Novel Microcontrollers With Direct Access to Flash Memory Benefit Implementation of Multi-Optimal Space Vector Modulation This paper discusses a new architecture for the PWM generation in digital control hardware intended for control of three-phase power converters. The novelty of the proposed architecture is based on the use of emerging flash memory devices. An infinite number of state combinations and sequences is therefore available during a sampling interval. Three optimization criteria are herein simultaneously employed, dealing with optimal sharing of the zero sequence states, variation of the pulse frequency, and over-modulation through an optimal pattern. Performance is measured with the harmonic current factor and this is demonstrated to surpass the results of conventional implementation. The proposed architecture is versatile because it can be used at different sampling and fundamental frequencies, different operation modes, and without jeopardizing transient performance. While the current products allow implementation on external 64-MB flash memory, this architecture can be adopted in the future within the next-generation microcontrollers.

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


demand-based block-level address mapping in large-scale nand flash storage systems The increasing capacity of NAND flash memory leads to large RAM footprint on address mapping in the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) design. This paper proposes a novel Demand-based block-level Address mapping scheme with two-level Caching mechanism (DAC) for large-scale NAND flash storage systems. The objective is to reduce RAM footprint without sacrificing too much system response time. In our technique, the block-level address mapping table is stored in fixed pages (called translation pages) in the flash memory. Considering temporal locality that workloads exhibit, we maintain one cache in RAM to store the on-demand block-level address mapping information. Meanwhile, by exploring both spatial locality and access frequency of workloads with another two caches, the second-level cache is designed to cache selected translation pages into RAM. In such a way, address mapping information for both sequential accesses and most-frequently-accessed translation pages can be found in the cache, and therefore, the system response time can be improved. We conduct experiments on a mixture of real-world and synthetic traces. The experimental results show that our technique can significantly reduce the RAM footprint while the average response time is kept well under control. Moreover, our technique shows big improvement on wear-leveling compared with the previous work.

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


Particle swarm optimization of ensemble neural networks with fuzzy aggregation for time series prediction of the Mexican Stock Exchange This paper describes a hybrid method based on particle swarm optimization for designing ensemble neural networks with fuzzy aggregation of responses to forecast complex time series. The time series that was considered in this paper, to compare the hybrid approach with traditional methods, is the Mexican Stock Exchange, and the results shown are for the optimization of the structure of the ensemble neural network with type-1 and type-2 fuzzy logic integration. Simulation results show that the optimized ensemble neural network approach produces good prediction of the Mexican Stock Exchange.

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

ensemble neural network
particle swarm optimization
time series prediction


Large-scale analysis of the evolutionary histories of phosphorylation motifs in the human genome Protein phosphorylation is a post-translational modification that is essential for a wide range of eukaryotic physiological processes, such as transcription, cytoskeletal regulation, cell metabolism, and signal transduction. Although more than 200,000 phosphorylation sites have been reported in the human genome, the physiological roles of most remain unknown. In this study, we provide some useful datasets for the assessment of functional phosphorylation signaling using a comparative genome analysis of phosphorylation motifs.

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

phosphorylation motif
comparative evolutionary analysis
kinase


Proteomic Approaches within the NCI Early Detection Research Network for the Discovery and Identification of Cancer Biomarkers In the postgenome era, proteomics provides a powerful approach for the analysis of normal and transformed cell functions, for the identification of disease-specific targets, and for uncovering novel endpoints for the evaluation of chemoprevention agents and drug toxicity. Unfortunately, the genomic information that has greatly expounded the genetic basis of cancer does not allow an accurate prediction of what is actually occurring at the protein level within a given cell type at any given time. The gene expression program of a given cell is affected by numerous factors in the in vivo environment resulting from tissue complexity and organ system orchestration, with cells acting in concert with each other and responding to changes in their microenvironment. Repositories of genomic information can be considered master inventory lists of genes and their maps, which need to be supplemented with protein-derived information. The National Cancer Institute's Early Detection Research Network is employing proteomics, or protein walking, in the discovery and evaluation of biomarkers for cancer detection and for the identification of high-risk subjects. Armed with microdissection techniques, including the use of Laser Capture Microdissection (LCM) to procure pure populations of cells directly from human tissue, the Network is facilitating the development of technologies that can overcome the problem of tissue heterogeneity and address the need to identify markers in easily accessible biological fluids. Proteomic approaches complement plasma-based assays of circulating DNA for cancer detection and risk assessment. LCM, coupled with downstream proteomics applications, such as two-dimensional polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and SELDI (surface enhanced laser desorption ionization) separation followed by mass spectrometry (MS) analysis, may greatly facilitate the characterization and identification of protein expression changes that track normal and disease phenotypes. We highlight recent work from Network investigators to demonstrate the potential of proteomics to identify proteins present in cancer tissues and body fluids that are relevant for cancer screening.

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


A Read-Copy Update based parallel server for distributed crowd simulations The Read-Copy Update (RCU) synchronization method was designed to cope with multiprocessor scalability some years ago, and it was included in the Linux kernel October of 2002. Recently, libraries providing user-space access to this method have been released, although they still have not been used in complex applications.

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


Case-based instruction strategies in architecture This paper is about case-based instruction (CBI) and not about computer-implemented case-based reasoning systems, as some readers tend to assume. CBI is a very old method of teaching, particularly in the studio setting. Usually it takes the form of precedent analysis. An empirical study was conducted in order to better understand how experienced designers use cases in the course of a brief design session. Based on this experience a computer-based case tool, electronic design assistance tool (EDAT), was developed and used in studio instruction. Finally, our experience with case-based instruction in non-design courses is described.

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

case studies
computer-supported design
design precedents
design tools


Description logics with contraries, contradictories, and subcontraries Several constructive description logics,(12)) in which classical negation was replaced by strong negation as a component to treat negative atomic information have been proposed as intuitionistic variants of description logics. For conceptual representation, strong negation alone and in a combination with classical negation seems to be useful and necessary due to their respective predicate denial (e.g., not happy) and predicate term negation (e.g., uhappy) properties. In this paper, we propose an alternative description logic ALC(similar to)(n) with classical negation and strong negation. We adhere in particular to the notions of contraries, contradictories, and subcontraries (as discussed in (6))), generated from conceivable statement types using predicate denial and predicate term negation. To capture these notions, our formalization includes a semantics that suitably interprets various combinations of classical negation and strong negation. We show that our semantics preserves contradictoriness and contrariness for ALC(similar to)(n)-concepts, but the semantics of constructive description logic CALC(similar to)(2) with Heyting negation and strong negation cannot preserve the property for CALC(similar to)(2)-concepts.

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

constructive description logic
strong negation

negative information
terminological knowledge representation


Evaluation of a PECVD advanced barrier (k=3.7) for 32nm CMOS technology and below An advanced dielectric barrier proposed for sub-45nm CMOS technology nodes is firstly characterized on 300mm full sheet wafers. The barrier is a bi-layer deposited by PECVD. The copper diffusion barrier property is ensured by a depositing dense initiation layer with the efficiency of a standard SiCN barrier (k=5.0). The top layer, thicker, with lower density, enables the decrease of the barrier k-value to 3.66 and plays the role of etch stop layer. Combined with a PECVD porous a-SiOC:H dielectric (k-value=2.5), the advanced dielectric barrier is successfully integrated in a C65 dual damascene architecture reaching a 3% gain in RC. A high via chain resistance yield is evidence of good via opening. Finally, the advanced barrier shows the same electromigration performance than the standard SiCN barrier.

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

dielectric barrier
etch stop layer
dual damascene
electromigration


Procedures for static compaction of test sequences for synchronous sequential circuits We propose three static compaction techniques for test sequences of synchronous sequential circuits. We apply the proposed techniques to test sequences generated for benchmark circuits by various test generation procedures. The results show that the test sequences generated by all the test generation procedures considered can be significantly compacted. The compacted sequences thus have shorter test application times and smaller memory requirements. As a by-product, the fault coverage is sometimes increased as well. Additionally, the ability to significantly reduce the length of the test sequences indicates that it may be possible to reduce test generation time if superfluous input vectors are not generated.

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

static test compaction
test application time


Design of self-checking fully differential circuits and boards A design methodology for on-line testing analog Linear fully differential (FD) circuits is presented in this work. The test strategy is based on concurrently monitoring via an analog checker the common mode (CM) at the inputs of all amplifiers. The totally self-checking (TSC) goal is achieved for linear FD implementations provided that the checker CM threshold is small enough with respect to the specified margins of erroneous behavior in the circuit outputs. The design methodology is illustrated for a switched-capacitor biquadratic filter and the self-checking properties evaluated for a hard/soft-fault model, A large checker threshold of 100 mV of CM is chosen since the filter implementation does not minimize nonidealities (e.g., amplifier offsets or clock feedthrough) which result in significant CM components. The circuit outputs are accepted to deviate within a 10% band. With the implemented checker, the TSC goal is not achieved for some faults in narrow regions of the frequency band. For the worst case, a hard fault which results in a 31% deviation is undetected in only a narrow band of approximately 310 Hz. The circuit can be made TSC with a checker threshold of 40 mV and an accepted output deviation of 15%, This is, however, more demanding on the checker (which currently takes less than 3% of the total area and about 7.6% of the total power) and requires an improved filter implementation to reduce CM components. Our solution consists of relaxing a bit the TSC property of the functional block and applying a periodical off-line test to make the checker strongly code disjoint (SCD), This is easy to implement since an off-line test is also required for the checker. The checker outputs a double-rail error indication which ensures compatibility with digital checkers and makes the design of self-checking mixed signal circuits straightforward. The circuit-level mixed-signal approach is extended to the board level by means of the IEEE Std. 1149.1 digital test bus.

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

boundary scan
mixed-signal test
safety applications
self-checking systems


Transport layer abstraction in event channels for embedded systems As embedded systems increase in complexity and begin to participate in distributed systems, the need for middle-ware in building such systems becomes imperative. However, the use of middle-ware that fully implements such standards can impose a significant increase in footprint for an application, making it unsuitable for use in embedded systems. We consider the use of a standard CORBA event channel in a setting where distribution and inter-language support are unnecessary. We report our experience in applying aspects to abstract the transport layer (CORBA) of the event channel into a selectable feature. Thus, enabling or disabling CORBA for a specific application can be decided at build-time, by merely selecting CORBA as a feature. We-describe the patterns used to achieve this abstraction and present footprint and throughput results showing the effect of CORBA on automatically derived subsets of the event channel.

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

algorithms
design
experimentation
performance
aop
subsetting
event service
software composition
transport abstraction


Constructing a Personal Web Map with anytime-control of Web robots In this paper, we propose a PWM (Personal Web Map) which is a personal and small database of interesting Web pages to a user and develop a method to construct it under the user's control of multiple Web robots. While general search engines with very large databases are valid for information retrieval in the WWW, it is still important that a user constructs a small, personal database of relevant Web pages to his/her interest. For such a Web page database, we propose a PWM and develop a PWM system. First a user gives keywords indicating his/her interest to a system, and it constructs a PWM concerned with the keywords. For building a useful PWM, it is necessary that a user can interrupt the construction of a PWM anytime and instruct a sub-field which should be explored more. For this function, we develop an anytime-control algorithm for multiple Web robots. A density blackboard is used for controlling Web robots, and an uniform distributed PWM is built. Whenever a system is interrupted by a user, it provides a valid PWM in terms of keeping search space wide, and indicates many alternatives on which he/she wants more information. From Web pages in a database, document vectors are generated and used to construct a 2D-map of a PWM by using self-organization maps. A user easily recognizes interim results through the 2D-map, and gives instruction by clicking a node about which he/she wants more detail information. We made experiments by subjects and found out that our method outperformed breadth-first search for constructing a useful PWM. As results, a PWM system is considered as a promising approach to assist a user in gathering relevant information in the WWW.

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

information gathering
anytime-control
user preference
som


Coulomb, Landau and maximally Abelian gauge fixing in lattice QCD with multi-GPUs A lattice gauge theory framework for simulations on graphic processing units (GPUs) using NVIDIAs CUDA is presented. The code comprises template classes that take care of an optimal data pattern to ensure coalesced reading from device memory to achieve maximum performance. In this work we concentrate on applications for lattice gauge fixing in 3+1 dimensional SU(3) lattice gauge field theories. We employ the overrelaxation, stochastic relaxation and simulated annealing algorithms which are perfectly suited to be accelerated by highly parallel architectures like GPUs. The applications support the Coulomb, Landau and maximally Abelian gauges. Moreover, we explore the evolution of the numerical accuracy of the SU(3) valued degrees of freedom over the runtime of the algorithms in single- (SP) and double-precision (DP). Therefrom we draw conclusions on the reliability of SP and DP simulations and suggest a mixed-precision scheme that performs the critical parts of the algorithm in full DP while retaining 80%90% of the SP performance. Finally, multi-GPUs are adopted to overcome the memory constraint of single GPUs. A communicator class which hides the MPI data exchange at the boundaries of the lattice domains, via the low bandwidth PCI-Bus, effectively behind calculations in the inner part of the domain is presented. Linear scaling using 16 NVIDIA Tesla C2070 devices and a maximum performance of 3.5 Teraflops on lattices of size down to 643256 64 3 256 is demonstrated.

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

lattice qcd
maximally abelian
gauge fixing
overrelaxation
simulated annealing
cuda


Software quality assessment using a multi-strategy classifier Classifying program modules as fault-prone or not fault-prone is a valuable technique for guiding the software development process, so that resources can be allocated to components most likely to have faults. The rule-based classification and the case-based learning techniques are commonly used in software quality classification problems. However, studies show that these two techniques share some complementary strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, in this paper we propose a new multi-strategy classification model, RB2CBL, which integrates a rule-based (RB) model with two case-based learning (CBL) models. RB2CBL possesses the merits of both the RB model and CBL model and restrains their drawbacks. In the RB2CBL model, the parameter optimization of the CBL models is critical and an embedded genetic algorithm optimizer is used. Two case studies were carried out to validate the proposed method. The results show that, by suitably choosing the accuracy of the RB model, the RB2CBL model outperforms the RB model alone without overfitting.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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
software quality classification

rule-based model
case-based learning
multi-strategy classifier


Enabling policy-based access control in BI applications Protecting the sensitive information in a companys data warehouse from unauthorized access is an important component of regulatory compliance and privacy protection for Business Intelligence (BI) applications. The access control features in current database systems are not suitable to meet this requirement since they are limited to base table accesses whereas BI applications typically use materialized views for better performance. In this paper, we provide a middleware-enabled policy-based framework that allows access control to be uniformly applied to both base tables and materialized views to enable selective access to data warehouse. We also provide empirical evaluation of our approach.

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


experiments in using tangible interfaces to enhance collaborative learning experiences TICLE (Tangible Interfaces for Collaborative Learning Environments) is a project that explores new ways that a computer can enhance learning without dominating the educational experience. We have developed a prototype system that "watches" as students play with Tangram pieces on a physical tabletop, and acts as a "guide on the side" by offering help at appropriate times. This system is currently installed at the Goudreau Museum of Mathematics in Art and Science. Our paper describes the implementation of our prototype and results of a usability study conducted at the museum. We also discuss ongoing enhancements and plans for further testing. Although this work focuses on learning with mathematical puzzles, it has implications for other physical learning activities.

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

k-12 math education
multimedia user interface
tangible interface
multimodal interaction


Spatial outlier detection in heterogeneous neighborhoods Spatial outlier detection approaches identify outliers by first defining a spatial neighborhood. However, existing approaches suffer from two issues: (1) they primarily consider autocorrelation alone in forming the neighborhood, but ignore heterogeneity among spatial objects. (2) they do not consider interrelationships among the attributes for identifying how distinct the object is with respect to its neighbors, but consider them independently (either single or multiple). As a result, one may not identify truly unusual spatial objects and may also end up with frivolous outliers. In this paper, we revisit the computation of the spatial neighborhood and propose an approach to address the above two issues. We begin our approach with identifying a spatially related neighborhood, capturing autocorrelation. We then consider interrelationships between attributes and multiple, multilevel distributions within these attributes, thus considering autocorrelation and heterogeneity in various forms. Subsequently, we identify outliers in these neighborhoods. Our experimental results in various datasets (North Carolina SIDS data, New Mexico Leukemia data, etc.) indicate that our approach indeed correctly identifies outliers in heterogeneous neighborhoods.

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

spatial outliers heterogeneity neighborhoods


Immunization with Tick Salivary Gland Extracts Tick burdens cause direct damage to hosts and transmit several disease agents, the majority of which are secreted into feeding lesions through tick salivary glands. Reduced incidence of naturally transmitted tick-borne diseases was recently observed among cattle immunized with tick salivary gland extracts (TSGE). The aim of this work was to compare the ultrastructure of salivary glands from Rhipicephalus (Boophilus) microplus removed from cattle that were immunized with TSGE to those from control cattle injected with saline. Partially fed female ticks that infested these cattle were collected, and their salivary glands were removed and compared with light microscopy. More extensive salivary gland damage was observed in ticks collected from cattle immunized with TSGE than those from saline controls. Salivary glands from immunized cattle had extensive necrosis in agranular c and f cells; partial necrosis in granular b, c, and e cells; and slight necrosis in a and d cells. These results indicated that host immunization with TSGE causes detrimental effects to female tick salivary glands and correlated with the reduced incidence of naturally transmitted tick-borne diseases observed among these cattle.

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

boophilus microplus
salivary glands
ultrastructure


Motion Tuned Spatio-Temporal Quality Assessment of Natural Videos There has recently been a great deal of interest in the development of algorithms that objectively measure the integrity of video signals. Since video signals are being delivered to human end users in an increasingly wide array of applications and products, it is important that automatic methods of video quality assessment (VQA) be available that can assist in controlling the quality of video being delivered to this critical audience. Naturally, the quality of motion representation in videos plays an important role in the perception of video quality, yet existing VQA algorithms make little direct use of motion information, thus limiting their effectiveness. We seek to ameliorate this by developing a general, spatio-spectrally localized multiscale framework for evaluating dynamic video fidelity that integrates both spatial and temporal (and spatio-temporal) aspects of distortion assessment. Video quality is evaluated not only in space and time, but also in space-time, by evaluating motion quality along computed motion trajectories. Using this framework, we develop a full reference VQA algorithm for which we coin the term the MOtion-based Video Integrity Evaluation index, or MOVIE index. It is found that the MOVIE index delivers VQA scores that correlate quite closely with human subjective judgment, using the Video Quality Expert Group (VQEG) FRTV Phase 1 database as a test bed. Indeed, the MOVIE index is found to be quite competitive with, and even outperform, algorithms developed and submitted to the VQEG FRTV Phase 1 study, as well as more recent VQA algorithms tested on this database.

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

motion perception
perceptual quality
temporal distortion
visual perception


Scientific publishing in Benin as seen from Scopus 2,215 publications covering the period going from 1959 to 2011, with at least one author affiliated to Benin, were searched from Scopus and analyzed. These publications were co-authored by 10,225 scientists that correspond to 5,122 single authors in several disciplines of which the most prolific are Agricultural and biological science, and Medicine. None of the Benin-based journals were indexed in Scopus; approximately 5% of the publications appeared in African reviews covered by Scopus. Researchers home institutions are mainly the University of Abomey-Calavi, its laboratories and some international organizations or cooperation agencies. The private universities were not mentioned in the affiliations list. The yearly percentage of international collaboration is over 80%; France, the former colonial power is the main research partner whereas the West African region is the main partner at the African continent level; others partners are from Europe and America continents. This study suggests the setting up of a national database to index the domestic scientific literature; it should contribute to the improvement of the national research output.

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

scientific research
research assessment
research policy
informetrics
62-07
c8


Topological analysis of trabecular bone MR images Recently, imaging techniques have become available which permit nondestructive analysis of the three-dimensional (3-D) architecture of trabecular bone (TB), which forms a network of interconnected plates and rods, Most osteoporotic fractures occur at locations rich in TB, which has spurred the search for architectural parameters as determinants of bone strength. In this paper, we present a new approach to quantitative characterization of the 3-D microarchitecture of TB, based on digital topology. The method classifies each voxel of the 3-D structure based on the connectivity information of neighboring voxels, Following conversion of the 3-D digital image to a skeletonized surface representation containing only one-dimensional (1-D) and two-dimensional (2-D) structures, each voxel is classified as a curve, surface, or junction, The method has been validated by means of synthesized images and has subsequently been applied to TB images from the human wrist, The topological parameters were found to predict Young's modulus (YM) for uniaxial loading, specifically, the surface-to-curve ratio was found to be the single strongest predictor of YM (r(2) = 0.69). Finally, the method has been applied to TB images from a group of patients showing very large variations in topological parameters that parallel much smaller changes in bone volume fraction (BVF).

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


Study on parameterisation of plant tissue microstructure by confocal microscopy for finite elements modelling This paper reviews three different methods for parameterisation of plant tissues which can be applied to images obtained with a confocal scanning laser microscope to create models for the simulation of the mechanical behaviour of biological cellular structures. Vectorisation, Voronoi tessellation and ellipse tessellation were tested. Potato tuber and carrot parenchyma were chosen as examples. For each method tested, five geometrical parameters were analysed: area, perimeter, orientation, elongation and a local indicator of spatial association of all individual regions which represented cells. The reconstruction accuracy of the original tissue microstructure by each parameterisation method was investigated by the comparison of the geometrical properties of the cells from the segmentation with their virtual equivalents. Linear regression models between the reference and modelled parameters were built. The model performance was expressed in terms of the coefficient of determination (R2), the slope of the regression line and the root mean square errors for prediction (RMSEP). Based on the results, Voronoi tessellation was considered to be inaccurate for tissue modelling. The vectorisation procedure only allowed for reproduction of the general shapes of cells, and the curvature of cell walls was neglected in this method. For both the Voronoi tessellation as well as vectorisation, created cells completely filled the space with no additional gaps and possessed sharp, angular shapes. The best overall reconstruction accuracy was obtained with ellipse tessellation. Models created with this method can be considered as representative equivalents of real tissues in terms of cell area, orientation, perimeter, shape and spatial arrangement.

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

tissue geometry modelling
cslm microscopy
image analysis


exploiting geographical influence for collaborative point-of-interest recommendation In this paper, we aim to provide a point-of-interests (POI) recommendation service for the rapid growing location-based social networks (LBSNs), e.g., Foursquare, Whrrl, etc. Our idea is to explore user preference, social influence and geographical influence for POI recommendations. In addition to deriving user preference based on user-based collaborative filtering and exploring social influence from friends, we put a special emphasis on geographical influence due to the spatial clustering phenomenon exhibited in user check-in activities of LBSNs. We argue that the geographical influence among POIs plays an important role in user check-in behaviors and model it by power law distribution. Accordingly, we develop a collaborative recommendation algorithm based on geographical influence based on naive Bayesian. Furthermore, we propose a unified POI recommendation framework, which fuses user preference to a POI with social influence and geographical influence. Finally, we conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation over two large-scale datasets collected from Foursquare and Whrrl. Experimental results with these real datasets show that the unified collaborative recommendation approach significantly outperforms a wide spectrum of alternative recommendation approaches.

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

geographical influence
collaborative recommendation


Using a hybrid method to evaluate service innovation in the hotel industry The process of evaluating perceptions (qualitative scale) and data from operations (quantitative scale) should be merged for service innovation analysis. Hybrid MCDM methods (TFNs, TODIM and Choquet integral) deal with dependence relations and the shortcomings.

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 B O B I O O O O O O O

choquet integral
service innovation
todim

triangular fuzzy numbers
quantitative scales
qualitative scales


Surface roughness monitoring application based on artificial neural networks for ball-end milling operations Surface roughness plays an important role in the performance of a finished part. The roughness is usually measured off-line when the part is already machined, although in recent years the trend seems to have been to focus on online monitoring. Measuring and controlling the machining process is now possible thanks to improvements and advances in the fields of computers and sensors. The aim of this work was to develop a reliable surface roughness monitoring application based on an artificial neural network approach for vertical high speed milling operations. Experimentation was carried out to obtain data that was used to train the artificial neural network. Geometrical cutting factors, dynamic factors, part geometries, lubricants, materials and machine tools were all considered. Vibration was captured on line with two piezoelectric accelerometers placed following the X and Y axes of the machine tool.

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

ball end mill
cutting parameters
process monitoring
neural network modeling


Image encryption by multiple random grids In this paper, we first give a formal definition to the visual cryptograms of n (?2) random grids (VCRG-n) for encrypting an image. Specifically, a set of VCRG-n with respect to image P consists of n random grids printed on transparencies such that only when the n transparencies are superimposed altogether can P be recognized by human vision (without any computing device), while any group of less than n transparencies obtains no information about P. Then, we design novel VCRG-n encryption schemes for binary, gray-level and color images, validate the correctness by formal proofs and demonstrate the feasibility by computer simulations. Our schemes do not require any extra pixel expansion neither any encoding basis matrix, which are necessary and inevitable in the approaches of conventional visual cryptography. These attractive advantages make our schemes more informative in theoretical interests and much applicable in practical applications.

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

random grid
visual cryptogram
visual secret sharing


interactive decryption of dect phone calls DECT is a widely deployed standard mostly used for short range wireless phones. So far, no method has been published which is able to recover the audio signal in a call that is encrypted and lasts only for a few minutes. In this paper, we present a method that recovers the audio signal sent from the phone to its base station in an encrypted call. To do so, we use a replay-attack against the phone to recover the key streams, which were used to encrypt the call. The method is applicable to short calls too, where not enough keystreams are available to recover the ciphers key using a key recovery attack on DSC. The method is fast and practical and can be executed at very low cost.

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


Theta(N-5/6) time complexity of fault diagnosis algorithms in N x N dilated blocking photonic switching networks Dilated Optical Multistage Interconnection Networks (DOMINs) based on 2 x 2 directional coupler photonic switches play an important role in all-optical high-performance networks, especially for the emerging IP over DWDM architectures. The problem of crosstalk within photonic switches is underestimated due to the aging of the switching element, control voltage, temperature and polarization, and thus causes undesirable coupling of the signal from one path to the other. Previous works [18] designed an efficient diagnosing disjoint faults algorithm in small sized networks, which reduced the number of tests required by overlapping the tests with computations to one half in photonic switching networks. Furthermore, this paper generically derives algorithms and mathematical modules to find the optimal degree of parallelism of faults diagnosis for N x N dilated blocking networks, as the size of network is larger. Taking advantage of the properties of disjoint faults, diagnosis can be accelerated significantly because the optimal degree of parallel fault diagnosis may grow exponentially. To reduce the diagnosis time, an algorithm is proposed herein to find the maximum number of disjoint faults. Rather than requiring up to 4MN tests as a native approach, a two-phase diagnosis algorithm is proposed to reduce the testing requirement to 4N tests. This study extends the concept of disjoint faults to reduce the number of tests to the time efficiency of Phi(N-5/6) for N x N DOMINs.

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

dilated photonic switching network
crosstalk fault
fault diagnosis algorithm
disjoint-faults


A numerical approximation of the thermal coupling of fluids and solids In this article we analyze the problem of the thermal coupling of fluids and solids through a common interface. We state the global thermal problem in the whole domain, including the fluid part and the solid part. This global thermal problem presents discontinuous physical properties that depend on the Solution of auxiliary problems on each part of the domain (a fluid flow problem and a solid state problem). We present a domain decomposition strategy to iteratively solve problems posed in both subdomains and discuss some implementation aspects of the algorithm. This domain decomposition framework is also used to revisit the use of wall function approaches used in this context. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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 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

thermal boundary layers
stabilized finite elements


Coarse-grid treatment in parallel AMG for coupled systems in CFD applications We present an agglomeration approach for the solution of the coarse-grid problems in algebraic multigrid for coupled systems. Our implementation relies on an appropriate reordering of the variables of the merged systems. A benchmark from fluid dynamics, representing the important class of mixed elliptichyperbolic problems, is used to demonstrate that the performance of the suggested agglomeration scheme comes much closer to the desired behaviour of the ideal multigrid than that of alternatives described in the literature.

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

algebraic multigrid
coupled systems
fluid dynamics


CENTROID TRIANGULATIONS FROM k-SETS Given a set V of n point a in tin plane, no three of them being collinear, a convex inclusion chain of V is an ordering of the points of V such that no point belongs to the convex hull of the points preceding it in the ordering. We call k-set of the convex inclusion chain, every k-set of an initial subsequence of at least k points of the ordering. We show that the number of such k-sets (without in is an invariant of V, that is, it does not depend on the choice of the convex inclusion chain. Moreover, this number is equal to the number of regions of the order-k Voronoi diagram of V (when no four points are cocircular). The dual of the order-k Voronoi diagram belongs to the set of So-Called centroid triangulations that have been originally introduced to generate bivariate simplex spline spaces. We show that the centroids of the k-sets of a convex inclusion chain are the vertices of such a centroid triangulation. This leads to the currently most efficient algorithm to construct particular centroid triangulations of any given point set; it runs in O(n log n + k(n - k) log k) worst are tine.

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

k-set enumeration
convex inclusion chains
order-k voronoi diagrams
centroid traiangulations


collection of bcnet bgp traffic This poster paper describes testbed for collection of BCNET Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) traffic. The BGP traffic was collected using special purpose hardware and software. Preliminary data collection was illustrated using the Wireshark and Walrus graph visualization tools.

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

communication system traffic control
communication networks
communications technology
communication system traffic
protocols
routing protocols


The multi-multiway cut problem In this paper, we define and study a natural generalization of the multicut and multiway cut problems: the minimum multiintiltiwaY cut problem. The input to the problem is a weighted undirected graph G = (V, E) and k sets S(1), S(2),..., S(k) of vertices. The goal is to find a subset of edges of minimum total weight whose removal completely disconnects each one of the sets S(1), S(2)... S(k),. i.e., disconnects every pair of vertices u and v such that u, v E Si, for some i. This problem generalizes both the multicut problem, when vertical bar S(i)vertical bar = 2, for 1 <= i <= k, and the multiway cut problem, when k = 1. We present an approximation algorithm for the multi-multiway cut problem with an approximation ratio which matches that obtained by Garg, Vazirani, and Yarmakakis on the standard multicut problem. Namely, our algorithm has an 0 (log k) approximation ratio. Moreover, we consider instances of the minimum multi-multiway cut problem which are known to have an optimal solution of light weight. We show that our algorithm has an approximation ratio substantially better than 0 (log k) when restricted to such "light" instances. Specifically, we obtain an O (log LP)-approximation algorithm for the problem when all edge weights are at least 1 (here LP denotes the.value of a natural linear programming relaxation of the problem). The latter improves the 0 (log LP log log LP) approximation ratio for the minimum multicut problem (implied by the work of Seymour and Even et al.). (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

approximation algorithms
minimum multiway cut


implementing remote procedure calls Remote procedure calls ( RPC ) are a useful paradigm for providing communication across a network between programs written in a high level language. This paper describes a package, written as part of the Cedar project, providing a remote procedure call facility. The paper describes the options that face a designer of such a package, and the decisions we made. We describe the overall structure of our RPC mechanism, our facilities for binding RPC clients, the transport level communication protocol, and some performance measurements. We include descriptions of some optimisations we used to achieve high performance and to minimize the load on server machines that have many clients. Our primary aim in building an RPC package was to make the building of distributed systems easier. Previous protocols were sufficiently hard to use that only members of a select group of communication experts were willing to undertake the construction of distributed systems. We hoped to overcome this by providing a communication paradigm as close as possible to the familiar facilities of our high level languages. To achieve this aim, we concentrated on making remote calls efficient, and on making the semantics of remote calls as close as possible to those of local calls.

transport layer protocols
inter-process communication
remote procedural calls
performance of communication protocols
distributed naming and binding


A clustering-based approach for inferring recurrent neural networks as gene regulatory networks Constructing genetic regulatory networks is one of the most important issues in system biology research. Yet, building regulatory models manually is a tedious task, especially when the number of genes involved increases with the complexity of regulation. To automate the procedure of network construction, in this work we establish a clustering-based approach to infer recurrent neural networks as regulatory systems. Our approach also deals with the scalability problem by developing a clustering method with several data analysis techniques. To verify the presented approach, experiments have been conducted and the results show that it can be used to infer gene regulatory networks successfully.

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

gene regulatory network
recurrent neural network
reverse engineering
system modeling


Threshold Anonymous Password-Authenticated Key Exchange Secure against Insider Attacks An anonymous password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocol is designed to provide both password-only authentication and client anonymity against a semi-honest server, who honestly follows the protocol. In INDOCRYPT2008, Yang and Zhang [26] proposed a new anonymous PAKE (NAPAKE) protocol and its threshold (D-NAPAKE) which they claimed to be secure against insider attacks. In this paper, we first show that the D-NAPAKE protocol [26] is completely insecure against insider attacks unlike their claim. Specifically, only one legitimate client can freely impersonate any subgroup of clients (the threshold t > 1) to the server. After giving a security model that captures insider attacks, we propose a threshold anonymous PAKE (called, TAP(+)) protocol which provides security against insider attacks. Moreover, we prove that the TAP(+) protocol has semantic security of session keys against active attacks as well as insider attacks under the computational Diffie-Hellman problem, and provides client anonymity against a semi-honest server, who honestly follows the protocol. Finally, several discussions are followed: I) We also show another threshold anonymous PAKE protocol by applying our RATIONALE to the non-threshold anonymous PAKE (VEAP) protocol [23]; and 2) We give the efficiency comparison, security consideration and implementation issue of the TAP(+) protocol.

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

password-authenticated key exchange
passwords
on-line/off-line dictionary attacks
provable security


The discrete strategy improvement algorithm for parity games and complexity measures for directed graphs The problem whether winning regions and wining strategies for parity games can be computed in polynomial time is a major open problem in the field of infinite games, which is relevant for many applications in logic and formal verification. For some time the discrete strategy improvement algorithm due to Jurdzi?ski and Vge had been considered to be a candidate for solving parity games in polynomial time. However, it has recently been proved by Oliver Friedmann that this algorithm requires super-polynomially many iteration steps, for all popular local improvements rules, including switch-all (also with Fearnley's snare memorisation), switch-best, random-facet, random-edge, switch-half, least-recently-considered, and Zadeh's Pivoting rule. We analyse the examples provided by Friedmann in terms of complexity measures for directed graphs such as treewidth, DAG-width, Kelly-width, entanglement, directed pathwidth, and cliquewidth. It is known that for every class of parity games on which one of these parameters is bounded, the winning regions can be efficiently computed. It turns out that with respect to almost all of these measures, the complexity of Friedmann's counterexamples is bounded, and indeed in most cases by very small numbers. This analysis strengthens in some sense Friedmann's results and shows that the discrete strategy improvement algorithm is even more limited than one might have thought. Not only does it require super-polynomial running time in the general case, where the problem of polynomial-time solvability is open, it even has super-polynomial time lower bounds on natural classes of parity games on which efficient algorithms are known.

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


Finite difference procedures for solving a problem arising in modeling and design of certain optoelectronic devices Several finite difference schemes are discussed for solving the two-dimensional Schrodinger equation with Dirichlet's boundary conditions. We use three fully implicit finite difference schemes, two fully explicit finite difference techniques, an alternating direction implicit procedure and the Barakat and Clark type explicit formula. Theoretical and numerical comparisons between four families of methods are described. The main advantage of the alternating direction implicit finite difference technique is that the bandwidth of the sets of equations is a fixed small number that depends only on the nature of the computational molecule. This allows the use of very efficient and very fast techniques for solving the resulting tridiagonal systems of linear algebraic equations. The unique advantage of the Barakat and Clark technique is that it is unconditionally stable and is explicit in nature. Numerical results are presented followed by concluding remarks. (c) 2005 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All fights reserved.

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

two-dimensional schrodinger equation
electro-magnetic waves
finite difference methods
difichlet's boundary conditions


mr-NIL 6000LT Epoxy-based curing resist for combined thermal and UV nanoimprint lithography below 50C The aim of the work presented here was to develop curing polymers for nanoimprint lithography (NIL) enabling short cycle time, low imprint temperature, and an isothermal imprint process. The result is mr-NIL 6000LT: A photochemically curing polymer system for isothermal imprinting by combined thermal and UV nanoimprint lithography. It allows a lower imprint temperature than materials presented previously [C. Schuster, M. Kubenz, F. Reuther, M. Fink, G. Grtzner, mr-NIL 6000 New epoxy-based curing resist for efficient processing in combined thermal and UV nanoimprint lithography, in: Proceedings of SPIE 6517 2007, 65172B.; D.W. Johnson, H. Miller, M. Kubenz, F. Reuther, G. Grtzner, Nanoimprinting with SU-8 Epoxy Resists, in: Proceedings of SPIE 6517 2007, 65172A.]. The material system chosen is based on a blend of epoxy resins and a photo acid generator. Such epoxy resists cure during the imprint step in combined thermal and UV nanoimprint lithography. Initiated by UV exposure the cationic polymerisation occurs at elevated temperature forming a polymer pattern with significantly increased thermal stability compared to the uncured system. Apart from the material development leading to mr-NIL 6000LT the correlations between the parameters imprint temperature, exposure time and post exposure hold time are investigated in this work. With the applied resin combination a Tg of ?15C is obtained. This enables the formation of solid films at room temperature after spin-coating and prebake and nevertheless imprint temperatures in the range of 4550C, which is a distinct decrease compared to the 100110C needed for the previously introduced mr-NIL 6000 [C. Schuster, M. Kubenz, F. Reuther, M. Fink, G. Grtzner, mr-NIL 6000 New epoxy-based curing resist for efficient processing in combined thermal and UV nanoimprint lithography, in: Proceedings of SPIE 6517 2007, 65172B.] or the 6570C necessary for defect-free imprinting of the epoxy-based polymer described in [D.W. Johnson, H. Miller, M. Kubenz, F. Reuther, G. Grtzner, Nanoimprinting with SU-8 Epoxy Resists, in: Proceedings of SPIE 6517 2007, 65172A.]. mr-NIL 6000LT exhibits good dimensional stability at 120C after curing during the imprint process. This is sufficient for an isothermal imprint process as well as subsequent processes, e.g. metallization or etching.

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

nanoimprint lithography
curing polymer
low imprint temperature


FE calculation of contour integrals in plane anisotropic elastic media with crack surface tractions The application of the Jk, M, and L integrals is extended for fracture analysis with consideration of crack surface tractions. The study is considered to be feasible for problems with generally linearly anisotropic elastic materials. With the presence of crack surface tractions in anisotropic fields, the concept of path independence of these contour integrals needs to be modified by additionally including extra domain and line integrals, where the near-tip region is inevitably included in their evaluations. A numerical procedure, based on the finite element solutions, is therefore presented for calculation of these integrals, with special attention addressed to modeling of the portion of integration around the near-tip area, where singular mechanical behavior dominates. No particular singular elements are used in the study.

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

jk
m
l integrals
crack surface tractions

anisotropic solids
modified path-independence
singular behavior


Index information algorithm with local tuning for solving multidimensional global optimization problems with multiextremal constraints Multidimensional optimization problems where the objective function and the constraints are multiextremal non-differentiable Lipschitz functions (with unknown Lipschitz constants) and the feasible region is a finite collection of robust nonconvex subregions are considered. Both the objective function and the constraints may be partially defined. To solve such problems an algorithm is proposed, that uses Peano space-filling curves and the index scheme to reduce the original problem to a Holder one-dimensional one. Local tuning on the behaviour of the objective function and constraints is used during the work of the global optimization procedure in order to accelerate the search. The method neither uses penalty coefficients nor additional variables. Convergence conditions are established. Numerical experiments confirm the good performance of the technique.

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

global optimization
multiextremal constraints
local tuning


On a new defect of shock-capturing methods This paper proposes an explanation and a cure (or avoidance) to the new defect found of Eulerian shock-capturing methods in "A note on the conservative schemes for the Euler equations" by Tang and Liu [H. Tang, Tiegang Liu, A note on the conservative schemes for the Euler equations, J. Comput. Phys. 218 (2006) 451-459]. The latter gives a numerical investigation using several popular high resolution conservative schemes applied to Riemann problems of inviscid, compressible, perfect gas flows in Eulerian and Lagrangian coordinates with an initial high density ratio as well as a high pressure ratio. The results show that these methods work very inefficiently when applied to such problems and may give inaccurate numerical results, especially in shock location (or speed), even with a very fine grid. We have found that in problems of this type a strong rarefaction wave (SRW) is present adjacent to a contact line. Godunov averaging over the wave then produces large errors which, when the wave is strong, also persist for a long time. The cumulative error is thus very large which violates the strength of the contact line adjacent to it which, in turn, affects the speed and hence the location of the shock on the other side of the contact. We confirm this numerically using a method based on the unified coordinates with the shock-adaptive Godunov scheme plus contact strength preserving. The method, when applied to the Examples 2.1 and 2.2 of Tang and Liu [H. Tang, Tiegang Liu, A note on the conservative schemes for the Euler equations, J. Comput. Phys. 218 (2006) 451-459], produces high quality results even for comparatively coarse grids. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

unified coordinates
lagrangian coordinates
contact strength

shock-capturing methods
strong rarefaction waves


Diffusion under crossed local and global biases in disordered systems Diffusion on 2D site percolation clusters at p = 0.7, 0.8, and 0.0 above pc on the square lattice in the presence of two crossed bias fields, a local bias B and a global bias E, has been investigated. The global bias E is applied in a fixed global direction whereas the local bias B imposes a rotational constraint on the motion of the diffusing particle. The rms displacement R-t similar to t(k) in the presence of both biases is studied. Depending on the strength of E and B, the behavior of the random walker changes from diffusion to drift to no-drift or trapping. There is always diffusion for finite B with no global bias. A crossover from drift to no-drift at a critical global bias E-c is observed in the presence of local bias B for all disordered lattices. At the crossover, value of the rms exponent changes from k = 1 to k has a maximum rate of change with respect to the global bias E. The value of critical bias E-c depends on the disorder p as well as on the strength of local bias B. Phase diagrams for diffusion, drift, and no-drift are obtained as a function of bias fields E and B for these systems.

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

diffusion
percolation
crossed bias fields


Nonlinearities in stereoscopic phase-differencing Exploiting the quasi-linear relationship between local phase and disparity, phase-differencing registration algorithms provide a fast, powerful means for disparity estimation. Unfortunately, these phase-differencing techniques suffer a significant impediment: phase nonlinearities. In regions of phase nonlinearity, the signals under consideration possess properties that invalidate the use of phase for disparity estimation. This paper uses the amenable properties of Gaussian white noise images to analytically quantify these properties. The improved understanding gained from this analysis enables us to better understand current methodologies for detecting regions of phase instability. Most importantly, we introduce a new, more effective means for identifying these regions based on the second derivative of phase.

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

gabor functions
gaussian random processes
instantaneous frequency
local correlation
stereopsis


Cyclic correntropy and its spectrum in frequency estimation in the presence of impulsive noise Cyclic correntropy is proposed as a novel correlation function. The relation between CCE and the carrier frequency is studied. New frequency estimation method based on CCE performs better.

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

cyclostationarity
cyclic correlation
kernel method
non-gaussian
?-stable


Robust reconstruction of 2D curves from scattered noisy point data ? We propose a robust 2D reconstruction method from unorganized noisy point data. The outliers and noise of data can be effectively detected and smoothed. Sharp corners are preserved properly in the output curves with our method.

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

2d curve reconstruction
feature-preserving
normal-based smoothing


Iterative decreasing dimension algorithm In this study, we have given an iterative decreasing dimension method (IDDM) which decreases by one dimension at every step for solution of a system of linear algebraic equations without any pre-processing and an iterative decreasing dimension algorithm (IDDA) which is based on this method. We have also given numerical examples using this algorithm.

B I I I 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 B I I 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


Adaptive shadow estimator for removing shadow of moving object We propose an adaptive shadow estimator to detect and eliminate the shadow of a moving object while adapting to variation of illumination and the environment in an automatic manner. The proposed method discriminates between the shadow and the moving object by cascading three estimators which use the properties of chromaticity, brightness, and local intensity ratio. In the spatial adjustment step, the method compensates for accumulated errors in the cascading process. Experimental results show that our scheme can operate in real-time, outperforms existing methods, and rapidly adapts to variations in the environment.

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

estimate shadow
remove shadow
real-time surveillance system


using code analysis tools for architectural conformance checking Architectural conformance checking verifies whether a system conforms to its intended architecture, which is essential to safeguard the quality attributes of the system. Due to the size of many systems, performing conformance checking by means of manual code inspections is often practically infeasible. Code analysis tools can be used to automatically check architectural conformance. In this paper, we investigate several code analysis tools that offer support for Java and compare them on their usefulness for architectural conformance checking: Architecture Rules, Macker, Lattix DSM, SonarJ, Structure101 and XDepend.

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

code analysis tool
software architecture
architectural constraints


Deterministic Error Analysis of Support Vector Regression and Related Regularized Kernel Methods We introduce a new technique for the analysis of kernel-based regression problems. The basic tools are sampling inequalities which apply to all machine learning problems involving penalty terms induced by kernels related to Sobolev spaces. They lead to explicit deterministic results concerning the worst case behaviour of epsilon- and nu-SVRs. Using these, we show how to adjust regularization parameters to get best possible approximation orders for regression. The results are illustrated by some numerical examples.

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

sampling inequality
radial basis functions
approximation theory
reproducing kernel hilbert space
sobolev space


effective and efficient user interaction for long queries Handling long queries can involve either pruning the query to retain only the important terms (reduction), or expanding the query to include related concepts (expansion). While automatic techniques to do so exist, roughly 25\% performance improvements in terms of MAP have been realized in past work through interactive variants. We show that selectively reducing or expanding a query leads to an average improvement of 51\% in MAP over the baseline for standard TREC test collections. We demonstrate how user interaction can be used to achieve this improvement. Most interaction techniques present users with a fixed number of options for all queries. We achieve improvements by interacting less with the user, i.e., we present techniques to identify the optimal number of options to present to users, resulting in an interface with an average of 70\% fewer options to consider. Previous algorithms supporting interactive reduction and expansion are exponential in nature. To extend their utility to operational environments, we present techniques to make the complexity of the algorithms polynomial. We finally present an analysis of long queries that continue to exhibit poor performance in spite of our new techniques.

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

query reduction
interactive retrieval efficiency
query analysis
query expansion


Interactive PDF files with embedded 3D designs as support material to study the 32 crystallographic point groups PDF is a self-contained format that supports 3D designs and multi-layer structure. We use embedded 3D designs in PDF files to illustrate point groups. We use crystallographic notation to set a structure of interactive buttons in PDF files.

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

polyhedra modeling crystallography education


application of the operational profile in software performance analysis Most of the existing operational profile studies have been proposed for software reliability. Operational profile describes how the program to be used. Our experience with software performance analysis shows that the operational profile may play a role in the performance analysis of a program. In this paper we investigate the application of the operational profile in software performance analysis. We introduce a new type of performance deficiency referred to as redundant computation and show how the operational profile can guide in detecting such deficiency. Our initial experiment shows the application of operational profile in enhancing program's performance.

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

redundant computation
operational profile
software performance analysis


Weak sense of direction labelings and graph embeddings An edge-labeling ? ? for a directed graph G G has a weak sense of direction (WSD) if there is a function f f that satisfies the condition that for any node u u and for any two label sequences ? ? and ?? ? ? generated by non-trivial walks on G G starting at u u , f(?)=f(??) f ( ? ) = f ( ? ? ) if and only if the two walks end at the same node. The function f f is referred to as a coding function of ? ? . The weak sense of direction number of G G , WSD(G) ( G ) , is the smallest integer k k so that G G has a WSD-labeling that uses k k labels. It is known that WSD(G) ( G ) ??+(G) ? ? + ( G ) , where ?+(G) ? + ( G ) is the maximum outdegree of G G . Let us say that a function ?:V(G)?V(H) ? : V ( G ) ? V ( H ) is an embedding from G G onto H H if ? ? demonstrates that G G is isomorphic to a subgraph of H H . We show that there are deep connections between WSD-labelings and graph embeddings. First, we prove that when fH f H is the coding function that naturally accompanies a Cayley graph H H and G G has a node that can reach every other node in the graph, then G G has a WSD-labeling that has fH f H as a coding function if and only if G G can be embedded onto H H . Additionally, we show that the problem Given G G , does G G have a WSD-labeling that uses a particular coding function f f ? is NP-complete even when G G and f f are fairly simple. Second, when D D is a distributive lattice, H(D) H ( D ) is its Hasse diagram and G(D) G ( D ) is its cover graph, then WSD(H(D))=?+(H(D))=d? ( H ( D ) ) = ? + ( H ( D ) ) = d ? , where d? d ? is the smallest integer d d so that H(D) H ( D ) can be embedded onto the d d -dimensional mesh. Along the way, we also prove that the isometric dimension of G(D) G ( D ) is its diameter, and the lattice dimension of G(D) G ( D ) is ?+(H(D)) ? + ( H ( D ) ) . Our WSD-labelings are poset-based, making use of Birkhoffs characterization of distributive lattices and Dilworths theorem for posets.

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

sense of direction
graph embeddings
isometric dimension
lattice dimension


Balanced and 1-balanced graph constructions There are several density functions for graphs which have found use in various applications. In this paper, we examine two of them, the first being given by b(G)=|E(G)|/|V(G)| b ( G ) = | E ( G ) | / | V ( G ) | , and the other being given by g(G)=|E(G)|/(|V(G)|??(G)) g ( G ) = | E ( G ) | / ( | V ( G ) | ? ? ( G ) ) , where ?(G) ? ( G ) denotes the number of components of G G . Graphs for which b(H)?b(G) b ( H ) ? b ( G ) for all subgraphs H H of G G are called balanced graphs , and graphs for which g(H)?g(G) g ( H ) ? g ( G ) for all subgraphs H H of G G are called 1-balanced graphs (also sometimes called strongly balanced or uniformly dense in the literature). Although the functions b b and g g are very similar, they distinguish classes of graphs sufficiently differently that b(G) b ( G ) is useful in studying random graphs, g(G) g ( G ) has been useful in designing networks with reduced vulnerability to attack and in studying the World Wide Web, and a similar function is useful in the study of rigidity. First we give a new characterization of balanced graphs. Then we introduce a graph construction which generalizes the Cartesian product of graphs to produce what we call a generalized Cartesian product. We show that generalized Cartesian product derived from a tree and 1-balanced graphs are 1-balanced, and we use this to prove that the generalized Cartesian products derived from 1-balanced graphs are 1-balanced.

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

balanced graphs
cartesian product of graphs


VEGAWES: variational segmentation on whole exome sequencing for copy number detection Copy number variations are important in the detection and progression of significant tumors and diseases. Recently, Whole Exome Sequencing is gaining popularity with copy number variations detection due to low cost and better efficiency. In this work, we developed VEGAWES for accurate and robust detection of copy number variations on WES data. VEGAWES is an extension to a variational based segmentation algorithm, VEGA: Variational estimator for genomic aberrations, which has previously outperformed several algorithms on segmenting array comparative genomic hybridization data.

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

copy number variation
whole-exome sequencing
variational based model


Critical contact stiffness concept and simulation of crack generation in particle models of large length-scales When the particle simulation method is used to simulate large length-scale problems, such as crustal length-scale problems in the field of geology, it is necessary to include gravity effect into the particle model. To consider gravity effect appropriately, there is a minimum value requirement for the contact stiffness of a particle so that unexpected particle overlap can be avoided. This minimum value is called the critical contact stiffness of a particle due to gravity effect. Using the vertical force equilibrium condition of a particle at the bottom of a two-dimensional particle model, a theoretical formula has been successfully derived for determining the critical contact stiffness of the particle in this paper. For the two-dimensional particle model consisting of circular particles of unit thickness, there is a relationship between the critical contact stiffness of a particle and the critical elastic modulus of the particle material when a linear-elastic-contact model between any two particles is used. Since the elastic moduli of most crustal rocks are greater than the corresponding critical elastic modulus of the particle material, it has been theoretically demonstrated that the particle simulation method, which is based on the linear-elastic-contact model between any two particles, is suitable for simulating gravity effect within the particle model of a large length-scale. The related simulation results have demonstrated the usefulness of the particle simulation method for simulating spontaneous crack generation patterns within brittle crustal rocks.

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

gravity effect
critical contact stiffness
crack generation
particle simulation method


Solution of a nonlinear time-delay model in biology via semi-analytical approaches The delay logistic equations have been extensively used as models in biology and other sciences, with particular emphasis on population dynamics. In this work, the variational iteration and Adomian decomposition methods are applied to solve the delay logistic equation. The variational iteration method is based on the incorporation of a general Lagrange multiplier in the construction of correction functional for the equation. On the other hand, the Adomian decomposition method approximates the solution as an infinite series and usually converges to the accurate solution. Moreover, these techniques reduce the volume of calculations because they have no need of discretization of the variables, linearization or small perturbations. Illustrative examples are included to demonstrate the validity and applicability of the presented methods.

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

delay logistic equation
variational iteration method
adomian decomposition method

delay differential equation
semi-analytic approach


A phase field model for vesicle-substrate adhesion In this paper, a phase field model is developed for vesicle adhesion involving complex substrate and vesicle geometries. The model takes into account an adhesion potential that depends on the distance of vesicle to the substrate. A variational problem is solved in a 3D computational domain by minimizing the contribution of bending elastic energy and the adhesion energy under the constraints of total surface area and volume, described via a phase function. An adaptive finite element method is used to efficiently compute the numerical solutions of the model. The computational results are validated through comparison of several axisymmetric shapes with the sharp-interface ODE solution. Moreover, we compute shapes for non-axisymmetric situations to support the observation that concave substrates favor adhesion. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

vesicle
adhesion
phase field model
adaptive finite element

elastic bending energy
diffuse interface model


Reliable Key Management and Data Delivery Method in Multicast Over Wireless IPv6 Networks Multicast is an efficient way to reduce the required bandwidth of transmitting data simultaneously to a group of users in wireless IPv6 networks. Nevertheless, multicast suffers from two main drawbacks which can be looked from two perspectives, namely security and QoS. With regard to security, the main challenge is to provide security protection to multicast data, which can be achieved by using a secure key management process. Considering a highly dense environment where connection of users to the network is changing frequently due to join or leave operations, key updating approach may burden a network devices with a huge amount of complex encryption/decryption processes. From the QoS perspective, multicast transmission over WLAN offers a tradeoff between the transmission rate and the coverage. The transmission rate of multicast is confined by the user with the lowest data rate in the group which is called fixed base rate problem. To address the above mentioned problems, we propose and implement a lightweight key management and data delivery scheme for multicast over wireless IPv6 networks. The proposed solution is envisaged to reduce the complexity of key updating, while at the same time is able to address the fixed base rate problem. The performance evaluation (by means of analytical and test-bed implementation) of the proposed key management method indicates its efficiency in reducing communication, computation, and storage costs, while maintaining both forward and backward securities. Moreover, the proposed data delivery method is able to improve the throughput and QoS, with low packet loss and transmission delay.

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

multicast security
data rate transmission
quality of service
multicast over wlans
multicast ipv6 test-bed


Testing the equality of several covariance matrices Using a new approach based on Meijer G-functions and computer simulation, we numerically compute the exact null distribution of the modified-likelihood ratio statistic used to test the hypothesis that several covariances matrices of normal distributions are equal. Small samples of different sizes are considered, and for the case of two matrices, we introduce a new test based on determinants, with the null distribution of its criterion also fully computable. Comparisons with published results show the accuracy of our approach, which is proved to be more flexible and adaptable to different cases.

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

covariance matrix
likelihood ratio
beta distribution
meijer function
latent roots
determinant
percentiles


Practical scalable image analysis and indexing using Hadoop The ability to handle very large amounts of image data is important for image analysis, indexing and retrieval applications. Sadly, in the literature, scalability aspects are often ignored or glanced over, especially with respect to the intricacies of actual implementation details. In this paper we present a case-study showing how a standard bag-of-visual-words image indexing pipeline can be scaled across a distributed cluster of machines. In order to achieve scalability, we investigate the optimal combination of hybridisations of the MapReduce distributed computational framework which allows the components of the analysis and indexing pipeline to be effectively mapped and run on modern server hardware. We then demonstrate the scalability of the approach practically with a set of image analysis and indexing tools built on top of the Apache Hadoop MapReduce framework. The tools used for our experiments are freely available as open-source software, and the paper fully describes the nuances of their implementation.

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


Sequencing of a 15-kb Ehrlichia ruminantium Clone and Evaluation of the cpg1 Open Reading Frame for Protection against Heartwater A 1.2 kb polymorphic fragment from the Gardel isolate of Ehrlichia (formerly Cowdria) ruminantium was used to isolate a 15kb clone from the E. ruminantium Welgevonden LambdaGEM-11 library. This clone, WL2EL1, was subcloned and sequenced. Eight open reading frames (ORFs) were identified. The ORF in WL2EL1 which contained the Welgevonden homologue of the 1.2 kb polymorphic fragment was designated Cowdria polymorphic gene 1 (cpg1). The cpg1 ORF was cloned into pCMViUB, a genetic vaccine vector. Mice and sheep were immunized with pCMViUB/cpg1 by intramuscular injection and gene gun inoculation. Although all of the immunized mice died, there was a trend for mice that received larger amounts of pCMViUB/cpg1 DNA to survive longer. Four out of five sheep immunized with the construct survived lethal challenge.

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

recombinant vaccine against e. ruminantium


Changes in publication languages and citation practices and their effect on the scientific impact of Russian science (19932010) This article analyzes the effects of publication language on the international scientific visibility of Russia using the Web of Science (WoS). Like other developing and transition countries, it is subject to a growing pressure to internationalize its scientific activities, which primarily means a shift to English as a language of scientific communication. But to what extent does the transition to English improve the impact of research? The case of Russia is of interest in this respect as the existence of many combinations of national journals and languages of publications (namely, Russian and English, including translated journals) provide a kind of natural I experiment to test the effects of language and publisher's country on the international visibility of research through citations as well as on the referencing practices of authors. Our analysis points to the conclusion that the production of original English-language papers in foreign journals is a more efficient strategy of internationalization than the mere translation of domestic journals. If the objective of a country is to maximize the international visibility of its scientific work, then the efforts should go into the promotion of publication in reputed English-language journals to profit from the added effect provided by the Matthew effect of these venues.

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


Type inference for record concatenation and subtyping Record concatenation, multiple inheritance, and multiple-object cloning are closely related and part of various language designs. For example, in Cardelli's untyped Obliq language, a new object can be constructed from several existing objects by cloning followed by concatenation; an error is given in case of field name conflicts. Type systems for record concatenation have been studied by Wand, Harper and Pierce, Remy, and others; and type inference for the combination of record concatenation and subtyping has been studied by Sulzmann and by Pottier. In this paper we present a type inference algorithm for record concatenation, subtyping, and recursive types. Our example language is the Abadi-Cardelli object calculus extended with a concatenation operator. Our algorithm enables type checking of Obliq programs without changing the programs at all. We prove that the type inference problem is NP-complete. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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