parent node
child node


Spike-latency codes and the effect of saccades Spike-time-based models of visual processing often cover only a few spike waves. This disregards the continuous character of visual processing and the fact that the visual field is scanned by series of saccades to different fixation points. Thus, some form of reset is needed in order to bring the neurons into a well-defined state after each saccade. In this contribution, we investigate the ability of various tentative reset mechanisms to maintain a latency-based temporal code in a model of layer 4 spiny stellate cells in the primary visual cortex of primates. We conclude that input suppression and inhibition of neurons are effective ways of setting temporal reference frames for spike-time processing.

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

latency
spike rank
saccadic suppression
temporal reference frame


Exploiting extreme coupling to realize a metamaterial perfect absorber An optical metamaterial, operating in between the MID/IR and the visible domain, which uses the effect of extreme coupling between closely spaced nanostructured gold metal plates and a planar gold substrate was realized by means of electron beam lithography and lift-off technique. This regime is only accessible by using an ultrathin oxide layer between metal plates and substrate, where the oxide layerisrealized by atomic layer deposition here. The involved fabrication is discussed in detail. The metamaterial shows the predicted effect of perfect absorption with multiple resonances in the spectral range from 100THz to 600THz. The plasmonic based resonance frequencies are very sensitive to the plate size of the grating and the spacer thickness.

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 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 B O O O O O B I 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

metamaterial
plasmonic
perfect absorption
electron beam lithography


a dual band cmos vco with a balanced duty cycle buffer This paper proposes a dual band VCO with a standard 0.35? CMOS process to generate 1.07GHz and 2.06GHz. The proposed VCO architecture with 50\% duty cycle circuit and a half adder(HA) is able to produce a frequency two times higher than that of the conventional VCOs. The measurement results demonstrate that the gain of VCO and power dissipation are 561MHz/V and 14.6mW, respectively. The phase noises of the dual band VCO are measured to be -99.05dBc/Hz and -94.9dBc/Hz at 2MHz offset from 1.07GHz and 2.06GHz.

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


Molecular Epidemiology of Human and Bovine Anaplasmosis in Southern Europe The genus Anaplasma (Rickettsiale

a. marginale
a. phagocytophilum
tick
deer


adaptive least mean square behavioral power modeling In this work we propose an effective solution to the main challenges of behavioral power modeling: the generation of models for the power dissipation of technology-independent soft macros and the strong dependence of power from input pattern statistics. Our methodology is based on a fast characterization performed by simulating the gate-level implementation of instances of soft macros within the behavioral description of the complete design. Once characterization has been completed, the backannotated behavioral model replaces the gate-level representation, thus allowing fast but accurate power estimates in a fully behavioral context. Our power characterization procedure is a very efficient process that can be easily embedded in synthesis-based design flows. No additional effort is required from the designer, since power characterization merges seamlessly with a natural top-down design methodology with iterative improvement. After characterization, the behavioral power simulation produces accurate average and instantaneous pourer estimates (with errors around 7\% and 25\%, respectively, from accurate gate-level power simulation).

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

statistics
generation
simulation
characterization
input
context
power dissipation
representation
model
errors
pattern
macros
methodology
implementation
mean
process
power
design

challenge
power model
efficiency
integrated circuit modelling
behavior model
dependencies
adapt
technologies
behavior
design methodologies
effect
gate-level power simulation
pattern statistics
synthesis
soft macro
iter
embedding
completeness


Stable multiscale PetrovGalerkin finite element method for high frequency acoustic scattering We present and analyze a pollution-free PetrovGalerkin multiscale finite element method for the Helmholtz problem with large wave number ? ? as a variant of Peterseim (2014). We use standard continuous Q1 Q 1 finite elements at a coarse discretization scale H H as trial functions, whereas the test functions are computed as the solutions of local problems at a finer scale h h . The diameter of the support of the test functions behaves like mH m H for some oversampling parameter m m . Provided m m is of the order of log(?) log ( ? ) and h h is sufficiently small, the resulting method is stable and quasi-optimal in the regime where H H is proportional to ??1 ? ? 1 . In homogeneous (or more general periodic) media, the fine scale test functions depend only on local mesh-configurations. Therefore, the seemingly high cost for the computation of the test functions can be drastically reduced on structured meshes. We present numerical experiments in two and three space dimensions.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 construction of the Vietoris-Rips complex The Vietoris-Rips complex characterizes the topology of a point set. This complex is popular in topological data analysis as its construction extends easily to higher dimensions. We formulate a two-phase approach for its construction that separates geometry from topology. We survey methods for the first phase, give three algorithms for the second phase, implement all algorithms, and present experimental results. Our software can be used also for constructing any clique complex, such as the weak witness complex.

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 I O O O O O O

topological data analysis
clique complex


XMobile: A MB-UID environment for semi-automatic generation of adaptive applications for mobile devices Ubiquitous Computing promises seamless access to information anytime, anywhere with different and heterogeneous devices. This kind of environment imposes new challenges to software development. For example, information and user interface should be adapted according to contextual characteristics such as user, environment, and access device. In case of device adaptation, the development challenge is related to the heterogeneity of the devices, which requires software engineers to create different versions for each type of device and every platform. This paper proposes a MB-UID (model-based user interface development) approach for semi-automatic generation of adaptive applications for mobile devices. An environment, called XMobile, offers a device-independent user interface framework and a code generation tool for providing fast development of multi-platform and adaptive applications according to device and platform features. A case study is also presented to illustrate how the environment can be used for constructing an application for heterogeneous devices with different network connectivity modes.

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

dynamic adaptation
mobile computing
mb-uid


Steady filtration problems with seawater intrusion: Macro-hybrid penalized finite element approximations Macro-hybrid penalized finite element approximations are studied for steady filtration problems with seawater intrusion. On the basis of nonoverlapping domain decompositions with vertical interfaces, sections of coastal aquifers are decomposed into subsystems with simpler geometries and small scales, interconnected via transmission conditions of pressure and flux continuity. Corresponding local penalized formulations are derived from the global penalized variational formulation of the two-free boundary flow problem, with continuity transmission conditions modelled variationally in a dual sense. Then, macro-hybrid finite element approximations are derived for the system, defined on independent subdomain grids. Parallel relaxation penalty-duality algorithms are proposed from fixed-point problem characterizations. Numerical experiments exemplify the macro-hybrid penalized theory, showing a good agreement with previous primal conforming penalized finite element approximations.

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

open flow in porous media
seawater intrusion problem
free boundary problem
domain decomposition method
macro-hybrid finite element
proximal-point algorithm


multi-agent learning in extensive games with complete information Learning in a multi-agent system is difficult because the learning environment jointly created by all learning agents is time-variant . This paper studies the model of multi-agent learning in complete-information extensive games (CEGs). We provide two provably convergent algorithms for this model. Both algorithms utilize the special structure of CEGs and guarantee both individual and collective convergence. Our work contributes to the multi-agent learning literature in several aspects: 1. We identify a model of multi-agent learning, namely, learning in CEGs, and provide two provably convergent algorithms for this model. 2. We explicitly address the environment-shifting problem and show that how patient agents can collectively learn to play equilibrium strategies. 3. Many game-theoretical work on learning uses a technique called fictitious play , which requires agents to build beliefs about their opponents. For our model of learning in CEGs, we show it is true that agents can collectively converge to the sub-game perfect equilibrium (SPE) by repeatedly reinforcing their previous success/failure experience; no belief building is necessary.

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


Search pattern leakage in searchable encryption: Attacks and new construction Searching on remote encrypted data (commonly known as searchable encryption) has become an important issue in secure data outsourcing, since it allows users to outsource encrypted data to an untrusted third party while maintains the capability of keyword search on the data. Searchable encryption can be achieved using the classical method called oblivious RAM, but the resultant schemes are too inefficient to be applied in the real-world scenarios (e.g., cloud computing). Recently, a number of efficient searchable encryption schemes have been proposed under weaker security guarantees. Such schemes, however, still leak statistical information about the users search pattern. In this paper, we first present two concrete attack methods to show that the search pattern leakage will result in such a situation: an adversary who has some auxiliary knowledge can uncover the underlying keywords of user queries. To address this issue, we then develop a grouping-based construction (GBC) to transform an existing searchable encryption scheme to a new scheme hiding the search pattern. Finally, experiments based on the real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack methods and the feasibility of our construction.

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

search pattern
searchable encryption
cloud computing


Automatic component protocol adaptation with the CoConut/J tool suite ? While industrial middleware platforms such as CORBA, EJB, or .NET facilitate the development of distributed applications by providing certain infra-structural services required in many distributed systems (such as name services, remote method calls, parameter marshalling, etc.), these industrial platforms fail to support the development of distributed systems with independent components. In particular, their component models do not provide sufficient information for component interoperability checks or automated component adaptation. Especially when considering the personal and institutional separation between component developer and component vendor as one of the prerequisites of an independent component market, finding automatically as many component interoperability errors as possible is crucial. Hence, it is of practical concern that component interfaces not only model the correct way of calling the single methods but also the valid sequences of method calls. Likewise, practice clearly shows that component reuse usually requires component adaptation. This directly shows that only detecting incompatibilities is of limited use, but advocates for techniques of automated component adaptation. In this paper we describe algorithms and tools for specifying and analysing component interfaces in order to check interoperability and to generate adapted component interfaces automatically. Therefore, we introduce the concept of parameterised contracts and a new component interface model.

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

component protocol specification
automatic protocol adaptation
distributed middleware platforms


Interior-point methods: Worst case and average case analysis of a phase-I algorithm and a termination procedure We are interested in the average behavior of interior-point methods (IPMs) for linear programming problems (LPs). We use the rotation-symmetry-model as the probabilistic model for the average case analysis. This model had been used by Borgwardt in his average case analysis of the simplex-method. IPMs solve LPs in three phases. First, one has to find an appropriate starting point, then a sequence of interior points is generated, which converges to the optimal face. Finally, the optimum has to be calculated, as it is not an interior point. We present upper bounds on the average number of iterations in the first and the third phase by looking at random figures of the underlying polyhedron. These bounds show, that IPMs solve LPs in strongly polynomial time in the average case, so only the dimension parameters and not the encoding length of the problem determine the average behavior of IPMs. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).

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

interior-point methods
probabilistic analysis


An on-line performance visualization technology A new software technology for on-line performance analysis and the visualization of complex parallel and distributed systems is presented. Often heterogeneous, these systems need capabilities for the flexible integration and configuration of performance analysis and visualization. Our technology is based on an object-oriented framework for the rapid prototyping and development of distributable visual objects. The visual objects consist of two levels, a platform/device-specific low level and an analysis- and visualization-specific high level. We have developed a very high-level markup language called VOML and a compiler for the component-based development of high-level visual objects. The VOML is based on a software architecture for on-line event processing and performance visualization called EPIRA. The technology lends itself to constructing high-level visual objects from globally distributed component definitions. Details of the technology and tools used, as well as how an example visual object can be rapidly prototyped from several reusable components, are presented. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

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 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 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

markup language
performance analysis
performance visualization


A real-time FPGA architecture for 3D reconstruction from integral images In this paper, we present a hardware architecture for real-time three-dimensional (3D) surface model reconstruction from Integral Images (InIms). The proposed parallel digital system realizes a number of computational-heavy calculations in order to achieve real-time operation. The processing elements are deployed in a systolic architecture and operate on multiple image areas simultaneously. Moreover, memory organization allows random access to image data and copes with the increased processing throughput of the system. Operating results reveal that the proposed architecture is able to process 3D data at a real-time rate. The proposed system can handle large sized InIms in real time and outputs 3D scenes of enhanced depth and detailed texture, which apply to emerging 3D applications. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

three-dimensional
integral image
image reconstruction
image representation
autostereoscopy
real-time


TURINstream: A Totally pUsh, Robust, and effIcieNt P2P Video Streaming Architecture This paper presents TURINstream, a novel P2P video streaming architecture designed to jointly achieve low delay, robustness to peer churning, limited protocol overhead, and quality-of-service differentiation based on peers cooperation. Separate control and video overlays are maintained by peers organized in clusters that represent sets of collaborating peers. Clusters are created by means of a distributed algorithm and permit the exploitation of the participant nodes upload capacity. The video is conveyed with a push mechanism by exploiting the advantages of multiple description coding. TURINstream design has been optimized through an event driven overlay simulator able to scale up to tens of thousands of peers. A complete prototype of TURINstream has been developed, deployed, and tested on PlanetLab. We tested our prototype under varying degree of peer churn, flash crowd arrivals, sudden massive departures, and limited upload bandwidth resources. TURINstream fulfills our initial design goals, showing low average connection, startup, and playback delays, high continuity index, low control overhead, and effective quality-of-service differentiation in all tested scenarios.

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

multiple description coding
video streaming

peer-to-peer
planet-lab testbed
push architecture


Integrated prefetching and caching in single and parallel systems We study integrated prefetching and caching in single and parallel disk systems. In the first part of the paper, we investigate approximation algorithms for the single disk problem. There exist two very popular approximation algorithms called Aggressive and Conservative for minimizing the total elapsed time. We give a refined analysis of the Aggressive algorithm, improving the original analysis by Cao et al. We prove that our new bound is tight. Additionally, we present a new family of prefetching and caching strategies and give algorithms that perform better than Aggressive and Conservative. In the second part of the paper, we investigate the problem of minimizing stall time in parallel disk systems. We present a polynomial time algorithm for computing a prefetching/caching schedule whose stall time is bounded by that of an optimal solution. The schedule uses at most 2(D - 1) extra memory locations in cache. This is the first polynomial time algorithm that, using a small amount of extra resources, computes schedules whose stall times are bounded by that of optimal schedules not using extra resources. Our algorithm is based on the linear programming approach of [Journal of the ACM 47 (2000) 969]. However, in order to achieve minimum stall times, we introduce the new concept of synchronized schedules in which fetches on the D disks are performed completely in parallel. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

prefetching
caching
approximation algorithms


Bioinformatic identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins likely to target host cell mitochondria: virulence factors? M. tuberculosis infection either induces or inhibits host cell death, depending on the bacterial strain and the cell microenvironment. There is evidence suggesting a role for mitochondria in these processes.

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


A class of 1-generator quasi-cyclic codes from R-n onto S, where (alpha(0), alpha(1)...., alpha(n-1)) is a basis for F-qn over F-q. This carries the q-ray 1-generator quasi-cyclic (QC) code R a(x) onto the code RA(x) in S whose parity-check polynomial (p.c.p.) is defined as the monic polynomial h(x) over F, of least degree such that h(x) A (x) = 0. In the special case, where gcd(q, m) = 1 and where the prime factorizations of x(m) - 1 over Fq and F,. are the same we show that there exists a one-to-one correspondence between the q-ary 1-generator quasis-cyclic codes with p.c.p. h(x) and the elements of the factor group J*/I* where J is the ideal in S with p.c.p. h(x) and I the corresponding quantity in R. We then describe an algorithm for generating the elements of J*/I*. Next, we show that if we choose a normal basis for F q. over F., then we can modify the aforementioned algorithm to eliminate a certain number of equivalent codes, thereby rending the algorithm more attractive from a computational point of view. Finally in Section IV, we show how to modify the above algorithm in order to generate all the binary self-dual 1-generator QC codes.

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

cyclic code
direct sum decomposition
idempotent
minimal ideal
orbit representative
primitive element
quasicyclic (qc) code


A text mining approach for automatic construction of hypertexts The research on automatic hypertext construction emerges rapidly in the last decade because there exists a urgent need to translate the gigantic amount of legacy documents into web pages. Unlike traditional flat texts, a hypertext contains a number of navigational hyperlinks that point to some related hypertexts or locations of the same hypertext. Traditionally, these hyperlinks were constructed by the creators of the web pages with or without the help of some authoring tools. However, the gigantic amount of documents produced each day prevent from such manual construction. Thus an automatic hypertext construction method is necessary for content providers to efficiently produce adequate information that can be used by web surfers. Although most of the web pages contain a number of non-textual data such as images, sounds, and video clips, text data still contribute the major part of information about the pages. Therefore, it is not surprising that most of automatic hypertext construction methods inherit from traditional information retrieval research. In this work, we will propose a new automatic hypertext construction method based on a text mining approach. Our method applies the self-organizing map algorithm to cluster some at text documents in a training corpus and generate two maps. We then use these maps to identify the sources and destinations of some important hyperlinks within these training documents. The constructed hyperlinks are then inserted into the training documents to translate them into hypertext form. Such translated documents will form the new corpus. Incoming documents can also be translated into hypertext form and added to the corpus through the same approach. Our method had been tested on a set of at text documents collected from a newswire site. Although we only use Chinese text documents, our approach can be applied to any documents that can be transformed to a set of index terms.

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

automatic hypertext construction
text mining


Estrogen Action in Neuroprotection and Brain Inflammation The fertile period of women's life compared to menopause is associated with a lower incidence of degenerative inflammatory diseases. In brain, estrogens ameliorate brain performance and have positive effects on selected neural pathologies characterized by a strong inflammatory component. We thus hypothesized that the inflammatory response is a target of estrogen action; several studies including ours provided strong evidence to support this prediction. Microglia, the brain's inflammatory cells, and circulating monocytes express the estrogen receptors ER-? and ER-? and their responsiveness in vivo and in vitro to pro-inflammatory agents, such as lipopolysaccharide (LPS), is controlled by 17?-estradiol (E2). Susceptibility of central nervous system (CNS) macrophage cells to E2 is also preserved in animal models of neuroinflammatory diseases, in which ER-? seems to be specifically involved. At the molecular level, induction of inflammatory gene expression is blocked by E2. We recently observed that, differently from conventional anti-inflammatory drugs, E2 stimulates a nongenomic event that interferes with the LPS signal transduction from the plasma membrane to cytoskeleton and intracellular effectors, which results in the inhibition of the nuclear translocation of NF-?B, a transcription factor of inflammatory genes. Interference with NF-?B intracellular trafficking is selectively mediated by ER-?. In summary, evidence from basic research strongly indicates that the use of estrogenic drugs that can mimic the anti-inflammatory activity of E2 might trigger beneficial effects against neurodegeneration in addition to carrying out their specific therapeutic function

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

estrogen receptors
inflammation
neurodegeneration


Parsimonious additive models A new method for function estimation and variable selection, specifically designed for additive models fitted by cubic splines is proposed. This new method involves regularizing additive models using the l1 l 1 -norm, which generalizes the lasso to the nonparametric setting. As in the linear case, it shrinks coefficients and produces some coefficients that are exactly zero. It gives parsimonious models, selects significant variables, and reveals nonlinearities in the effects of predictors. Two strategies for finding a parsimonious additive model solution are proposed. Both algorithms are based on a fixed point algorithm, combined with a singular value decomposition that considerably reduces computation. The empirical behavior of parsimonious additive models is compared to the adaptive backfitting BRUTO algorithm. The results allow to characterize the domains in which our approach is effective: it performs significantly better than BRUTO when model estimation is challenging. An implementation of this method is illustrated using real data from the Cophar 1 ANRS 102 trial. Parsimonious additive models are applied to predict the indinavir plasma concentration in HIV patients. Results suggest that this new method is a promising technique for the research and application areas.

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

function estimation
splines
variable selection
lasso

model selection
supervised learning
nonparametric regression
smoothing
penalization
interpretable models


The oscillation of partial difference equations with continuous arguments For the partial difference equations A(x - a, y) + A(x, y - b) - A(x, y) + P(x, y)A(x + tau, y + sigma) = 0 and A(x - a,y) + A(x, y - b) - A(x, y) + (x, y, A(x + tau, y + sigma)) = 0, we shall obtain sufficient conditions for the oscillation of all solutions of these equations. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

partial difference equations
oscillation


The dialectical potential of Cultural Historical Activity Theory for researching sustainable CSCL practices This article explores conceptual and methodological challenges in researching sustainable computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) within authentic educational settings. It argues that to investigate the sustainability of CSCL in such settings, we need to understand how new innovations become enculturated as part of educational communities and the shared repertoires and practices of learners and teachers. The potential for Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) as a relational, dialectical framework for researching collaborative learning is examined. The article argues that, although CHAT is increasingly being used for researching educational settings, it is often employed only descriptively or as a set of guiding principles and the dialectical method, which focuses on emergent contradictions and tensions, is not always fully explored. An integrated conceptual and methodological CHAT framework is proposed for understanding the complex interrelations between discourse, actions and community and as a result how new technological innovations and knowledge creation practices can be appropriated and sustained. This is illustrated through the analytical processes undertaken in a recent empirical study of undergraduates working on an online collaborative research project. The article concludes by arguing that the dialectical method at the heart of CHAT is both unifying and problematizing and could allow us to develop a richer, more integrated and explanatory picture of sustainable CSCL activities.

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

cultural historical activity theory
sustainability
discourse
knowledge creation
community


Nature-inspired techniques for conformance testing of object-oriented software Soft computing offers a plethora of techniques for dealing with hard optimization problems. In particular, nature based techniques have been shown to be very efficient in optimization applications. The present paper investigates the suitability of various nature-inspired meta-heuristics (genetic algorithms, evolutionary programming and ant-colony systems) to the problem of software testing. The present study is part of the nature-inspired techniques for object-oriented testing (NITOT) environment. It aims at addressing the problem of conformance testing of object-oriented software to its specification expressed in terms of finite state machines. Detailed description, adaptation and evaluation of the various nature-inspired meta-heuristics are discussed showing their potential in this context of conformance testing.

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

conformance testing
genetic algorithms
evolutionary programming

testing data generation
ant-colony systems


Performance guarantees for Schatten-p quasi-norm minimization in recovery of low-rank matrices ? Recovery of low-rank matrices from compressed linear measurements is considered. Schatten-p quasi-norm minimization is one of the solutions for the above problem. We address theoretical guarantees for this approach. First, we provide a sufficient condition for exact recovery. Second, some conditions for robust and stable recovery are provided.

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

schatten-p quasi-norm minimization (psnm)


A segment selection technique for speaker verification The performance of speaker verification systems degrades considerably when the test segments are utterances of very short duration. This might be either due to variations in score-matching arising from the unobserved speech sounds of short speech utterances or the fact that the shorter the utterance, the greater the effect of individual speech sounds on the average likelihood score. In other words, the effects of individual speech sounds have not been cancelled out by a large number of speech sounds in very short utterances. This paper presents a score-based segment selection technique for discarding portions of speech that result in poor discrimination ability in a speaker verification task. Theory is developed to detect the most significant and reliable speech segments based on the probability that the test segment comes from a fixed set of cohort models. This approach, suitable for any duration of test utterance, reduces the effect of acoustic regions of the speech that are not accurately modelled due to sparse training data, and makes a decision based only on the segments that provide the best-matched scores from the segment selection algorithm. The proposed segment selection technique provides reductions in relative error rate of 22% and 7% in terms of minimum Detection Cost Function (DCF) and Equal Error Rate (EER) compared with a baseline used the segment-based normalization, when evaluated on the short utterances of NIST 2002 Speaker Recognition Evaluation dataset.

O B I 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 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 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


Experiments and finite element modelling for the study of prolapse in the pelvic floor system Pelvic prolapse affects one woman in three of all ages combined and is quite common for more than 60% of patients over 60 years of age. The treatment of this pathological problem is one of the biggest challenges to the gynaecologist today. The rate of surgical intervention failure is quite significant. The recurrence of prolapse could be related to inadequate surgical technique or the pathology or/and biomechanical deficiency of the soft tissues. The modelling and simulation of the behaviour of the pelvic cavity could be a major tool for specific evaluation of pelvic status. A first stage of this model is being developed and reported. The computer-aided design model of the organs of the pelvic floor is created using magnetic resonance image data and the ligament boundary conditions are defined. A multi-organ geometric model is thus created and studied.

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


Critical infrastructure dependencies: A holistic, dynamic and quantitative approach The proper functioning of critical infrastructures is crucial to societal well-being. However, critical infrastructures are not isolated, but instead are tightly coupled, creating a complex system of interconnected infrastructures. Dependencies between critical infrastructures can cause a failure to propagate from one critical infrastructure to other critical infrastructures, aggravating and prolonging the societal impact. For this reason, critical infrastructure operators must understand the complexity of critical infrastructures and the effects of critical infrastructure dependencies. However, a major problem is posed by the fact that detailed information about critical infrastructure dependencies is highly sensitive and is usually not publicly available. Moreover, except for a small number of holistic and dynamic research efforts, studies are limited to a few critical infrastructures and generally do not consider time-dependent behavior. This paper analyzes how a failed critical infrastructure that cannot deliver products and services impacts other critical infrastructures, and how a critical infrastructure is affected when another critical infrastructure fails. The approach involves a holistic analysis involving multiple critical infrastructures while incorporating a dynamic perspective based on the time period that a critical infrastructure is non-operational and how the impacts evolve over time. This holistic approach, which draws on the results of a survey of critical infrastructure experts from several countries, is intended to assist critical infrastructure operators in preparing for future crises.

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 B I I 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

holistic treatment
dynamic analysis
quantitative analysis


On Using Anisotropic Diffusion for Skeleton Extraction We present a novel and effective skeletonization algorithm for binary and gray-scale images, based on the anisotropic heat diffusion analogy. We diffuse the image in the direction normal to the feature boundaries and also allow tangential diffusion (curvature decreasing diffusion) to contribute slightly. The proposed anisotropic diffusion provides a high quality medial function in the image: it removes noise and preserves prominent curvatures of the shape along the level-sets (skeleton features). The skeleton strength map, which provides the likelihood of a point to be part of the skeleton, is defined by the mean curvature measure. Finally, thin and binary skeleton is obtained by non-maxima suppression and hysteresis thresholding of the skeleton strength map. Our method outperforms the most related and the popular methods in skeleton extraction especially in noisy conditions. Results show that the proposed approach is better at handling noise in images and preserving the skeleton features at the centerline of the shape.

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 O O O O O O O

feature extraction
heat flow
computer vision


Analytical synthesis of general high-order voltage/current transfer functions using CCIIs This paper proposes two circuit structures to realize general high-order voltage and current transfer functions using second-generation current conveyors (CCIIs). The proposed general high-order voltage/current-mode circuit structures are designed based on an analytical synthesis method. The nth-order voltage-mode transfer function requires 2n+1 CCIIs, 2n+2 grounded resistors and n grounded capacitors. The nth-order current-mode transfer function requires 2n+2 CCIIs, 2n+2 grounded resistors and n grounded capacitors. The voltage-mode third-order allpass, lowpass and highpass filters and the current-mode third-order notch, lowpass and highpass filters that are derived out from the proposed high-order voltage and current-mode circuit structures are simulated to verify the synthesis methods.

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

high-order
voltage-mode
current-mode
analog circuit design
current conveyor


An adaptive sample count particle filter The particle filter technique has been used extensively over the past few years to track objects in challenging environments. Due to its nonlinear nature and the fact that it does not assume a Gaussian probability density function it tends to outperform other available tracking methods. A novel adaptive sample count particle filter (ASCPF) tracking method is presented in this paper for which the main motivation is to accurately track an object in crowded scenes using fewer particles and hence with reduced computational overhead. Instead of taking a fixed number of particles, a particle range technique is used where an upper and lower bound for the range is initially identified. Particles are made to switch between an active and inactive state within this identified range. The idea is to keep the number of active particles to a minimum and only to increase this as and when required. Active contours are also utilized to determine a precise area of support around the tracked object from which the color histograms used by the particle filter can be accurately calculated. This, together with the variable particle spread, allows a more accurate proposal distribution to be generated while using less computational resource. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only tracks the object with comparable accuracy to existing particle filter techniques but is up to five times faster. (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Inc.

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 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 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

object tracking
variable sampling
active contour


Non-parametric hand pose estimation with object context ? ?? We developed a system that estimates in real-time the articulated pose of the hand. Our approach is discriminative, with low computational load and fast error recovery. Our system is robust to occlusions, implicitly extracting information from them. The system is thoroughly evaluated with quantitative and qualitative experiments.

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

articulated hand pose
approximate nearest neighbor


social distance games In this paper we introduce and analyze social distance games , a family of non-transferable utility coalitional games where an agent's utility is a measure of closeness to the other members of the coalition. We study both social welfare maximisation and stability in these games from a graph theoretic perspective. We investigate the welfare of stable coalition structures, and propose two new solution concepts with improved welfare guarantees. We argue that social distance games are both interesting in themselves, as well as in the context of social networks.

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


A novel statistical distortion model based on mixed Laplacian and uniform distribution of Mpeg-4 FGS The Laplacian Distribution has been widely used to characterize the distribution of DCT coefficients in a great deal of research on statistical attributes of DCT for the reason that Laplacian distribution can achieve a good balance between the simplification of the model and fidelity to the real empirical data. But in our research, we found that there is a large discrepancy between the real data and the distortion model based on Laplacian distribution. Furthermore, the higher the rate, the larger the distortion. In this paper we proposed a new distortion model based on mixed Laplacian and Uniform distributions. Experimental results show that the MLQ distortion model can approximate the real empirical data and has a higher degree of accuracy than the conventional distortion model based on Laplacian distribution. Compared with the conventional distortion model based on Laplacian distribution, the new model can decrease the MSE distortion by 2-6 units. The MLQ distortion model can represent the relationship of rate and distortion of the Mpeg-4 FGS enhancement layer with a higher degree of accuracy.

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

mpeg 4 fgs
bit plane
scalable coding
statistical model


constraint-based test data generation in the presence of stack-directed pointers Constraint-Based Test data generation (CBT) exploits constraint satisfaction techniques to generate test data able to kill a given mutant or to reach a selected branch in a program. When pointer variables are present in the program, aliasing problems may arise and may lead to the failure of current CBT approaches. In our work, we propose an overall CBT method that exploits the results of an intraprocedural points-to analysis and provides two specific constraint combinators for automatically generating test data able to reach a selected branch. Our approach correctly handles multi-levels stack-directed pointers that are mainly used in real-time control systems. The method has been fully implemented in the test data generation tool INKA and first experiences in applying it to a variety of existing programs tend to show the interest of the approach.

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

stack-directed pointers
constraint-based test data generation


Practical aspects in solving the medium-term operation planning problem of hydrothermal power systems by using the progressive hedging method The medium-term operation planning (MTOP) of hydrothermal systems aims to define generation targets that minimize the expected operation cost over the planning period, considering a set of constraints with respect to the power system and the generating units. Mathematically, this problem can be characterized as a linear, stochastic and large scale, which requires the application of suitable optimization tools. The purpose of this paper is to apply the progressive hedging (PH) method to solve the MTOP problem. For that, two critical aspects of the PH are addressed: the use of warm start and the choice of a suitable penalty parameter. In addition, this paper compares the performance of the PH to other popular methods, the full high-scale linear programming problem, also known as deterministic equivalent, and the nested decomposition, when solving similar problems. As a result we show that the PH is a competitive method to solve the MTOP problem.

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

hydrothermal systems
progressive hedging

medium-term operating planning
stochastic programming


Finding Paths between graph colourings: PSPACE-completeness and superpolynomial distances Suppose we are given a graph G together with two proper vertex k-colourings of G, alpha and beta. How easily can we decide whether it is possible to transform alpha into beta recolouring vertices of G one at a time, making sure we always have a proper k-colouring of G? This decision problem is trivial for k = 2, and decidable in polynomial time for k = 3. Here we prove it is PSPACE-complete for all k >= 4. In particular, we prove that the problem remains PSPACE-complete for bipartite graphs, as well as for: (i) planar graphs and 4 = 4, a class of graphs {G(N,k) : N is an element of N*}, together with two k-colourings for each G(N,k), such that the minimum number of recolouring steps required to transform the first colouring into the second is superpolynomial in the size of the graph: the minimum number of steps is Omega(2(N)), whereas the size of G(N) is O(N(2)). This is in stark contrast to the k = 3 case, where it is known that the minimum number of recolouring steps is at most quadratic in the number of vertices. We also show that a class of bipartite graphs can be constructed with this property, and that: (i) for 4 <= k <= 6 planar graphs and (ii) for k = 4 bipartite planar graphs can be constructed with this property. This provides a remarkable correspondence between the tractability of the problem and its underlying structure. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

vertex-recolouring
colour graph
pspace-complete
superpolynomial distance


Resource scheduling in a high-performance multimedia server Supporting continuous media (CM) data-such as video and audio-imposes stringent demands on the retrieval performance of a multimedia server. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a set of data-placement and retrieval algorithms to exploit the full capacity of the disks in a multimedia server. The data-placement algorithm declusters every object over all of the disks in the server-using a time-based declustering unit-with the aim of balancing the disk load. As for runtime retrieval, the quintessence of the algorithm is to give each disk advance notification of the blocks that have to be fetched in the impending time periods, so that the disk can optimize its service schedule accordingly. Moreover, in processing a block request for a replicated object, the server will dynamically channel the retrieval operation to the most lightly loaded disk that holds a copy of the required block. We have implemented a multimedia server based on these algorithms. Performance tests reveal that the server achieves very high disk efficiency. Specifically, each disk is able to support up to 25 MPEG-1 streams. Moreover, experiments suggest that the aggregate retrieval capacity of the server scales almost linearly with the number of disks.

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

time-based storage scheme
declustering/stripping
replication
look-ahead data retrieval


clustering pair-wise dissimilarity data into partially ordered sets Ontologies represent data relationships as hierarchies of possibly overlapping classes. Ontologies are closely related to clustering hierarchies, and in this article we explore this relationship in depth. In particular, we examine the space of ontologies that can be generated by pairwise dissimilarity matrices. We demonstrate that classical clustering algorithms, which take dissimilarity matrices as inputs, do not incorporate all available information. In fact, only special types of dissimilarity matrices can be exactly preserved by previous clustering methods. We model ontologies as a partially ordered set (poset) over the subset relation. In this paper, we propose a new clustering algorithm, that generates a partially ordered set of clusters from a dissimilarity matrix.

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


Channel Estimation in Long Term Evolution Uplink Using Minimum Mean Square Error-Support Vector Regression In this paper, minimum mean square error-support vector regression (MMSE-SVR) is proposed, which is shown to be adequate for the estimation of the long term evolution (LTE) uplink channel with nonlinear features. MMSE-SVR was applied to estimate real channel environments such as the vehicular A channels defined by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The simulation results show that the proposed method has a better performance than the least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) and the standard MMSE with linear and spline interpolation.

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

channel estimation
lte
mmse
interpolation


Properties and applications of the average interparticle distance The first and second moment operators are used to define the origin invariant shape and size of a molecule or functional group, as well as expressions for the distance between two electrons and the distance between an electron and a nucleus. The measure of molecular size correlates quite well with an existing theoretical measure of molecular volume calculated from isodensity contours. Also, the measure of size is effective in predicting steric effects of substituents which have been measured experimentally. The electron-electron and electron-nuclear distances are related to components of the Hartree-Fock energy. The average distance between two-electrons can model the Coulomb energy quite well, especially in the case of localized molecular orbitals. The average distance between an electron and a nucleus is closely related to the electron-nuclear attraction energy of a molecule.

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 B I 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

molecular volume
second moment
steric effects

coulomb integral
localized molecular orbital


bias scheduling in heterogeneous multi-core architectures Heterogeneous architectures that integrate a mix of big and small cores are very attractive because they can achieve high single-threaded performance while enabling high performance thread-level parallelism with lower energy costs. Despite their benefits, they pose significant challenges to the operating system software. Thread scheduling is one of the most critical challenges. In this paper we propose bias scheduling for heterogeneous systems with cores that have different microarchitectures and performance.We identify key metrics that characterize an application bias, namely the core type that best suits its resource needs. By dynamically monitoring application bias, the operating system is able to match threads to the core type that can maximize system throughput. Bias scheduling takes advantage of this by influencing the existing scheduler to select the core type that bests suits the application when performing load balancing operations. Bias scheduling can be implemented on top of most existing schedulers since its impact is limited to changes in the load balancing code. In particular, we implemented it over the Linux scheduler on a real system that models microarchitectural differences accurately and found that it can improve system performance significantly, and in proportion to the application bias diversity present in the workload. Unlike previous work, bias scheduling does not require sampling of CPI on all core types or offline profiling. We also expose the limits of dynamic voltage/frequency scaling as an evaluation vehicle for heterogeneous systems.

O B 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 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 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 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


Branch-and-bound with decomposition-based lower bounds for the Traveling Umpire Problem An exact algorithm based on a decomposition scheme is presented for the problem. Optimal solutions for all 14-team and several 16-team TUP instances were found. Most optimal solutions were obtained in very short runtime. Experiments on the influence of the components of the algorithm are reported.

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


Implementation of Multimode-Multilevel Block Truncation Coding for LCD Overdrive The Liquid-crystal display (LCD) overdrive technique has been utilized to reduce motion blur on a display via a reduction in the response time. However, to measure the variation of the pixel amplitudes, it is necessary to store the previous frame using a large frame memory. To downscale the frame memory, block truncation coding (BTC) is commonly employed due to the simplicity of its implementation, even if some visual artifacts may occur for image blocks with high frequency components. In this paper, we present a multimode-multilevel BTC (MBTC) technique that improves performance while maintaining simplicity. To improve the visual quality, we uniquely determine the quantization level and coding mode of each block according to the distribution of the luminance and chrominance amplitudes. For a compression ratio of 6:1, the proposed method demonstrates higher coding efficiency and overdrive performance by up to 3.81 dB in the PSNR compared to other methods.

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

liquid-crystal display (lcd)
block truncation coding (btc)
adaptive resource allocation


Exploring the dynamic model of the returns from value stocks and growth stocks using time series mining We explore the dynamic process of the return rates of value stocks and growth stocks. We find value stocks exhibit a significantly over-reacting phenomenon. We find growth stocks exhibit an obviously under-reacting phenomenon. We propose the exponential decay model to explain the dynamic process of returns. The exponential decay models could accurately match with the real data.

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

growth stocks
value stocks
exponential decay model


Authentication mechanism for fast handoff in cdma2000-WiBro interworking In this paper, we propose the authentication mechanism for a handoff in cdma2000-WiBro inter-working environment. In the interworking environment, the handoff procedure requires the authentication on MS for the access control and the accounting. In the handoff procedure, it is required to perform the EAP-AKA authentication process with cdma2000-HN (home network) because TN (target network) does not have the information for the authentication about MS. This process has relatively long delay. Therefore, the fast handoff authentication mechanism for reducing the long delay in the handoff procedure is needed. Thus this paper proposes the handoff authentication method of using the reactive context transfer and ticket forwarding method, to provide the fast handoff in cdma2000-WiBro interworking environment. The proposed scheme satisfies security requirements on handoff and has the advantage of low signaling overhead in handoff authentication.

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


using csim to model complex systems Simulation models of complex systems, defined here to be systems with large number of activities or resources or with activities which exhibit complex behavior patterns, make severe requirements on simulation packages. These requirements are in the form of expressiveness (can you express the complexity in the language of the model?) and in the form of accommodation (can the runtime environment handle the large number of simulation objects?). This paper describes CSIM, a process-oriented simulation language based on C, and the features of CSIM which make it useful in developing and executing models of complex systems.

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

requirements systems simulation language behavior express complexity paper model runtime

activation
environments
packaging
object
complex systems
process
feature
resource
pattern


Security for a multi-agent system based on JADE The present paper explores the challenges, issues and solutions to satisfy the security requirements of a Multi-Agent System (MAS) based on the JADE framework. By means of a prototype system used for Learning Management, an adequate security concept for MAS in general is presented. Hereby several security features are considered, ranging, among others, from the authentication of users over encryption of the exchanged data up to the authorization of the access to services designated only to a determined group of users. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

jade
learning management
authentication
authorization
encryption

multi-agent jade-s signature availability


A virtual prototype for a hybrid electric vehicle A virtual prototype of a hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) is created within the virtual test bed (VTB) environment, which has been developed for modeling, simulation, analysis and virtual prototyping of large-scale multi-technical dynamic systems. Attention is focused on the electric system, which is composed of (i) a fuel cell system as a prime power source, (ii) battery and super capacitor banks as energy storage devices for high and intense power demands, (iii) DC-to-DC power converters to control the flow of power, (iv) a three-phase inverter-fed permanent magnet synchronous motor as a drive, and (v) a common DC bus. The simulation of the proposed system is conducted using two types of driving cycles. These are: (i) rapid acceleration and deceleration, and (ii) Federal Urban Driving Schedule (FUDS). The parameter values chosen for the components and the numerical results obtained by simulation are consistent with the practical HEV applications. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

hybrid electric vehicle
virtual prototype