Pseudo software: A mediating instrument for modeling software requirements A new synthesis of software requirements models called pseudo software is proposed with the aim to cut requirements-related errors. Pseudo software achieves this aim by serving as a mediating instrument to empower stakeholders to participate in requirements elicitation and validation through model construction and manipulation, and to provide guidance to the development team to correctly interpret the requirements in the downstream development activities. Pseudo software obtains its traits as a mediating instrument through the choice of requirements information bits and the use of multimodal representations with tool support to integrate the requirements. Using historical data of fifty projects in the enterprise computing domain, pseudo software is shown to effectively cut the requirements-related errors committed by both the customer and the development team. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

models as mediators
ontology of models
learning from models


Physicians responses to clinical decision support on an intensive care unitComparison of four different alerting methods In intensive care environments, technology is omnipresent whereby ensuring constant monitoring and the administration of critical drugs to unstable patients. A clinical decision support system (CDSS), with its widespread possibilities, can be a valuable tool in supporting adequate patient care. However, it is still unclear how decision support alerts should be presented to physicians and other medical staff to ensure that they are used most effectively. To determine the effect of four different alert presentation methods on alert compliance after the implementation of an advanced CDSS on the intensive care unit (ICU) in our hospital. A randomized clinical trial was executed from August 2010 till December 2011, which included all patients admitted to the ICU of our hospital. The CDSS applied contained a set of thirteen locally developed clinical rules. The percentage of alert compliance was compared for four alert presentation methods: pharmacy intervention, physician alert list, electronic health record (EHR) section and pop-up alerts. Additionally, surveys were held to determine the method most preferred by users of the CDSS. In the study period, the CDSS generated 902 unique alerts, primarily due to drug dosing during decreased renal function and potassium disturbances. Alert compliance was highest for recommendations offered in pop-up alerts (41%, n=68/166), followed by pharmacy intervention (33%, n=80/244), the physician alert list (20%, n=40/199) and the EHR section (19%, n=55/293). The method most preferred by clinicians was pharmacy intervention, and pop-up alerts were found suitable as well if applied correctly. The physician alert list and EHR section were not considered suitable for CDSSs in the process of this study. The alert presentation method used for CDSSs is crucial for the compliance with alerts for the clinical rules and, consequently, for the efficacy of these systems. Active alerts such as pop-ups and pharmacy intervention were more effective than passive alerts, which do not automatically appear within the clinical workflow. In this pilot study, ICU clinicians also preferred pharmacy intervention and pop-up alerts. More research is required to expand these results to other departments and other hospitals, as well as to other types of CDSSs and different alert presentation methods.

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

alert presentation method
intensive care
clinical rules

clinical decision support systems
medication alerts systems


Advanced river flood monitoring, modelling and forecasting Integration of different types of models and technologies for flood monitoring. A real-time flood monitoring and forecasting system is proposed. Heterogeneous data processing and integration. A case study for short-term river flood forecasting is given. Experimental results show a high forecasting accuracy.

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

flood monitoring
heterogeneous data processing

integrated approach
river flow forecasting
hydrological models
flooded zone simulation
visualisation


Mobility analysis of mobile hosts with random walking in ad hoc networks This paper focuses on the modeling and analysis of the host mobility characteristics in an ad hoc network, in terms of the link available time and the number of link changes for multi-hop connectivity. Both the mobile handover model and the random walk model, which are based on the relative velocity between neighboring hosts, are considered in the analysis, respectively. The numerical results obtained from both theoretical analysis and simulation experiments indicate that the random walk analytical model is able to provide better description of the complicated mobile host moving behavior than the mobile handover model. However, the performance margin between these two mobility models is smaller when the mobile host moving speed is higher. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

ad hoc network
mobility
random walk
link available time


Certainty equivalent citation: generalized classes of citation indexes Drawing from the existing literature on risk and inequality measurement, we implement the notion of certainty equivalent citation in order (i) to generalize most of the h-type citation indexes (h-, g-, \(\tilde{g},\) t-, f-, w-index), and (ii) to highlight the centrality of the decision-makers preferences on distributive aspects (concentration aversion) for the ranking of citation profiles. In order to highlight the sensitivity of citation orderings with respect to concentration aversion, an application to both simulated and real citation profiles is presented.

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


Construction of solutions for the shallow water equations by the decomposition method This paper deals with the implementation of Adomian's decomposition method for the variable-depth shallow water equations with source term. Using this method, the solutions were calculated in the form of a convergent power series with easily computable components. The convergence of the method is illustrated numerically. (C) 2004 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

the adomian decomposition method
shallow watere quations
soliton solutions
conservation laws


Reliability modeling of fault tolerant control systems This paper proposes a novel approach to reliability evaluation for active Fault Tolerant Control Systems (FTCSs). By introducing a reliability index based on the control performance and hard deadline, a semi-Markov process model is proposed to describe system operation for reliability evaluation. The degraded performance of FTCSs in the presence of imperfect Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) is reflected by semi-Markov states. The semi-Markov kernel, the key parameter of the process, is determined by four probabilistic parameters based on the Markovian model of FTCSs. Computed from the transition probabilities of the semi-Markov process, the reliability index incorporates control objectives, hard deadline, and the effects of imperfect FDI, a Suitable quantitative measure of the overall performance.

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

fault tolerant control
reliability evaluation


Gridless spectral algorithm for Stokes flow with moving boundaries A gridless, spectrally-accurate algorithm for the Stokes flow with moving boundaries is presented. The algorithm uses fixed computational domain with boundaries of the flow domain moving inside the computational domain. The spatial discretization is based on the Fourier expansions in the streamwise direction and the Chebyshev expansions in the transverse direction. Temporal discretization uses one- and two-steps implicit formulations. The boundary conditions on the moving boundaries are imposed using the immersed boundary conditions concept. Numerical tests confirm the spectral accuracy in space and theoretically-predicted accuracy in time. Different variants of the solution procedure are presented and their relative advantages are discussed.

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

immersed boundary conditions
spectral accuracy

gridless methods
moving boundary problems


Unsaturated Throughput Analysis of IEEE 802.11 DCF under Imperfect Channel Sensing In this paper, throughput of IEEE 802.11 carrier-sense multiple access (CSMA) with collision-avoidance (CA) protocols in non-saturated traffic conditions is presented taking into account the impact of imperfect channel sensing. The imperfect channel sensing includes both missed-detection and false alarm and their impact on the utilization of IEEE 802.11 analyzed and expressed as a closed form. To include the imperfect channel sensing at the physical layer, we modified the state transition probabilities of well-known two state Markov process model. Simulation results closely match the theoretical expressions confirming the effectiveness of the proposed model. Based on both theoretical and simulated results, the choice of the best probability detection while maintaining probability of false alarm is less than 0.5 is a key factor for maximizing utilization of IEEE 802.11.

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

unsaturated throughput
imperfect channel sensing
false alarm


Profiling Literature in Healthcare Simulation The publications that relate to the application of simulation to healthcare have steadily increased over the years. These publications are scattered amongst various journals that belong to several subject categories, including operational research, health economics and pharmacokinetics. The simulation techniques that are applied to the study of healthcare problems are also various. The aim of this study, therefore, is to review healthcare simulation literature that have been published between 1970 and 2007 in high-quality journals belonging to various subject categories and that report on the application of four simulation techniques, namely, Monte Carlo simulation, discrete-event simulation, system dynamics and agent-based simulation. Arguably, journal impact factor is fundamental in assessing the quality of publications. Thus, the 201 publications selected for review have been queried from the ISI Web of Science (R) bibliographic database of high-impact research journals. Through a review of healthcare simulation literature the following three objectives have been realized: (a) papers have been categorized under the different simulation techniques, and the healthcare problems that each technique is employed to investigate are identified; (b) variables such as authors, article citations, etc., within our dataset of healthcare papers have been profiled; (c) turning point (strategically important) papers and authors have been identified through co-citation analysis of references cited by the papers in our dataset. The above objectives have been realized by devising and then employing a methodology for profiling literature. It is expected that this review paper will help the readers gain a broader understanding of research in healthcare simulation.

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

simulation research
healthcare research
profiling research
co-citation analysis


Forecasting the yield of a semiconductor product with a collaborative intelligence approach Forecasting the yield of a semiconductor product is an important task to the manufacturer. However, it is not easy to deal with the uncertainty in the yield. In order to effectively forecast the yield, a collaborative intelligence approach is proposed in this study. The difference with the existing methods is that the collaborative intelligence approach takes into account the different points of view in a more efficient way, and therefore the results obtained are more comprehensive and more reliable. In the collaborative intelligence approach, a group of domain experts is formed. These domain experts are asked to configure their fuzzy feed-forward neural networks (FFNNs) to forecast the yield based on their views. A collaboration mechanism is therefore established to evolve the views. To facilitate the collaboration process and to derive a single representative value from these forecasts, the maximal-consensus and radial basis function network (MC-RBF) approach is used. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is shown with a case study.

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

yield
semiconductor
forecasting
collaborative intelligence


Biomarker discovery for toxicity Toxicity biomarkers allow the safe evaluation of possible toxic effects of a substance in early phases of drug discovery. Finding the optimal subset of genes to use as biomarkers is an important problem. We tried evolutionary classification methods for finding biomarkers in hexachlorobenzene (HCB) toxicity using microarray data. We improve upon Kucukural et al. by modifying the algorithm to incrementally filter the features instead of generating new populations from scratch and by finding the common subset of features from multiple runs to be used as biomarkers. Using this modified genetic algorithm, we discovered gene sets of size 4 that were able to predict HCB exposure with >99% accuracy in 5-fold cross-validation tests. Repeating this process on independent test studies resulted in 14 biologically significant genes that predict exposure with 91% accuracy, surpassing other feature selection methods. Making use of these genes as biomarkers may allow us to detect hepatotoxic substances similar to HCB in a fast and cost-efficient manner when there are no emerging symptoms.

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

feature selection
biomarker discovery
hexachlorobenzene


prediction and indexing of moving objects with unknown motion patterns Existing methods for peediction spatio-temporal databases assume that objects move according to linear functions. This severely limits their applicability, since in practice movement is more complex, and individual objects may follow drastically diffferent motion patterns. In order to overcome these problems, we first introduce a general framework for monitoring and indexing moving objects, where (i) each boject computes individually the function that accurately captures its movement and (ii) a server indexes the object locations at a coarse level and processes queries using a filter-refinement mechanism. Our second contribution is a novel recursive motion function that supports a broad class of non-linear motion patterns. The function does not presume any a-priori movement but can postulate the particular motion of each object by examining its locations at recent timestamps. Finally. we propse an efficient indexing scheme that faciliates the processing of predicitive queries without false misses.

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

framework order movement object general motion indexing queries server scheme class

applications
efficiency
recursion
temporal
filtering
practical
predict
pattern
timestamp
method
locatability
functional
process
complexity
monitor
refine
moving object
database


Universal service issues in converging communications environments: the case of the UK Convergent trends in telecommunications and broadcasting technologies and markets have called forth a re-examination of universal service provision in the communications sector and present an opportunity to update and re-formulate its provision. In the UK, proposed changes announced in the 2000 UK Communications White Paper and subsequent 2003 Communications Act, whilst still emphasising the importance of guaranteeing universal access to stipulated key public services and content across communications, suggest a closer relationship between economic and content regulation will be developed. This paper argues that whilst it is important to consider issues of economic efficiency in the communications sector, this should neither obscure nor compromise the need to create progressive, socially responsible, universal service reflective of the requirements of 21st century users. Crucial to the delivery of such a system in the UK is an actively supportive government policy backdrop and the development of the new convergent regulator the Office of Communications as an effective regulatory force.

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


Boosting partial least-squares discriminant analysis with application to near infrared spectroscopic tea variety discrimination In the present study, boosting has been combined with partial least-squares discriminant analysis (PLS-DA) to develop a new pattern recognition method called boosting partial least-squares discriminant analysis (BPLS-DA). BPLS-DA is implemented by firstly constructing a series of PLS-DA models on the various weighted versions of the original calibration set and then combining the predictions from the constructed PLS-DA models to obtain the integrative results by weighted majority vote. Coupled with near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy, BPLS-DA has been applied to discriminate different kinds of tea varieties. As comparisons to BPLS-DA, the conventional principal component analysis, linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and PLS-DA have also been investigated. Experimental results have shown that the inter-variety difference can be accurately and rapidly distinguished via NIR spectroscopy coupled with BPLS-DA. Moreover, the introduction of boosting drastically enhances the performance of an individual PLS-DA, and BPLS-DA is a well-performed pattern recognition technique superior to LDA. Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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


dynamic instructional models of computer organizations and programming languages Although there has been much progress over the years, students learning computer organizations and programming languages are usually still working with the computer through several layers of confusion and delay. Highly responsive interactive computer systems have recently become available which make it possible to create dynamic instructional models of computer organizations and programming languages. With proper development of these systems, such models can economically be used to give the student a more vivid experience with the computing machine and a more vital means of learning to program. Models of computer organization can allow the student to see the inner workings of a computing machine as it executes an instruction or a program which has been entered mnemonically at the assembly language level. Models of higher level programming languages can provide the student with constant help by presenting alternatives, checking acceptability of inputs, supplying amplifications of correct inputs, displaying syntactic structures to be completed, and prompting him as necessary at any point. Such models should also help provide a more productive environment for accomplished programmers to develop and debug programs. Exploratory models of each of these types have been implemented on a small interactive computer system to demonstrate these techniques.

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

help point delay experience student program organization systems dynamic language types instruction demonstrate learning

present
developer
computation
response
model
program modelling
interaction
environments
layer
assemblers
debugging
programmer
programming language


Loose ontological coupling and the Social Semantic Web Best practices for the publication of Semantic Web data currently place an unacceptably high burden on the end-user, who is supposed to locate and embrace third-party, ontological structures prior to publishing any information. This paper argues for a different publication paradigm where end-users are encouraged to publish potentially incomplete or conflicting information according to their own local context, and where heterogeneous data is consolidated a posteriori through bottomup, decentralized processes. This approach has two key advantages: first, it greatly simplifies the publication of semantic information by allowing users to contribute purely local data, without any consideration for global schemas or third-party structures. Second, it takes advantage of expressive, semantic links to relate both schemas and instances, creating complex webs of knowledge where cultural or social differences can flourish and be confronted one another.

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

social semantics
human-centered computing
loosely-coupled semantics
web of data
emergent semantics


Emotional states in judicial courtrooms: An experimental investigation Thanks to the recent progress in the judicial proceedings management, especially related to the introduction of audio/video recording facilities, the challenge of identification of emotional states can be tackled. Discovering affective states embedded into speech signals could help in semantic retrieval of multimedia clips, and therefore in a deep understanding of mechanisms behind courtroom debates and judges/jurors decision making processes. In this paper two main contributions are given: (1) the collection of real-world human emotions coming from courtroom audio recordings; (2) the investigation of a hierarchical classification system, based on a risk minimization method, able to recognize emotional states from speech signatures. The accuracy of the proposed classification approach named Multilayer Support Vector Machines has been evaluated by comparing its performance with traditional machine learning approaches, by using both benchmark datasets and real courtroom recordings. Results in recognition obtained by the proposed technique outperform the prediction power achieved by traditional approaches like SVM, k-Nearest Neighbors, Nave Bayes, Decision Trees and Bayesian Networks.

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

emotion recognition
pattern recognition
application


A study of labor assignment flexibility in cellular manufacturing systems The objective of this research is to study labor flexibility in cellular manufacturing systems characterized by intra-cell operator's mobility. The special focus of the investigation is to explore the impact that using different labor allocation strategies have on system performance. This internal aspect of labor flexibility is referred to as labor assignment flexibility. Labor strategies are classified according to the type of machine-operator assignments including dedicated (when only one operator is responsible for a machine or group or machines), shared (when more than one operator is responsible for a machine or a group of machines) or combined assignments (when the operator has both dedicated and shared machine assignments). This work proposes a classification scheme and a framework that is composed by a set of propositions that evolved from an empirical study and includes the concepts of workload balancing, workload sharing, and the presence of bottleneck operations. The suitability of the framework is tested using simulation modeling in an actual cell implementation. The experimental results based on labor strategies using two and three operators show that the balance in the workload assigned to the individual operators and the level of shared workload are significant factors in determining the performance of the system. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

cellular manufacturing systems
labor flexibility
workload balancing
workload sharing
bottleneck operations

labor limited systems
assignment strategies


Data-dependent k(n)-NN and kernel estimators consistent for arbitrary processes Let X-1, X-2,... be an arbitrary random process taking values in a totally bounded subset of a separable metric space. Associated with X-i we observe Y-i drawn from an unknown conditional distribution F(y\X-i = x) with continuous regression function m(x) = E[Y\X = x]. The problem of interest is to estimate Y-n based on X-n and the data {(X-i, Y-i)}(n-1) (i=1). We construct appropriate data-dependent nearest neighbor and kernel estimators and show, with a very elementary proof, that these are consistent for every process X-1, X-2, ....

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

arbitrary random processes
consistency
data dependent
kernel estimate
nearest neighbor estimate
nonparametric regression


Domain described support vector classifier for multi-classification problems In this paper, a novel classifier for multi-classification problems is proposed. The proposed classifier, based on the Bayesian optimal decision theory, tries to model the decision boundaries via the posterior probability distributions constructed from support vector domain description rather than to model them via the optimal hyperplanes constructed from two-class support vector machines. Experimental results show that the proposed method is more accurate and efficient for multi-classification 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 B I I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

multi-class classification
kernel methods
bayes decision theory
density estimation


One-operator, two-machine open shop and flow shop problems with setup times for machines and weighted number of tardy jobs objective One-operator two-machine open shop and flow shop problems are -hard in the ordinary sense even if all the weights are the same. We discuss two different pseudo polynomial dynamic programming recursions for each of the open shop and flow shop case. Some of the running times are better than those of the best known algorithms in the literature.

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

scheduling
computational complexity
pseudopolynomial algorithm
one-operator
two-machine


Mixed micellization of gemini and conventional surfactant in aqueous solution: A lattice Monte Carlo simulation The Monte Carlo simulation of mixed gemini and conventional surfactant is proposed. Synergism in micelle formation has been observed for mixed surfactant systems. There is no compliance in behavior of mixed surfactant systems and RST.

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

lattice monte carlo
mixed micellization
conventional surfactant
synergism


Extension of the VR discretization scheme for velocity saturation It is argued that the vector resolution discretization scheme [1] is not consistent with the velocity saturation model. As a result, the simulation results show dependence on grid orientation. A modification is then presented to overcome this difficulty. Simulation examples are discussed to clearly demonstrate the improvement obtained with the new scheme. Finally, some comments are made regarding the convergence behaviour of the new scheme.

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

discretization scheme
velocity saturation


Comparison of the performance of neural network methods and Cox regression for censored survival data Strategies that have been developed to extend NN prediction methods to accommodate right-censored data include methods due to Faraggi-Simon, Liestol-Andersen-Andersen, and a modification of the Buckley-James method. In a Monte Carlo simulation study, we evaluated the performance of all three NN methods with that of Cox regression models which included main effects and interactions, when interactions exist. Using the EPILOG PLUS(R) PROC NEURAL utility, feed-forward back-propagation networks were examined under nine designs representing a variety of experimental conditions which varied (a) the number of inputs and interactions, (b) the degree of censoring, (c) proportional vs. non-proportional hazards, and (d) sample size. Minimization methods were implemented that efficiently determined optimal parameters. The C-index was used as a measure of performance. For the testing phase of the study, none of the NN methods outperformed Cox regression. Compared to Cox regression, the Faraggi-Simon, Buckley-James, and Liestol-Andersen-Andersen methods performed as well as Cox regression for 7,5 and 1 of the nine designs, respectively. The effect on performance of modeling interactions in Cox regression, varying the number of intervals in the Liestol-Andersen-Andersen method, and varying the NN architecture are also presented. The results of our study suggest that NNs can serve as effective methods for modeling right-censored data. However, the performance of the NN is somewhat variable, depending on the underlying data structure. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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

neural network
cox regression
monte carlo simulation


A modified Hausdorff distance between fuzzy sets In an earlier paper (B.B. Chaudhuri, A. Rosenfeld, Pattern Recognition Letters 17 (1996) 11571160) we defined a Hausdorff-like metric distance between fuzzy sets. This distance contained two terms, one representing geometric distance and the other representing dissimilarity. Combining two terms representing two unrelated notions is not very appealing. In this paper, a modified metric is proposed which contains a single term representing geometric distance only; which reduces to the classical Hausdorff distance when the fuzzy sets are crisp; and which is relatively insensitive to noise.

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


IM(S)(2): Interactive movie summarization system The need of summarization methods and systems has become more and more crucial as the audio-visual material continues its critical growth. This paper presents a novel vision and a novel system for movies summarization. A video summary is an audio-visual document displaying the essential parts of an original document. However, the definition of the term "essential" is user-dependent. The advantage of this work, unlike the others, is the involvement of users in the summarization process. By means of IM(S)(2), people generate on the fly customized video summaries responding to their preferences. IM(S)(2) is made up of an offline part and an online part. In the offline, we segment the movies into shots and we compute features describing them. In the online part users inform about their preferences by selecting interesting shots. After that, the system will analyze the selected shots to bring out the user's preferences. Finally the system will generate a summary from the whole movie which will provide more focus on the user's preferences. To show the efficiency of IM(S)(2), it was tested on the database of the European project MUSCLE made up of five movies. We invited 10 users to evaluate the usability of our system by generating for every movie of the database a semi-supervised summary and to judge at the end its quality. Obtained results are encouraging and show the merits of our approach. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

video analysis
video summarization
interactive multimedia system
content analysis
pattern recognition
genetic algorithm
one-class svm


Urban environmental management: monitoring, GIS, and modeling Urban environmental management must integrate the spatial, structural features of a city, typically captured in geographical information systems (GIS), and the dynamics of environmental quality indicators that can be obtained by monitoring. To provide decision-relevant information supporting planning and management, these components are integrated in models for scenario analysis and optimisation tasks. The paper describes some results from an environmental Telematics project (ECOSIM) and two Esprit projects (HITERM, SIMTRAP), as well as a EUREKA EUROENVIRON project (AIDAIR), and applications in cities such as Vienna, Berlin, Geneva, Basel, Milano, Athens, Gdansk, and Izmir. Strategies for the integration of monitoring, GIS, and modeling are presented, that use a common clientserver architecture, an object-oriented design, embedded expert systems technology, and a multi-media user interface to support easy access, and easy use of complex analytical tools for urban environmental management.

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

urban environmental management
monitoring
gis
modeling


Time-domain analysis of multiple straight thin wires in a non-homogeneous medium Time-domain analysis of the transient current distribution along parallel wires located at different heights above a real ground is presented. The numerical solution is carried out via time-domain variant of the GalerkinBubnov indirect boundary element method (GB-IBEM) of solution extended to handle the case of arbitrary array of parallel wires located in a homogenous lossless medium, above a perfectly conducting (PEC) ground, or above a dielectric half-space. The mathematical formulation is based on the set of coupled space-time integral equations of the Hallen type. Some illustrative numerical results being compared to the results obtained via other methods wherever possible are presented.

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

time-domain analysis
multiple wires
non-homogeneous media
set of hallen equations


Numerical linear algebra in the integrity theory of the Global Positioning System The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite based navigation system. Since safety is the main concern for aircraft navigation, various means of monitoring the integrity (certainty of position) have been developed. This is an important area of research in the GPS community. In the following, it will be shown how some numerical linear algebra techniques can be applied to this interesting application. A typical model is presented. A uniform approach to derive the statistics for fault detection and isolation by orthogonal transformations is given. It is shown that the diagonal elements Q of the orthogonal projection matrix onto the residual space are fundamental to the theory and understanding of integrity. omega(ii) can, for example, have a drastic effect on integrity when they are small. The sensitivity of related problems in this area are discussed. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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

global positioning system
integrity theory
orthogonal transformations
sensitivity


light context-sensitive points-to analysis for java We design a new context-sensitive points-to analysis for Java thattargets key object-oriented features such as inheritance and encapsulation, and improves precision over the Andersen-style context-insensitive analysis. At the same time, it has cubic worst-case complexity, thus giving precision improvement for free.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 migrating birds optimization algorithm for closed loop layout with exact distances in flexible manufacturing systems The paper modifies MBO algorithm using GA operators. The paper considers exact distances in layout evaluation. Taguchi method is used to calibrate the parameters of the algorithm. The modified MBO performs better than previous algorithms and also exact methods.

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

closed loop layout
migrating birds optimization

flexible manufacturing system
facility layout problem
meta-heuristic


Effective fuzzy c-means based kernel function in segmenting medical images ? The objective of this paper is to develop an effective robust fuzzy c-means for a segmentation of breast and brain magnetic resonance images. The widely used conventional fuzzy c-means for medical image segmentations has limitations because of its squared-norm distance measure to measure the similarity between centers and data objects of medical images which are corrupted by heavy noise, outliers, and other imaging artifacts. To overcome the limitations this paper develops a novel objective function based standard objective function of fuzzy c-means that incorporates the robust kernel-induced distance for clustering the corrupted dataset of breast and brain medical images. By minimizing the novel objective function this paper obtains effective equation for optimal cluster centers and equation to achieve optimal membership grades for partitioning the given dataset. In order to solve the problems of clustering performance affected by initial centers of clusters, this paper introduces a specialized center initialization method for executing the proposed algorithm in segmenting medical images. Experiments are performed with synthetic, real breast and brain images to assess the performance of the proposed method. Further the validity of clustering results is obtained using silhouette method and this paper compares the results with the results of other recent reported fuzzy c-means methods. The experimental results show the superiority of the proposed clustering results.

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

fuzzy c-means
center knowledge
image segmentation
mr imaging


Rate-distortion analysis for light field coding and streaming A theoretical framework to analyze the rate-distortion performance of a light field coding and streaming system is proposed. This framework takes into account the statistical properties of the light field images, the accuracy of the geometry information used in disparity compensation, and the prediction dependency structure or transform used to exploit correlation among views. Using this framework, the effect that various parameters have on compression efficiency is studied. The framework reveals that the efficiency gains from more accurate geometry, increase as correlation between images increases. The coding gains due to prediction suggested by the framework match those observed from experimental results. This framework is also used to study the performance of light field streaming by deriving a view-trajectory-dependent rate-distortion function. Simulation results show that the streaming results depend both the prediction structure and the viewing trajectory. For instance, independent coding of images gives the best streaming performance for certain view trajectories. These and other trends described by the simulation results agree qualitatively with actual experimental streaming results.

O O O B I I 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 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

light field coding
light field streaming

light fields
rate-distortion theory
statistical signal processing


A mechanism for validating dimensioning and tolerancing schemes in CAD systems Dimensioning and tolerancing are inter-related tasks; the validity of the tolerance representation model is dependent on the dimension model. Validation of tolerances is necessary at input and also after any changes of the dimension scheme. This paper presents a computational model for validating the dimensioning scheme and tolerance specifications compatible with dimensioning and tolerancing practice. Validation is implemented through a dimension and tolerance graph. Constrained entities are combined into progressively expanding clusters, which can be used to represent datum reference frames (DRFs), constraint groups of geometric entities, patterns, or the entire part. Validation of all dimensioning and tolerancing relations is performed using the concept of control frames, theoretical dimensions and general rules for forming clusters. The tolerance validation method proposed here supports all tolerance classes defined in the ISO/ANSI/ASME standards, as well as DRFs and special pattern and profile entity relations.

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

geometric dimensioning and tolerances
iso 1101
asme/ansi y14.5


Is the mouse click mighty enough to bring society to its knees? Over the years, we have created an information infrastructure, with most of us connected but nobody totally responsible, which is easily targeted for attacks by adversaries. A series of deadly viruses and denial-of-service attacks are warnings of the fragile state of information security. Information warfare (IW) is a serious concern as it has no border and operates in a different realm. This paper articulates how IW can devastatingly attack the critical information infrastructure. Two aspects of IW are considered, viz., Defensive IW and Offensive IW. Currently, security solutions lag far behind the potential threats. Loosely coupled defenders cannot avert the damage caused by orchestrated coordinated attacks. Society is locked up in a vicious circle of wits and resources. This situation is likely to continue and we need to be proactive and make progress on a rocky path. It is time we got battle space ready. Without the coordinated efforts of government, disparate groups and organisations, society is one click away from grave danger of exploitation and dominance.

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

defensive warfare
offensive warfare
battlefield
commanders
army
weapons


Behavior of micro-polar flow due to linear stretching of porous sheet with injection and suction The boundary layer flow of a micro-polar fluid due to a linearly stretching sheet is investigated. The influence of various flow parameters like suction and injection velocity through the porous surface, viscosity parameter causing the coupling of the micro-rotation field and the velocity field and vortex viscosity parameter on shear stress at the surface, fluid velocity and micro-rotation are studied. The governing equations of the transformed boundary layer are solved analytically using homotopy analysis method (HAM). The convergence of the obtained series solutions is explicitly studied and a proper discussion is given for the obtained results. Comparison between the HAM and numerical solutions showed excellent agreement.

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

micro-polar flow
micro-rotation
homotopy analysis method (ham)


Biological networks: Comparison, conservation, and evolution via relative description length We describe a new approach for comparing cellular-biological networks and finding conserved regions in two or more such networks. Our distance measure is based on the description length of one network, given the description of the other one, and it is efficiently computable. We employ these distances as inputs for generating phylogenetic trees. Using KEGG's metabolic networks as our starting point, we obtained trees that are not perfect, but are very good (considering the characteristics of the inputs). Our approach enables us to identify conserved regions among more than a dozen metabolic networks, and among two protein interaction networks. These conserved regions appear to be biologically relevant, proving the viability of our approach.

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

biological networks
conserved regions
metabolic networks
relative description length

networks comparison
network evolution
tree reconstruction


Acceleration of 3D, nonlinear warping using standard video graphics hardware: implementation and initial validation Thin Plate Spline (TPS) transformations are used in many medical imaging algorithms, but are time-prohibitive for iterative or interactive use. We have utilized current generation consumer 3D graphics cards to accelerate the application of the TPS nonlinear transformation by combining hardware accelerated 3D textures, vertex shaders and trilinear interpolation. Our hardware accelerated algorithm warped a 512512173 Computed Tomography (CT) dataset in 2.3s, and the same study, scaled to 256256173, in 0.5s, using a set of 92 landmarks. An accelerated software implementation of the TPS transformation warped the 512512173 study in 32.9s and the 256256173 study in 9.5s. Subtracted images were used for qualitative analysis of the warp and the Mutual Information (MI) and Sum of Absolute Difference (SAD) similarity metrics were used to quantitatively compare the output of the hardware accelerated algorithm to that of the software algorithm. The hardware accelerated algorithm provided a 765 times performance increase when compared to the software algorithm, and produced output of comparable quality (MI>300 and SAD <1.75%).

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


Spectroscopic differentiation between O-atom vacancy and divacancy defects, respectively, in TiO2 and HfO2 by X-ray absorption spectroscopy Defect state features have been detected in second derivative O K edge spectra for thin films of nano-crystalline TiO2 and HfO2. Based on soft X-ray photoelectron band edge spectra, and the occurrence of occupied band edge 4f states in Gd(Sc,Ti)O3, complementary spectroscopic features have been confirmed in the pre-edge ( 545eV) regimes of O K edge spectra. Qualitatively similar spectral features have been obtained for thin films of HfO2 and TiO2, and these have been assigned to defect states associated with vacancies. The two electrons/removed O-atom are not distributed uniformly over the TM atoms defining the vacancy geometry, but instead are localized in equivalent d-states: a d2 state for a Ti monovacancy and a d4 state for a Hf divacancy. This new model for electronic structure provides an unambiguous way to differentiate between monovacancy and divacancy arrangements, as well as immobile (or fixed) and mobile vacancies.

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

monovacancies
divacancies
x-ray absorption spectroscopy
pre-edge regime
bound resonance states
immobile and mobile vacancies


Health information technology and sociotechnical systems: A progress report on recent developments within the UK National Health Service (NHS) This paper summarises some of the research that Ken Eason and colleagues at Loughborough University have carried out in the last few years on the introduction of Health Information Technologies (HIT) within the UK National Health Service (NHS). In particular, the paper focuses on three examples which illustrate aspects of the introduction of HIT within the NHS and the role played by the UK National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT). The studies focus on stages of planning and preparation, implementation and use, adaptation and evolution of HIT (e.g., electronic patient records, virtual wards) within primary, secondary and community care settings. Our findings point to a number of common themes which characterise the use of these systems. These include tensions between national and local strategies for implementing HIT and poor fit between healthcare work systems and the design of HIT. The findings are discussed in the light of other large-scale, national attempts to introduce similar technologies, as well as drawing out a set of wider lessons learnt from the NPfIT programme based on Ken Eason's earlier work and other research on the implementation of large-scale HIT.

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

sociotechnical systems
health information technology


A second-order BGK scheme for the equations of radiation hydrodynamics We present a second-order BGK scheme for the equations of multidimensional radiation hydrodynamics (RHE) in zero diffusion limit by using the generalized Maxwellian (Comput. Fluids 2000; 29:917-933) and the second-order BGK scheme for the Euler equations (J. Comput. Phys. 1993; 109:53-66; Gas Kinetic Scheme for Unsteady Compressible Flow Simulations. Lecture Note Series 1998-03. Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, 1998). This extends a (first-order) kinetic flux vector splitting scheme (KFVS) for RHE (Tang and Wu (2000)) to a second-order BGK scheme. Several one- and two-dimensional numerical examples demonstrate improvement of the scheme in accuracy and resolution compared with the KFVS scheme (Tang and Wu (2000)) and the first-order BGK scheme. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

radiation hydrodynamics
zero diffusion
kfvs scheme


Topology correction of segmented medical images using a fast marching algorith We present here a new method for correcting the topology of objects segmented from medical images. Whereas previous techniques alter a surface obtained from a binary segmentation of the object, our technique can be applied directly to the image intensities of a probabilistic or fuzzy segmentation, thereby propagating the topology for all isosurfaces of the object. From an analysis of topological changes and critical points in implicit surfaces, we derive a topology propagation algorithm that enforces any desired topology using a fast marching technique. The method has been applied successfully to the correction of the cortical gray matter/white matter interface in segmented brain images and is publicly released as a software plug-in for the MIPAV package. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


Expanding the propositional logic of a t-norm with truth-constants: completeness results for rational semantics In this paper we consider the expansions of logics of a left-continuous t-norm with truth-constants from a subalgebra of the rational unit interval. From known results on standard semantics, we study completeness for these propositional logics with respect to chains defined over the rational unit interval with a special attention to the completeness with respect to the canonical chain, i.e. the algebra over \([0,1] \cap {{\mathbb{Q}}}\) where each truth-constant is interpreted in its corresponding rational truth-value. Finally, we study rational completeness results when we restrict ourselves to deductions between the so-called evaluated formulae.

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

mathematical fuzzy logic
left-continuous t-norms
t-norm based logics
truth-constants
real and rational completeness


Arithmetic Brownian motion and real options We treat real option value when the underlying process is arithmetic Brownian motion (ABM). In contrast to the more common assumption of geometric Brownian motion (GBM) and multiplicative diffusion, with ABM the underlying project value is expressed as an additive process. Its variance remains constant over time rather than rising or falling along with the projects value, even admitting the possibility of negative values. This is a more compelling paradigm for projects that are managed as a component of overall firm value. After outlining the case for ABM, we derive analytical formulas for European calls and puts on dividend-paying assets as well as a numerical algorithm for American-style and other more complex options based on ABM. We also provide examples of their use.

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

investment analysis
risk-neutral valuation


incorporating quality metrics in centralized/distributed information retrieval on the world wide web Most information retrieval systems on the Internet rely primarily on similarity ranking algorithms based solely on term frequency statistics. Information quality is usually ignored. This leads to the problem that documents are retrieved without regard to their quality. We present an approach that combines similarity-based similarity ranking with quality ranking in centralized and distributed search environments. Six quality metrics, including the currency , availability , information-to-noise ratio , authority , popularity , and cohesiveness , were investigated. Search effectiveness was significantly improved when the currency, availability, information-to-noise ratio and page cohesiveness metrics were incorporated in centralized search. The improvement seen when the availability, information-to- noise ratio, popularity, and cohesiveness metrics were incorporated in site selection was also significant. Finally, incorporating the popularity metric in information fusion resulted in a significant improvement. In summary, the results show that incorporating quality metrics can generally improve search effectiveness in both centralized and distributed search environments.

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

availability
fusion
statistics
quality
systems
environments
similarity
internet
distributed
noise
world wide web
search
information retrieval
ranking

select
paging
centrality
metrication
information qualities
algorithm
documentation
informal
effect


performance model for an obs node utilizing a shared-wavelength-converter-pool per node for contention resolution To avoid optical buffering, wavelength conversion has been widely investigated to handle potential burst collisions in the optical domain. The objective of this study is to analyze an optical burst switched node that uses wavelength conversion for contention resolution. In an OBS node, wavelength converters may be available to each channel, may be shared per link, or shared per node, according to the node architecture. Due to the cost of wavelength converters, sharing is commonly preferred. With shared converters all except one of the contending burst switching demands are assigned to available converters from the pool to change their outgoing wavelength, solving contention. We propose a performance model for symmetric traffic case for a node employing shared converter pool per node (SPN), which is considered to be most cost saving architecture. The model is validated with simulations to prove that it effectively provides a tool for dimensioning of an OBS switch.

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

tunable wavelength converters
optical burst switching


automatic extraction of web search interfaces for interface schema integration This paper provides an overview of a technique for extracting information from the Web search interfaces of e-commerce search engines that is useful for supporting automatic search interface integration. In particular, we discuss how to group elements and labels on a search interface into attributes and how to derive certain meta-information for each attribute.

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

search interface extraction
search interface representation
metasearch engine
search engine


exploiting spatial context constraints for automatic image region annotation In this paper we conduct a relatively complete study on how to exploit spatial context constraints for automated image region annotation. We present a straight forward method to regularize the segmented regions into 2D lattice layout, so that simple grid-structure graphical models can be employed to characterize the spatial dependencies. We show how to represent the spatial context constraints in various graphical models and also present the related learning and inference algorithms. Different from most of the existing work, we specifically investigate how to combine the classification performance of discriminative learning and the representation capability of graphical models. To reliably evaluate the proposed approaches, we create a moderate scale image set with region-level ground truth. The experimental results show that (i) spatial context constraints indeed help for accurate region annotation, (ii) the approaches combining the merits of discriminative learning and context constraints perform best, (iii) image retrieval can benefit from accurate region-level annotation.

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


Resource Sharing and Bandwidth Allocation for WiMAX Mesh Networks Using Centralized Scheduling IEEE 802.16, also known as WiMAX, is considered to be an important technology for next-generation wireless metropolitan area network (WMAN) and has received great attention for its potential applications. WiMAX supports two types of modes: point-to-multipoint mode and mesh mode. While the point-to-multipoint mode is well developed, the mesh mode still has many design issues to be addressed, such as routing and packet scheduling algorithms. This paper investigates the routing and packet scheduling algorithms of WiMAX mesh networks. Three sets of routing and packet scheduling algorithms are proposed: (1) interference-based optimal routing and parallel-relay-based packet scheduling, (2) link-prioritization-based routing and link-group-based packet scheduling, and (3) minimal-conflict-cost routing and deficiency-fair priority-based packet scheduling. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can make efficient use of radio resource.

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

wimax mesh networks
packet scheduling
bandwidth allocation

route construction
interference-aware routing


a theory of goal-oriented communication We put forward a general theory of goal-oriented communication , where communication is not an end in itself, but rather a means to achieving some goals of the communicating parties. Focusing on goals provides a framework for addressing the problem of potential "misunderstanding" during communication, where the misunderstanding arises from lack of initial agreement on what protocol and/or language is being used in communication. Despite the enormous diversity among the goals of communication, we propose a simple model that captures all goals.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 scheme for reliable real-time messaging with bounded delays Network-based real-time computing applications that require tightly bounded end-to-end delays have been increasing at a steady rate in recent years. A messaging layer that yields tight bounds on the latencies in detecting message losses and enables the application layer to initiate a timely recovery action has thus become highly desirable. In this paper, we present a new reliable real-time messaging scheme called the Delay-Bounded Reliable Messaging Scheme (DB-RMS) that is aimed at meeting such requirements. It is built on top of the User Datagram Protocol sub-layer. DB-RMS provides multiple service options, each with different fault detection/recovery capabilities and different costs in terms of the execution overhead. This feature makes DB-RMS suitable for a variety of applications. In this paper, the DB-RMS service options and the corresponding support protocols are presented first followed by a formal analysis on the detection and reaction latency bounds under various service options. A messaging layer prototype using DB-RMS has been implemented. To demonstrate the practice of the DB-RMS, we implemented a clock synchronization algorithm for 802.11 wireless local area networks on top of the DB-RMS messaging layer. Performance measurements of the prototype implementation have been taken, and the positive results obtained are also presented. Copyright 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

reliable messaging
clock synchronization

delay bound
message loss
detection/reaction latency
real-time messaging


Type-2 interval fuzzy rule-based systems in spatial analysis In this paper we present a rule-based system by using interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2-FS) for solving problems of spatial analysis. This system is encapsulated in a Geographical Information System (GIS) by performing numerous tests for evaluating their reliability.

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 B O O O O O O O O

interval type-2 fuzzy set
it2-fs rule-based system


Binary and \(q\)-ary Tardos codes, revisited The Tardos code is a much studied collusion-resistant fingerprinting code, with the special property that it has asymptotically optimal length \(m\propto c_0^2\), where \(c_0\) is the number of colluders. In this paper we give alternative security proofs for the Tardos code, working with the assumption that the strongest coalition strategy is position-independent. We employ the Bernstein inequality and Bennett inequality instead of the typically used Markov inequality. This proof technique requires fewer steps and slightly improves the tightness of the bound on the false negative error probability. We present new results on code length optimization, for both small and asymptotically large coalition sizes.

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

traitor tracing
tardos fingerprinting
collusion
94b99


Solving 2D rolling problems using the NORMTANG iteration and mathematical programming In this paper, an approach to steady-state rolling, based on the boundary element method and mathematical programming techniques is presented. The algorithm solves the problem by an enchained iteration with the NORM and TANG parts of the problem. These two parts are solved by different methods because of the different nature of the non-linearities inside each one of them. The normal part has a weak non-linearity and can be solved as a linear complementary problem by the Lemke method, but the tangential part, with a stronger non-linearity, needs other methods. This work presents three different ways to solve this part by using mathematical programming techniques, showing their flexibility and reliability by solving various classic problems.

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

rolling
mathematical programming
boundary element method


A Generalization of Nash Bargaining and Proportional Fairness to Log-Convex Utility Sets With Power Constraints Many solutions and concepts in resource allocation and game theory rely on the assumption of a convex utility set. In this paper, we show that the less restrictive assumption of a logarithmic "hidden" convexity is sometimes sufficient. We consider the problems of Nash bargaining and proportional fairness, which are closely related. We extend the Nash bargaining framework to a broader family of log-convex sets. We then focus on the set of feasible signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratios (SINRs), for the cases of individual power constraints and a sum power constraint. Under the assumption of log-convex interference functions, we show how Pareto optimality of boundary points depends on the interference coupling between the users. Finally, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for strict log-convexity of the feasible SINR region.

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

game theory
interference
nash bargaining
proportional fairness


A Recommender System for Device Sharing Based on Context-Aware and Personalization In ubiquitous computing, invisible devices and software are connected to one another to provide convenient services to users [1][2]. Users hope to obtain a personalized service which is composed of customized devices among sharable devices in a ubiquitous smart space (which is called USS in this paper). However, the situations of each user are different and user preferences also are various. Although users request the same service in the same USS, the most suitable devices for composing the service are different for each user. For these user requirements, this paper proposes a device recommender system which infers and recommends customized devices for composing a user required service. The objective of this paper is the development of the systems for recommending devices through context-aware inference in peer-to-peer environments. For this goal, this paper considers the context and user preference. Also I implement a prototype system and test performance on the real ubiquitous mobile object (UMO).

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

context reasoning
context-aware
ontology-based reasoning
rule-based reasoning
estimating user preference


ON THE POWER OF RANDOMIZATION FOR JOB SHOP SCHEDULING WITH k-UNITS LENGTH TASKS In the job shop scheduling problem k-units-J(m), there are m machines and each machine has an integer processing time of at most k time units. Each job consists of a permutation of m tasks corresponding to all machines and thus all jobs have an identical dilation D. The contribution of this paper are the following results; (i) for d = o(root D) jobs and every fixed k, the makespan of an optimal schedule is at most D + o(D), which extends the result of [3] for k = 1; (ii) a randomized on-line approximation algorithm for k-units-J(m) is presented. This is the on-line algorithm with the best known competitive ratio against an oblivious adversary for d = o(root D) and k > 1; (iii) different processing times yield harder instances than identical processing times. There is no 5/3 competitive deterministic on-line algorithm for k-units-J(m), whereas the competitive ratio of the randomized on-line algorithm of (ii) still tends to 1 for d = o(root D).

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

randomization
competitive ratio
scheduling


visualizing a computer mediated communication (cmc) process to facilitate knowledge management The archive of a computer-mediated communication (CMC) process contains knowledge shared and implicit information about participants' behavior patterns during discussion. However, most CMC systems focus only on organizing the content of discussions. On the other hand, the social visualization research has developed techniques to depict human behaviors during a process of CMC but has not been integrated in any organizational memory system yet. In addition, the impacts of the graphical representations created by social visualization techniques have seldom been studied. The dissertation thus proposes a two-phase research to address those issues. The first phase proposes a prototype system that integrates a social visualization technique with various information analysis technologies to graphically summarize both the content and behavior of a CMC process. The second phase proposes to adopt the "de-featuring" approach used by previous interface evaluation studies to evaluate how the graphical interface developed affects users' information acquisition and evaluation process.

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

individual decision making
computer-based communication systems
user interface


Full-Wave Analysis of Circular Guiding Structures Using the Finite Difference Frequency Domain Method In this article, a general full-wave two dimensional finite difference frequency domain (2D-FDFD) method is presented that could be used to analyze general circular multi-layered multi-conductor guiding structures. The FDFD method is mainly used to get the dispersion curves for these structures. The results which are obtained using the FDFD equations come through solving an eigen-value problem, where the obtained eigen-values and eigen-vectors are used to produce the propagation constants, distribution of the fields and the characteristic impedances for these structures. Several examples ranging from simple coaxial lines to coupled circular microstrip lines are presented. The FDFD results are compared with those obtained through other analytical and numerical techniques. (C) 2010 Wiley Periodicals. Inc Int J RF and Microwave CAE 20 659-666. 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 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

finite difference frequency domain (fdfd), cylindrical microwave structures


Hyperplane aggregation of dominance decision rules In this paper we consider multiple criteria decision aid systems based on decision rules generated from examples. A common problem in such systems is the over-abundance of decision rules, as in many situations the rule generation algorithms produce very large sets of rules. This prolific representation of knowledge provides a great deal of detailed information about the described objects, but is appropriately difficult to, interpret and use. One way of solving this problem is to aggregate the created rules into more general ones, e.g. by forming rules of enriched syntax. The paper presents a generalization of elementary rule conditions into linear combinations. This corresponds to partitioning the preference-ordered condition space of criteria with non-orthogonal hyperplanes. The objective of this paper is to introduce the generalized rules into the multiple criteria classification problems and to demonstrate that these problems can be successfully solved using the introduced rules. The usefulness of the introduced solution is finally demonstrated in computational experiments with real-life data sets.

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

rough sets
knowledge discovery and representation
rule induction


Improvement of service quality by reducing waiting time for service One of the major concerns of any service organisation is the time customers have to spend waiting for service. As is well known, waiting time depends on a number of quantities, such as the system arrival rate, service rate, type of services, time of the day, and efficiency of the servers. In this paper, we propose a service model appropriate in the Indian banking industry and discuss the effectiveness of various solutions using simulation. The best solution found from the alternatives has been implemented. In this paper, we summarize the efforts and the results thereof.

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

queuing
gamma distribution
weibull distribution


Exact solutions of sonic nonlinear evolution equations using symbolic computations In this paper, we present a solution methodology that utilizes symbolic computations to obtain analytic solutions of some nonlinear evolution equations by balancing the nonlinear and the dispersive effects. The solution method is demonstrated by obtaining solutions to Burgers' equation, the nonlinear heat equation, the modified KdV equation, and the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

evolution equations
exact solutions
kdv equation

nonlinear partial differential equations


Behavioral models of the praying mantis as a basis for robotic behavior ? Formal models of animal sensorimotor behavior can provide effective methods for generating robotic intelligence. In this article we describe how schema-theoretic models of the praying mantis derived from behavioral and neuroscientific data can be implemented on a hexapod robot equipped with a real time color vision system. This implementation incorporates a wide range of behaviors, including obstacle avoidance, prey acquisition, predator avoidance, mating, and chantlitaxia behaviors that can provide guidance to neuroscientists, ethologists, and roboticists alike. The goals of this study are threefold: to provide an understanding and means by which fielded robotic systems are not competing with other agents that are more effective at their designated task; to permit them to be successful competitors within the ecological system and capable of displacing less efficient agents; and that they are ecologically sensitive so that agentenvironment dynamics are well-modeled and as predictable as possible whenever new robotic technology is introduced.

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

schema-based control
behavior-based robotics
praying mantis behavior


Design and Validation of Android Based Wireless Integrated Device for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring Mobile wireless technologies have become more favourable for ubiquitous healthcare nowadays to provide healthcare services anytime anywhere. This paper presents Android based integrated wireless smart device and a mobile monitoring terminal to observe and analyze real time health parameters such as saturated percentage of oxygen (SpO2), heart rate and skin temperature. The device is designed and implemented using a microcontroller platform for primary processing of data and wireless communication is done through Bluetooth protocol. The developed system is clinically useful and user friendly due to its compact size, cost effectiveness, wearability and can be used widely in hospitals for post operative care, home healthcare, community healthcare and sports training. The experimental results illustrate that the mean absolute percentage error of prototype device is 0.75% for SpO2, 1.58% for heart rate and 0.66% for skin temperature measurement. Correlation coefficient is also calculated to find the linear association between the standard and prototype device.

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

application programming interface (api)
digital storage oscilloscope (dso)
saturated percentage of oxygen (spo2)
photoplethysmography (ppg)
application (app)


Hierarchical fusion of multi-spectral face images for improved recognition performance This paper presents a two level hierarchical fusion of face images captured under visible and infrared light spectrum to improve the performance of face recognition. At image level fusion, two face images from different spectrums are fused using DWT based fusion algorithm. At feature level fusion, the amplitude and phase features are extracted from the fused image using 2D log polar Gabor wavelet. An adaptive SVM learning algorithm intelligently selects either the amplitude or phase features to generate a fused feature set for improved face recognition. The recognition performance is observed under the worst case scenario of using single training images. Experimental results on Equinox face database show that the combination of visible light and short-wave IR spectrum face images yielded the best recognition performance with an equal error rate of 2.86%. The proposed image-feature fusion algorithm also performed better than existing fusion algorithms. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

image fusion
feature fusion
wavelet transform
support vector machine


wiki-based process framework for blended learning With few exceptions, currently published research on the educational use of wikis does not include how the learning activities should be shaped, planned or enforced in a wiki [11]. In this paper we aim to fill that gap by providing a framework for learning and teaching processes supported by the use of wikis. An instance of that process framework ("feedback-driven" process) was formulated and implemented through a series of trials performed at University of Hertfordshire Business School during the course of the last two academic years to 2006/7. The results of the trial have been collected and analyzed using the quantitative and qualitative methods and have led to the conclusion that students engagement with wiki-based learning activities is directly proportional to the quality and frequency of tutors feedback and the clarity of the underlying learning and teaching process.

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


Semantic model for flood management Risk assessment involves the study of vulnerability and hazards. When focused on flood events, such an analysis should evidently include the theoretical and practical study of floods and their behavior. Nevertheless, risk assessment is not useful if the results are not subsequently used for more effective management and planning by local authorities and qualified personnel. The risk evaluation process is composed of a set of actions, each of which requires different inputs. In fact, the results of one action are used as the input for another. This paper describes a semantic model for the study and management of floods with a view to elaborating a conceptual framework and designing a knowledge base. The model is based on the environmental assessment ontology and demonstrates how a brief ontology can be generated.

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 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 B O O O

knowledge representation
owl (web ontology language)


A sales agent for part manufacturers: VMSA The sales activity of most parts manufacturing companies is based on orders of buyers. The process of promotion, receipt and selection of orders of the parts manufacturers is closely coupled with the load status of the production lines. On deciding whether to accept an order or not, as well as negotiating with buyers, sales persons need information such as load and schedule of production lines, and manufacturability of the order. Manufacturability analysis, process planning, and scheduling are therefore key features in developing an agent of sales activity for the parts manufacturing business. In this paper, an intelligent agent, a virtual manufacturing-based sales agent (VMSA) with multi-agent architecture is proposed to support the sales activity for the parts manufacturers in the Internet environment. A VMSA has an integrated architecture of agent and virtual manufacturing. The prototype of VMSA has been developed for a machine parts manufacturing company that has lathe machines, drilling machines, cutting machines, and milling machines.

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


On the spatial behavior of solutions for porous elastic solids with quasi-static microvoids The spatial behavior of solutions for the dynamic problem of elasticity with voids is well known. It has been analyzed making use of the usual techniques for hyperbolic differential equations. Here we consider a related but different problem, the problem determined by the dynamic deformations of porous elasticity with porous dissipation when the motion of the microvoids is supposed to be quasi-static. We think that this kind of dynamical problem deserves some consideration. However, little attention has been paid to it in the literature. On the one hand, the problem has interest from a mechanical point of view, because this is the system that one must study when the microvoids deformations are small enough as to assume that their acceleration is nearly zero. On the other hand, the problem has also interest from its mathematical structure, because the coupling of a parabolic equation with a hyperbolic one arises in the system. (c) 2006 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

porous visco-elasticity
quasi-static microvoids


Analysis of Shortest Path Routing for Large Multi-Hop Wireless Networks In this paper, we analyze the impact of straight line routing in large homogeneous multi-hop wireless networks. We estimate the nodal load, which is defined as the number of packets served at a node, induced by straight line routing. For a given total offered load on the network, our analysis shows that the nodal load at each node is a function of the node's Voronoi cell, the node's location in the network, and the traffic pattern specified by the source and destination randomness and straight line routing. In the asymptotic regime, we show that each node's probability that the node serves a packet arriving to the network approaches the products of half the length of the Voronoi cell perimeter and the load density function that a packet goes through the node's location. The density function depends on the traffic pattern generated by straight line routing, and determines where the hot spot is created in the network. Hence, contrary to conventional wisdom, straight line routing can balance the load over the network, depending on the traffic patterns.

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

geometric probability
multi-hop wireless network
simulations


Alterations in vasomotor control of coronary resistance vessels in remodelled myocardium of swine with a recent myocardial infarction The mechanism underlying the progressive deterioration of left ventricular (LV) dysfunction after myocardial infarction (MI) towards overt heart failure remains incompletely understood, but may involve impairments in coronary blood flow regulation within remodelled myocardium leading to intermittent myocardial ischemia. Blood flow to the remodelled myocardium is hampered as the coronary vasculature does not grow commensurate with the increase in LV mass and because extravascular compression of the coronary vasculature is increased. In addition to these factors, an increase in coronary vasomotor tone, secondary to neurohumoral activation and endothelial dysfunction, could also contribute to the impaired myocardial oxygen supply. Consequently, we explored, in a series of studies, the alterations in regulation of coronary resistance vessel tone in remodelled myocardium of swine with a 2 to 3-week-old MI. These studies indicate that myocardial oxygen balance is perturbed in remodelled myocardium, thereby forcing the myocardium to increase its oxygen extraction. These perturbations do not appear to be the result of blunted ?-adrenergic or endothelial NO-mediated coronary vasodilator influences, and are opposed by an increased vasodilator influence through opening of KATP channels. Unexpectedly, we observed that despite increased circulating levels of noradrenaline, angiotensin II and endothelin-1, ?-adrenergic tone remained negligible, while the coronary vasoconstrictor influences of endogenous endothelin and angiotensin II were virtually abolished. We conclude that, early after MI, perturbations in myocardial oxygen balance are observed in remodelled myocardium. However, adaptive alterations in coronary resistance vessel control, consisting of increased vasodilator influences in conjunction with blunted vasoconstrictor influences, act to minimize the impairments of myocardial oxygen balance.

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

myocardial infarction
swine
coronary blood flow
myocardial oxygen balance