Efficient Genome-Wide TagSNP Selection Across Populations via the Linkage Disequilibrium Criterion In this article, we studied the tag single-nucleotide polymorphism (tagSNP) selection problem on multiple populations using the pairwise r(2) linkage disequilibrium criterion. We proposed a novel combinatorial optimization model for the tagSNP selection problem, called the minimum common tagSNP selection (MCTS) problem, and presented efficient solutions for MCTS. Our approach consists of the following three main steps: (i) partitioning the SNP markers into small disjoint components, (ii) applying some data reduction rules to simplify the problem, and (iii) applying either a fast greedy algorithm or a Lagrangian relaxation algorithm to solve the remaining (general) MCTS. These algorithms also provide lower bounds on tagging (i. e., the minimum number of tagSNPs needed). The lower bounds allow us to evaluate how far our solution is from the optimum. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time the tagging lower bounds are discussed in the literature. We assessed the performance of our algorithms on real HapMap data for genome-wide tagging. The experiments demonstrated that our algorithms run 3-4 orders of magnitude faster than the existing single-population tagging programs such as FESTA, LD-Select, and the multiple-population tagging method MultiPop-TagSelect. Our method also greatly reduced the required tagSNPs compared with LD-Select on a single population and MultiPop-TagSelect on multiple populations. Moreover, the numbers of tagSNPs selected by our algorithms are almost optimal because they are very close to the corresponding lower bounds obtained by our method.

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

greedy algorithm
hapmap
lagrangian relaxation
linkage disequilibrium
multiple populations


A novel agent-based concept of household appliances Mass production, such as white goods manufacturing, is traditionally bound to hierarchical factory-floor procedures and accepts only gradual changes in technology and product architecture. This paper introduces an idea on how to upgrade from classical to network-connected reconfigurable devices. A generic multi-agent architecture was created, derived from belief-desire-and-intention (BDI) agents. It covers all types of white goods in the form of rational home assistant, and enables reconfiguration of agent-based household appliances during the design, production and implementation phases. The introduced concept involves a multi-agent architecture which utilizes distributed processing power at different levels: higher-level agents run on more powerful devices than embedded appliance's controllers, personal assistant (PDAs), or Windows or Linux based personal computers (PCs). PDAs can run a single agent, for example a GUI agent, whereas the embedded controllers execute lower-level device (embedded) agents. In this way, all the appliance's basic functionality, such as its hardware units (e.g., electrical motors, valves, heaters, etc.), are initially simulated by auxiliary agents running together with higher-level agents on a PC or PDA. Using this simulator in the design phase, all vital functions and capabilities of the agent-based appliance under development are thoroughly tested first. Afterwards, the agents that simulate the device's hardware units and environment are simply replaced by the communication to the corresponding device units. In such way, any new functionality or device's behaviour can be upgraded any time just by adapting the core of the multi-agent architecture on the PC and individual agents on the PDA or the embedded agents in appliances. A thorough design and implementation cycle of the proposed solution using two freeware development tools is also described, i.e., the Prometheus agent design methodology and the agent simulation/execution environment called Jadex. The approach is exemplified by building a simulator of an agent-based household appliance, namely a Multi-agent Washing Assistant as a special instance of rational home assistant.

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

rational agent
multi-agent system
reconfigurability


Genetics in neuroendocrine immunology: implications for rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis Both genetic and environmental factors contribute to rheumatoid arthritis (RA) as well as osteoarthritis (OA). For RA, most of the known genetic markers are linked with genes from immunological pathways. Recent genome-wide association studies (GWAS) on RA identified known and novel susceptibility genes like HLA-DRB1, PTPN22, STAT4, TRAF1/C5, OLIG3/TNFAIP3, CD40, CCL21, MMEL1-TNFRSF14, CDK6, PRKCQ, IL2RB, and KIF5A-PIP4K2C. These association signals explain more than 50% of the genetic influence on RA. In contrast, less GWAS data for OA exist. Most OA susceptibility genes arose from classical candidate gene analyses and were not replicated in all study samples. Neuroendocrine factors are hypothesized to play an important role both in RA and OA etiology. Here, we discuss these findings and present an outlook for genetic association studies after GWAS.

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

rheumatoid arthritis
osteoarthritis
neuroendocrine immunology

polymorphisms
genome-wide association studies
candidate genes
plexin-a2


Algorithms and bounds for drawing non-planar graphs with crossing-free subgraphs ? We initiate the study of the following problem: Given a non-planar graph G and a planar subgraph S of G, does there exist a straight-line drawing ? of G in the plane such that the edges of S are not crossed in ? by any edge of G? We give positive and negative results for different kinds of connected spanning subgraphs S of G. Moreover, in order to enlarge the subset of instances that admit a solution, we consider the possibility of bending the edges of G not in S; in this setting we discuss different trade-offs between the number of bends and the required drawing area.

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

graph drawing
graph planarity
area requirement
crossing complexity


On the hybrid propositional encodings of planning Recently, casting planning as propositional satisfiability (SAT) has been shown to be an efficient technique of plan synthesis. This article is a response to the recently proposed challenge(1) of developing novel propositional encodings that are based on a combination of different types of plan refinements and characterizing the tradeoffs. We refer to these encodings as hybrid encodings, An investigation of these encodings is important, because this can give insights into what kinds of planning problems can be solved faster with hybrid encodings. Encodings based on partial-order planning and state-space planning have been reported in previous research. We propose a new type of encoding called a unifying encoding that subsumes these two encodings. We also report on several other hybrid encodings. Next, we show how the satisfiability framework can be extended to incremental planning. State-space encoding is attractive because of its lower size and causal encoding is attractive because of its highest flexibility in reordering steps. We show that hybrid encodings have a higher size and a lower flexibility in step reordering and, thus. do not combine the best ofthe,c encodings, we discuss in detail Several specific planning scenarios where hybrid encodings are likely to be superior to nonhybrid encodings.

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

planning
propositional encodings
satisfiability


index-frame audio transmission Sending audio data over a computer network consumes a large amount of bandwidth, and so compression strategies are regularly built into audio file formats and transmission software. In some environments, the basic nature of the sound does not change significantly; for example, phone lines deal frequently with voice transmission. By matching input audio blocks against those in a table, we can transmit the table indices only, and audio can be synthesized at the receiving end by simple table look-up. This has a number of potentially interesting applications.

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


Nonlinear system identification and model reduction using artificial neural networks We present a technique for nonlinear system identification and model reduction using artificial neural networks (ANNs). The ANN is used to model plant input-output data, with the states of the model being represented by the outputs of an intermediate hidden layer of the ANN. Model reduction is achieved by applying a singular value decomposition (SVD)-based technique to the weight matrices of the ANN. The sequence of state values is used to convert the model to a form that is useful for state and parameter estimation. Examples of chemical systems (batch and continuous reactors and distillation columns) are presented to demonstrate the performance of the ANN-based system identification and model reduction technique. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

nonlinear system identification
model reduction
artificial neural networks


The exact overall time distribution of a project with uncertain task durations This paper presents a new technique for computing the exact overall duration of a project, when task durations have independent distributions. A project is represented as an Activity-on-Arc (AoA) graph, where a task begins as soon as all its predecessor tasks have finished. Task durations use a probability density function (p.d.f.) which combines piecewise polynomial segments and Dirac delta functions, defined over a finite interval. A semi-analytical procedure is proposed to compute the cumulative distribution function (c.d.f.) directly by integrating a linear transformation of the p.d.f. of the task durations. Graph reduction techniques by Hopcroft and Tarjan and by Valdes allow the problem to be broken into a series of smaller subproblems, improving computational efficiency. Examples are presented to illustrate the proposed method.

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

project management
pert network
graph theory
network reduction
multivariate statistics


Analysis of a general limited scheduling mechanism for a distributed communication system1 This paper studies an alternative scheduling mechanism of general limited service discipline for a distributed communication system, where the distributed system has a modular architecture and the module has tasks in the queue. We successfully analyze the system by way of imbedded Markov chains and use a recursive method to derive the mean waiting time of task. The arrival processes for modules are assumed to be Poisson processes; the service time of a task in queues and the walking time between queues are assumed to be generally distributed. We also presents an optimal-pattern design of the general limited scheduling mechanism for the distributed communication system via a genetic algorithm. A distributed communication system, if designed with the general limited scheduling mechanism and its optimal pattern, can be flexible to meet the system requirements as much as possible.

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

scheduling mechanism
limited
distributed communication system


Stabilized SQP revisited The stabilized version of the sequential quadratic programming algorithm (sSQP) had been developed in order to achieve superlinear convergence in situations when the Lagrange multipliers associated to a solution are not unique. Within the framework of Fischer (Math Program 94:91-124, 2002), the key to local superlinear convergence of sSQP are the following two properties: upper Lipschitzian behavior of solutions of the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) system under canonical perturbations and local solvability of sSQP subproblems with the associated primal-dual step being of the order of the distance from the current iterate to the solution set of the unperturbed KKT system. According to Fernandez and Solodov (Math Program 125:47-73, 2010), both of these properties are ensured by the second-order sufficient optimality condition (SOSC) without any constraint qualification assumptions. In this paper, we state precise relationships between the upper Lipschitzian property of solutions of KKT systems, error bounds for KKT systems, the notion of critical Lagrange multipliers (a subclass of multipliers that violate SOSC in a very special way), the second-order necessary condition for optimality, and solvability of sSQP subproblems. Moreover, for the problem with equality constraints only, we prove superlinear convergence of sSQP under the assumption that the dual starting point is close to a noncritical multiplier. Since noncritical multipliers include all those satisfying SOSC but are not limited to them, we believe this gives the first superlinear convergence result for any Newtonian method for constrained optimization under assumptions that do not include any constraint qualifications and are weaker than SOSC. In the general case when inequality constraints are present, we show that such a relaxation of assumptions is not possible. We also consider applying sSQP to the problem where inequality constraints are reformulated into equalities using slack variables, and discuss the assumptions needed for convergence in this approach. We conclude with consequences for local regularization methods proposed in (Izmailov and Solodov SIAM J Optim 16:210-228, 2004; Wright SIAM J. Optim. 15:673-676, 2005). In particular, we show that these methods are still locally superlinearly convergent under the noncritical multiplier assumption, weaker than SOSC employed originally.

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

constrained optimization
stabilized sqp
superlinear convergence
local regularization

degenerate constraints
second-order sufficiency
critical multipliers
error bound


empirical measurements of intrabody communication performance under varied physical configurations Intrabody communication (IBC) is a wireless communications technology that uses a person's body as the transmission medium for imperceptible electrical signals. Because communication is limited to the vicinity of a person's body, ambiguities arising from communication between personal devices and environmental devices when multiple people are present can, in theory, be solved simply. Intrabody communication also potentially allows data to be transferred when a person touches an IBC-enabled device. We have designed and constructed an intrabody communication system, modeled after Zimmerman's original design, and extended it to operate up to 38.4Kbps and to calculate signal strength. In this paper, we present quantitative measurements of data error rates and signal strength while varying hand distance to transceiver plate, electrode location on the body, touch plate size and shape, and several other factors. We find that plate size and shape have only minor effects, but that the distance to plate and the coupling mechanism significantly effect signal strength. We also find that portable devices, with poor ground coupling, suffer more significant signal attenuation. Our goal is to promote design guidelines for this technology and identify the best contexts for its effective deployment.

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

wearable computing
mobile interfaces
input devices
ubiquitous computing
hardware


Verification of RANS solvers with manufactured solutions This paper discusses code verification of Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) solvers with the method of manufactured solutions (MMS). Examples of manufactured solutions (MSs) for a two-dimensional, steady, wall-bounded, incompressible, turbulent flow are presented including the specification of the turbulence quantities incorporated in several popular eddy-viscosity turbulence models. A wall-function approach for the MMS is also described. The flexiblity and usefulness of the MS is illustrated with calculations performed in three different exercises: the calculation of the flow field using the manufactured eddy-viscosity; the calculation of the eddy-viscosity using the manufactured velocity field; the calculation of the complete flow field coupling flow and turbulence variables. The results show that the numerical performance of the flow solvers is model dependent and that the solution of the complete problem may exhibit different orders of accuracy than in the exercises with no coupling between the flow and turbulence variables.

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

manufactured solution
near-wall turbulent flow
eddy-viscosity


Constructing lattice rules based on weighted degree of exactness and worst case error Recall that an integration rule is said to have a trigonometric degree of exactness m if it integrates exactly all trigonometric polynomials of degree a parts per thousand currency sign m. In this paper we focus on high dimensions, say, d a parts per thousand << 6. We introduce three notions of weighted degree of exactness, where we use weights to characterize the anisotropicness of the integrand with respect to successive coordinate directions. Unlike in the classical unweighted setting, the minimal number of integration points needed to achieve a prescribed weighted degree of exactness no longer grows exponentially with d provided that the weights decay sufficiently fast. We present a component-by-component algorithm for the construction of a rank-1 lattice rule such that (i) it has a prescribed weighted degree of exactness, and (ii) its worst case error achieves the optimal rate of convergence in a weighted Korobov space. Then we introduce a modified, more practical, version of this algorithm which maximizes the weighted degree of exactness in each step of the construction. Both algorithms are illustrated by numerical results.

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


Using random subspace method for prediction and variable importance assessment in linear regression A random subset method (RSM) with a new weighting scheme is proposed and investigated for linear regression with a large number of features. Weights of variables are defined as averages of squared values of pertaining t-statistics over fitted models with randomly chosen features. It is argued that such weighting is advisable as it incorporates two factors: a measure of importance of the variable within the considered model and a measure of goodness-of-fit of the model itself. Asymptotic weights assigned by such a scheme are determined as well as assumptions under which the method leads to consistent choice of significant variables in the model. Numerical experiments indicate that the proposed method behaves promisingly when its prediction errors are compared with errors of penalty-based methods such as the lasso and it has much smaller false discovery rate than the other methods considered.

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

random subspace method
prediction
variable importance
false discovery rate

high-dimensional model selection
positive selection rate


Microarchitecture of a Coarse-Grain Out-of-Order Superscalar Processor We explore the design, implementation, and evaluation of a coarse-grain superscalar processor in the context of the microarchitecture of the Control Processor (CP) of the Multilevel Computing Architecture (MLCA), a novel architecture targeted for multimedia multicore systems. The MLCA augments a traditional multicore architecture (called the lower level) with a CP (called the top-level), which automatically extracts parallelism among coarse-grain units of computation (tasks), synchronizes these tasks and schedules them for execution on processors. It does so in a fashion similar to how instruction-level parallelism is extracted by superscalar processors, i.e., using register renaming, Out-of-Order Execution (OoOE) and scheduling. The coarse-grain nature of tasks imposes challenging constraints on the direct use of these techniques, but also offers opportunities for simpler designs. We analyze the impact of these constraints and opportunities and present novel microarchitectural mechanisms for coarse-grain superscalar execution, including register renaming, task queue, dynamic out-of-order scheduling and task-issue. We design an MLCA system around our CP microarchitecture and implement it on an FPGA. We evaluate the system using multimedia applications and show good scalability for eight processors, limited by the memory bandwidth of the FPGA platform. Furthermore, we show that the CP introduces little overhead in terms of resource usage. Finally, we show scalability beyond eight processors using cycle-accurate RTL-level simulation with an idealized memory subsystem. We demonstrate that the CP poses no performance bottlenecks and is scalable up to 32 processors.

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

coarse-grain parallelism
task-level superscalar execution
out-of-order execution


Practical power consumption estimation for real life HPC applications Due to high energy costs, fine-grained power consumption accounting and capability of making users of High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters aware of the cost of their computation is becoming more and more important. Hardware power measurement solutions can be very expensive, hence the appeal of software-based estimation methods. In this paper we present a practical approach to power consumption estimation of both individual application executions and whole computing nodes. We compare it to existing state-of-the-art solutions, provide accuracy figures, and discuss possible deployment scenarios.

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 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 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

power consumption estimation
hpc clusters
power measurement


A guide to assist nurse practitioners with standardized nursing language The purpose of this project was to develop a guide to support use of the Omaha System in primary care. The Omaha System is a community practice-based standardized nursing language developed by the Visiting Nurses Association (VNA) of Omaha, NE. Nurse practitioners at a primary care faculty practice clinic began using the Omaha System to describe more completely the advanced nursing care provided to clients, beyond ICD-9 and CPT codes, After 9 months of data collection, key faculty members convened to analyze the data and discuss issues in coding and interpretation. To simplify use of the system and facilitate orientation of new faculty, this group devised a Primary Care Guide for the Omaha System. High-frequency problems and interventions were identified, Definitions of the intervention categories were reviewed, and targets appropriate for the primary care environment were recorded. The result was a concise, user-friendly guide to assist the primary care nurse practitioner in the use of standardized nursing language.

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

standardized nursing language
omaha system
nurse practitioner
faculty practice


Merging polyhedral shapes with scattered features The paper presents a technique for merging two genus-0 polyhedra. Merging establishes correspondences between vertices of the models as a first step in a 3D morphing process. The technique allows for the specification of scattered features to be aligned. This is accomplished with the following three steps: 1. initial embeddings of the polyhedra on unit spheres are computed, 2. the embeddings are deformed so that user-defined features (vertices) coincide on the spheres, and 3. an overlay of the subdivisions is computed and the aligned vertices are fused in the merged model.

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


a comprehensive analysis of performance and side-channel-leakage of aes sbox implementations in embedded software The Advanced Encryption Standard is used in almost every new embedded application that needs a symmetric-key cipher. In such embedded applications, high-performance as well as resistance against implementation attacks is mandatory. In this paper, we compare and contrast three different software implementations of AES. The first two are based on cryptographic lookup tables, while the third uses bit-slicing. We analyze the performance and side-channel resistance of each implementation on two different FPGA platforms, one based on a PowerPC processor, and the second based on a LEON-3 soft-core processor. Our measurements show that, on embedded platforms, a bit-sliced AES implementation does not always outperform a lookup-table based AES implementation. We also present a detailed analysis of the side-channel resistance and the source of side-channel leakage, and show that our bit-sliced implementation has eight times more side-channel leakage than the lookup-table implementations. Hence, we conclude that a variation on the implementation style for embedded software implementation of AES will not only affect performance, but also embedded system security.

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


Nursing informatics education for the next millenium Better health care for all and an overall health care restructuring are two among most important processes which should be introduced in the new millenium. These two processes will expose many new tasks and responsibilities for the nursing personnel, entailing information as input and also generating information as the output. It is assumed that in the near future it is to be expected that most of the information processing including data gathering decision making support, data mining and information generation will be performed by computers. To cope with this new situation the nurses have to be armed with proper knowledge and thereafter the proper education will play a very important role. In this manner we started a new European project called NICE , whose main objective is to develop a new nursing informatics curricula and the aim of this paper is to present it and its design.

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


Multi-scale texture classification from generalized locally orderless images ? Locally orderless images are families of three intertwined scale spaces that describe local histograms. We generalize locally orderless images by considering local histograms of a collection of filtered versions of the image, and by extending them to joint probability distributions. These constructions can be used to derive texture features and are shown to be a more general description of two established texture classification methods, viz., filter bank methods and cooccurrence matrices. Because all scale parameters are stated explicitly in this formulation, multi-resolution feature sets can be extracted in a systematic way. This includes new types of multi-resolution analysis, not only based on the spatial scale, but on the window size and intensity scale as well. Each multi-resolution approach improves texture classification performance, the best result being obtained if a multi-resolution approach for all scale parameters is used. This is demonstrated in experiments on a large data set of 1152 images for 72 texture classes.

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

texture
locally orderless images
cooccurrence matrices

scale-space
multi-resolution texture classification
filter banks


An adaptive-learning algorithm to solve the inverse kinematics problem of a 6 DOF serial robot manipulator An adoptive learning strategy using an artificial neural network ANN has been proposed here to control the motion of a 6 D.O.F manipulator robot and to overcome the inverse kinematics problem, which are mainly singularities and uncertainties in arm configurations. In this approach a network have been trained to learn a desired set of joint angles positions from a given set of end effector positions, experimental results has shown an excellent mapping over the working area of the robot, to validate the ability of the designed network to make prediction and well generalization for any set of data, a new training using different data set has been performed using the same network, experimental results has shown a good generalization for the new data sets. The proposed control technique does not require any prior knowledge of the kinematics model of the system being controlled, the basic idea of this concept is the use of the ANN to learn the characteristics of the robot system rather than to specify explicit robot system model. Any modification in the physical set-up of the robot such as the addition of a new tool would only require training for a new path without the need for any major system software modification, which is a significant advantage of using neural network technology. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

neural networks
back propagation
robot control


Using a modified genetic algorithm to minimize the production costs for slabs of precast prestressed concrete joists Genetic algorithms (GAs) are search methods that have been successfully applied to a variety of tasks. This paper describes the use of a modified GA as an optimization method in structural engineering for minimizing the production costs of slabs using precast prestressed concrete joists. The work initially identifies and describes the multiple costs involved in the production of these slabs and then combines them into a function subjected to 28 equality and inequality constraints. The experiments conducted address the minimization of this function using GA, where constraints are treated using a penalty technique. In addition, results obtained with a conventional optimization method are presented, for comparison.

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

genetic algorithm
structural engineering

slabs with precast prestressed concrete joists


Statistical multi-object shape models The shape of a population of geometric entities is characterized by both the common geometry of the population and the variability among instances. In the deformable model approach, it is described by a probabilistic model on the deformations that transform a common template into various instances. To capture shape features at various scale levels, we have been developing an object-based multi-scale framework, in which a geometric entity is represented by a series of deformations with different locations and degrees of locality. Each deformation describes a residue from the information provided by previous steps. In this paper, we present how to build statistical shape models of multi-object complexes with such properties based on medial representations and explain how this may lead to more effective shape descriptions as well as more efficient statistical training procedures. We illustrate these ideas with a statistical shape model for a pair of pubic bones and show some preliminary results on using it as a prior in medical image segmentation.

O O O O O O 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 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

statistical shape models
deformable model

multi-object shape models
multi-scale shape analysis
medial representation


extended privilege inheritance in rbac In existing RBAC literature, administrative privileges are inherited just like ordinary user privileges. We argue that from a security viewpoint this is too restrictive, and we believe that a more flexible approach can be very useful in practice. We define an ordering on the set of administrative privileges, enabling us to extend the standard privilege inheritance relation in a natural way. This means that if a user has a particular administrative privilege, then she is also implicitly authorized for weaker administrative privileges. We prove the non-trivial result that it is possible to decide whether one administrative privilege is weaker than another and show how this result can be used to decide administrative requests in an RBAC security monitor.

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


A High-throughput routing metric for multi-hop Underwater Acoustic Networks ? We investigate performance of various topology-based routing metrics in Underwater Acoustic Network. Acquired knowledge is applied to design a new routing metric, Cubic Min to Avg Signal-to-Noise Ratio (CMAS). This metric is capable of selecting high-throughput links. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed metric.

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

underwater acoustic networks routing metrics cmas


relevance feedback strategies for artistic image collections tagging This paper provides an analysis on relevance feedback techniques in a multimedia system designed for the interactive exploration and annotation of artistic collections, in particular illuminated manuscripts. The relevance feedback is presented not only as a very effective technique to improve the performance of the system, but also as a clever way to increase the user experience, mixing the interactive surfing through the artistic content with the possibility to gather valuable information from the user, and consequently improving his retrieval satisfaction. We compare a modification of the Mean-Shift Feature Space Warping algorithm, as representative of the standard RF procedures, and a learning-based technique based on transduction, considered in order to overcome some limitation of the previous technique. Experiments are reported regarding the adopted visual features based on covariance matrices.

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

tagging
relevance feedback
illuminated manuscripts
covariance matrices

visual similarity
user interaction
image retrieval


LANGUAGE IDENTIFICATION OF KANNADA, HINDI AND ENGLISH TEXT WORDS THROUGH VISUAL DISCRIMINATING FEATURES In a multilingual country like India, a document may contain text words in more than one language. For a multilingual environment, multi lingual Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system is needed to read the multilingual documents. So, it is necessary to identify different language regions of the document before feeding the document to the OCRs of individual language. The objective of this paper is to propose visual clues based procedure to identify Kannada, Hindi and English text portions of the Indian multilingual document.

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

document mage processing
multi-lingual document
horizontal lines
vertical lines
feature extraction


combining conceptual modeling and active rules for the design of adaptive web applications In this paper we propose a framework for the design and development of adaptive Web applications. The framework leverages on the integration of two well established approaches: a conceptual model, complemented with a CASE tool for automatic code generation, and a language for expressing ECA rules, supported by an engine for rule execution. Such integration leads to a versatile and flexible adaptivity environment, whose advantage is twofold: on one hand, conceptual modeling and automatic code generation support an efficient development process; on the other hand a detached rule engine allows us to widen the set of adaptivity requirements that can be handled and to overcome some limitations of current modeling approaches.

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

adaptivity
active rules
adaptive web applications

web application modeling
context-awareness


Engineering portfolios of Machine Learning algorithms to solve complex tasks in Robotics and Automated Reasoning This report provides a summary of a dissertation focusing in the application of Machine Learning (ML) techniques to solve complex tasks both in Robotics and Automated Reasoning. In particular, we focus on the contributions achieved in engineering ML techniques to yield a robust solver for quantified Boolean formulas.

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 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 B I I

automated reasoning
machine learning
quantified boolean formulas


On the distribution of Leja-Gorski points Based on the concept of Leja-Gorski points, discrete approximations to the equilibrium distribution of a smooth surface or a quasiconformal curve or arc are constructed. Estimates for the order of approximation in terms of discrepancy are given and numerical computations are performed in the case of the unit sphere.

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

leja-gorski points
equilibrium measure
fekete points


Using the particle filter for nuclear decision support In the case of a nuclear accident, forecasting the spread of contamination is important for determining whether contamination thresholds are exceeded. In this study we explore ensemble modeling for forecasting threshold exceedance. This involves defining probability density functions for the most import model drivers and parameters and creating an ensemble of models by drawing from them. We test two ensemble modeling techniques, a simple Monte Carlo simulation (MC) and the particle filter. The particle filter extends on MC by assimilating observations into the model as they become available in real-time. In this paper we show that using a deterministic model run provides a false sense of accuracy. Using ensemble modeling we can visualize the uncertainty in threshold exceedance by classifying the 95% prediction interval at each grid cell relative to the threshold into either higher, lower or not distinguishable. In addition, we classify the grid cells relative to 4 multiples of the threshold (0.5, 1, 2 and 4), showing the sensitivity of the classification. Large changes between multiples indicate a small prediction interval. By comparing MC to the particle filter we observe a reduction by a factor of up to 10.6 in uncertainty in the PDF of the spread of contamination. We also aggregate the results to the level of a municipality, which might prove more informative to decision makers. Finally, we demonstrate that errors in the PDFs of the most important model settings can degrade the performance of the particle filter.

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 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 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 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 B I

particle filter
monte carlo
threshold exceedance

data assimilation
spatial aggregation
nuclear accidents


The emergence of links between lexical acquisition and object categorization: a computational study Language is about symbols, and those symbols must be grounded in the physical world. Children learn to associate language with sensorimotor experiences during their development. In light of this, we first provide a computational account of how words are mapped to their perceptually grounded meanings. Moreover, the main part of this work proposes and implements a computational model of how word learning influences the formation of object categories to which those words refer. This model simulates the bi-directional relationship between word and object category learning: (1) object categorization provides mental representations of meanings that are mapped to words to form lexical items; (2) linguistic labels help object categorization by providing additional teaching signals; and (3) these two learning processes interplay with each other and form a developmental feedback loop. Compared with the method that performs these two tasks separately, our model shows promising improvements in both word-to-world mapping and perceptual categorization, suggesting a unified view of lexical and category learning in an integrative framework. Most importantly, this work provides a cognitively plausible explanation of the mechanistic nature of early word learning and object learning from co-occurring multisensory data.

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


Toward the integration of a single carbon nanofibre as via interconnect The use of carbon nanotube/nanofibres as via interconnects is widely studied. As the vias dimensions decrease below 50nm, the number of carbon nanotubes could be close to the unity in each via hole. In the present study we show the integration processes to obtain interconnects made of one single vertically free standing carbon nanofibre. Two different catalyst integrations are detailed and tested.

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


Enforcement of privacy requirements ? Enterprises collect and use private information for various purposes. Access control can limit who can obtain such data, however, the purpose of their use is not clear. In this paper we focus on the purpose of data access and demonstrate that dynamic role-based access control (RBAC) is not sufficient for enforcement of privacy requirements. We extend RBAC with monitoring capability and describe a formal approach to determining whether access control policies actually implement privacy requirements based on the behaviour of the system. We show how access control fails to detect privacy violations and use small examples to demonstrate how our technique is used to solve such issues. We also describe a prototype implementation of our technique and present two case studies that demonstrate the applicability of our approach in practice.

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

privacy protection
formal modelling
verification


performance analysis of mobility management protocols using a generic mathematical model An important challenge for All-IP wireless networks is the development of solutions for fast and seamless mobility. Many mobility management protocols have been developed to match real-time requirements in All-IP networks. In addition, lots of performance studies have been performed. In order to estimate the performance of a certain mobility management protocol compared to some others, a mathematical model for each protocol should be developed or each protocol should be simulated or implemented. In general, the simulation and the implementation take a long time and deliver detailed and accurate results. The mathematical model can be developed faster and results in a good estimation of the performance. Until now there is no generic mathematical model that can be used for a wide range of mobility management solutions. In this paper we propose a model that allows for the evaluation of the performance of a large set of mobility management protocols with respect to the handoff latency and the expected number of dropped packets. Our model takes the dropping of control messages, mobility patterns and network topology into account. The parameters of the generic model are set according to the characteristics of the studied protocols. Mobile IP Fast Authentication protocol (MIFA) and Handoff-Aware Wireless Access Internet Infrastructure (HAWAII) are compared to each other in this paper using the developed model.

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

performance analysis
mobility management


Double linear regressions for single labeled image per person face recognition DLR seeks the best discriminating subspace and preserves the sparse structure. DLR uses label information to learn a more discriminative sparse structure. Sparse coefficient vector is quickly computed by class specific linear regression. The difficulty of selecting graph construction parameters is avoided in DLR. Promising experimental results on three public face datasets are presented.

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


Information fusion estimators for systems with multiple sensors of different packet dropout rates In this paper, the optimal centralized and distributed fusion estimation problems in the linear minimum variance (LMV) sense are investigated for multi-sensor systems with multiple packet dropouts. For discrete time-varying linear stochastic systems with multiple sensors of different packet dropout rates, the LMV centralized fusion estimators (CFEs) including filter, predictor and smoother are presented in virtue of the method of innovation analysis. However, CFEs can bring expensive computational cost and poor reliability due to augmentation. To reduce the computational cost and improve the reliability, the distributed fusion estimators (DFEs) are given based on the well-known optimal fusion estimation algorithm weighted by scalars in the LMV sense, which have the parallel structures. Estimation error cross-covariance matrices between any two sensor subsystems are derived to obtain the distributed fusion estimators. A numerical example shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. (C) 2010 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 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

multi-sensor
centralized estimator
distributed fusion estimator
cross-covariance


High order numerical methods for the space non-homogeneous Boltzmann equation In this paper we present accurate methods for the numerical solution of the Boltzmann equation of rarefied gas. The methods are based on a time splitting technique. The transport is solved by a third order accurate (in space) positive and flux conservative (PFC) method. The collision step is treated by a Fourier approximation of the collision integral, which guarantees spectral accuracy in velocity, coupled with several high order integrators in time. Strang splitting is used to achieve second order accuracy in space and time. Several numerical tests illustrate the properties of the methods.

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

rarefied gas dynamics
spectral methods
splitting algorithms


Novel delay-dependent stability criteria for switched Hopfield neural networks of neutral type ? This paper investigates the stability of switched Hopfield neural networks of neutral type with time-varying delay and continuously distributed delay. By using the quadratic convex combination method, the reciprocal convex combination approach, some generalized Jensen integral inequalities, and the free-weight matrix method, several novel sufficient conditions are derived to ensure the asymptotic stability of the equilibrium point of the considered networks. The proposed results, which do not require the differentiability of the activation functions, can be easily checked via Matlab software. Finally, three numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and less conservativeness of our theoretical results over existing literature.

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

quadratic convex combination
reciprocal convex combination approach

switched neural networks of neutral type


On the number of connected convex subgraphs of a connected acyclic digraph ? A digraph D D is connected if the underlying undirected graph of D D is connected. A subgraph H H of an acyclic digraph D D is convex if there is no directed path between vertices of H H which contains an arc not in H H . We find the minimum and maximum possible number of connected convex subgraphs in a connected acyclic digraph of order n n . Connected convex subgraphs of connected acyclic digraphs are of interest in the area of modern embedded processors technology.

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


Reinforcement Learning: A Tutorial Survey and Recent Advances In the last few years, reinforcement learning (RL), also called adaptive (or approximate) dynamic programming, has emerged as a powerful tool for solving complex sequential decision-making problems in control theory. Although seminal research in this area was performed in the artificial intelligence (AI) community, more recently it has attracted the attention of optimization theorists because of several noteworthy success stories from operations management. It is on large-scale and complex problems of dynamic optimization, in particular the Markov decision problem (MDP) and its variants, that the power of RL becomes more obvious. It has been known for many years that on large-scale MDPs, the curse of dimensionality and the curse of modeling render classical dynamic programming (DP) ineffective. The excitement in RL stems from its direct attack on these curses, which allows it to solve problems that were considered intractable via classical DP in the past. The success of RL is due to its strong mathematical roots in the principles of DP, Monte Carlo simulation, function approximation, and AI. Topics treated in some detail in this survey are temporal differences, Q-learning, semi-MDPs, and stochastic games. Several recent advances in RL, e. g., policy gradients and hierarchical RL, are covered along with references. Pointers to numerous examples of applications are provided. This overview is aimed at uncovering the mathematical roots of this science so that readers gain a clear understanding of the core concepts and are able to use them in their own research. The survey points to more than 100 references from the literature.

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

artificial intelligence
dynamic programming
simulation
reinforcement learning


Parity Forwarding for Multiple-Relay Networks This paper proposes a relaying strategy for the. multiple-relay network in which each relay decodes a selection of transmitted messages by other transmitting terminals, and forwards parities of the decoded codewords. This protocol improves the previously known achievable rate of the decode-and-forward (DF) strategy for multirelay networks by allowing relays to decode only a selection of messages from relays with strong links to it. Hence, each relay may have several choices as to which messages to decode, and for a given network many different parity forwarding protocols may exist. A tree structure is devised to characterize a class of parity forwarding protocols for an arbitrary multirelay network. Based on this tree structure, closed-form expressions for the achievable rates of these DF schemes are derived. It is shown that parity forwarding is capacity achieving for new forms of degraded relay 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 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 B O O O O O O B I


Crosstalk between Tumor T Lymphocytes and Reactive T Lymphocytes in Cutaneous T Cell Lymphomas We have established several tumor T cell lines, both from the skin and from the blood of a patient with an MHC class II?/class I+, CD4+ cutaneous T cell lymphoma (CTCL). These cell lines, like the initial tumor cells, had a CD3+CD4+CD8? phenotype. We also isolated two cytotoxic T lymphocyte clones from the tumor site of this CTCL patient. These clones displayed a CD4+CD8dim+ (TC5) and CD4+CD8? (TC7) phenotype and mediated a specific MHC class I-restricted cytotoxic activity toward noncultured tumor cells and autologous tumor cell lines. Despite surface expression of Fas on tumor cells and Fas-L induction on TC5 and TC7 cell membrane after coculture with autologous tumor cells, the CD4+ CTL clones did not use this cytotoxic mechanism to lyse their specific target. TC7 used a granzyme/perforin-dependent pathway, whereas TC5 used a TRAIL-dependent mechanism. Quantitative analysis of cytokine mRNA expression indicated that while the tumor cells displayed a Th2-type profile, the CTL clones expressed Th1-type cytokines. Pre-incubation of TIL clones with autologous tumor cells in a short-term culture induced their activation and subsequent amplification of the Th1-type response, which indicates a direct contribution of the malignant cells in the Th1/Th2 imbalance. However, we found that tumor cells produced high amounts of TGF-?, which could explain the inhibition of a specific antitumor immune response. Another mechanism to avoid the host immune response was the expression of CD158a, CD158b, p70, and CD94/NKG2A inhibitory receptors by tumor-specific lymphocytes. Finally, we present recent data on new antigen structures expressed both by long-term CTCL lines and uncultured tumor cells.

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

cutaneous t cell lymphomas
cytotoxic t lymphocyte clones


Punctuated equilibrium in a non-linear system of action Coleman's equilibrium model of social development, the Linear System of Action, is extended to cover the dynamics of societal transitions. The model implemented has the characteristics of a dissipative system. A variation and selection algorithm favoring the retention of relatively dependent actors forces the system away from equilibrium, while exchange of control, according to Coleman the driving force behind social action, accounts for dissipation, pulling the social system back to equilibrium. This Non-linear System of Action self-organizes into a critical state, as confirmed by the robust power law distribution of exchange of control for a wide range of model sizes. Related punctuated equilibrium dynamics and structural change are of special interest, as these are closely connected to hypotheses on social dynamics developed in the literature on societal transitions.

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

self-organized criticality
societal transition
social change
social simulation


Growing fuzzy topology adaptive resonance theory models with a pushpull learning algorithm A new incrementally growing neural network model, called the growing fuzzy topology ART (GFTART) model, is proposed based on integrating the conventional fuzzy ART model with the incremental topology-preserving mechanism of the growing cell structure (GCS) model. This is in addition, to a new training algorithm, called the pushpull learning algorithm. The proposed GFTART model has two purposes: First, to reduce the proliferation of incrementally generated nodes in the F2 layer by the conventional fuzzy ART model based on replacing each F2 node with a GCS. Second, to enhance the class-dependent clustering representation ability of the GCS model by including the categorization property of the conventional fuzzy ART model. In addition, the proposed pushpull training algorithm enhances the cluster discriminating property and partially improves the forgetting problem of the training algorithm in the GCS model.

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

fuzzy art
gcs
growing fuzzy topology art
pushpull training algorithm


A feature-oriented approach for developing reusable product line assets of service-based systems Service orientation (SO) is a relevant promising candidate for accommodating rapidly changing user needs and expectations. One of the goals of adopting SO is the improvement of reusability, however, the development of service-based system in practice has uncovered several challenging issues, such as how to identify reusable services, how to determine configurations of services that are relevant to users current product configuration and context, and how to maintain service validity after configuration changes. In this paper, we propose a method that addresses these issues by adapting a feature-oriented product line engineering approach. The method is notable in that it guides developers to identify reusable services at the right level of granularity and to map users context to relevant service configuration, and it also provides a means to check the validity of services at runtime in terms of invariants and pre/post-conditions of services. Moreover, we propose a heterogeneous style based architecture model for developing such systems.

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

software product line engineering
feature-oriented
service-based systems
software architecture
software architecture styles


Quantifying fluid distribution and phase connectivity with a simple 3D cubic pore network model constrained by NMR and MICP data Inverse estimation of pore-network attributes from NMR and MICP data. Quantification of fluid distribution and phase connectivity in a cubic pore-network. Relative permeability modeling for tight-gas sandstone samples.

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

pore network
fluid distribution
relative permeability

mercury injection capillary pressure
nuclear magnetic resonance
invasion percolation
tight-gas sandstone


Solutions for H-infinity filtering of two-dimensional systems This paper deals with the H-infinity filtering problem for linear discrete-time two-dimensional (2-D) systems described by the Roesser model. It firstly establishes a version of the bounded real lemma to give a sufficient condition for quantification of the H-infinity noise attenuation for 2-D systems. Based on the bounded real lemma, the H-infinity filtering problem is investigated for filters of an observer-based structure or a general state equation form and the solutions are obtained in terms of Riccati inequalities or linear matrix inequalities. The design approach is illustrated by an example of a stationary field in image 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 B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

h-infinity filtering
linear matrix inequality
riccati inequality
two-dimensional systems


Inapproximability of the kidney exchange problem To overcome the shortage of kidneys available for transplantation, several countries have started various programmes of kidney exchanges between incompatible patient-donor pairs. This situation can be modeled as a cooperative game in which the players are the patient-donor pairs and their preferences are derived in the first step from the suitability of the donated kidney and in the second step from the length of the obtained cycle of exchanges. Although the core of such a cooperative game is always nonempty and one core solution can be found by the famous Top Trading Cycles algorithm, many questions concerning the structure of the core are NP-hard. In this paper we show that the problem of finding a core permutation that maximizes the number of patients who obtain a suitable kidney is not approximable within n(1-epsilon) for any epsilon > 0 unless P = NP. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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 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 B 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 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

kidney transplantation
computational complexity


origin 2000 design enhancements for communication intensive applications The SGI Origin 2000 is designed to support a wide range of applications and has low local and remote memory latencies. However, it often has a high ratio of remote to local misses. In this paper, we evaluate the Origin 2000 performance with communication intensive applications. We use detailed execution-driven simulation of six shared-memory applications. This paper evaluates a base, Origin 2000-like system and three derived systems that incorporate techniques to reduce the communication cost by lowering the ratio of remote misses. We show that the performance of these applications is generally improved when the local bus is used in the snoopy mode, the number of processors per node is increased, the processors use the Illinois cache coherence protocol, or when adding a snoopy cache to retain remote data within each node. Illinois protocol and the interconnect cache reduce the average remote miss ratio by 16\% and 21\%, respectively.

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

cc-numa
communication performance
performance evaluation
execution-driven simulation


Uncertain generalized aggregation operators The aim of this paper is to extend the generalized ordered weighted averaging operator and provide a new class of operators called the uncertain generalized ordered weighted averaging (UGOWA) operator. It provides a very general formulation that includes as special cases a wide range of aggregation operators and aggregates the input arguments taking the form of intervals rather than exact numbers. We further generalize the UGOWA operator to obtain the uncertain generalized hybrid averaging operator, the quasi uncertain ordered weighted averaging operator and the uncertain generalized Choquet integral aggregation operator. In the meanwhile, a new approach to determining the UGOWA weights is proposed based on the relative deviation measure. Finally, a numerical example is presented to illustrate the proposed approach to group decision making with UGOWA operator. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

owa operator
generalized mean
operator weights


Convergence of gradient method for training ridge polynomial neural network The ridge polynomial neural network is one of the most popular higher-order neural networks, which has the powerful capability of approximating reasonable functions while avoiding the combinatorial increase in the number of weights required. In this paper, we study the convergence of gradient method with batch updating rule for ridge polynomial neural network, and a monotonicity theorem and two convergence theorems (including a weak convergence and a strong convergence) are proved. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed theorems are valid.

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

ridge polynomial neural network
monotonicity
convergence


Greedy colorings of words In the Binary Paint Shop Problem proposed by Epping etal. (2004) [4] one has to find a 0/1 0 / 1 -coloring of the letters of a word in which every letter from some alphabet appears twice, such that the two occurrences of each letter are colored differently and the total number of color changes is minimized. Meunier and Seb? (2009) [5] and Amini etal. (2010) [1] gave sufficient conditions for the optimality of a natural greedy algorithm for this problem. Our result is a best possible generalization of their results. We prove that the greedy algorithm optimally colors every suitable subword of a given instance word w w if and only if w w contains none of the three words (a,b,a,c,c,b) ( a , b , a , c , c , b ) , (a,d,d,b,c,c,a,b) ( a , d , d , b , c , c , a , b ) , and (a,d,d,c,b,c,a,b) ( a , d , d , c , b , c , a , b ) as a subword. Furthermore, we relate this to the fact that every member of a family of hypergraphs associated with w w is evenly laminar.

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

binary paint shop problem
greedy algorithm

evenly laminar hypergraph
odd transversal


Evaluation and possible improvements of the Swedish electoral system The Swedish electoral system exhibits significant levels of proportionality compared with the systems used in other countries. However, it has several deficiencies that could be corrected. Therefore, this paper (a) evaluates the current Swedish electoral system by identifying the imbalances in the representation of political parties and the sizes of the electoral constituencies that can occur and (b) presents two proposals for improvement that seek to correct the previously identified deficiencies. The first proposal consists of a slight modification of the current system that applies when parties get more seats than they proportionally deserve according to their global number of votes, as occurred in the 2010 election. In this case, the proposal includes a criterion so that the overrepresented parties return their excess seats. The second proposal relies on the implementation of biproportional allotments and on the replacement of the electoral thresholds of 4% of the total votes nationwide and 12% of the votes in a given constituency by a new threshold based on a reduction in the number of votes of the parties. The application of any of these proposals to the Swedish election held in 2010 reveals that the deficiencies in the representation of political parties are eliminated. Furthermore, the second proposal also corrects the deficiencies in the sizes of the electoral constituencies for Sweden.

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

swedish electoral system
proportionality
threshold


A new impulse detector based on order statistics The acquisition or transmission of digital images through sensors or communication channels is often interfered by impulse noise. It is very important to eliminate noise in the images before subsequent processing, such as image segmentation, object recognition, and edge detection. In this letter, a novel impulse noise-detection algorithm is presented, which can remove impulse noise from corrupted images successfully, and at the same time, without eliminating image details. The algorithm is based on the order statistics within a local window. Although our method is low in complexity when compared with some other complicated algorithms, experimental results show that it produces better restored images than many other existing techniques.

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


An Additivity Theorem for Plain Kolmogorov Complexity We prove the formula C(a,b)=K(a|C(a,b))+C(b|a,C(a,b))+O(1) that expresses the plain complexity of a pair in terms of prefix-free and plain conditional complexities of its components.

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

symmetry of information
additivity of kolmogorov complexity


A Bee Colony based optimization approach for simultaneous job scheduling and data replication in grid environments This paper presents a novel Bee Colony based optimization algorithm, named Job Data Scheduling using Bee Colony (JDS-BC). JDS-BC consists of two collaborating mechanisms to efficiently schedule jobs onto computational nodes and replicate datafiles on storage nodes in a system so that the two independent, and in many cases conflicting, objectives (i.e., makespan and total datafile transfer time) of such heterogeneous systems are concurrently minimized. Three benchmarks varying from small- to large-sized instances are used to test the performance of JDS-BC. Results are compared against other algorithms to show JDS-BC's superiority under different operating scenarios. These results also provide invaluable insights into data-centric job scheduling for grid environments.

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

bee colony optimization
grid computing
resource allocation


Rough clustering utilizing the principle of indifference The proposed approach is robust, intuitive and easy to understand. It utilizes Laplaces indifference principle as firm common grounding. The mean function in the new approach is parameter-free (no weights required). The boundary objects impacts are competitive, not cumulative like in other RKM. The impacts of lower approximations are higher than the impacts of boundaries.

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

rough k-means
laplaces principle of indifference
overlapping clusters


Empirical investigation towards the effectiveness of Test First programming The Test First (TF) programming, which is based on an iterative process of setting up test cases, implementing the functionality, and having all test cases passed, has been put forward for decades, however knowledge of the evidence of the Test First programmings success is limited. This paper describes a controlled experiment that investigated the distinctions between the effectiveness of Test First and that of Test Last (TL) (the traditional approach). The experimental results showed that Test First teams spent a larger percentage of time on testing. The achievable minimum external quality of delivered software applications increased with the percentage of time spent on testing regardless of the testing strategy (TF or TL) applied, although there does not exist a linear correlation between them. With four years data, it is also found that a strong linear correlation between the amount of effort spent on testing and coding in Test First teams, while this phenomenon was not observed in Test Last teams.

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

agile methods
empirical software engineering
software testing
testing strategies
software engineering process
programming paradigms


Multi-bidding strategy in sponsored search auctions The generalized second price auction has recently become a much studied model for sponsored search auctions for Internet advertisement. Though it is known not to be incentive compatible, properties of its pure Nash equilibria have been well characterized under the single bidding strategy of each bidder. In this paper, we study the properties of pure Nash equilibria of the generalized second price auction when each bidder is allowed to submit more than one bid. This multi-bidding strategy is noted to have been adopted by companies for keyword advertisements on search engines. In consideration of the pure Nash equilibria, we completely characterize conditions on the number of selling slots for a pure Nash equilibrium to exist, assuming all the advertisers are allowed to use multi-bidding strategies or only one advertiser will use a multi-bidding strategy. Our findings reveal interesting properties of limitations and potentials of the generalized second price auction for the sponsored search market.

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 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 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 I I O O O O O

generalized second price auction
nash equilibrium

sponsored search auction
multi-bidding strategy


analysis of multiterm queries in a dynamic signature file organization Our analysis combines the concerns of signature extraction and signature file organization which have usually been treated as separate issues. We also relax the uniform frequency and single term query assumptions and provide a comprehensive analysis for multiterm query environments where terms can be classified based on their query and database occurrence frequencies. The performance of three superimposed signature generation schemes is explored as they are applied to one dynamic signature file organization based on linear hashing: Linear Hashing with Superimposed Signatures (LHSS). First scheme (SM) allows all terms set the same number of bits regardless of their discriminatory power whereas the second and third methods (MMS and MMM) emphasize the terms with high query and low database occurrence frequencies. Of these three schemes, only MMM takes the probability distribution of the number of query terms into account in finding the optimal mapping strategy. Derivation of performance evaluation formulas is provided together with the results of various experimental settings. Suggestions as to how to implement the given techniques in real life cases are also provided. Results indicate that MMM outperforms the other methods as the gap between the discriminatory power of the terms gets larger. The absolute value of the savings provided by MMM reach a maximum for the high query weight case. However, the extra savings decline sharply for high weight and moderately for the low weight queries with the increase in database size.

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

value
generation
hashing
analysis
performance
probability
case
account
environments
extraction
file organization
size
dynamic
queries
power
signature
database
query
scheme

map
performance evaluation
method
strategies
experimentation
optimality
classifiation
distributed


Binding modes of CCR5-targetting HIV entry inhibitors: Partial and full antagonists Since the CC-chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5) was identified as a major co-receptor for human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) entry into a host cell, CCR5-targetting HIV entry inhibitors have been developed and some of them are currently in clinical trials. Most of these inhibitors also inhibit the physiological chemokine reaction function of CCR5, which is so far considered to be safe to patients based on the observation that individuals that naturally lack CCR5 do not show apparent health problems. Nevertheless, to minimize the toxicity and side effects, it would be ideal to preserve the chemokine receptor activity. In this work, we simulated the flexible docking of two small molecule inhibitors to CCR5 in a solvated phospholipid bilayer environment. One of the inhibitors, aplaviroc has a unique feature of preserving two of the natural chemokine ligands binding to CCR5 and subsequent activation whereas the other one, SCH-C fully blocks chemokine-CCR5 interactions. Our results revealed significantly different binding modes of these two inhibitors although both established extensive interaction networks with CCR5. Comparison of the different binding modes suggests that avoiding the deep insertion of inhibitors into the transmembrane helix bundle may be able to preserve chemokine-CCR5 interactions. These results could help design HIV co-receptor activity-specific inhibitors.

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

hiv entry inhibitors
antagonists
flexible docking

cc-chemokine receptor 5 (ccr5)
molecular dynamics simulation


Periodic Plus Smooth Image Decomposition When the Discrete Fourier Transform of an image is computed, the image is implicitly assumed to be periodic. Since there is no reason for opposite borders to be alike, the "periodic" image generally presents strong discontinuities across the frame border. These edge effects cause several artifacts in the Fourier Transform, in particular a well-known "cross" structure made of high energy coefficients along the axes, which can have strong consequences on image processing or image analysis techniques based on the image spectrum (including interpolation, texture analysis, image quality assessment, etc.). In this paper, we show that an image can be decomposed into a sum of a "periodic component" and a "smooth component", which brings a simple and computationally efficient answer to this problem. We discuss the interest of such a decomposition on several applications.

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

discrete fourier transform
periodic image
image quality assessment

edge effect
ringing
artifact
sinc interpolation
phase coherence


Magneto-thermo-elastic vibration of thin shells under a surge current The mathematical model of thin cylindrical conducting shell deformation under a current surge was elaborated. The shell deformation influence on the electromagnetic and thermal field distribution has been calculated. The perturbation analysis of the vibration of a thin cylindrical shell under heavy current surge was given The critical wave number and mode was found and the most probable instability was calculated.

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


Random test problems and parallel methods for quadratic programs and quadratic stochastic programs This paper proposes a data parallel procedure for randomly generating test problems for two-stage quadratic stochastic programming. Multiple quadratic programs in the second stage are randomly generated in parallel. A solution of the quadratic stochastic program is determined by multiple symmetric linear complementarity problems. The procedure allows the user to specify the size of the problem, the condition numbers of the Hessian matrices of the objective functions and the structure of the feasible regions in the first and the second stages. These test problems are used to evaluate three parallel algorithms for multiple quadratic programs and a parallel inexact Newton method for quadratic stochastic programming. Numerical experiments on a Thinking Machine CM-5, Silicon Graphics Power Challenge, and DEC Alpha Server are reported.

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quadratic programs
stochastic programming

parallel computation
test problem generation


line width optimization for interdigitated power/ground networks Higher operating frequencies have increased the importance of inductance in power and ground networks. The effective inductance of the power and ground network can be reduced with an interdigitated structure. A closed-form solution for determining the optimal power and ground wire width is described, producing the minimum impedance within an interdigitated structure. The optimal wire width is determined under different physical network dimensions and signal frequencies, suggesting useful trends for interdigitated power and ground networks. In addition, a closed-form expression for the optimal wire width is determined that minimizes the voltage drop over a single metal layer of an interdigitated power/ground network.

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power/ground network
power network
optimal line width


On the prediction error variance of three common spatial interpolation schemes Three forms of linear interpolation are routinely implemented in geographical information science, by interpolating between measurements made at the endpoints of a line, the vertices of a triangle, and the vertices of a rectangle (bilinear interpolation). Assuming the linear form of interpolation to be correct, we study the propagation of error when measurement error variances and covariances are known for the samples at the vertices of these geometric objects. We derive prediction error variances associated with interpolated values at generic points in the above objects, as well as expected (average) prediction error variances over random locations in these objects. We also place all the three variants of linear interpolation mentioned above within a geostatistical framework, and illustrate that they can be seen as particular cases of Universal Kriging (UK). We demonstrate that different definitions of measurement error in UK lead to different UK variants that, for particular expected profiles or surfaces (drift models), yield weights and predictions identical with the interpolation methods considered above, but produce fundamentally different (yet equally plausible from a pure data standpoint) prediction error variances.

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linear interpolation
bilinear interpolation

spatial accuracy assessment
error propagation
geostatistics
trend surface models


Electrochemicalmechanical polishing application: Monitoring of electrochemical copper removal from currentvoltage characteristics in HNO3 electrolyte Recently, electrochemicalmechanical polishing (ECMP) has been suggested as an alternative to the conventional chemicalmechanical polishing (CMP) process. In ECMP process, copper (Cu) ions are electrochemically dissolved by applying an anodic potential to the Cu surface in an electrolyte. In this paper, the voltage-activated electrochemical reactions of Cu for ECMP application were investigated with different concentration of HNO3 electrolyte. The electrochemical characteristics of Cu such as active, passive, transient and trans-passive state were evaluated from its currentvoltage (IV) curve obtained by linear sweep voltammetry (LSV) and cyclic voltammetry (CV) method. The proposed mechanism and analyses were a good methodology in finding suitable electrochemical process parameter for ECMP application.

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Fast online error detection and correction with thread signature calculae To recognize transient control-flow and data faults, caused by Single-Event Upsets (SEUs) in a microprocessor pipeline, several mechanisms to check the execution in the retirement have been proposed and discussed over the years. In this paper, we suggest a compression-based and compression-free checksum-scheme, which is able to recognize transient faults before commitment and preserves binary compatibility. The scheme is applicable for time-redundant (virtual duplex and redundantly multithreaded systems) as well as structural redundant systems. It can localize a fault by partial re-execution within the pipeline. By additionally introducing a modified micro-rollback, single or multiple pipeline stages can be rolled back for a retry. In the best case, a fault can be localized, detected and corrected in four clock cycles within a fine-grained redundantly threaded microprocessor. We validate and analyze the scheme through an FPGA and standard-cell implementation and conclude that it is able to replace the well-known parity-computation for high-performance designs.

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online error detection and correction
thread
duplex
fpga


User interaction with machines on the move: Location aware computing The aim of current mobile computing systems is to hide the network as far as possible from applications. This paper introduces location aware computing which makes details of the networked computing environment explicitly available to applications. Objects which move, such as people as located and equipment, are electronically tagged. Depending upon where a person is located, and the capabilities of the machines around a person, applications will after their behaviour. This will automate tasks such as logging on and telephone re-routing. Applications will automatically modify themselves to make best use of a person's nearby environment. Audit trails may be created detailing the person's or object's movement allowing time and motion studies to be conducted and the analysis sf product movement efficiency within a factory. It is argued that a location aware computing system must address the three main issues of information gathering, data structure and querying and access control. Ideas within these areas are introduced and explained and the concepts of co-location and spheres of influence suggested as paradigms of person-machine interaction.

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Evaluation of bile reflux in HIDA images based on fluid mechanics We used optical flow to ascertain the direction and velocity of bile flow to help physicians diagnose bile reflux exact. We combined image processing technology and hydrodynamic models to quantify bile reflux. We reconstructed 3D images from SPECT and CT to help physicians diagnosis.

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hida image
hydrodynamic model
tc99m-disida