Analysis of surface contamination on organosilicate low k dielectric materials It has been widely acknowledged that copper and low k dielectric materials are required in order to reduce RC delay and achieve high-speed operations in VLSI technology. Introduction of copper resulted in the adoption of damascene processing and via-first dual damascene architecture is one of the most popular integration schemes. However, photoresist poisoning is a major challenge and surface contamination of the via side-wall is considered to be the root cause. Wet cleaning has been found to be one of the processes which can lead to wafer surface contamination. In this paper, thermal desorption GCMS and ToF-SIMS are used to analyze the surfaces of an organosilicate low k material before and after wet cleaning. It has been found that cleaning of the low k wafer with the wet chemicals used in post-etch polymer stripping process and storage of cleaned wafers in a polymer wafer box will lead to amine contamination on the low k surface, probably via airborne molecular contamination. The amount of amine contamination depends on the wet chemicals used, wafer patterning and the wafer storage conditions. The effect of amine contamination on photoresist poisoning is also discussed.

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

surface contamination
photoresist poisoning


Asymmetries in vowel perception, in the context of the DispersionFocalisation Theory In a recent paper in this journal, Polka and Bohn [Polka, L., Bohn, O.-S., 2003. Asymmetries in vowel perception. Speech Communication 41, 221231] display a robust asymmetry effect in vowel discrimination, present in infants as well as adults. They interpret this effect as a preference for peripheral vowels, providing an anchor for comparison. We discuss their data in the framework of the DispersionFocalisation Theory of vowel systems. We show that focalisation, that is the convergence between two consecutive formants in a vowel spectrum, is likely to provide the ground for anchor vowels, by increasing their perceptual salience. This enables to explain why [y] is an anchor vowel, as well as [i], [a] or [u]. Furthermore, we relate the asymmetry data to an old experiment we had done on the discrimination of focal vs. non-focal vowels. Altogether, it appears that focal vowels, more salient in perception, provide both a stable percept and a reference for comparison and categorisation.

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

vowel discrimination
peripheral vowels
focalisation
salience
anchor


another view of software (panel session) Before we can assess the roles and values of AI and the tools of logic in the domain of software we must be sure that we appreciate the nature of this domain. Unfortunately there is a great deal of truth to the statement software is to the computer as life is to the planet. Thus we know that there are many kinds of software created in many kinds of ways and serving myriad purposes. We can appreciate some of the key issues of life by examining the human being but not, in a completely satisfactory way, by examining his tools. his tools. To understand software we must go beyond the techniques and methodologies we have so carefully and painfully crafted, e.g., high level languages, structured programming, data structures and types, semaphores, functional programming, etc. Adding a few more tools will not change things very much and will probably not tell us much about why software is the way it is. Our dissatisfaction with software surfaced with operating systems and their offspring. Why? I think it was because they were created to provide an open set of services from a pool of loosely cooperating functions. Furthermore the set of services and the pool of functions would not tolerate a bound in number, intricacy of communication, and efficiency of computer use. I believe that the word software obscures the issues that dominate our concerns and I choose the word organithm to identify that class of programs we study in software engineering. Operating systems are the archetype organithms. Paraphrasing Bernal, an organithm is a partial, continuous, progressive, multiform, and conditionally interactive realization of the potentiality of human thought expressed as computer program. Thought, being what it is, an organithm is a large collection of other perhaps more limiting programs held together by useful traffic patterns. While we may say that some of the parts are perfect for their purpose, the collection is never more than adequate and thus always in a state of evolution. Supporting this evolution is the major goal of software engineering. Put another way, the dynamics of organithm development set the locus of the concerns of software engineering. Organithms model mental abstractions. As models they are approximations and never have enough state to serve as uniform approximants. Mental abstractions thrive on deduction and induction to increase their set of accessible states and sooner or later, like the interpolants they are, they turn sour and must change, often in unanticipated ways, in order to remain of use. So it is with the organithms that model them: Organithms are not maintained, they are reared. Like living matter they are continual consumers of energy and continual producers of waste. The creation of an organithm implies the support and act of husbandry. Thus research in the processes of organithm husbandry is, and has been, a vital concern of software engineering. Since organithms compete in their own biospherethe computerimprovement in performance is eternally sought and, as a result, most of an organithm's state is concerned with the management of its own internals: As an organithm develops, an ever increasing concern of its logic is its own internal management and significantly, a smaller fraction of its logic is devoted to serving its external utility. Organithms tend to take advantage of their own purposes: As they develop, the internal functions of an organithm tend to maximize their use of the external functions the organithm exists to supply-this has been called closing the loop. Often these internal uses intensify traffic to such a degree that organithms are created to manage the use of the external functions, e.g., a mail system must be capable of supporting organithms that generate and read mail. Every external purpose of an organithm can be replaced by an organithmic surrogate. Since organithms are models it takes little modification for them to model unanticipated abstractions. In the course of their development organithms suggest abstractions that are both valuable and that they can support. Organithms fuel the expansion of abstract modeling as a technological activity. Unlike life, in which reproduction dominates mutation, our organithms are so simple that mutation still dominates reproduction, but this will change. A major role of AI and logic is to help in the creation of organithms that increasingly extricate us from direct involvement in the internal growth of organithms. The major issue of software engineering environments is not how to ease our task of programming systems but how to accelerate the rate at which improvement in internal function can be obtained without unduly jeopardizing the external functions of an organithm and with maximizing the use of organithms to perform reorganization. Insofar as AI and logic support autonomy in these activities of development and response will they be of value in the software enterprise.

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

use
enterprise
evolution
performance
data structures
direct
response
read
change
program
research
environments
functional
types
support
utility
class
tools
communication
help
value
task
order
autonomy
efficiency
human
model
traffic
software engineering
management
role
software
semaphores
systems
values
energy
mutation
logic
roles

activation
intern
access
interaction
abstraction
language
dynamic
process
developer
computation
collect
service
functional programming
pattern
structure
methodology
operating system
continuation
inductance
computer programming
interpolation


Crop type mapping using spectraltemporal profiles and phenological information Spatially explicit multi-year crop information is required for many environmental applications. The study presented here proposes a hierarchical classification approach for per-plot crop type identification that is based on spectraltemporal profiles and accounts for deviations from the average growth stage timings by incorporating agro-meteorological information in the classification process. It is based on the fact that each crop type has a distinct seasonal spectral behavior and that the weather may accelerate or delay crop development. The classification approach was applied to map 12 crop types in a 14,000km2 catchment area in Northeast Germany for several consecutive years. An accuracy assessment was performed and compared to those of a maximum likelihood classification. The 7.1% lower overall classification accuracy of the spectraltemporal profiles approach may be justified by its independence of ground truth data. The results suggest that the number and timing of image acquisition is crucial to distinguish crop types. The increasing availability of optical imagery offering a high temporal coverage and a spatial resolution suitable for per-plot crop type mapping will facilitate the continuous refining of the spectraltemporal profiles for common crop types and different agro-regions and is expected to improve the classification accuracy of crop type maps using these profiles.

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

ndvi temporal profiles
multi-temporal
phenological correction
agro-meteorological data


Endogenous formation of political parties We consider a population of individuals characterized by their ideal points in the space of political programs. Each individual joins some political party, and the party program is determined according to a certain rule depending on the ideal points of its members. The utility function of any individual increases in the size of his party, and decreases as the distance between the party program and his ideal point increases. In contrast to the previous literature on endogenous formation of coalitions we, examine a model without side payments, do not fix the number of parties and consider a large (formally infinite) population. The latter assumption permits us to consider continuous distributions of individual ideal points and facilitates the formal analysis. We use game-theoretic solution concepts and study existence, uniqueness and computation problems for Nash equilibria. We also examine coalitional equilibria, that is such party structures where no new party can provide greater utilities for all its members. We find out the properties, in particular, the number of different coalitional equilibria and the number of parties at each equilibrium, depending on parameters of the individual utility function. (C) 2008 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 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

nash equilibrium
weak coalitional equilibrium


Computational modular model library of gas turbine Designing and developing new aircraft engine is time-consuming and expensive. Computational simulation is a promising means for alleviating this cost, but constructing flexible simulation software capable of evaluation of integrated aircraft engine system architectures is hard work. This paper addresses the design of a toola generic modular-modeled library of air gas turbine, this library is based on object-oriented technology and hierarchical decomposition and provides a flexible component-based representation for defining, modifying, and simulating the aircraft gas turbine system, subsystem and components. It enables users to customize and extend the framework to add new functionality or adapt the simulation behavior as required, and it allows new models to be composed programmatically or graphically to form more complex models. The model library can be used in steady-state and transient analysis of the aero-engine. It is also a user-friendly, accurate, fast PCbased and easily reusable simulating tool. The advanced object-oriented simulation language Modelica is used to construct this library. Modelica provides a powerful tool to design the library. All of the work described in this paper is developed based upon Dymola/Modelica.

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

object-oriented
system-level simulation
dymola/modelica


A fast method for calculating reliable event supports in tree reconciliations via Pareto optimality Given a gene and a species tree, reconciliation methods attempt to retrieve the macro-evolutionary events that best explain the discrepancies between the two tree topologies. The DTL parsimonious approach searches for a most parsimonious reconciliation between a gene tree and a (dated) species tree, considering four possible macro-evolutionary events (speciation, duplication, transfer, and loss) with specific costs. Unfortunately, many events are erroneously predicted due to errors in the input trees, inappropriate input cost values or because of the existence of several equally parsimonious scenarios. It is thus crucial to provide a measure of the reliability for predicted events. It has been recently proposed that the reliability of an event can be estimated via its frequency in the set of most parsimonious reconciliations obtained using a variety of reasonable input cost vectors. To compute such a support, a straightforward but time-consuming approach is to generate the costs slightly departing from the original ones, independently compute the set of all most parsimonious reconciliations for each vector, and combine these sets a posteriori. Another proposed approach uses Pareto-optimality to partition cost values into regions which induce reconciliations with the same number of DTL events. The support of an event is then defined as its frequency in the set of regions. However, often, the number of regions is not large enough to provide reliable supports.

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


Hydraulic manipulator design, analysis, and control at Oak Ridge National Laboratory In the early developmental stages of robotics, hydraulics played an important role. Many of the early high-payload capacity manipulators were actuated by hydraulic cylinders and hydraulic rotary actuators. As the power-to-weight ratio of electric motors increased, they eventually came to be the preferred form of actuation for robotic manipulators because of the relative ease of operation, control, and maintenance for general cleanliness. Recently, however, task requirements have dictated that manipulator payload capacity increase to accommodate greater payloads, greater manipulator length, and larger environmental interaction forces. In order to successfully design, build, and deploy a new hydraulic manipulator (or subsystem), sophisticated modeling. analysis, and control experiments are usually needed. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has a history of projects that incorporate hydraulics technology. including mobile robots, teleoperated manipulators, and full-scale construction equipment. The purpose of this article is to describe the hydraulic manipulator research capabilities at ORNL Included are experimental results from ORNL's teleoperated human-amplifier and a custom-designed hydraulic manipulator.

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


Modified wavelet neural network in function approximation and its application in prediction of time-series pollution data Properly designing a wavelet neural network (WNN) is crucial for achieving the optimal generalization performance. In this paper, in order to improve the predictive capability of WNNs, the types of activation functions used in the hidden layer of the WNN were varied. The modified WNNs were then applied in approximating a benchmark piecewise function. Subsequently, performance comparisons with other developed methods in studying the same benchmark function were made. An assessment analysis showed that this proposed approach outperformed the rest. The efficiency of the modified WNNs was explored through a real-world application problem-specifically, the prediction of time-series pollution data at Texas of United States. The comparative experimental results showed that integrating different wavelet families into the hidden layer of WNNs leads to superior performance.

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

wavelet neural network
time-series analysis


Investigation of the Effect of Obliquely Incident Plane Wave on a Human Head at 900 and 1800 MHz This article investigates file effect of obliquely incident plane wave on a multilayered structure representing a simplified model of the human head at a frequency of 900 id 1800 MHz. Exact formulas for the electric field within the structure are derived. The maximum power dissipation and its dependence on the frequency and dielectric parameters are presented. Using these results. the local specific absorption rate is calculated, plotted, and compared with international levels. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals. Inc Int J RF and Microwave CAE 20 133-140 2010

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

component
sar
dielectric properties
reflection coefficient
head model


Combination of TOPSIS and AHP in load shedding scheme for large pulp mill electrical system In the era of technology, a variety of powerful equipments are design to satisfy the demand of industry sector. However, these equipments need a stable and reliable electrical supply in order for the whole system to flow smoothly. The overview of this paper is mainly about the load shedding application toward a large pulp mill electrical system using the multi-decision making methods which are the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods. Whenever there are shortages of electrical supply, the load shedding method shall be applied in order to recover and stabilize the system. Load shedding is a module that shed the higher possible load in the system to overcome the voltage shortage in the system. The objective of this paper is to extract the possible unnecessary load and determine the ranking of the load according to their importance level. The proposed methods are to test on the plant load shedding table from a paper pulp mill industry with 25 load points for practical applications.

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

combination of topsis and analytical hierarchy process (ahp)


Flexibility-based large increment method for analysis of elasticperfectly plastic beam structures This paper presents the derivation and implementation of a flexibility-based large increment method (LIM) for solving nonlinear structural problems. The finite element displacement and force approaches have been developed for solving nonlinear structural problem. The displacement-based finite element method requires a step-by-step approach for material nonlinear analysis that depends on flow theory. Furthermore, significant mesh refinement is often required in plastic zones. The main advantage of the LIM is that it separates the usage of the three-system equation into two stages, global linear stage and local nonlinear stage. Here LIM formulations are developed for two-dimensional beam elements controlled by an elasticfully plastic material model. These new formulations are demonstrated using simple nonlinear problems and the results are compared to those obtained from the displacement method. The examples highlight the accuracy and the computational efficiency of the flexibility-based large increment method for this class of structural problems.

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

large increment method (lim)
step-by-step
generalized inverse
fully-plastic
beam element


Dislocation dynamics - Analytical description of the interaction force between dipolar loops The interaction between dislocation dipolar loops plays an important role in the computation of the dislocation dynamics. The analytical form of the interaction force between two loops derived in the present paper from Kroupa's formula of the stress field generated by a single dipolar loop allows for faster computation.

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

dislocation dynamics
interaction force between dipolar loops


Extracting and visualizing physiological parameters using dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging of the breast An analysis procedure is presented that enables the acquisition and visualization of physiologically relevant parameters using dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging. The first stage of the process involves the use of a signal model that relates the measured magnetic resonance signal to the contrast agent concentration. Since the model requires knowledge of the longitudinal relaxation time T1, a novel optimization scheme is presented which ensures a reliable measurement. Pharmacokinetic modelling of the observed contrast agent uptake is then performed to obtain physiological parameters relating to microvessel leakage permeability and volume fraction and the assumptions made in the derivation of these parameters are discussed. A simple colour representation is utilized that enables the relevant physiological information to be conveyed to the clinician in a visually efficient and meaningful manner. A second representation, based on vector maps, is also devised and it is demonstrated how this can be used for malignant tumour segmentation. Finally, the procedure is applied to 14 pre- and post-chemotherapy breast cases to demonstrate the clinical value of the technique. In particular, the apparent improved representation of tissue vascularity when compared to conventional methods and the implications for this in treatment assessment are discussed.

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

magnetic resonance imaging
pharmacokinetic modelling


AzimMod: Method to honor channel directionality when building 3-D petrophysical models Object-based (or Boolean) methods are used to create channels, bars, splays, or other features to model the distribution of facies in a reservoir. Geologic objects and their facies subsequently are used as templates to control the distribution of petrophysical and lithologic properties. Channels do not flow in a single direction or azimuth, but may meander or have different azimuths, so properties within them should not be aligned in a single direction or azimuth. Hence, standard geostatistical modeling methods, which assume a single azimuth, are not appropriate. This paper describes a process to assign petrophysical properties with continuity aligned parallel to the orientation of channels or bodies, regardless of their varying azimuths. The general process (1) transforms the coordinate system to one in which a channel is straight and can be modeled with geostatistical methods using a constant azimuth, (2) relates the geostatistical calculations to objects and facies, and (3) returns the petrophysical properties to the original, variable-azimuth coordinate system.

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

transformation of coordinates
geostatistics


Realistic modeling of complex oxide materials Since electronic and magnetic properties of many transition-metal oxides can be efficiently controlled by external factors such as the temperature, pressure, electric or magnetic field, they are regarded as promising materials for various applications. From the viewpoint of the electronic structure, these phenomena are frequently related to the behavior of a small group of states located near the Fermi level. The basic idea of this project is to construct a model for the low-energy states, derive all the parameters rigorously on the basis of density functional theory (DFT), and to study this model by modern techniques. After a brief review of the method, the abilities of this approach will be illustrated on a number of examples, including multiferroic manganites and spin-orbital-lattice coupled phenomena in RVO3 (where R is the three-valent element).

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

first-principles calculations
effective models
transition-metal oxides


A Multimodel Approach for Complex Systems Modeling based on Classification Algorithms In this paper, a new multimodel approach for complex systems modeling based on classification algorithms is presented. It requires firstly the determination of the model-base. For this, the number of models is selected via a neural network and a rival penalized competitive learning (RPCL), and the operating clusters are identified by using the fuzzy K-means algorithm. The obtained results are then exploited for the parametric identification of the models. The second step consists in validating the proposed model-base by using the adequate method of validity computation. Two examples are presented in this paper which show the efficiency of the proposed approach.

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

complex systems
multimodel
classification


Boosting by weighting critical and erroneous samples ? Real Adaboost is a well-known and good performance boosting method used to build machine ensembles for classification. Considering that its emphasis function can be decomposed in two factors that pay separated attention to sample errors and to their proximity to the classification border, a generalized emphasis function that combines both components by means of a selectable parameter, ? ? , is presented. Experiments show that simple methods of selecting ? ? frequently offer better performance and smaller ensembles.

B O O O O O O O B I 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


Graph-based criteria for spectrum-aware clustering in cognitive radio networks Cognitive radios (CRs) can exploit vacancies in licensed frequency bands to self-organize in opportunistic spectrum networks. Such networks, henceforth referred to as cognitive radio networks (CRNs), operate over a dynamic bandwidth in both time and space. This inherently leads to the partition of the network into clusters depending on the spatial variation of the primary radio network (PRN) activity. In this article, we analytically evaluate the performance of a new class of clustering criteria designed for CRNs, which explicitly take into account the spatial variations of spectrum opportunities. We jointly represent the network topology and spectrum availability using bipartite graphs. This representation reduces the problem of spectrum-aware cluster formation to a biclique construction problem. We investigate several criteria for constructing clusters for the CRN environment, and characterize their performance under different spectrum sensing and PR activity models. In particular, we evaluate the expected cluster size and number of common idle channels within each cluster, as a function of the spectrum and topology variability. We verify our analytical results via extensive simulations.

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

cognitive radio networks
clustering
bipartite graphs

graph theory
biclique graphs
opportunistic access
open spectrum


Optimizing bandwidth density in free space optical interconnects under the use of error correcting codes The bandwidth density of error corrected free space optical interconnects is considered in this article. Analyses for the bandwidth density with and without error correcting codes are presented and compared. It is shown that the bandwidth density can be improved using error correcting codes with code rate as a design parameter. Moreover, it is shown that the fill factor of the detector array can be used as a parameter to further improve the bandwidth density for the coded system. Numerical results on the effect of using the code rate and fill factor to optimize the bandwidth density are presented and discussed.

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

error correcting codes
free space optical interconnects
bandwidth density


A lossless copyright authentication scheme based on BesselFourier moment and extreme learning machine in curvature-feature domain To overcome some drawbacks existing in current zero-watermarking methods, a lossless copyright authentication scheme is proposed in this paper. This scheme designs a multiple zero-watermarking algorithm based on BesselFourier moment and extreme learning machine (ELM) in curvature-feature domain, develops a method for image feature enhancement and noise suppression in curvature-feature domain, and presents a simple algorithm which uses BesselFourier moment phase to estimate the rotation angle of the rotation-attacked image. The experimental results, involving five types of images, indicate the proposed scheme has better overall performance compared to other five current methods, especially in the aspects of resisting high ratio cropping and large angle rotation attacks. Finally, some related factors including phase and magnitude components, feature vector dimension and ELM optimization are considered in the algorithm performance evaluation.

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

copyright authentication
besselfourier moment

multiple zero-watermarking
extreme learning machine (elm)
curvature feature


pathological voice discrimination based on entropy measurements Digital signal processing techniques have been used to analyze vocal disorders caused by laryngeal pathologies. Laryngoscopical exams commonly used for detection of these diseases are invasive methods that cause discomfort to the patients. Because of its noninvasive nature, acoustical analysis of the temporal and spectral features of the voice signal can be used as an auxiliary technique in laringoscopical exams. This analysis may be applied for detection of vocal diseases and the evaluation of the vocal quality of patients subjected to surgical processes or medical treatments in the vocal folds. This work aims at investigating the behavior of entropy measures in disordered voices influenced by the presence of pathologies in the vocal folds. For this purpose, the Shannon entropy and the relative entropy are implemented, and their behavior for normal and pathological voices affected by vocal fold edemas is observed. The measurement of the entropy efficiency in discriminating between normal and pathological voices is obtained.

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

speech processing
vocal fold pathologies


Combining global, regional and contextual features for automatic image annotation This paper presents a novel approach to automatic image annotation which combines global, regional, and contextual features by an extended cross-media relevance model. Unlike typical image annotation methods which use either global or regional features exclusively, as well as neglect the textual context information among the annotated words, the proposed approach incorporates the three kinds of information which are helpful to describe image semantics to annotate images by estimating their joint probability. Specifically, we describe the global features as a distribution vector of visual topics and model the textual context as a multinomial distribution. The global features provide the global distribution of visual topics over an image, while the textual context relaxes the assumption of mutual independence among annotated words which is commonly adopted in most existing methods. Both the global features and textual context are learned by a probability latent semantic analysis approach from the training data. The experiments over 5k 5 k Corel images have shown that combining these three kinds of information is beneficial in image annotation.

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

textual context
latent semantic analysis
image annotation

global and regional features
cross media relevance model


Computational rim illumination of dynamic subjects using aerial robots We demonstrate the first approach for studio quality lighting using aerial robots. Our lighting robot automatically positions itself to produce optimal rim lighting. Our robot adapts to changes in subject position, subject posture and camera position. We validate our approach with several indoor experiments. Using an open-loop outdoor setup, we discuss design issues and ergonomic issues of robotic lighting.

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


Providing QoS in bluetooth Bluetooth polling, also referred to as Bluetooth MAC scheduling or intra-piconet scheduling, is the mechanism that schedules the traffic between the participants in a Bluetooth network. Hence. this mechanism is highly determining with respect to the delay packets experience in a Bluetooth network. In this paper, we present a polling mechanism that provides delay guarantees in an efficient manner, and we evaluate this polling mechanism by means of simulation. It is shown that this polling mechanism is able to provide delay guarantees while saving as much as possible resources, which can be used for transmission of best effort traffic or for retransmissions.

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

intra-piconet scheduling
predictive fair poller


Acceptance of competency-based workplace e-learning systems: Effects of individual and peer learning support Current endeavors to integrate competency-based learning approaches with e-learning systems designed for delivery of training to adult learners in the workplace are growing. However, academic efforts in examining learners' perceptions of, and reactions toward, this technology-delivered pedagogical innovation are limited. Drawing together perspectives from the literature on training and instructional design and technology acceptance, this research proposed a conceptual model to examine the influences of perceived individual and social learning support on employees' acceptance of competency-based e-learning systems. Structural equation modeling and multi-group structural equation modeling techniques were applied to sample data collected from work settings in Mainland China. The results show the positive effects of perceived individual learning support and perceived support for promoting a norm of cooperation on employees' intention to use the competency-based e-learning system. It was also found that perceived support for enhancing social ties had a negative effect on employees' behavioral intention. The gender, age, prior experience, and work experience differences in the main effects were also investigated. Besides, qualitative data collected via semi-structured in-depth interview provide complementary evidence to the findings. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

adult learning
evaluation of cal systems
pedagogical issues
distance education and telelearning
cooperative/collaborative learning


Distributed Lifetime-Maximized Target Coverage Game Wireless sensor nodes are usually densely deployed to completely cover (monitor) a set of targets. Consequently, redundant sensor nodes that are not currently needed in the covering task can be powered off to conserve energy. These sensors can take over the covering task later to prolong network lifetime. The coverage problem, concerns picking up a set of working sensors that collectively meet the coverage requirements. The problem is complicated by the possibility that targets may have different coverage requirements while sensor nodes may have different amounts of energy. This article proposes a game-theoretic approach to the coverage problem, where each sensor autonomously decides its state with a simple rule based on local information. We give rigorous proofs to show stability, correctness, and efficiency of the proposed game. Implementation variants of the game consider specific issues, such as game convergence time and different amounts of sensor energy. Simulation results show significant improvement in network lifetime by the proposed approach when compared with representative alternatives.

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

design
algorithms
theory
energy management
game theory
network protocols
wireless sensor networks


An iterative algorithm for myocardial activation time imaging An iterative algorithm based on a general regularization scheme for nonlinear ill-posed problems in Hilbert scales (method A) is applied to the magnetocardiographic inverse problem imaging the surface myocardial activation time map. This approach is compared to an algorithm using an optimization routine for nonlinear ill-posed problems based on Tikhonov's approach of second order (method B). Method A showed good computational performance and the scheme for determining the proper regularization parameter ? was found to be easier than in case of method B. The formulation is applied to magnetocardiographic recordings from a patient suffering from idiopathic ventricular tachycardia in which a sinus rhythm sequence was followed by a ventricular extrasystolic beat.

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

inverse problem
imaging
activation time map


Unmixing Dynamic Fluorescence Diffuse Optical Tomography Images With Independent Component Analysis Dynamic fluorescence diffuse optical tomography (D-FDOT) is important for drug delivery research. However, the low spatial resolution of FDOT and the complex kinetics of drug limit the ability of D-FDOT in resolving metabolic processes of drug throughout whole body of small animals. In this paper, we propose an independent component analysis (ICA)-based method to perform D-FDOT studies. When applied to D-FDOT images, ICA not only generates a set of independent components (ICs) which can illustrate functional structures with different kinetic behaviors, but also provides a set of associated time courses (TCs) which can represent normalized time courses of drug in corresponding functional structures. Further, the drug concentration in specific functional structure at different time points can be recovered by an inverse ICA transformation. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm in the study of drug kinetics at whole-body level, simulation study and phantom experiment are both performed on a full-angle FDOT imaging system with line-shaped excitation pattern. In simulation study, the nanoparticle delivery of indocynaine green (ICG) throughout whole body of a digital mouse is simulated and imaged. In phantom experiment, four tubes containing different ICG concentrations are imaged and used to imitate the uptake and excretion of ICG in organs. The results suggest that we can not only illustrate ICG distributions in different functional structures, but also recover ICG concentrations in specific functional structure at different time points, when ICA is applied to D-FDOT images.

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

fluorescence
kinetics
optical tomography


A Bayesian variable selection procedure to rank overlapping gene sets Genome-wide expression profiling using microarrays or sequence-based technologies allows us to identify genes and genetic pathways whose expression patterns influence complex traits. Different methods to prioritize gene sets, such as the genes in a given molecular pathway, have been described. In many cases, these methods test one gene set at a time, and therefore do not consider overlaps among the pathways. Here, we present a Bayesian variable selection method to prioritize gene sets that overcomes this limitation by considering all gene sets simultaneously. We applied Bayesian variable selection to differential expression to prioritize the molecular and genetic pathways involved in the responses to Escherichia coli infection in Danish Holstein cows.

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


An institutional theory perspective on e-HRMs strategic potential in MNC subsidiaries E-HRM practices are influenced by a number of local institutional pressures. Few empirical studies take into account the institutional factors. Chinese legislation, mindset, language, guanxi and Confucian values influence e-HRM. Findings present how institutional factors create positive and negative consequences. Some responses to pressures enabled the transposition of a new strategic IS practices.

O B I 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


Unsupervised learning algorithm for time series using bivariate AR(1) model Traditional time series clustering and classification algorithms deal only with univariate time series data. Unsupervised learning algorithm for bivariate time series has been developed. The initial clusters are found using K-means algorithm. The model parameters are estimated using the EM algorithm. Bivariate unsupervised learning algorithm gives better clustering results than univariate algorithms.

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


toward better weighting of anchors Okapi BM25 scoring of anchor text surrogate documents has been shown to facilitate effective ranking in navigational search tasks over web data. We hypothesize that even better ranking can be achieved in certain important cases, particularly when anchor scores must be fused with content scores, by avoiding length normalisation and by reducing the attentuation of scores associated with high tf . Preliminary results are presented.

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

contention
enterprise search
documentation
web search
effect
association
anchor text


Collective intelligence in law enforcement The WikiCrimes system Collaboration is on the rise, primordially leveraged by the Web 2.0 in which the difference between information producer and consumer decreases significantly. In this paper we describe WikiCrimes, an example of a Web 2.0 application that offers a collaborative environment based on the use and direct manipulation of maps, in order to register and research criminal events. WikiCrimes is driven by three goals: (i) to give more transparency and publicity to criminal information, (ii) to provide means for citizen prevention, and (iii) to reduce the phenomenon of under-reporting (crimes that are not notified to authorities). In the paper we pay particular attention to the fact that in this context, finding the equilibrium between peoples participation and information credibility is crucial. Anonymous mass collaboration is the easiest way to receive information; however, the credibility of the received information is depreciated, because the source of information is unknown. We particularly concentrate on the ways we have created to keep the participation vs. reliability of information trade-off at good level. The reputation model is the main component created with this purpose. The experiences and the obstacles we are facing in the implementation of the project are the subjects of discussion and analyses.

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


fundamental techniques for order optimization Decision support applications are growing in popularity as more business data is kept on-line. Such applications typically include complex SQL queries that can test a query optimizer's ability to produce an efficient access plan. Many access plan strategies exploit the physical ordering of data provided by indexes or sorting. Sorting is an expensive operation, however. Therefore, it is imperative that sorting is optimized in some way or avoided all together. Toward that goal, this paper describes novel optimization techniques for pushing down sorts in joins, minimizing the number of sorting columns, and detecting when sorting can be avoided because of predicates, keys, or indexes. A set of fundamental operations is described that provide the foundation for implementing such techniques. The operations exploit data properties that arise from predicate application, uniqueness, and functional dependencies. These operations and techniques have been implemented in IBM's DB2/CS.

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

sorting
order
applications
strategies
plan
test
exploit
sql
data
queries
physical
paper
access
decision support
business

indexing
efficiency
optimality
operability
complexity
functional dependency
query optimization


Quantification of trabecular bone microdamage using the virtual internal bond model and the individual trabeculae segmentation technique Trabecular bone microdamage significantly influences the skeletal integrity and bone remodelling process. In this paper a novel constitutive model, called the virtual internal bond model (VIB), was adopted for simulating the damage behaviour of bone tissue. A unique 3D image analysis technique, named individual trabeculae segmentation, was used to analyse the effects of microarchitectures on the damage behaviours of trabecular bone. We demonstrated that the process of initiation and accumulation of microdamage in trabecular bone samples can be captured by the VIB-embedded finite-element method simulation without a separate fracture criterion. Our simulation results showed that the microdamage can occur at as early as about 0.2-0.4% apparent strain, and a large volume of microdamage was accumulated around the apparent yield strain. In addition we found that the plate-like trabeculae, especially the longitudinal ones, take crucial roles in the microdamage behaviours of trabecular bone.

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

trabecular bone
microdamage
virtual internal bond model
individual trabeculae segmentation


Mechanism of Exocrine Pancreatic Insufficiency in Streptozotocin-Induced Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a major health problem at present affecting about 180 million people worldwide. DM is associated with many metabolic abnormalities in the body including the indigestion of carbohydrates leading to malnutrition and weight loss. In this article we investigate the cellular and molecular mechanisms of exocrine pancreatic insufficiency in streptozotocin (STZ, 60 mg kg?1, i.p.)-induced DM in male rats compared to healthy age-matched controls. Either electrical field stimulation (EFS) or cholecystokinin octapeptide (CCK-8, 10?8 M) can elicit large and significant (P < 0.05) increases in amylase output from pancreatic segments compared to basal secretion. Insulin (10?6 M) alone has no significant effect on amylase output compared to basal but it enhanced the secretory responses to either EFS or CCK-8. When rats were rendered diabetic with STZ, either EFS or CCK-8-evoked amylase output was significantly (P < 0.01) decreased compared to the responses obtained with either EFS or CCK-8 alone in healthy age-matched control pancreas. In addition, CCK-8 can elicit large dose-dependent release of amylase in age-matched control and diabetic acinar cells with significantly (P < 0.05) reduced responses in diabetic acinar cells. CCK-8 evoked a large rapid increase in peak cytosolic free calcium concentration ([Ca2+]c) followed by a decrease to a plateau phase in age-matched control fura-2-loaded pancreatic acinar cells. These responses were significantly (P < 0.05) decreased in STZ-induced diabetic acinar cells. In the presence of 10?6 M insulin, CCK-8 evoked a much larger increase in the Ca2+ transient compared to the response obtained with CCK-8 alone. These effects were significantly (P < 0.01) inhibited in STZ-induced diabetic acinar cells. Similarly, in zero extracellular Ca2+[Ca2+]?, the CCK-8-evoked [Ca2+]c was significantly (P < 0.05) reduced in both diabetic and age-matched control acinar cells, but with more pronounced reduction in diabetic acinar cells. CCKA receptor mRNA levels remained unchanged in diabetic rat acinar cells compared to age-matched healthy control. In contrast, amylase mRNA was significantly (P < 0.05) reduced in diabetic acinar cells compared to control. The results indicate that reduced amylase secretion in response to either EFS or CCK-8 in the diabetic pancreas may be due to reduced [Ca2+]c and gene expression for amylase and not to the gene expression of CCKA receptor in pancreatic acinar cells

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

cholecystokinin
amylase
insulin
calcium
gene expression
diabetes


Stochastic PDEs: convergence to the continuum? We examine the convergence properties of stochastic PDEs discretized using finite differences. In one space dimension, where the continuum solution is a stochastic process whose values are continuous functions in space, the transfer integral allows exact calculation of steady state properties, including the corrections due to finite grid spacing. The method applies to arbitrarily nonlinear PDEs, provided they have a stationary density. In two or more space dimensions, however, solution configurations are not continuous functions but only distributions. The stochastic PDE can still be solved on a finite grid of points in space, but the mean squared value at a grid point does not approach a finite limit as the grid spacing is decreased. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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

stochastic pdes
grid spacing
stationary density
transfer integral


a wireless test bed for mobile 802.11 and beyond In this paper, we present our approach of establishing a wireless test bed as a part of our collaborations with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) for studying the performance of current and upcoming wireless technologies in a mobile railroad environment. The focus is on studying the impact of mobility on the wireless system throughput for moving trains with different velocities. We describe details of our test bed design including selection of the location, equipment as well as system topology and performance evaluations approach. We also present and discuss test results obtained from our test bed.

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

802.16
ieee 802.11b performance
wireless in railroads


Computer-enriched instruction (CEI) is better for preview material instead of review material: An example of a biostatistics chapter, the central limit theorem This study examines the timing using computer-enriched instruction (CEI), before or after a traditional lecture to determine cross-over effect. period effect, and learning effect arising from sequencing of instruction. A 2 x 2 cross-over design was used with CEI to teach central limit theorem (CLT) Two sequences of graduate students in nursing participated in this study Sequence A was given the CEI and handout first, followed by a traditional lecture and handout. Sequence 13 was given a lecture and handout first, followed by the CEI and handout. A pre-test and posttests (posttest1 after the first presentation and posttest2 after the second presentation) were given to measure instructional outcomes All tests were 10 multiple choice questions with four options and only one option was the correct answer No significant difference in scores was seen in posttest1 between students in sequence A (6 1 +/- 2 5) and B (6 5 +/- 2.1) (p = 0.52 by unpaired t-test, p = 080 after adjusted for pre-test score by ANCOVA). No significant carryover effect was seen (p = 0.66). A significant period effect was observed, in which 7.7 for period 2 was greater than 6.3 for period 1. the difference of 1.4 with 95% Cl between 08 and 2.0, p <0.0001. When the course material was taught twice, traditional lecture had a higher average score (7 3) than CEI (6.6) and the difference between two teaching methods was 0.7 with 95% Cl between 0.1 and 1.3, p = 0 02) Sequence A's increase (2.1) represented a preview effect of CEI and sequence B's increase (0 8) represented a review effect of CEI. The study time needed for the first presentation was the same for the two teaching methods (55 min): the study time needed for the first presentation was always longer than that of the second presentation, regardless of which teaching method was being used. When comparing the subjective rating on two teaching methods between two sequences, sequence A students rated traditional lecture significantly better than sequence B students did in regards to satisfaction (p = 0.0003), clarity (p = 0.002), understanding (p = 0.02). About two-thirds of sequence A students preferred CEI followed by the lecture, and 43.8% of the sequence B students preferred the lecture followed by CEI In conclusion, when CLT was taught once, CEI and traditional lecture were equivalent in terms of the test score (posttest') and teaching time. When CLT was taught twice, traditional lecture had a higher average test score than CEI. Preview effect of CEI in CLT was suggested because of higher difference in test score in sequence A than sequence B. and better subjective rating of traditional lecture in sequence A than in sequence B. (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 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

multimedia/hypermedia systems
post-secondary education
simulations
teaching/learning strategies


A novel approach to improving search efficiency in unstructured peer-to-peer networks ? The decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) technique has been widely used to implement scalable file sharing systems. It organizes nodes in a system into a structured or unstructured network. The advantages of the unstructured P2P systems are that they have lower maintenance complexity and can better adapt to node heterogeneity as well as network dynamics. However, the search process in unstructured systems is not as efficient as in structured P2P systems because the same search message may go through a node multiple times. To facilitate the complex search and improve the search efficiency, we propose a novel approach of assigning identifications to nodes in an unstructured system. Our method can prevent a node from receiving duplicate search messages and retain the low maintenance overhead for the system. The performance evaluations demonstrate that the proposed approach can improve the search efficiency of unstructured P2P systems while keeping the maintenance overhead at a comparable or even lower level, compared with the traditional unstructured systems.

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

peer-to-peer network
message duplication


Defining tabu list size and aspiration criterion within tabu search methods ? An investigation to explicitly define two key elements in tabu search methods is attempted. In this study a functional representation of the tabu list size is presented and a softer aspiration criterion is put forward. Experiments are conducted on a set of p-median problems. Tabu search is a metaheuristic that proved successful in finding good solutions to difficult combinatorial problems that were hard to find otherwise. In this study, we attempt to help the user in the choice of some of the parameters used in this type of heuristics. We based our analysis on the tabu list size and on an implementation on how to define the aspiration criterion. This added information can be valuable to those users who apply these methods in a near systematic manner without relying heavily on experimentations. As an example we used a simple location problem to test the usefulness of these ideas.

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

tabu duration
aspiration level
facility location
p-median problem


Evaluation of architectures for mobile robotics In this paper we make a comparative study of some successful software architectures for mobile robot systems. The objective is to gather experience for the future design of a new robot architecture. Three architectures are studied more closely, Saphira, TeamBots and BERRA. Qualities such as portability, ease of use, software characteristics, programming and run-time efficiency are evaluated. In order to get a true hands-on evaluation, all the architectures are implemented on a common hardware robot platform. A simple reference application is made with each of these systems. All the steps necessary to achieve this are discussed and compared. Run-time data are also gathered. Conclusions regarding the results are made, and a sketch for a new architecture is made based on these results.

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 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


Self-regulation influence on game play flow state Self-regulation is a key factor for managing fun in DGBL environments. A sense of active failure results in greater enjoyment during game play. Game data can be used to measure self-regulation during different flow states. Experiences toward the end of game sessions strongly influence player satisfaction.

O O O B 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


Theoretical investigation of tautomerism in N-hydroxy amidines A DFT study with QST3 approach method is used to calculate kinetic, thermodynamic, spectral and structural data of tautomers and transition state structures of some N-hydroxy amidines. All tautomers and transition states are optimized at the B3LYP/6-311++g** and B3LYP/aug-cc-pvtz level, with good agreement in energetic result with energies obtained from CBS-QB3, a complete basis set composite energy method. The result shows that the tautomer a (amide oxime) is more stable than the tautomer b (imino hydroxylamine) as is reported in the literature. In addition, our finding shows that, the energy difference between two tautomers is only in about 4-10 kcal/mol but the barrier energy found in traversing each tautomer to another one is in the range of 33-71 kcal/mol. Therefore, it is impossible to convert these two tautomers to each other at room temperature. Additionally, transition state theory is applied to estimate the barrier energy and reaction rate constants of the hydrogen exchange between tautomers in presence of 1-3 molecules of water. The computed activation barrier shows us that the barrier energy of solvent assisted tautomerism is about 9-20 kcal/mol and lower than simple tautomerism and this water-assisted tautomerism is much faster than simple tautomerism, especially with the assisting two molecules of water.

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


Exploring local search in winner determination problem In Combinatorial Auctions, multiple goods (items) are available for auction simultaneously, and bidders bid for combinations of goods called bundles. In the single unit combinatorial auction problem, there is only single unit of each item present and the items are considered to be indivisible. This forms the supply side constraint resulting in a need by the seller to decide on which bundles to allocate for maximizing the revenue. Determining these winning bundles is an NP-complete problem and is known by the name of Winner Determination Problem (WDP) in literature. Combinatorial auction mechanism has a wide range of practical applications such as allocation of railroads, auction of adjacent pieces of real estate, auction of airport landing slots, distributed job shop scheduling etc. The optimal heuristic search algorithms like CASS and CABOB proposed for solving the WDP take a lot of CPU time for solving large problem instances. Though these algorithms give optimal solutions, they would be useful only in scenarios where time is not at all a constraint, and the bidding is a one time affair. This poses a limitation in conducting combinatorial auctions with multiple rounds of bidding and hence hinders the widespread use of combinatorial auctions on the patterns of traditional English auction and internet auctions. Thus faster solution of WDP holds the key to widespread use and popularity of combinatorial auctions. This paper attempts to address the above issue, and proposes a simple local search technique LSWDP (Local Search for Winner Determination Problem) that runs very fast and provides solutions quite close to optimal for a number of applications. It also outputs optimal solutions in many instances taking only a fraction of the CPU time taken by CASS. In addition LSWDP was found to outperform the anytime algorithm CASS given a time cutoff. This paper also presents an enhancement called LSCN (Local Search using Complimentary Neighborhood) that provides still better solutions in terms of close to optimal behavior and achieves a much better strike rate in hitting optimal solutions. LSCN runs slower than LSWDP but still takes only a fraction of the CPU time taken by CASS thus encouraging the use of local search for combinatorial auctions. Finally, an extension to multi-partition search has been proposed and analyzed.

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

near optimal solutions
random search
neighborhood size
dfbb


Predicting adolescent Internet addiction: The roles of demographics, technology accessibility, unwillingness to communicate and sought Internet gratifications Relationship between background, gratifications and Internet addiction. A cross-sectional survey with 1914 Indian adolescents was organized. EFA, CFA, correlations, t-tests, logistic and hierarchical regression. Social influence and approach avoidance dichotomize addicts and non-addicts. Practical and theoretical implications for IA research are presented.

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

adolescents
internet addiction
unwillingness to communicate


using allopoietic agents in replicated software to respond to errors, faults, and attacks As software becomes more prevalent in society and attacks and faults grow, it is important to have software that can survive. Autopoietic software exists to continuously repair, recreate, and improve itself without producing any computational result or providing any service. Replicated software introduces redundancy into software with diverse, redundant components doing tasks. This research proposes to work in an unbounded environment with agents used to search for software components that exhibit signs of faults, or attacks. The autopoietic agents would kill these processes and similar processes to make the healthy components more available and able to proactively deal with attacks, faults and errors.

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 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 O O O O O O O O


Hybrid extreme rotation forest This paper proposes the Hybrid Extreme Rotation Forest (HERF), an innovative ensemble learning algorithm for classification problems, combining classical Decision Trees with the recently proposed Extreme Learning Machines (ELM) training of Neural Networks. In the HERF algorithm, training of each individual classifier involves two steps: first computing a randomized data rotation transformation of the training data, second, training the individual classifier on the rotated data. The testing data is subjected to the same transformation as the training data, which is specific for each classifier in the ensemble. Experimental design in this paper involves (a) the comparison of factorization approaches to compute the randomized rotation matrix: the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and the Quartimax, (b) assessing the effect of data normalization and bootstrapping training data selection, (c) all variants of single and combined ELM and decision trees, including Regularized ELM. This experimental design effectively includes other state-of-the-art ensemble approaches in the comparison, such as Voting ELM and Random Forest. We report extensive results over a collection of machine learning benchmark databases. Ranking the cross-validation results per experimental dataset and classifier tested concludes that HERF significantly improves over the other state-of-the-art ensemble classifier. Besides, we find some other results such as that the data rotation with Quartimax improves over PCA, and the relative insensitivity of the approach to regularization which may be attributable to the de facto regularization performed by the ensemble approach.

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

extreme learning machines
rotation forest


A novel E-plane substrate inserted bandpass filter with high selectivity and compact size In this article, a novel E-plane substrate inserted waveguide bandpass filter with high selectivity and compact size is proposed in Ka-band. By integrating an extra resonator between two metal septa, the E-plane waveguide filter is achieved with two transmission zeros at both sides of the passband which contribute to the high-skirt selectivity. One sample is fabricated, whose total length is just 5 mm, namely, less than 0.5 and the minimum insertion loss is only about 0.3 dB. Good agreements between simulated and measured results are obtained. 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:451456, 2014.

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

high selectivity
compact size
waveguide filter


Improving predictive models of glaucoma severity by incorporating quality indicators In this paper we present an evaluation of the role of reliability indicators in glaucoma severity prediction. In particular, we investigate whether it is possible to extract useful information from tests that would be normally discarded because they are considered unreliable. We set up a predictive modelling framework to predict glaucoma severity from visual field (VF) tests sensitivities in different reliability scenarios. Three quality indicators were considered in this study: false positives rate, false negatives rate and fixation losses. Glaucoma severity was evaluated by considering a 3-levels version of the Advanced Glaucoma Intervention Study scoring metric. A bootstrapping and class balancing technique was designed to overcome problems related to small sample size and unbalanced classes. As a classification model we selected Nave Bayes. We also evaluated Bayesian networks to understand the relationships between the different anatomical sectors on the VF map. The methods were tested on a data set of 28,778 VF tests collected at Moorfields Eye Hospital between 1986 and 2010. Applying Friedman test followed by the post hoc Tukey's honestly significant difference test, we observed that the classifiers trained on any kind of test, regardless of its reliability, showed comparable performance with respect to the classifier trained only considering totally reliable tests (p-value>0.01). Moreover, we showed that different quality indicators gave different effects on prediction results. Training classifiers using tests that exceeded the fixation losses threshold did not have a deteriorating impact on classification results (p-value>0.01). On the contrary, using only tests that fail to comply with the constraint on false negatives significantly decreased the accuracy of the results (p-value<0.01). Meaningful patterns related to glaucoma evolution were also extracted. Results showed that classification modelling is not negatively affected by the inclusion of less reliable tests in the training process. This means that less reliable tests do not subtract useful information from a model trained using only completely reliable data. Future work will be devoted to exploring new quantitative thresholds to ensure high quality testing and low re-test rates. This could assist doctors in tuning patient follow-up and therapeutic plans, possibly slowing down disease progression.

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

predictive modelling
reliability indicators
glaucoma severity prediction


Analysis of the particle swarm algorithm in the optimization of a three-phase slurry catalytic reactor The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) method was employed to optimize an industrial chemical process characterized by being difficult to be optimized by conventional deterministic methods. The chemical process is a three phase catalytic slurry reactor (tubular geometry) in which the reaction of the hydrogenation of o-cresol producing 2-methyl-cyclohexanol is carried out. The optimization problem was formulated considering as input variables the operating conditions of the reactor and as objective function the maximization of productivity, subject to the environmental constraint of conversion. The process was represented by a multivariable non-linear rigorous mathematical model and in order to solve the optimization problem, the performance of the PSO algorithm was evaluated considering four sets of parameters values suggested by the literature. PSO demonstrated to be efficient and robust to solve the constrained optimization problem, independently of the values of the PSO parameters. The solution of the rigorous mathematical model of the reactor was associated with a high computational burden, and although the PSO algorithm presented high rate of convergence, the attempt to make possible the optimization in a timeframe suitable to real time applications failed because the algorithm lost robustness (fraction of the number of runs the algorithm reached the optimization goal) when run with a reduced number of function evaluations. Therefore, if this type of application is desired, simplified mathematical models with fast and simple numerical methods must be preferred. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


A comparative study of the performance of high resolution advection schemes in the context of data assimilation High resolution advection schemes have been developed and studied to model propagation of flows involving sharp fronts and shocks. So far the impact of these schemes in the framework of inverse problem solution has been studied only in the context of linear models. A detailed study of the impact of various slope limiters and the piecewise parabolic method (PPM) on data assimilation is the subject of this work, using the nonlinear viscous Burgers equation in 1-D. Also provided are results obtained in 2-D using a global shallow water equations model. The results obtained in this work may point out to suitability of these advection schemes for data assimilation in more complex higher dimensional models. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

finite volume methods
high resolution schemes
adjoint model


americans' attitudes about internet behavioral advertising practices This paper presents empirical data on American Internet users' knowledge about and perceptions of Internet advertising techniques. We present the results of in-depth interviews and an online survey focusing on participants' views of online advertising and their ability to make decisions about privacy tradeoffs. We find users hold misconceptions about the purpose of cookies and the effects of clearing them. Only 11\% of respondents understood the text description of NAI opt-out cookies, which are a self-help mechanism that enables user choice. 86\% believe ads are tailored to websites they have visited in the past, but only 39\% believe there are currently ads based on email content, and only 9\% think it is ok to see ads based on email content as long as their email service is free. About 20\% of participants want the benefits of targeted advertising, but 64\% find the idea invasive, and we see signs of a possible chilling effect with 40\% self-reporting they would change their online behavior if advertisers were collecting data. We find a gap between people's willingness to pay to protect their privacy and their willingness to accept discounts in exchange for private information. 69\% believe privacy is a right and 61\% think it is "extortion" to pay to keep their data private. Only 11\% say they would pay to avoid ads. We find participants are comfortable with the idea that advertising supports free online content, but they do not believe their data are part of that exchange.

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

targeted advertising
behavioral advertising


Determining Attributes to Maximize Visibility of Objects In recent years, there has been significant interest in the development of ranking functions and efficient top-k retrieval algorithms to help users in ad hoc search and retrieval in databases (e.g., buyers searching for products in a catalog). We introduce a complementary problem: How to guide a seller in selecting the best attributes of a new tuple (e.g., a new product) to highlight so that it stands out in the crowd of existing competitive products and is widely visible to the pool of potential buyers. We develop several formulations of this problem. Although the problems are NP-complete, we give several exact and approximation algorithms that work well in practice. One type of exact algorithms is based on Integer Programming (IP) formulations of the problems. Another class of exact methods is based on maximal frequent item set mining algorithms. The approximation algorithms are based on greedy heuristics. A detailed performance study illustrates the benefits of our methods on real and synthetic 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

knowledge and data engineering tools and techniques


Model checking probabilistic social commitments for intelligent agent communication We present PCTLC, a modal logic for probabilistic commitments and their fulfillments. We introduce a new model checking technique for PCTLC. We propose a set of reduction rules to formally reduce the problem of model checking PCTLC to the problem of model checking PCTL. We implement the proposed technique on top of the PRISM model checker.

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

multi-agent systems
autonomous reasoning
probabilistic logic


Resilient arcs and node disjointness in diverse routing ? In multi-layer networks protection can be provided at multiple layers. Hence some links at an upper layer may be resilient because they are protected at a lower layer. We will designate as resilient arc at a given layer, an arc which has some form of protection at an underlaying layer. When path diversity is used at an upper layer, and resilient arcs are taken into account, it may not be necessary for the considered paths to be fully disjoint. We solve a problem of finding the shortest node-disjoint pair of paths that can share resilient arcs. It is assumed that a network consists of a set of nodes and a set of arcs. Moreover, a number of available arcs are resilient. Our goal is to find the shortest pair of paths such that they share only those nodes that are incident to shared resilient arcs. Moreover, we assume that the resulting paths cannot contain loops, and costs of shared resilient arcs are counted only once towards the objective function. In the paper we present two novel algorithms solving the above problem, and two supporting algorithms that are utilized as subroutines. We implement the proposed algorithms and compare them to an MIP approach.

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


Intelligent adaptive mobile robot navigation This paper deals with the application of a neuro-fuzzy inference system to a mobile robot navigation in an unknown, or partially unknown environment. The final aim of the robot is to reach some pre-defined goal. For this purpose, a sort of a co-operation between three main sub-modules is performed. These sub-modules consist in three elementary robot tasks: following a wall, avoiding an obstacle and running towards the goal. Each module acts as a Sugeno-Takagi fuzzy controller where the inputs are the different sensor information and the output corresponds to the orientation of the robot. The rule-base is generated by the controller after some learning process based on a neural architecture close to that used by Wang and Menger. This leads to adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference systems (ANFIS) (one for each module). The adaptive navigation system (ANFIS), based on integrated reactive-cognitive parts, learns and generates the required knowledge for achieving the desired task. However, the generated rule-base suffers from redundancy and abundance of data, most of which are less useful. This makes the assignment of a linguistic label to the associated variable difficult and sometimes counter-intuitive. Consequently, a simplification phase allowing elimination of redundancy is required. For this purpose, an algorithm based on the class of fuzzy c-means algorithm introduced by Bezdek and we have developed an inclusion structure. Experimental results confirm the meaningfulness of the elaborated methodology when dealing with navigation of a mobile robot in unknown, or partially unknown environment.

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

neuro-fuzzy
fuzzy c-means
mobile robotics


Network Coding in Node-Constrained Line and Star Networks Line and star networks with both node and edge constraints are studied in the network coding framework. For line networks, the capacity region of the general multiple multicast problem is established. The coding theorem is based on a binary linear coding scheme, while the converse requires new upper bounds that improve on standard cut-based bounds. For star networks, the multiple unicast problem is examined. Capacity upper bounds are derived and a simple linear coding scheme is proposed which is based on the combinatorial optimization problem of cycle packing in directed graphs. The optimality of this scheme is established for a broad class of demands. The connection of node-constrained network coding in star networks, and index coding with side information is discussed and used to partially characterize the optimal linear code for general rates.

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 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

line network
linear network coding
node-constrained network
star network


The Rician inverse Gaussian distribution: A new model for non-Rayleigh signal amplitude statistics In this paper, we introduce a new statistical distribution for modeling non-Rayleigh amplitude statistics, which we have called the Rician inverse Gaussian (RiIG) distribution. It is a mixture of the Rice distribution and the inverse Gaussian distribution. The probability density function (pdf) is given in closed form as a function of three parameters. This makes the pdf very flexible in the sense that it may be fitted to a variety of shapes, ranging from the Rayleigh-shaped pdf to a noncentral chi(2)-shaped pdf. The theoretical basis of the new model is quite thoroughly discussed, and we also give two iterative algorithms for estimating its parameters from data. Finally, we include some modeling examples, where we have tested the ability of the distribution to represent locale amplitude histograms of linear medical ultrasound data and single-look synthetic aperture radar data. We compare the goodness of fit of the RiIG model with that of the K model, and, in most cases, the new model turns out as a better statistical model for the data. We also include a series of log-likelihood tests to evaluate the predictive performance of the proposed model.

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

synthetic aperture radar (sar) speckle model


DigitalSculpture: a subdivision-based approach to interactive implicit surface modeling This paper presents DigitalSculpture, an interactive sculpting framework founded upon iso-surfaces extracted from recursively subdivided, 3D irregular grids. Our unique implicit surface model arises from an interpolatory, volumetric subdivision scheme that is C1 continuous across the domains defined by arbitrary 3D irregular grids. We assign scalar coefficients and color to each control vertex and allow these quantities to participate in the volumetric subdivision of irregular grids. In the subdivision limit, a virtual sculpture is obtained by extracting the zero-level from the volumetric, scalar field defined over the irregular grid. This novel shape geometry extends concepts from solid modeling, recursive subdivision, and implicit surfaces; facilitates many techniques for interactive sculpting; permits rapid, local evaluation of iso-surfaces; and affords level-of-detail control of the sculpted surfaces.

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 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

implicit surfaces
interactive sculpting
solid modeling