Entropy coders and 3D-Hadamard coefficients sequency scan order for a fast embedded color video codec This work compares the performances of two Golomb family entropy coders applied to a video codec system named FHVC (fast hadamard video codec). The entropy coders considered have different operation modes and specific adaptation strategies. The work also presents a new 3D-transform coefficient scan order developed for the FHVC. This scan process is based on the multiplication of the three-dimensional sequency numbers of each coefficient. The FHVC (which is also described in this work) is a fast embedded color video codec developed to be implemented in a video set-top box used in a fiber optics network. The focus is on more reduced execution times, and not on higher compression rates. Low computational complexity and use of meager computational resources are also required. All the multiplications and divisions operations are performed by binary shifts and the system is implemented exclusively with 16-bit integer arithmetic. Even with these constraints, good distortion versus bit-rate results were achieved. The Hadamard transform is used in a three-dimensional fashion, in order to reduce spatial and temporal correlation and to avoid costly motion estimation and compensation techniques. The proposed scan procedure allows the transform coefficient reading in an idealistic decreasing in the average order. After the scan procedure, the encoding of the bit sequence of the 3D-Hadamard coefficients is carried out, bit-plane-by-bit-plane, with an adaptive Golomb run-length entropy coder, which produces a fully embedded output bitstream. Two entropy coders were considered. The first one uses an empirical, but fast and efficient, adaptation strategy that shows good results on non-stationary data. The second one has an adaptation strategy that is nearly optimum, in a maximum-likelihood sense, for independent Bernoulli identically distributed data.

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

embedded video coding
3d-hadamard transform
adaptive golomb entropy coder
fast video codec
3d-transform coefficient scan order
c# language


Construction and evaluation of ontological tag trees Tag trees are constructed to capture corpus statistics with low space requirements. They are constructed using semantic ontologies and corpus statistics. The formulated optimization is solved using local search paradigm. WordNet is used to solve optimization faster by initializing the local search. Completely automated evaluation tasks are proposed to evaluate tag trees.

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


deterministic simulation of non-deterministic turing machines (detailed abstract) Computations of non-deterministic Turing machines are shown to correspond to solving certain mazes. The storage needed to solve mazes is related to the storage needed to deterministically simulate non-deterministic Turing machines. In particular, it is shown that a non-deterministic L(n)-tape bounded Turing machine can be simulated by an (L(n)) 2 -tape bounded Turing machine, provided L(n)?log 2 n.

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


An intrinsical description of group codes A (left) group code of length n is a linear code which is the image of a (left) ideal of a group algebra via an isomorphism FG -> F(n) which maps G to the standard basis of F(n). Many classical linear codes have been shown to be group codes. In this paper we obtain a criterion to decide when a linear code is a group code in terms of its intrinsical properties in the ambient space F(n), which does not assume an "a priori" group algebra structure on F(n). As an application we provide a family of groups (including metacyclic groups) for which every two-sided group code is an abelian group code. It is well known that Reed-Solomon codes are cyclic and its parity check extensions are elementary abelian group codes. These two classes of codes are included in the class of Cauchy codes. Using our criterion we classify the Cauchy codes of some lengths which are left group codes and the possible group code structures on these codes.

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


Finding geographic information: Collection-level metadata Certain types of information are associated with specific locations on Earth's surface, and can be retrieved using location as the primary search key. The combination of a collection of such information and a location-based search mechanism is termed a geolibrary. A search for specific information over multiple collections is more efficient if one knows where to look. Information about the contents of a collection is termed collection-level metadata (CLM). Several conceptual designs for the process of search are reviewed, and the U.S. National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse is discussed. The Alexandria Digital Library provides an example of a large digital collection. Its geographic coverage is analyzed to determine whether its CLM can be modeled effectively. The difficulties of describing CLM are discussed from the perspective of institutional change, as library collections attempt to make themselves more accessible through the Internet.

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


Numerical modelling of semi-rigid boltless connectors The paper describes a finite element analysis of a boltless semi-rigid beam-end connector used in the storage rack industry. An elastic three-dimensional linear analysis of the connector was made and the results compared with experiments. The effects of different boundary conditions were investigated. Sub-models of the part of the upright in contact with the connection were made to determine the influence of upright behaviour on the momentcurvature relation. Comparisons with experimental results are made to validate the model. The paper also points out the variation in connection stiffness found by using different measurement positions.

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


VForce: An environment for portable applications on high performance systems with accelerators Special Purpose Processors (SPPs), including Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), are increasingly being used to accelerate scientific applications. VForce aims to aid application programmers in using such accelerators with minimal changes in user code. VForce is an extensible middleware framework that enables VSIPL++ (the Vector Signal Image Processing Library extension) programs to transparently use Special Purpose Processors (SPPs) while maintaining portability across platforms with and without SPP hardware. The framework is designed to maintain a VSIPL++-like environment and hide hardware-specific details from the application programmer while preserving performance and productivity. VForce focuses on the interface between application code and accelerator code. The same application code can run in software on a general purpose processor or take advantage of SPPs if they are available. VForce is unique in that it supports calls to both FPGAs and GPUs while requiring no changes in user code. Results on systems with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs and Xilinx FPGAs are presented. This paper describes VForce, illustrates its support for portability, and discusses lessons learned for providing support for different hardware configurations at run time. Key considerations involve global knowledge about the relationship between processing steps for defining application mapping, memory allocation, and task parallelism.

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


Initial Observations on Economics, Pricing, and Penetration of the Internet of Things Market One expection about the future Internet is the participation of billions of sensor nodes, integrating the physical with the digital world. This Internet of Things can offer new and enhanced services and applications based on knowledge about the environment and the entities within. Millions of micro-provides could come into existence, forming a highly fragmented market place with new business opportunities to offer commercial services. In the related field of Internet and Telecommunication services, the design of markets and pricing schemes has been a vital research area in itself. We discuss how these findings can be transferred to the Internet of Things. Both the appropriate market structure and corresponding pricing schemes need to be well understood to enable a commercial success of sensor-based services. We show some steps that an evolutionary establishment of this market might have to take.

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


Experimental and numerical dye washout flow visualization - Flow analysis in the realistic model of pathologic artery enlargement (aneurysm) Flow visualization in realistic models is very important for the study of pathological vessel enlargements (aneurysms). Furthermore, flow visualization may help in treatment decisions. However, the most interesting parameter, the wall shear stress, is difficult to measure in vivo. This parameter can be provided by computational fluid dynamics. However, the numerical methods don't visualize the results as does of the dye washout method-a method often used in flow studies. This experimental method simulates the cine angiograms acquired during contrast agent injection used in medicine. In this paper we present the dye washout visualization of CFD results and compare these results with the conventional dye washout experiments in the same aneurysm model under steady flow conditions.

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


Applying data mining to learn system dynamics in a biological model Data mining consists of a set of powerful methods that have been successfully applied to many different application domains, including business, engineering, and bioinformatics. In this paper, we propose an innovative approach that uses genetic algorithms to mine a set of temporal behavior data output by a biological system in order to determine the kinetic parameters of the system. Analyzing the behavior of a biological network is a complicated task. In our approach, the machine learning method is integrated with the framework of system dynamics so that its findings are expressed in a form of system dynamics model. An application of the method to the cell division cycle model has shown that the method can discover approximate parametric values of the system and reproduce the input behavior.

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

systems biology
neural network
genetic algorithm


Affinity-Based Network Interfaces for Efficient Communication on Multicore Architectures Improving the network interface performance is needed by the demand of applications with high communication requirements (for example, some multimedia, real-time, and high-performance computing applications), and the availability of network links providing multiple gigabits per second bandwidths that could require many processor cycles for communication tasks. Multicore architectures, the current trend in the microprocessor development to cope with the difficulties to further increase clock frequencies and microarchitecture efficiencies, provide new opportunities to exploit the parallelism available in the nodes for designing efficient communication architectures. Nevertheless, although present OS network stacks include multiple threads that make it possible to execute network tasks concurrently in the kernel, the implementations of packet-based or connection-based parallelism are not trivial as they have to take into account issues related with the cost of synchronization in the access to shared resources and the efficient use of caches. Therefore, a common trend in many recent researches on this topic is to assign network interrupts and the corresponding protocol and network application processing to the same core, as with this affinity scheduling it would be possible to reduce the contention for shared resources and the cache misses. In this paper we propose and analyze several configurations to distribute the network interface among the different cores available in the server. These alternatives have been devised according to the affinity of the corresponding communication tasks with the location (proximity to the memories where the different data structures are stored) and characteristics of the processing core. As this approach uses several cores to accelerate the communication path of a given connection, it can be seen as complementary to those that consider several cores to simultaneously process packets belonging to either the same or different connections. Message passing interface (MPI) workloads and dynamic web servers have been considered as applications to evaluate and compare the communication performance of these alternatives. In our experiments, performed by full-system simulation, improvements of up to 35% in the throughput and up to 23% in the latency have been observed in MPI workloads, and up to 100% in the throughput, up to 500% in the response time, and up to 82% in the requests attended per second have been measured in dynamic web servers.

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

interrupt affinity
processor affinity
offloading
simics


A context tree weighting algorithm with an incremental context set We propose a variation of the Context Tree Weighting algorithm for tree source modified such that the growth of the context resembles Lempel-Ziv parsing. We analyze this algorithm, give a concise upper bound to the individual redundancy for any tree source, and prove the asymptotic optimality of the data compression rate for any stationary and ergodic source.

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

universal source coding
contest tree weighting
incremental contest set
lempel-ziv parsing


eye tracking and gaze vector calculation within immersive virtual environments Human vision is arguably our most powerful sense, with our eyes constantly darting around in an almost subconscious manner to create a complete picture of the visual scene around us. These movements can unveil information about the way the brain is processing the incoming visual data into its mental image of our surroundings. In this paper we discuss a method of obtaining and preprocessing the eye movements of a user immersed within a controllable synthetic environment. We investigate how their gaze patterns can be captured and used to identify viewed virtual objects, and how this can be used as a natural method of interacting with the scene.

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


deterministic approaches to analog performance space exploration (pse) Performance space exploration (PSE) determines the range of feasible performance values of a circuit block for a given topology and technology. In this paper, we present two deterministic approaches for PSE. One approximates the feasible performance space based on linearized circuit models and is suitable for investigating a large number of performances. The other one computes discretizations of the Pareto front of competing performances. In addition, a motivation and application of PSE using a hierarchical design example is presented.

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

fourier motzkin elimination
pareto optimization
analog integrated circuits


ML parameter estimation and minimum distance classifier for texture analysis using wavelet transform This work concentrates on comparing the performance of the minimum distance classifier and maximum-likelihood classifier for texture analysis. A tree-structured wavelet transform has been used for extracting the features and the comparison is based on the correct classification percentage. The results indicate that the maximum-likelihood classifier performs marginally better than the mahalanobis distance for some feature sets. The Euclidean distance did not prove to be powerful in distinguishing the textures. The performance of various orthogonal wavelet transforms have also been compared in order to find out the best wavelet for each of the classifiers considered. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.

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

texture analysis
ml parameter estimation
minimum distance
wavelet transform


Combining Boundary and Region Information with Bolt Prior for Rail Surface Detection Railway inspection is important in railway maintenance. There are several tasks in railway inspection, e.g., defect detection and bolt detection. For those inspection tasks, the detection of rail surface is a fundamental and key issue. In order to detect rail defects and missing bolts, one must know the exact location of the rail surface. To deal with this problem, we propose an efficient Rail Surface Detection (RSD) algorithm that combines boundary and region information in a uniform formulation. Moreover, we reevaluate the rail location by introducing the top down information-bolt location prior. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can detect the rail surface efficiently.

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

boundary information
line segmentation detection
template matching


An automated and efficient substrate noise analysis tool This paper presents a methodology for the efficient modeling of substrate noise coupling. A closed-form Green's function for nonuniformly doped substrates is employed with the correct singular characteristics. A novel global surface impedance matrix scheme is introduced to efficiently model nonuniformly doped wells, channel stop implants, and buried layers. Layout, device, and netlist extractors are developed so as to integrate our boundary element method (BEM) solver with commercial layout and circuit simulation tools.

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

circuit
layout
modeling
noise analysis
simulation
substrate

system on a chip
very large scale integrated (vlsi)


Perceived authority and communication channel - Experiments with instant messaging The effects of diminished social context cues in computer-mediated communication between students and instructors are examined using instant-messaging (IM) technology. Two experiments verified such effects, students perceived informal surroundings in IM and, in one experiment, decreased presence of the instructor, but results of hypothesized effects on the perceived authority of the instructor were mixed. Students did show more self-centered behavior in IM but experienced increased feelings of regulation.

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

computer-mediated communication
cmc
social presence
education


On the mathematical theory of living systems, I: Complexity analysis and representation This paper is the first one of a sequel devoted to the challenging goal of developing a mathematical theory for living systems. We consider systems constituted of a number of living entities, called active particles, which have the ability to express specific strategies and interact with other entities. The author proposes a personal path, starting from the identification of a number of common features of living systems that can be viewed as sources of complexity, focusing specifically on the representation of systems based also on a strategy to reduce their complexity. The overall system is decomposed into functional subsystems whose representation is delivered by a probability distribution over the microscopic state of the active particles belonging to such system. Looking ahead, this paper indicates some guidelines to derive mathematical structures, where interactions involving active particles are nonlinearly additive. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

living systems
complexity
functional subsystems
active particles


A 45 dual dipole decomposition scheme to improve image fidelity Dipole exposure techniques are currently being explored as alternatives to the low k1 problem that hinders the manufacture of sub 100nm logic technology. Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in using a combination of vertical and horizontal dipole exposures capable of producing manufacturing-robust image results for Manhattan features. In this technique, a design is split into two complementary masks that have enhanced contrast at a given dipole imaging condition. The dipole is a strong case of off-axis illumination, and significant resolution enhancement can be achieved, but only for one pattern direction. Complementary dipole exposures are required when dense pitches in horizontal and vertical direction are present. Dipole decomposition approaches that separate vertical and horizontal features in a layout are based on the fact that horizontal features form an improved aerial image with a vertical dipole illumination, and vertical features show the same aerial image improvement with a horizontal dipole illumination. This technique, though conceptually simple, requires a computer algorithm to decompose a design layout into two patterns consisting of features oriented mainly in the horizontal and vertical directions. Some layout features, landing pads or angled lines for example, cannot easily be assigned to a particular mask based on this simple orientation logic. In this work a new approach has been presented in which 45 decomposition of the pattern is used to improve image contrast, pattern fidelity and focus behavior. The results will be analyzed in terms of contrast, pattern fidelity and focus dependence in order to determine the feasibility of printing manhattan and angled features using a dual dipole approach for sub 100nm processes.

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

mask decomposition
photolithography
low k1 imaging
dual dipole illumination


Play segmentation for the playbreak based sports video using a local adaptive model This paper proposes a new play segmentation algorithm using a local adaptive model for each sports game, in which the play start shots (PSS) that represent the start of each play segment are detected by comparing all of keyframes with the PSS model. The PSS model is calculated on the fly using generic clustering algorithm and a repetitive characteristic of the PSS. The end of each play segment (the play end shot (PES)) is determined by detecting close up shots using the field color extracted from the play start shots since the camera will focus on the players or the audience with close up view. Experimental results with 28 baseball videos show that good performance can be obtained with the proposed algorithm compared to other algorithms.

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

video structuring
video indexing
video segmentation
video summarization


Resource levelling for projects with schedule-dependent time windows The paper presents polynomial heuristic procedures for different types of resource levelling problems for projects with minimum and maximum time lags between project activities. Both problems without and with explicit resource constraints are treated. Thus far, only pseudopolynomial heuristics for special resource levelling problems without maximum time lags and resource constraints have been proposed. An experimental performance analysis shows that the new heuristics approximately solve problem instances with up to 500 activities and five resources within reasonable computing time.

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

project management
activity-on-node networks
schedule-dependent time windows


Soft computing methodologies for spectral analysis in cyclostratigraphy In this paper we present some soft computing methodologies for time-series analysis applied to cyclostratigraphy. An application to some stratigraphic signals to detect Earth orbital (Milankovic') periodicities which are expected to be recorded in Cretaceous shallow water carbonate sequences outcropping in Southern Apennines (Italy), is described. The results obtained with classical spectral analysis techniques, based on the modified periodogram, are compared to the results of our methods based on neural nets and genetic algorithms. The aim of these cross comparisons is to find the most reliable, fast and accurate methodology to identify orbital periodicities in noisy and segmented stratigraphic signals. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.

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

time-series analysis
neural networks
nonlinear principal component analysis
genetic algorithm


Dual MacWilliams pair A pair of posets (P, Q) on [n] is called a weak dual MacWilliams pair (wdMp) if the P-weight enumerator of a linear code uniquely determines the Q-weight enumerator of the dual of that code for every linear code of length n over a finite field. First, we show that (P, P) is a wdMp if and only if the group of all P-weight preserving linear automorphisms of the ambient n-dimensional space over the finite field acts transitively on every P-sphere centered at 0. Here P is the dual poset of P. Also, we show some equivalent conditions which say that P being weak order poset with Q = P is essentially the only possible case for (P, Q) to be a wdMp.

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

macwilliams-type identity
(weak) dual macwilliams pair
p-weight enumerator


Combined MCDM techniques for exploring company value based on Modigliani-Miller theorem This study combines decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), analytical network process (ANP), and VIKOR to discuss the influence relationship between and relative weights of the major factors influencing company value - cash flow, weighted average cost of capital (WACC), and tax shield and their sub-factors based on the Modigliani-Miller (MM) theorem. The purpose of this study is to offer a reference to investors and regulatory units on how to choose the most valuable company as well as utilize a more accurate financial econometrics model to support their decisions. The factors and sub-factors are identified through the research model proposed by this study and the 3 factors of MM are then expanded into a seven-factor model. Among the seven factors, a study on company value shows that scale of debt is the most important criterion compared to all other criteria, followed by cost of debt, and earnings before interest and tax (EBIT). Moreover, empirical findings demonstrate that among the leading companies of Taiwan, Japan and Korea's panel sector, the investment value of Samsung Electronics is significantly higher than LG, AU Optronics (AUO), Innolux, and Sharp. Research results further indicate that decomposing the MM model into a more precise financial econometrics model can help investors make better stock investment decisions. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


Proposal and implementation of the "Science SQC" quality control principle In forecasting the operation of the manufacturing industry in the 21(st) century, the authors recently proposed "science SQC" as a demonstrative-scientific methodology and discussed its effectiveness on the basis of verification studies conducted by Toyota Motor Corporation. This study outlines a new SQC principle "science SQC", as a demonstrative-scientific methodology, which enables the principle of TQM to be improved systematically. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

science statistical quality control
total quality management


Object-oriented numerical integration - a template scheme for FEM and BEM applications An object-oriented numerical integration template implementation is presented on the basis of the C + + programming language. Aiming its straightforward application in finite and boundary element methods, the design supports integrand objects of scalar, vector or matrix types, so that a single programming statement is able to integrate element matrices and vectors. The integrand can contain singularities like the ones typically found in boundary element methods, allowing the evaluation of both regular and singular integrals under the same programming structure. The use of the proposed design is illustrated through sonic elementary applications as well as finite element and boundary element code excerpts. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

numerical integration
singular integrals

object-oriented programming
templates
boundary element method
finite element method


Amoeba-based Chaotic Neurocomputing: Combinatorial Optimization by Coupled Biological Oscillators We demonstrate a neurocomputing system incorporating an amoeboid unicellular organism, the true slime mold Physarum, known to exhibit rich spatiotemporal oscillatory behavior and sophisticated computational capabilities. Introducing optical feedback applied according to a recurrent neural network model, we induce that the amoeba's photosensitive branches grow or degenerate in a network-patterned chamber in search of an optimal solution to the traveling salesman problem (TSP), where the solution corresponds to the amoeba's stably relaxed configuration (shape), in which its body area is maximized while the risk of being illuminated is minimized.Our system is capable of reaching the optimal solution of the four-city TSP with a high probability. Moreover, our system can find more than one solution, because the amoeba can coordinate its branches' oscillatory movements to perform transitional behavior among multiple stable configurations by spontaneously switching between the stabilizing and destabilizing modes. We show that the optimization capability is attributable to the amoeba's fluctuating oscillatory movements. Applying several surrogate data analyses, we present results suggesting that the amoeba can be characterized as a set of coupled chaotic oscillators.

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

multilevel self-organization
coupled oscillators
chaotic neural network
chaotic itinerancy
self-disciplined computing


Nuclear fuel depletion analysis using Matlab software Coupled first order IVPs axe frequently used in many parts of engineering and sciences. In this article, we presented a code including three computer programs which are joint with the Matlab software to solve and plot the solutions of the first order coupled stiff or non-stiff IVPs. Some engineering and scientific problems related to IVPs are given and fuel depletion (production of the Pu-239 isotope) in a Pressurized Water Nuclear Reactor (PWR) are computed by the present code.

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

matlab
nuclear reactor
nuclear fuel
depletion

initial value problems
stiff and non-stiff
computer algebra


The influence of mental models on undergraduate students' searching behavior on the Web This article explores the effects of undergraduate students' mental models of the Web on their online searching behavior. Forty-four undergraduate students, mainly freshmen and sophomores, participated in the study. Subjects' mental models of the Web were treated as equally good styles and operationalized as drawings of their perceptions about the Web. Four types of mental models of the Web were identified based on the drawings and the associated descriptions: technical view, functional view, process view, and connection view. In the study, subjects were required to finish two search tasks. Searching behavior was measured from four aspects: navigation and performance, subjects' feelings about tasks and their own performances, query construction, and search patterns. The four mental model groups showed different navigation and querying behaviors, but the differences were not significant. Subjects' satisfaction with their own performances was found to be significantly correlated with the time to complete the task. The results also showed that the familiarity of the task to subjects had a major effect on their ways to start interaction, query construction, and search patterns. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

mental models
query construction
search patterns


Visual Targeted Advertisement System Based on User Profiling and Content Consumption for Mobile Broadcasting Television Content personalisation is one of the main aims of the mobile media delivery business models, as a new way to improve the users experience. In broadcasting networks, the content is sent one to many, so a complete personalisation where the user may select any content is not possible. But using the mobile bidirectional return channel (e.g. UMTS connection) visual targeted advertising can be performed in a simple way: by off-line storing the advertisement for selectively replacing the normal broadcasted advertisement. In fact, these concepts provide powerful methods to increase the value of the service, mainly in mobile environments. In this article we present a novel intelligent content personalisation system for targeted advertising over mobile broadcasting networks and terminals, based on user profiling and clustering, as a new solution where the use of content personalisation represents the competitive advantage over traditional advertising.

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

content personalisation
targeted advertising
clustering

mobile television
profile segmentation
dvb-h


Foreign exchange transaction exposure in a newsvendor setting Transaction exposure normally arises when there exists a time lag between the time the financial obligation has been incurred and the time it is due to be settled, because the purchase price to the buyer/retailer may, on settlement day, differs from that when it was incurred, if the debt is denominated in the supplier/manufacturers currency. This is due to possible unexpected changes in the exchange rates during the time period. In this paper, we show that, in a newsvendor setting, when the risk-neutral supplier/manufacturer has full information, the optimal policies are independent of which side bears the exchange risk, if the retailer is not a risk-taker. If, on the other hand, the retailer is a risk-taker, it is better for the manufacturer that the retailer assumes the risk. Numerical examples are also presented to highlight model sensitivities to parametric changes.

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

newsvendor model
supply-chain management
prices under uncertainty
global operations


Correcting curvature-density effects in the Hamilton-Jacobi skeleton The Hainilton-Jacobi approach has proven to be a powerful and elegant method for extracting the skeleton of two-dimensional (2-D) shapes. The approach is based on the observation that the normalized flux associated with the inward evolution of the object boundary at nonskeletal points tends to zero as the size of the integration area tends to zero, while the flux is negative at the locations of skeletal points. Nonetheless, the error in calculating the flux on the image lattice is both limited by the pixel resolution and also proportional to the curvature of the boundary evolution front and, hence, unbounded near endpoints. This makes the exact location of endpoints difficult and renders the performance of the skeleton extraction algorithm dependent on a threshold parameter. This problem can be overcome by using interpolation techniques to calculate the flux with subpixel precision. However, here, we develop a method for 2-D skeleton extraction that circumvents the problem by eliminating the curvature contribution to the error. This is done by taking into account variations of density due to boundary curvature. This yields a skeletonization algorithm that gives both better localization and less susceptibility to boundary noise and parameter choice than the Hamilton-Jacobi method.

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

hamilton-jacobi equations
shape-description
two-dimensional (2-d) skeleton


Position control of shape memory alloy actuator based on the generalized Prandtl-Ishlinskii inverse model Hysteresis and significant nonlinearities in the behavior of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actuators encumber effective utilization of these actuator. Due to these effects, the position control of SMA actuators has been a great challenge in recent years. Literature review of the research conducted in this area shows that using the inverse of the phenomenological hysteresis models can compensate the hysteresis of these actuators effectively. But, inverting some of these models, such as Preisach model, is numerically a complex task. However, the generalized Prandtl-Ishlinskii model is analytically invertible, and therefore can be implemented conveniently as a feedforward controller for compensating hysteresis nonlinearities effects in SMA actuators. In this paper a feedforward-feedback controller is used to control the tip deflection of a large deflected flexible beam actuated by an SMA actuator wire. The feedforward part of the control system is based on the generalized Prandtl-Ishlinskii inverse model while a conventional proportional-integral feedback controller is added to the feedforward controller to increase the accuracy together with eliminating the steady state error in position control process. Experimental results show that the proposed controller performs well in terms of achieving small overshoot and undershoot for square wave tracking as well as small tracking errors for sinusoidal trajectory. It has also great capability for tracking hysteresis minor loops. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

position control
shape memory alloy actuator
inverse model


A Karatsuba-Based Algorithm for Polynomial Multiplication in Chebyshev Form In this paper, we present a new method for multiplying polynomials in Chebyshev form. Our approach has two steps. First, the well-known Karatsuba's algorithm is applied to polynomials constructed by using Chebyshev coefficients. Then, from the obtained result, extra arithmetic operations are used to write the final result in Chebyshev form. The proposed algorithm has a quadratic computational complexity. We also compare our method to other approaches.

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

analysis of algorithms and problem complexity


Balanced model reduction of partially observed Langevin equations: an averaging principle We study balanced model reduction of partially observed stochastic differential equations of Langevin type. Upon balancing, the Langevin equation turns into a singularly perturbed system of equations with slow and fast degrees of freedom. We prove that in the limit of vanishing small Hankel singular values (i.e. for infinite scale separation between fast and slow variables), its solution converges to the solution of a reduced-order Langevin equation. The approach is illustrated with several numerical examples, and we discuss the relation to model reduction of deterministic control systems having an underlying Hamiltonian structure.

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

stochastic langevin equation
model order reduction
balanced truncation
optimal prediction


Development of two-phase neural network-genetic algorithm hybrid model in modeling damage evolution in roll forming of aluminum sheet In this paper a two-phase artificial neural network-genetic algorithm (ANN-GA) hybrid model has been developed for the modeling and prediction of the damage evolution in the roll forming (RF) process of aluminum sheet metal, as a function of process parameters. The multilayer perceptron is used to build the network while the genetic algorithm (GA) is employed to optimize the network structure in the modeling phase. In detail, the number of hidden layer, hidden neurons, weights and biases of the network are optimized by GA to minimize the error between predicted values and actual results. After the modeling phase the optimization of parameters is carried out in the optimization phase to minimize the damage in the aluminum sheet during the forming process. In this work the experimental data used for training and verifying the network is obtained automatically by the integration between CAD-CAE. As a result, the predicted results are validated with the actual values and a good agreement is observed. Moreover, the parametric study also is performed to find the relative influences of process parameters on the damage evolution. It is proven that the hybrid model is the powerful tool for modeling and predicting such a highly nonlinear problem as the damage evolution in RF process. The developed two-phase ANN GA hybrid model is a new approach that can bring benefits to the forming industry by predicting and preventing the failure at the design stage, as well as improving efficiently the product's quality by optimizing the process parameters.

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


finding patterns in behavioral observations by automatically labeling forms of wikiwork in barnstars Our everyday observations about the behaviors of others around us shape how we decide to act or interact. In social media the ability to observe and interpret others' behavior is limited. This work describes one approach to leverage everyday behavioral observations to develop tools that could improve understanding and sense making capabilities of contributors, managers and researchers of social media systems. One example of behavioral observation is Wikipedia Barnstars. Barnstars are a type of award recognizing the activities of Wikipedia editors. We mine the entire English Wikipedia to extract barnstar observations. We develop a multi-label classifier based on a random forest technique to recognize and label distinct forms of observed and acknowledged activity. We evaluate the classifier through several means including use of separate training and testing datasets and the by application of the classifier to previously unlabeled data. We use the classifier to identify Wikipedia editors who have been observed with some predominant types of behavior and explore whether those patterns of behavior are evident and how observers seem to be making the observations. We discuss how these types of activity observations can be used to develop tools and potentially improve understanding and analysis in wikis and other online communities.

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

behavioral patterns
multi-label learning


Identifying crosscutting concerns using fan-in analysis Aspect mining is a reverse engineering process that aims at finding crosscutting concerns in existing systems. This article proposes an aspect mining approach based on determining methods that are called from many different places, and hence have a high fan-in, which can be seen as a symptom of crosscutting functionality. The approach is semiautomatic, and consists of three steps: metric calculation, method filtering, and call site analysis. Carrying out these steps is an interactive process supported by an Eclipse plug-in called FINT. Fan-in analysis has been applied to three open source Java systems, totaling around 200,000 lines of code. The most interesting concerns identified are discussed in detail, which includes several concerns not previously discussed in the aspect-oriented literature. The results show that a significant number of crosscutting concerns can be recognized using fan-in analysis, and each of the three steps can be supported by tools.

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

reverse engineering
crosscutting concerns

design
experimentation
languages
measurement
aspect-oriented programming
fan-in metric


Some exact tests for manifest properties of latent trait models Item response theory is one of the modern test theories with applications in educational and psychological testing. Recent developments made it possible to characterize some desired properties in terms of a collection of manifest ones, so that hypothesis tests on these traits can, in principle, be performed. But the existing test methodology is based on asymptotic approximation, which is impractical in most applications since the required sample sizes are often unrealistically huge. To overcome this problem, a class of tests is proposed for making exact statistical inference about four manifest properties: covariances given the sum are non-positive (CSN), manifest monotonicity (MM), conditional association (CA), and vanishing conditional dependence (VCD). One major advantage is that these exact tests do not require large sample sizes. As a result, tests for CSN and MM can be routinely performed in empirical studies. For testing CA and VCD, the exact methods are still impractical in most applications, due to the unusually large number of parameters to be tested. However, exact methods are still derived for them as an exploration toward practicality. Some numerical examples with applications of the exact tests for CSN and MM are provided.

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

conditional distribution
exact test
monte carlo
markov chain monte carlo


Analysis of existing remote attestation techniques This paper has been written as a part of the research project that is working towards the implementation of dynamic behavioral attestation for mobile platforms. The motivation behind this paper was to analyze the existing remote attestation techniques in order to figure out their strengths and weaknesses. We have analyzed Integrity Measurement Architecture, Policy-reduced Integrity Measurement Architecture, Property-based Attestation, Remote Attestation on Program Execution, Semantic Remote Attestation, Trustable Remote Verification of Web Services, and Model-based Behavior Attestation. Each of the existing remote attestation techniques was found to be effective in some situations but was found to be infeasible in others. Therefore, a new remote attestation technique is needed, which is platform independent and flexible enough to meet the challenges of today's scalable computing environments. Copyright (c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

remote attestation
integrity measurement


The Capacity of Channels With Feedback In this paper, we introduce a general framework for treating channels with memory and feedback. First, we prove a general feedback channel coding theorem based on Massey's concept of directed information. Second, we present coding results for Markov channels. This requires determining appropriate sufficient statistics at the encoder and decoder. We give a recursive characterization of these sufficient statistics. Third, a dynamic programming framework for computing the capacity of Markov channels is presented. Fourth, it is shown that the average cost optimality equation (ACOE) can be viewed as an implicit single-letter characterization of the capacity. Fifth, scenarios with simple sufficient statistics are described. Sixth, error exponents for channels with feedback are presented.

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

capacity
directed information
dynamic programming
feedback
markov channels
sufficient statistics


GUESSTIMATE: A Programming Model for Collaborative Distributed Systems We present a new programming model GUESSTIMATE for developing collaborative distributed systems. The model allows atomic, isolated operations that transform a system from consistent state to consistent state, and provides a shared transactional store for a collection of such operations executed by various machines in a distributed system. In addition to "committed state" which is identical in all machines in the distributed system, GUESSTIMATE allows each machine to have a replicated local copy of the state (called "guesstimated state") so that operations on shared state can be executed locally without any blocking, while also guaranteeing that eventually all machines agree on the sequences of operations executed. Thus, each operation is executed multiple times, once at the time of issue when it updates the guesstimated state of the issuing machine, once when the operation is committed (atomically) to the committed state of all machines, and several times in between as the guesstimated state converges toward the committed state. While we expect the results of these executions of the operation to be identical most of the time in the class of applications we study, it is possible for an operation to succeed the first time when it is executed on the guesstimated state, and fail when it is committed. GUESSTIMATE provides facilities that allow the programmer to deal with this potential discrepancy. This paper presents our programming model, its operational semantics, its realization as an API in C#, and our experience building collaborative distributed applications with this model.

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

design
languages
collaborative applications
concurrency
language extensions


Cold-active enzymes studied by comparative molecular dynamics simulation Enzymes from cold-adapted species are significantly more active at low temperatures, even those close to zero Celsius, but the rationale of this adaptation is complex and relatively poorly understood. It is commonly stated that there is a relationship between the flexibility of an enzyme and its catalytic activity at low temperature. This paper gives the results of a study using molecular dynamics simulations performed for five pairs of enzymes, each pair comprising a cold-active enzyme plus its mesophilic or thermophilic counterpart. The enzyme pairs included alpha-amylase, citrate synthase, malate dehydrogenase, alkaline protease and xylanase. Numerous sites with elevated flexibility were observed in all enzymes; however, differences in flexibilities were not striking. Nevertheless, amino acid residues common in both enzymes of a pair (not present in insertions of a structure alignment) are generally more flexible in the cold-active enzymes. The further application of principle component analysis to the protein dynamics revealed that there are differences in the rate and/or extent of opening and closing of the active sites. The results indicate that protein dynamics play an important role in catalytic processes where structural rearrangements, such as those required for active site access by substrate, are involved. They also support the notion that cold adaptation may have evolved by selective changes in regions of enzyme structure rather than in global change to the whole protein.

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

cold-active enzymes
psychrophiles
extremophiles


A Study of Edema Disease in Pigs in Vietnam with Particular Reference to the Use of Autovaccine for the Prevention of Disease Edema disease caused by Escherichia coli is one of the most common diseases in postweaning piglets throughout Vietnam. Verotoxigenic E. coli (VTEC) was isolated from 197 of 261 samples (75.5%). All isolates were confirmed by basic biochemical tests and carbohydrate fermentation characteristics. Of these, 70.1% of isolates are hemolytic, 45% isolates belonged to serotypes O14

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


Video Aesthetic Quality Assessment by Temporal Integration of Photo-and Motion-Based Features This paper presents a new method for accessing the aesthetic quality of videos. It consists of two processes: aesthetic features construction and temporal integration. First, our method combines both photo-based and motion-based visual clues to extract the aesthetic features for each frame in a video. We introduce new motion-based features built from optical flow and salient region extraction, and show their effectiveness to enhance the estimation of aesthetic values. Then, a temporal-order-aware framework that integrates the frame-based features is presented to further improve the evaluation accuracy by taking the time-varying properties into consideration. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach can accomplish remarkable improvement for aesthetic quality assessment of videos.

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 I O O

computational aesthetics
image quality assessment
video quality assessment
visual aesthetics.


Development of a regressive finite element model optimization technique making use of transmissibilities Optimization of vibrating structures by means of finite element models usually requires a high number of optimization runs, where the finite element analysis time itself is often already a serious issue. The total optimization time consists of the finite element (FE) analysis calculation time multiplied by the number of optimization iterations. In this paper a computationally efficient strategy for optimization of structures is presented. Transmissibility functions are introduced to speed-up the FE analysis step, making use of the modal model. The method demonstrates it usefulness in the case of random response analysis where the external loading types are defined statistically by means of power spectral density functions. The relationship between random response displacement power spectral density and input base acceleration power spectral density is written in terms of a transmissibility function between response and excitation. An important feature of the presented method is its numerical efficiency with respect to calculation times. A comparison will be made with existing methods available in commercial FE software. The effectiveness of the proposed procedure is illustrated by means of a case study.

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

vibration reduction over a frequency range


Committees of learning agents We describe how machine learning and decision theory is combined in an application that supports control room operators of a combined heating and power plant to cope with the overwhelming complexity of situations when severe plant disturbancies occur. The application is designed as an assistant, rather than as an automatic system that intervenes directly in the operator/plant loop. The application is required to handle vague and numerically imprecise background information in the construction of classifier committees. A classifier committee (or ensemble) is a classifier created by combining the predictions of multiple sub-classifiers. The presented method combines classifiers into a committee by using computational methods for decision analysis that are designed to work when the information at hand is imprecise. The application evaluates and make priorities between classified alarms according to credibilities that depend on the current context. Machine learning techniques are used to construct classifiers that recognize various malfunctions in a process, determine whether a situation is normal or not, and make priorities among alarms.

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


Design and deployment of wireless sensor networks for aquaculture monitoring and control based on virtual instruments We present an architecture that meets the efficiency and flexibility requirements. An implementation using microcontroller and low power radio technology. System software that provide support for sensor network and actuator applications. Real-time water quality monitoring and control system. An experimental results for two sensor nodes deployed in fishponds was presented.

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

environmental parameters
wireless sensor network
labwindows/cvi
zigbee


a timing model for synchronous language implementations in simulink We describe a simple scheme for mapping synchronous language models, in the form of Boolean Mealy Machines, into timed automata. The mapping captures certain idealized implementation details that are ignored, or assumed away, by the synchronous paradigm. In this regard, the scheme may be compared with other approaches such as the AASAP semantics. However, our model addresses input latching and reaction triggering differently. Additionally, the focus is not on model-checking but rather on creating a semantic model for simulating synchronous controllers within Simulink.The model considers both sample-driven and event-driven execution paradigms, and clarifies their similarities and differences. It provides a means of analyzing the timing behavior of small-scale embedded controllers.The integration of the timed automata models into Simulink is described and related work is discussed.

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


TWO BINARY SEQUENCE FAMILIES WITH LARGE MERIT FACTOR We calculate the asymptotic merit factor, under all rotations of sequence elements, of two families of binary sequences derived from Legendre sequences. The rotation is negaperiodic for the first family, and periodic for the second family. In both cases the maximum asymptotic merit factor is 6. As a consequence, we obtain the first two families of skew-symmetrics sequences with known asymptotic merit factor, which is also 6 in both cases.

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

binary sequence
merit factor
asymptotic
rotation
periodic
negaperiodic

legendre sequence
construction
skew-symmetric


Proteasome Inhibition Enhances Lipofuscin Formation Lipofuscin, a hallmark of aged nondividing cells, is an undegradable autofluorescent intralysosomal substance composed essentially of oxidized, cross-linked proteins. To test whether impaired activity of proteasomeswhich, along with lysosomes, belong to major cellular proteolytic systemsmay contribute to lipofuscinogenesis, we exposed growth-arrested human fibroblasts to subapoptotic doses (2 and 5 nM) of a highly specific proteasome inhibitor, MG-262. This resulted in accelerated lipofuscin accumulation (especially when MG-262 exposure was combined with mild hyperoxiai.e., cultivation at 40% ambient oxygen versus 8% for controls); and enhanced immunostaining for ubiquitin, reflecting accumulation of modified cytosolic proteins subjected for degradation, and cathepsin L, reflecting enlargement of the lysosomal compartment. These data suggest that insufficient proteasomal function may contribute to lipofuscinogenesis by a compensatory increase in the amount of proteins that are difrected for lysosomal degradation. The findings may be helpful for the understanding of cellular aging as well as diseases associated with intralysosomal accumulation of undegradable material.

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


Compressed Sensing-Based Multi-Layer Data Communication in Smart Grid Systems Compressed sensing is a novel technology used in the field of wireless communication and sensor networks for channel estimation, signal detection, data gathering, network monitoring, and other applications. It plays a significant role in highly secure, real-time, well organized, and cost-effective data communication in smart-grid (SG) systems, which consist of multi-tier network standards that make it challenging to synchronize in power management communication. In this paper, we present a multi-layer communication model for SG systems and propose compressed-sensing based data transmission at every layer of the SG system to improve data transmission performance. Our approach is to utilize the compressed-sensing procedure at every layer in a controlled manner. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed monitoring devices need less transmission power than conventional systems. Additionally, secure, reliable, and real-time data transmission is possible with the compressed-sensing technique.

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

home area network
multi-layer data communication
wireless sensor network
zigbee


Ontology Learning from Text: A Look Back and into the Future Ontologies are often viewed as the answer to the need for interoperable semantics in modern information systems. The explosion of textual information on the Read/Write Web coupled with the increasing demand for ontologies to power the Semantic Web have made (semi-)automatic ontology learning from text a very promising research area. This together with the advanced state in related areas, such as natural language processing, have fueled research into ontology learning over the past decade. This survey looks at how far we have come since the turn of the millennium and discusses the remaining challenges that will define the research directions in this area in the near future.

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

algorithms
languages
term recognition
concept discovery
semantic relation acquisition
application of ontologies


Now it's Necessary: Virtual Reference Services at Washington State University, Pullman While virtual reference services (VRS) are becoming more and more common in academic libraries, implementing and maintaining well-used and effective VRS can be a challenge in the face of competing demands on time, staffing, and funding. Between 2011 and 2012, librarians at Washington State University, Pullman (WSU) have overhauled and reorganized VRS, committing more time, money, and energy to VRS than ever before. While past experiences with VRS at WSU Pullman have been mixed, data collected from recent years shows that the decision to prioritize VRS was worth it, leading to a vital and rapidly growing service. VRS at WSU shows sizable increases in usage between 2010 and 2012, indicating that VRS is now a necessary part of the WSU Libraries' mission to best serve their community of users.

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

virtual reference services
academic libraries


Toluene and TCE Decrease Binding to Mu-Opioid Receptors, but Not to Benzodiazepine and NMDA Receptors in Mouse Brain In vitro and in vivo studies have shown that abused solvents affect different neurotransmitter systems, including the GABAergic, glutamatergic, and opioidergic. The first purpose of this study was to determine in mice whether an acute exposure to 4,000 ppm toluene or 12,000 ppm 1,1,1-trichloroethane (TCE) modifies receptor binding levels to: (a) DAMGO, a mu-opioid receptor selective agonist; (b) MK-801, a noncompetitive selective NMDA-receptor antagonist; and (c) flunitrazepam, a benzodiazepine binding site selective agonist. In addition, in separate groups of animals, nociceptive effects of toluene alone or co-administered with morphine were evaluated in the hot-plate test. Mice were exposed to toluene or TCE in static exposure chambers for 30 min, and their brains were removed 24 h later for autoradiography. Acute toluene inhalation produced a significant decrease in mu-opioid receptor binding levels in cingulate and piriform cortices, caudate putamen, thalamus, amygdala, and periaqueductal gray, whereas TCE significantly decreased mu-opioid receptor levels, but only in thalamus and periaqueductal gray. Both toluene and TCE decreased benzodiazepine receptor binding levels in discrete brain areas, but had no effect on NMDA receptor levels. In the hot-plate test, a single toluene exposure counteracted morphine antinociceptive response when the solvent exposure time was immediately followed by morphine treatment, but not when morphine was administered 24, 48, 72, and 96 h later. However, co-administration of morphine and toluene 24, 48, 72, and 96 h after the single solvent exposure resulted in morphine-induced analgesia blockade. Present results suggest that mu-opioid receptors are an important molecular target for organic solvents, and that the inhalation of these compounds may affect the analgesic properties of opioids.

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

abused solvents
nmda
autoradiography
receptor binding
analgesia

inhalants
benzodiazepines
mu-opioid receptors
pain
hot plate


acoustic wavefield propagation using paraxial extrapolators Modeling by paraxial extrapolators is applicable to wave propagation problems in which most of the energy is traveling within a restricted angular cone about a principle axis of the problem. Frequency domain finite-difference solutions are readily generated by using this technique. Input models can be described either by specifying velocities or appropriate media parameters on a two or three dimensional grid of points. For heterogeneous models, transmission and reflection coefficients are determined at structural boundaries within the media. The direct forward scattered waves are modeled with a single pass of the extrapolator operator in the paraxial direction for each frequency. The first-order back scattered energy can then be modeled by extrapolation (in the opposite direction) of the reflected field determined on the first pass. Higher order scattering can be included by sweeping through the model with more passes. The chief advantages of the paraxial approach are 1) active storage is reduced by one dimension as compared to solutions which must track both up-going and down-going waves simultaneously, thus even realistic three dimensional problems can fit on today's computers, 2) the decomposition in frequency allows the technique to be implemented on highly parallel machines such the hypercube, 3) attenuation can be modeled as an arbitrary function of frequency, and 4) only a small number of frequencies are needed to produce movie-like time slices. By using this method a wide range of seismological problems can be addressed, including strong motion analysis of waves in three-dimensional basins, the modeling of VSP reflection data, and the analysis of whole earth problems such as scattering at the core-mantle boundary or the effect of tectonic boundaries on long-period wave propagation.

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

media
motion analysis
fit
order
grid
input
analysis
forward
direct
model
propagation
decomposition
method
parallel
storage
energy
data
hypercube
effect

point activation computation timing slice heterogeneity structure functional operability reflectance tracking core


Automation of IP qualification and IP exchange ? Current and future SOC designs will use IP cores as basic building blocks. These IP cores have to fulfill defined quality characteristics. Conformance to these characteristics has to be checked automatically, as the increase in complexity makes manual checks infeasible. This article introduces IP quality aspects and describes the IP qualification platform which is able to check quality characteristics of digital soft IP. In order to distribute qualified IP it is essential to introduce an IP exchange process. More than 80% time and resource savings are expected through automated IP delivery which is based on a general IP transfer format.

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

ip packaging
ip compliance
ip quality checking
ip delivery automation


developers ask reachability questions A reachability question is a search across feasible paths through a program for target statements matching search criteria. In three separate studies, we found that reachability questions are common and often time consuming to answer. In the first study, we observed 13 developers in the lab and found that half of the bugs developers inserted were associated with reachability questions. In the second study, 460 professional software developers reported asking questions that may be answered using reachability questions more than 9 times a day, and 82\% rated one or more as at least somewhat hard to answer. In the third study, we observed 17 developers in the field and found that 9 of the 10 longest activities were associated with reachability questions. These findings suggest that answering reachability questions is an important source of difficulty understanding large, complex codebases.

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

empirical study
developer questions
program comprehension
software maintenance
code navigation


Kinect range sensing: Structured-light versus Time-of-Flight Kinect ? This work compares Kinect Structured-Light with Kinect Time-of-Flight cameras. The results offer descriptions under which condition one is superior to the other. Solid insight of the devices is given to make decisions on their application. We propose a set of nine tests for comparing both Kinects, five of which are novel.

B O O O O O B 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


Oxidative Stress and Changes in ?- and ?-Tocopherol Levels during Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting We studied whether cardiopulmonary bypass (CPB) has any immediate impact on the initiation of antioxidative defenses in the body by measuring F2-isoprostanes and ?- and ?-tocopherol, respectively. 8-iso-PGF2? levels increased significantly within 3 minutes and until the end of CPB. ?-Tocopherol levels increased gradually at 20 min during CPB and continued until 6 hours after CPB. ?-Tocopherol levels followed a similar fashion at the end of CPB. 8-iso-PGF2? and tocopherol levels kept at basal level 12 and 24 hours post CPB. These findings suggest that an increased free radical-induced oxidative stress together with a gradual appearance of antioxidative defense system during and after CPB.

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

antioxidants isoprostanes ischemia-reperfusion humans


Undecidability in omega-regular languages In the infinite Post Correspondence Problem an instance (h, g) consists of two morphisms h and 9, and the problem is to determine whether or not there exists an infinite word a such that h(alpha) = g(alpha). In the general case this problem was shown to be undecidable by K. Ruohonen (1985). Recently, it was proved that the infinite PCP is undecidable already when the domain alphabet of the morphisms consists of at least 9 letters. Here we show that the problem is undecidable for instances where the morphisms have a domain of 6 letters, when we restrict to solutions of omega-languages of the form R-omega where R is a given regular language.

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

post correspondence problem
infinite word
regular language
undecidability


Revealing Skype traffic: When randomness plays with you Skype is a very popular VoIP software which has recently attracted the attention of the research community and network operators. Following a closed source and proprietary design, Skype protocols and algorithms are unknown. Moreover, strong encryption mechanisms are adopted by Skype, making it very difficult to even glimpse its presence from a traffic aggregate. In this paper, we propose a framework based on two complementary techniques to reveal Skype traffic in real time. The first approach, based on Pearson's Chi-Square test and agnostic to VoIP-related traffic characteristics, is used to detect Skype's fingerprint from the packet framing structure, exploiting the randomness introduced at the bit level by the encryption process. Conversely, the second approach is based on a stochastic characterization of Skype traffic in terms of packet arrival rate and packet length, which are used as features of a decision process based on Naive Bayesian Classifiers. In order to assess the effectiveness of the above techniques, we develop an off-line cross-checking heuristic based on deep-packet inspection and flow correlation, which is interesting per se. This heuristic allows us to quantify the amount of false negatives and false positives gathered by means of the two proposed approaches: results obtained from measurements in different networks show that the technique is very effective in identifying Skype traffic. While both Bayesian classifier and packet inspection techniques are commonly used, the idea of leveraging on randomness to reveal traffic is novel. We adopt this to identify Skype traffic, but the same methodology can be applied to other classification problems as well.

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

experimentation
measurement
traffic identification
passive measurement
naive bayesian classification
pearson chi-square test
deep packet inspection


Pre-whitening of data by covariance-weighted pre-processing A data pre-processing method is presented for multichannel 'spectra' from process spectro-photometers and other multichannel instruments. It may be seen as a 'pre-whitening' of the spectra, and serves to make the instrument 'blind' to certain interferants while retaining its analyte sensitivity. Thereby the instrument selectivity may be improved already prior to multivariate calibration. The result is a reduced need for process perturbation or sample spiking just to generate calibration samples that span the unwanted interferants. The method consists of shrinking the multidimensional data space of the spectra in the off-axis dimensions corresponding to the spectra of these interferants. A 'nuisance' covariance matrix Sigma is first constructed, based on prior knowledge or estimates of the major interferants' spectra, and the scaling matrix G = Sigma(-1/2) is defined. The preprocessing then consists of multiplying each input spectrum by G. When these scaled spectra are analysed in conventional chemometrics software by PCA, PCR, PLSR, curve resolution, etc., the modelling becomes simpler, because it does not have to account for variations in the unwanted interferants. The obtained model parameter may finally be descaled by G(-1) for graphical interpretation. The pre-processing method is illustrated by the use of prior spectroscopic knowledge to simplify the multivariate calibration of a fibre optical vis/NIR process analyser. The 48-dimensional spectral space, corresponding to the 48 instrument wavelength channels used, is shrunk in two of its dimensions, defined by the known spectra of two major interferants. Successful multivariate, calibration could then be obtained, based on a very small calibration sample set. Then the paper shows the pre-whitening used for reducing the number of bilinear PLSR components in multivariate calibration models. Nuisance covariance Sigma is either based on the prior knowledge of interferants' spectra or based on estimating the interferants' spectral subspace from the calibration data at hand. The relationship of the pre-processing to weighted and generalized least squares from classical statistics is outlined. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

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

covariance
weighted
preprocessing
prior knowledge
process
multivariate calibration


Classification based on dimension transposition for high dimension data Based on Jordan Curve Theorem, a universal classification method called hyper surface classification (HSC) has recently been proposed. Experimental results are exciting, which show that in three-dimensional space, this method works fairly well in both accuracy and efficiency even for large size data up to 10(7). However, designing a number of new classifiers is needed with the growing of feature dimension. To solve the problem, a kind of efficient dimension transposition method that is suitable for HSC and without losing any essential information is put forward in this paper. The dimension transposition method rearrange all of the numerals in the higher dimensional data to lower dimensional data without changing each numeral, but only change their position according to some orders. The experiment shows that the method can classify high dimension data with high accuracy.

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

dimension transposition
hsc
jordan curve theorem


preference-based selection of highly configurable web services A key challenge for dynamic Web service selection is that Web services are typically highly configurable and service requesters often have dynamic preferences on service configurations. Current approaches, such as WS-Agreement, describe Web services by enumerating the various possible service configurations, an inefficient approach when dealing with numerous service attributes with large value spaces. We model Web service configurations and associated prices and preferences more compactly using utility function policies, which also allows us to draw from multi-attribute decision theory methods to develop an algorithm for optimal service selection. In this paper, we present an OWL ontology for the specification of configurable Web service offers and requests, and a flexible and extensible framework for optimal service selection that combines declarative logic-based matching rules with optimization methods, such as linear programming. Assuming additive price/preference functions, experimental results indicate that our algorithm introduces an overhead of only around 2 sec.~compared to random service selection, while giving optimal results. The overhead, as percentage of total time, decreases as the number of offers and configurations increase.

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

preference-based service selection
customisation


network response analyzer system for interactive lectures in classroom or distance learning Knowing learner's property, consciousness, level of understanding in classroom is important to do fruitful and apprehensive lectures. However, in large classes or distance learning situations, face-to-face interactions between a teacher and students are limited. To catch students' learning status, we implemented a network based response analyzer system which collects students' responses in real time during distance learning or lectures in a large classroom. Each student uses a personal computer on his/her desktop and the questions from the teacher are sent and displayed on his/her screen. The student answers the questions by pushing an answer button such as Yes or No by clicking a mouse button. In addition, our response analyzer system stores teacher's questions and students' answers individually in a database. Thus, we can see relations between multiple questions and answers in history. Cross tabulation analyses are useful for teachers to know students' comprehension. We tested the system during classes in our university and discussed effective uses of the response analyzer system.

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


Spline shell element and plane-wave approximation for dynamic response of submerged structures This paper presents a performance study on the plane-wave approximation for dynamic responses of shell structures using spline finite elements, in particular, the interaction between submerged shell structures and the surrounding infinite fluid. The shell structures are discretized by using quadrilateral spline shell elements. The element is doubly curved. Each element consists of nine primary nodes and eight auxiliary nodes, and has a total of 63 degrees of freedom. The inter-element is C1 continuous. A non-reflecting boundary based on acoustic approximations is used to model the infinite fluid medium. Two examples are presented. Results demonstrated good performance.

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 B I I O O O O O O O O

spline shell element
infinite fluid medium

finite element method
fluidstructure interaction
plane-wave approximation
underwater shock wave


Separable linear discriminant analysis Linear discriminant analysis (LDA) is a popular technique for supervised dimension reduction. Due to the curse of dimensionality usually suffered by LDA when applied to 2D data, several two-dimensional LDA (2DLDA) methods have been proposed in recent years. Among which, the Y2DLDA method, introduced by Ye etal. (2005), is an important development. The idea is to utilize the underlying 2D data structure to seek for an optimal bilinear transformation. However, it is found that the proposed algorithm does not guarantee convergence. In this paper, we show that the utilization of a bilinear transformation for 2D data is equivalent to modeling the covariance matrix of 2D data as separable covariance matrix. Based on this result, we propose a novel 2DLDA method called separable LDA (SLDA). The main contributions of SLDA include (1) it provides interesting theoretical relationships between LDA and some 2DLDA methods; (2) SLDA provides a building block for mixture extension; (3) unlike Y2DLDA, a neatly analytical solution can be obtained as that in LDA. Empirical results show that our proposed SLDA achieves better recognition performance than Y2DLDA while being computationally much more efficient.

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


Tractor_PT: A traction prediction software for agricultural tractors Traction prediction modelling, a key factor in farm tractor design, has been driven by the need to find the answer to this question without having to build physical prototypes. A wide range of theories and their respective algorithms can be used in such predictions. The Tractors and Tillage research team at the Polytechnic University of Madrid, which engages, among others, in traction prediction for farm tractors, has developed a series of programs based on the cone index as the parameter representative of the terrain. With the software introduced in the present paper, written in Visual Basic, slip can be predicted in two- and four-wheel drive tractors using any one of four models. It includes databases for tractors, front tyres, rear tyres and working conditions (soil cone index and drawbar pull exerted). The results can be exported in spreadsheet format.

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

tractor performance
simulation
visual programming