fast algorithms for slew constrained minimum cost buffering As a prevalent constraint, sharp slew rate is often required in circuit design which causes a huge demand for buffering resources. This problem requires ultra-fast buffering techniques to handle large volume of nets, while also minimizing buffering cost. This problem is intensively studied in this paper. First, a highly efficient algorithm based on dynamic programming is proposed to optimally solve slew buffering with discrete buffer locations. Second, a new algorithm is developed to handle the difficult cases in which no assumption is made on buffer input slew. Third, an adaptive buffer selection approach is proposed to efficiently handle slew buffering with continuous buffer locations. Experiments on industrial netlists demonstrate that our algorithms are very effective and highly efficient: we achieve > 100X speed up and save up to 40\% buffer area over the commonly-used van Ginneken style buffering.

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

buffer insertion
slew constraint
physical design


Effects of substrate temperature on electrical and structural properties of copper thin films This paper addresses the effects of substrate temperature on electrical and structural properties of dc magnetron sputter-deposited copper (Cu) thin films on p-type silicon. Copper films of 80 and 500nm were deposited from Cu target in argon ambient gas pressure of 3.6mTorr at different substrate temperatures ranging from room temperature to 250C. The electrical and structural properties of the Cu films were investigated by four-point probe and atomic force microscopy. Results from our experiment show that the increase in substrate temperature generally promotes the grain growth of the Cu films of both thicknesses. The RMS roughness as well as the lateral feature size increase with the substrate temperature, which is associated with the increase in the grain size. On the other hand, the resistivity for 80nm Cu film decreases to less than 5??-cm at the substrate temperature of 100C, and further increase in the substrate temperature has not significantly decreased the film resistivity. For the 500nm Cu films, the increase in the grain size with the substrate temperature does not conform to the film resistivity for these Cu films, which show no significant change over the substrate temperature range. Possible mechanisms of substrate-temperature-dependent microstructure formation of these Cu films are discussed in this paper, which explain the interrelationship of grain growth and film resistivity with elevated substrate temperature.

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

sputtering
surface morphology
electrical properties


Language as a Cognitive Tool The standard view of classical cognitive science stated that cognition consists in the manipulation of language-like structures according to formal rules. Since cognition is linguistic in itself, according to this view language is just a complex communication system and does not influence cognitive processes in any substantial way. This view has been criticized from several perspectives and a new framework (Embodied Cognition) has emerged that considers cognitive processes as non-symbolic and heavily dependent on the dynamical interactions between the cognitive system and its environment. But notwithstanding the successes of the embodied cognitive science in explaining low-level cognitive behaviors, it is still not clear whether and how it can scale up for explaining high-level cognition. In this paper we argue that this can be done by considering the role of language as a cognitive tool: i.e. how language transforms basic cognitive functions in the high-level functions that are characteristic of human cognition. In order to do that, we review some computational models that substantiate this view with respect to categorization and memory. Since these models are based on a very rudimentary form of non-syntactic language we argue that the use of language as a cognitive tool might have been an early discovery in hominid evolution, and might have played a substantial role in the evolution of language itself.

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

language
cognitive tool
embodied cognition

computational model
language evolution
high-level cognition


policy-driven workflows for mobile network management automation Future wireless networks will experience a continuous growth regarding the number of network elements with increasingly complex interrelations between the configuration of multiple network elements. Another trend is the seamless integration of multiple radio technologies into a single wireless network. Both developments increase network management complexity and require new management concepts with a very high degree of automation. For this purpose, a novel management approach based on a combination of workflow and policy technologies is presented. The goal is to simplify and automate management tasks in mobile networks in order to raise the state of self-organization while the network still remains under control of the operator. The approach provides the means for a dynamic system to automatically adapt to context changes. Moreover, an experimental system is presented for the purposes of concept validation and evaluation along with a real world use case.

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


detection of transactional memory anomalies using static analysis Transactional Memory allows programmers to reduce the number of synchronization errors introduced in concurrent programs, but does not ensures its complete elimination. This paper proposes a pattern matching based approach to the static detection of atomicity violation, based on a path-sensitive symbolic execution method to model four anomalies that may affect Transactional Memory programs. The proposed technique may be used to to bring to programmer's attention pairs of transactions that the programmer has mis-specified, and should have been combined into a single transaction. The algorithm first traverses the AST tree, removing all the non-transactional blocks and generating a trace tree in the path sensitive manner for each thread. The trace tree is a Trie like data structure, where each path from root to a leaf is a list of transactions. For each pair of threads, erroneous patterns involving two consecutive transactions are then checked in the trace tree. Results allow to conclude that the proposed technique, although triggering a moderate number of false positives, can be successfully applied to Java programs, correctly identifying the vast majority of the relevant erroneous patterns.

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

concurrency
verification
testing
software transactional memory


An ant-based approach for dynamic RWA in optical WDM networks In this paper, we propose a new ant-based algorithm for the dynamic routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) problem in optical WDM networks under the wavelength continuity constraint. Unlike conventional approaches, which usually require centralized global network information, our new RWA algorithm constructs the routing solution in a distributed manner by means of cooperative ants. To facilitate the ants' foraging task, we adopt in our algorithm a probabilistic routing table structure for route selection. The new algorithm is highly adaptive in that it always keeps a suitable number of ants in the network to cooperatively explore the network states and continuously update the routing tables, so that the route for a connection request can be determined promptly by the current states of routing tables with only a small setup delay. Some new schemes for path scoring and path searching are also proposed to enhance the performance of our ant-based algorithm. Extensive simulation results upon three typical network topologies indicate that the proposed algorithm has a very good adaptability to traffic variations and it outperforms both the fixed routing algorithm and the promising fixed-alternate routing algorithm in terms of blocking probability. The ability to guarantee both a low blocking probability and a small setup delay makes the new ant-based routing algorithm very attractive for both the optical circuit switching networks and future optical burst switching 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 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

ant-based routing
routing and wavelength assignment (rwa)
wdmnetworks


Toward a Robust Search Method for the Protein-Drug Docking Problem Predicting the binding mode(s) of a drug molecule to a target receptor is pivotal in structure-based rational drug design. In contrast to most approaches to solve this problem, the idea in this paper is to analyze the search problem from a computational perspective. By building on top of an existing docking tool, new methods are proposed and relevant computational results are proven. These methods and results are applicable for other place-and-join frameworks as well. A fast approximation scheme for the docking of rigid fragments is described that guarantees certain geometric approximation factors. It is also demonstrated that this can be translated into an energy approximation for simple scoring functions. A polynomial time algorithm is developed for the matching phase of the docked rigid fragments. It is demonstrated that the generic matching problem is NP-hard. At the same time, the optimality of the proposed algorithm is proven under certain scoring function conditions. The matching results are also applicable for some of the fragment-based de novo design methods. On the practical side, the proposed method is tested on 829 complexes from the PDB. The results show that the closest predicted pose to the native structure has the average RMS deviation of 1.06 angstrom.

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

curve, surface, solid and object representations

bioinformatics (genome or protein) databases


Stress induced leakage current generated by hot-hole injection SILC caused by hot-hole injection depends only on the number of injected holes. SILC is independent of the filed, and carrier density and energy at the stress. SILC increases exponentially at an early stress and linearly at a large stress.

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


On computing longest paths in small graph classes The longest path problem is the one that finds a longest path in a given graph. While the graph classes in which the Hamiltonian path problem can be solved efficiently are widely investigated, few graph classes are known to be solved efficiently for the longest path problem. Among those, for trees, a simple linear time algorithm for the longest path problem is known. We first generalize the algorithm, and show that the longest path problem can be solved efficiently for some tree-like graph classes by this approach. We next propose two new graph classes that have natural interval representations, and show that the longest path problem can be solved efficiently on these classes.

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

algorithmic graph theory
design and analysis of algorithms


Find it if you can: usability case study of search engines for young users The Internet is an integral part of the lives of our children nowadays. Using the Internet, in particular search engines, children search for information for school, for their individual interests or simply for entertainment. Unfortunately, research shows that children face many difficulties when searching and browsing for information, even though there are several search engines that are designed especially for children. In this paper, we review recent work in this field and evaluate to what extent current search engines for children are appropriately supporting the motor and cognitive skills of elementary school-age children. We base our study on findings of previous research and derive criteria to assess existing search engines. Our results suggest that most of them still require improvements in order to fit the skills and competencies of children.

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

children information retrieval
targeted search engine
hci


Decomposing bent functions In a recent paper [1], it is shown that the restrictions of bent functions to subspaces of codimension 1 and 2 are highly nonlinear. Here, we present an extensive study of the restrictions of bent functions to affine subspaces. We propose several methods which are mainly based on properties of the derivatives and of the dual of a given bent function. We solve an open problem due to Hou [2]. We especially describe the connection, for a bent function, between the Fourier spectra of its restrictions and the decompositions of its dual. Most notably, we show that the Fourier spectra of the restrictions of a bent function to the subspaces of codimension 2 can be explicitly derived from the Hamming weights of the second derivatives of the dual function. The last part of the paper is devoted to some infinite classes of bent functions which cannot be decomposed into four bent functions.

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 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 B I O O O O O O B I

boolean functions
derivatives of boolean functions
reed-muller codes
restrictions of boolean functions


Experimental observations on nonlinear phenomena in transducer assembly for thermosonic Flip-Chip bonding Dynamical characteristics of PZT actuated transducer assembly are the key to reliable flip-chip bonding and basic understanding of metal interconnection. A systematic experimental observations and analysis clearly exhibit that, rich phenomena and effects like the negative cubic stiffness, dynamical coupling between transducer body and tool, velocity dropping and anomalous phase portrait of the die movement, may be explained by nonlinear features and non-parallel loading of transducer assembly onto its bonding area. It will be possible to explore their mechanism and effects to bonding quality by identifying and decoding them.

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

pzt transducer assembly
nonlinear dynamics
thermosonic bonding
flip-chip die
laser vibrometer


ROBUST ADAPTIVE FUZZY CONTROLLER DESIGN FOR A CLASS OF UNCERTAIN NONLINEAR TIME-DELAY SYSTEMS In this paper, the problems of stability and control for a class of uncertain nonlinear systems with unknown state time-delay are studied by using the fuzzy logic systems. Because the dynamic surface control technique is introduced to deal with the uncertain time-delay systems, the designed adaptive fuzzy controller can avoid the issue of "explosion of complexity", which comes from the traditional backstepping design procedure. Compared with the existing results in the literature, the robustness to the fuzzy approximation errors is improved by adjusting the estimations of the unknown bounds for the approximation errors. It is shown that the resulting closed-loop system is stable in the sense that all the signals are bounded and the system output track the reference signal in a small neighborhood of the origin by choosing design parameters appropriately. Three simulation examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques.

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

robust adaptive control
fuzzy control
nonlinear time-delay systems


Computational modelling of the natural hip: a review of finite element and multibody simulations Primary objective: The hip joint suffers from a high prevalence of degenerative conditions. Athough patient's well-being could be improved through early and more effective interventions, without a greater understanding of the mechanics of the hip, these developments cannot be attained. Thus, this review article summarises the current literature on this subject in order to provide a platform for future developments. To illustrate the influence computational simulations have had on the knowledge advancement in hip mechanics, we explored two methodological approaches: finite element (FE) analysis and multibody dynamics (MBD). Main outcomes and results: Notwithstanding the unique capabilities of FE and MBD, the former generally offers the micromechanics of the articulating surfaces whereas the latter the macromechanics of the skeleton, these two methodologies also provide the bulk of the literature regarding computational modelling of the musculoskeletal system. Although FE has provided significant knowledge on contact pressures and the effects of musculoskeletal geometries, in particular cartilage and bone shapes, MBD has afforded a wealth of understanding on the influence of gait patterns and muscle attachment locations on force magnitudes. Conclusions: These two computational techniques have, and will continue to, provide significant contributions towards the development of interventions. It is hoped that this article will help focus ongoing technological developments by highlighting areas of success, but also areas of under development.

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


Computing the k-Error Linear Complexity of q-Ary Sequences with Period 2p(n) The linear complexity and its stability of periodic sequences are of fundamental importance as measure indexes on the security of stream ciphers and the k-error linear complexity reveals the stability of the linear complexity properly. Recently, Zhou designed an algorithm for computing the k-error linear complexity of 2p(n) periodic sequences over GF(q). In this paper, we develop a genetic algorithm to confirm that one can't get the real k-error linear complexity for some sequenes by the Zhou's algorithm. Analysis indicates that the Zhou's algorithm is unreasonable in some steps. The corrected algorithm is presented. Such algorithm will increase the amount of computation, but is necessary to get the real k-error linear complexity. Here p and q are odd prime, and q is a primitive root (mod p(2)).

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

stream cipher
periodic sequence
k-error linear complexity


A text-based decision support system for financial sequence prediction Although most quantitative financial data are analyzed using traditional statistical, artificial intelligence or data mining techniques, the abundance of online electronic financial news articles has opened up new possibilities for intelligent systems that can extract and organize relevant knowledge automatically in a usable format. Most information extraction systems require a hand-built dictionary of templates and thus need continual modification to accommodate new patterns that are observed in the text. In this research, we propose a novel text-based decision support system (DSS) that (i) extracts event sequences from shallow text patterns, and (ii) predicts the likelihood of the occurrence of events using a classifier-based inference engine. The prediction relies on two major, but complementary, feature sets: adjacent events and a set of information-theoretic functions. In contrast to other approaches, the proposed text-based DSS gives explanatory hypotheses about its predictions from a coalition of intimations learned from the inference engine, while preserving robustness and without indulging in formalism. We investigate more than 2000 financial reports with 28,000 sentences. Experiments show that the prediction accuracy of our model outperforms similar statistical models by 7% for the seen data while significantly improving the prediction accuracy for the unseen data. Further comparisons substantiate the experimental findings. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

textual analysis
decision support systems
classifier based machine learning


Model for estimating nutrient addition contents to staple foods fortified simultaneously: Mexico and Kampala data The objective of this work was to present a generic model for estimating fortification contents when several food vehicles are being considered simultaneously. It is based on approximating the magnitude of the nutritional inadequacy of the population (nutrient gap), the optimal use of the combination of food vehicles (fortifiable food energy, FFE), and the upper intake level to decrease the possibility that individuals with the highest combined intake of all food vehicles will exceed it. The model is intended to be used when only per capita food and micronutrient intake information, not detailed food intake data, are available. Food consumption survey data from Mexico and Kampala (Uganda) were analyzed for adult women, assuming that their intake may be similar to general per capita values. General adjustment factors for estimating the lowest and highest FFE and micronutrient intake for satisfying the requirements of other family members were calculated. These factors were used to estimate the additional effective content and the maximum allowable content, and then the recommended nutrient contents at the consumers level were chosen on the basis of technological compatibility and cost. The method should be used in other contexts to test its validity as well as its application to nonstaple foods.

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


clustering with case-based reasoning for wireless sensor network In wireless sensor network one of the key issues is how to maximize the network lifetime since it consists of sensor nodes of limited energy. Numerous cluster-based routing schemes have been proposed for sensor networks. Here various important factors such as sensing coverage and distribution of live nodes need to be effectively accounted in forming the clusters. In this paper we propose a new scheme which considers the nodes' remaining energy, distance between the nodes, and sensor coverage in clustering the nodes. We also employ the case-based reasoning technique in the clustering process. Compared with the existing cluster-based protocols such as LEACH and Coverage-Preserving protocol through computer simulation, the proposed scheme allows substantially enhanced network lifetime and coverage. Especially, it is more effective when the network has been used for a while and thus some nodes have become inoperable.

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

leach
wireless sensor network
sensor coverage

case-based reasoning
cluster-based protocol
energy efficiency


Systematic searching for theory to inform systematic reviews: is it feasible? Is it desirable? In recognising the potential value of theory in understanding how interventions work comes a challenge how to make identification of theory less haphazard?

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

bibliographic databases
database searching
information retrieval
literature searching
review and systematic search


Recursion based parallelization of exact dense linear algebra routines for Gaussian elimination Use of fast matrix arithmetic and modular reductions penalize fine grains Block recursive algorithms with OpenMP tasks can reach state of the art efficiency The libkomp library handles recursive tasks more efficiently than libgomp Recursive PLUQ decomposition behaves best using explicit task synchronizations Dataflow task synchronizations improves efficiency on finer grain implementations

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

parallel shared memory computation
finite field
dataflow task dependencies
numa architecture
rank deficiency


Different pulse shapes for selective large fibre block in sacral nerve roots using a technique of anodal block: an experimental study The aim of this study was experimentally to investigate whether it is possible to reduce the charge per phase that is applied during selective large fibre block. Sacral roots in pigs were stimulated. Sacral roots contain large somatic nerve fibres and small parasympathetic nerve fibres. Large nerve fibres that innervate the external urethral and external anal sphincters were selectively blocked using a technique of anodal block. In that way, selective activation of the detrusor muscle and the rectum innervated by parasympathetic fibres could be obtained. The square stimulation pulse was replaced with three different pulse shapes that had the same duration as the square pulse and consisted of a depolarising prepulse and a blocking part of the pulse. Compared with the square pulse, the charge per phase needed for anodal block could be reduced with all three pulse shapes. Maximum reduction of the charge per pulse was 17 +/- 6%. A lower charge might make anodal block safer in long-term applications.

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

charge per phase
selective large fibre block


Algorithm for computing the queue length distribution at various time epochs in DMAP/G(1, a, b)/1/N queue with batch-size-dependent service time We investigate a discrete-time queue with batch-size-dependent service. The discrete-Markovian arrival process captures the correlation structure of the arrival process. UL-type RG-factorization approach is employed to calculate the joint state probabilities at various epochs. The impact of the correlation factor on performance measures is also studied.

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

queueing
batch-size-dependent service
markovian arrival process
phase-type distribution
finite-buffer


Graphene nanosheets modified by nitrogen-doped carbon layer to support Pt nanoparticles for direct methanol fuel cell Aniline was used to form nitrogen-doped carbon layer on graphene nanosheets. Aggregation between graphene nanosheets was hindered. Electrochemical surface area of the catalyst is largely increased. Better catalytic activity and stability of Pt nanoparticles were achieved.

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


A sub-cell based indicator for troubled zones in RKDG schemes and a novel class of hybrid RKDG+HWENO schemes RungeKutta Discontinuous Galerkin (RKDG) schemes can provide highly accurate solutions for a large class of important scientific problems. Using them for problems with shocks and other discontinuities requires that one has a strategy for detecting the presence of these discontinuities. Strategies that are based on total variation diminishing (TVD) limiters can be problem-independent and scale-free but they can indiscriminately clip extrema, resulting in degraded accuracy. Those based on total variation bounded (TVB) limiters are neither problem-independent nor scale-free. In order to get past these limitations we realize that the solution in RKDG schemes can carry meaningful sub-structure within a zone that may not need to be limited. To make this sub-structure visible, we take a sub-cell approach to detecting zones with discontinuities, known as troubled zones. A monotonicity preserving (MP) strategy is applied to distinguish between meaningful sub-structure and shocks. The strategy does not indiscriminately clip extrema and is, nevertheless, scale-free and problem-independent. It, therefore, overcomes some of the limitations of previously-used strategies for detecting troubled zones. The moments of the troubled zones can then be corrected using a weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) or Hermite WENO (HWENO) approach. In the course of doing this work it was also realized that the most significant variation in the solution is contained in the solution variables and their first moments. Thus the additional moments can be reconstructed using the variables and their first moments, resulting in a very substantial savings in computer memory. We call such schemes hybrid RKDG+HWENO schemes. It is shown that such schemes can attain the same formal accuracy as RKDG schemes, making them attractive, low-storage alternatives to RKDG schemes. Particular attention has been paid to the reconstruction of cross-terms in multi-dimensional problems and explicit, easy to implement formulae have been catalogued for third and fourth order of spatial accuracy. The utility of hybrid RKDG+WENO schemes has been illustrated with several stringent test problems in one and two dimensions. It is shown that their accuracy is usually competitive with the accuracy of RKDG schemes of the same order. Because of their compact stencils and low storage, hybrid RKDG+HWENO schemes could be very useful for large-scale parallel adaptive mesh refinement calculations.

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

higher order schemes
weno schemes
conservation laws


Mobile-health: A review of current state in 2015 An extensive review of the state of the art on m-Health and related approaches. Study of the scientific developments/break-through on m-Health. Analysis of the top mobile health applications in the top mobile markets. Discussion about current and open issues on m-Health services and technologies.

O O O O O O O O O O O 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

e-health
health telematics
healthcare
m-health
telemedicine


Adenosine A(2A) receptor agonists: CoMFA-based selection of the most predictive conformation A step-wise comparative molecular field analysis (CoMFA)-based procedure was applied to a series of 51 2-oxyadenosines in order to select the most predictive conformation for binding to A(2A) adenosine receptor (AR). The highest correlation and predictive power were found for conformers with side chain at 2nd position oriented in the direction opposite to the exocyclic amino group on the adenine ring (torsion N1C2OR = 120degrees) and fully extended. The interaction of ligand and receptor is under steric and electrostatic control. The steric contribution is of a greater importance for the predictivity than the electrostatic one. Hydrophobicity of the compounds investigated does not affect significantly either the affinity to A(2A) AR, nor the predictivity of the models.

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

2-alkyloxy-, 2-aryloxy- and 2-aralkyloxy-adenosines


On learning thresholds of parities and unions of rectangles in random walk models In a recent breakthrough, [Bshouty et al., J Comput Syst Sci 71 (2005), 250-265] obtained the first passive- learning algorithm for DNFs under the uniform distribution. They showed that DNFs are learnable in the Random Walk and Noise Sensitivity models. We extend their results in several directions. We first show that thresholds of parities, a natural class encompassing DNFs, cannot be learned efficiently in the Noise Sensitivity model using only statistical queries. In contrast, we show that a cyclic version of the Random Walk model allows to learn efficiently polynomially weighted thresholds of parities. We also extend the algorithm of Bshouty et al. to the case of Unions of Rectangles, a natural generalization of DNFs to {0, . . . , b - 1}(n). (C) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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


PHONETIC ANALYSES OF WORD AND SEGMENT VARIATION USING THE TIMIT-CORPUS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH This paper reports a set of studies of some phonetic characteristics of the American English represented in the TIMIT speech database. First we describe some relevant characteristics of TIMIT, and how we use the non-speech files on the TIMIT CD with a commercial database program. Two studies are then described: one using only the non-audio parts of TIMIT (segmental transcriptions and durations, and speaker information), and one using the audio signal for acoustic analysis. Results of such studies should be useful not only to linguistic phoneticians but also for speech recognition lexicons and text-to-speech systems.

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

speech databases
pronounciation variation
velar fronting


Fault tolerant deployment and topology control in wireless ad hoc networks We consider a large-scale of wireless ad hoc networks whose nodes are distributed randomly in a two-dimensional region Omega (more specifically, a unit square). Given n wireless nodes V, each with transmission range r(n), the wireless networks are often modeled by graph G(V, r(n)) in which two nodes are connected if and only if their Euclidean distance is no more than r(n). We first consider how to relate the transmission range with the number of nodes in a fixed area such that the resulted network can sustain k fault nodes in its neighborhood with high probability when all nodes have the same transmission range. We show that, for a unit-area square region Q, the probability that the network G(V, r(n)) is k-connected is at least e(-e-alpha) when the transmission radius r(n) satisfies npir(n)(2) greater than or equal to In n + (2k - 3)ln In n - 2 ln(k - 1)! + 2alpha for k > 1 and n sufficiently large. This result also applies to mobile networks when the moving of wireless nodes always generates randomly distributed positions. We also conduct extensive simulations to study the practical transmission range to achieve certain probability the network being k-connectivity, when the number of nodes n is not large enough. The relation between the minimum node degree and the connectivity of graph G(V, r) is also studied. Setting the transmission range of all nodes to r(n) guarantees the k-connectivity with high probability, but some nodes may have excessive number of neighbors in the graph G(V, r(n)). We then present a localized method to construct a subgraph of the network topology G(V, r(n)) such that the resulting subgraph is still k-connected but with much fewer communication links maintained. We show that the constructed topology has only 0(k - n) links and is a length spanner. Here a graph H subset of or equal to G is spanner for graph G, if for any two nodes, the length of the shortest path connecting them in H is no more than a small constant factor of the length of the shortest path connecting them in G. Finally, we conduct some simulations to study the practical transmission range to achieve certain probability of k-connected when n is not large enough. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

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

connectivity
topology control
wireless ad hoc networks


Global optimum shape design An optimum shape design problem can be formulated as a minimization problem of a functional subject to certain constraints. Usually, it is nonlinear and nonconvex. Conventional optimization techniques are gradient-based, they highly depend on the initial design, and are difficult to be applied to find a global solution. Integral global optimization algorithm is proposed to solve optimum shape design problems. Three design examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science 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

mathematical programming
random number generation
testing
choice of initial values


Self-similarity of parallel machines Self-similarity is a property of physical systems that describes how to scale parameters such that dissimilar systems appear to be similar. Computer systems are self-similar if certain ratios of computational forces, also known as computational intensities, are equal. Two machines with different computational power, different network bandwidth and different inter-processor latency behave the same way if they have the same ratios of forces. For the parallel conjugate gradient algorithm studied in this paper, two machines are self-similar if and only if the ratio of one force describing latency effects to another force describing bandwidth effects is the same for both machines. For the two machines studied in this paper, this ratio, which we call the mixing coefficient, is invariant as problem size and processor count change. The two machines have the same mixing coefficient and belong to the same equivalence class.

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

parallel algorithms
benchmark analysis
computational intensity
computational force
dimensional analysis
self-similarity
scaling


Novel Approach for fast Compressed Hybrid color image Cryptosystem In this Paper, the issues pertaining with efficient, fast, cost effective and secured image transmission are addressed in totality. The proposed model employs Compressed Hybrid Cryptosystem constitutes compression, encryption and secured session key exchange along with the transmission of image. In the proposed work, an algorithm has been designed to generate diffusion template using 3D Standard map. The image is rotated vertically and horizontally followed by a shuffle using 3D Cat map and Standard map. The image is then encrypted by performing XOR operation on the shuffled image and diffusion template. Proposed method takes lesser time and is found to be safe from any of the existing cryptanalytic attack. Further Elliptic Curve Cryptography is used for secure transfer of private key, which has resulted in significant reduction in the key size without compromising its security strength. To reduce bandwidth requirement and power consumption, a compression technique is proposed based on curvelet transform before image encryption, with special technique of coefficient elimination by which a higher compression ratio can be obtained without much loss in image information. Even though the coefficients neglected are large, the higher PSNR values show that curvelet has better reconstruction performance. The model has been rigorously examined over the prevalent standard test and has encouragingly succeeded to pass most of them like key sensitivity analysis, key space analysis, statistical analysis, differential analysis, entropy analysis, randomness analysis, PSNR analysis, MSE analysis, for fast, cost effective and secured image transmission. Which was the key problem statement for this research work.

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

cat map
standard map
elliptic curve cryptography
curvelet transform


TCAM Razor: A Systematic Approach Towards Minimizing Packet Classifiers in TCAMs Packet classification is the core mechanism that enables many networking services on the Internet such as firewall packet filtering and traffic accounting. Using ternary content addressable memories (TCAMs) to perform high-speed packet classification has become the de facto standard in industry. TCAMs classify packets in constant time by comparing a packet with all classification rules of ternary encoding in parallel. Despite their high speed, TCAMs suffer from the well-known range expansion problem. As packet classification rules usually have fields specified as ranges, converting such rules to TCAM-compatible rules may result in an explosive increase in the number of rules. This is not a problem if TCAMs have large capacities. Unfortunately, TCAMs have very limited capacity, and more rules mean more power consumption and more heat generation for TCAMs. Even worse, the number of rules in packet classifiers has been increasing rapidly with the growing number of services deployed on the Internet. In this paper, we consider the following problem: given a packet classifier, how can we generate another semantically equivalent packet classifier that requires the least number of TCAM entries? In this paper, we propose a systematic approach, the TCAM Razor, that is effective, efficient, and practical. In terms of effectiveness, TCAM Razor achieves a total compression ratio of 29.0%, which is significantly better than the previously published best result of 54%. In terms of efficiency, our TCAM Razor prototype runs in seconds, even for large packet classifiers. Finally, in terms of practicality, our TCAM Razor approach can be easily deployed as it does not require any modification to existing packet classification systems, unlike many previous range encoding schemes.

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

ternary content addressable memory (tcam) optimization


Protein cellular localization prediction with Support Vector Machines and Decision Trees ? Many cellular functions are carried out in specific compartments of the cell. The prediction of the cellular localization of a protein is thus related to its function identification. This paper uses two Machine Learning techniques, Support Vector Machines (SVMs) and Decision Trees, in the prediction of the localization of proteins from three categories of organisms: gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria and fungi. For all categories considered, the localization task has multiple classes, which correspond to the possible protein locations. Since SVMs are originally designed for the solution of two-class problems, this paper also investigates and compares several strategies to extend this technique to perform multiclass predictions.

B I I 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 B I O B I 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

protein cellular localization
machine learning
support vector machines
decision trees


Automata-based assertion-checker synthesis of PSL properties Assertion-based verification with languages such as PSL is gaining in importance. From assertions, one can generate hardware assertion checkers for use in emulation, simulation acceleration and silicon debug. We present techniques for checker generation of the complete set of PSL properties, including all variants of operators, both strong and weak. A full automata-based approach allows an entire assertion to be represented by a single automaton, hence allowing optimizations that can not be done in a modular approach where subcircuits are created only for individual operators. For this purpose, automata algorithms are developed for the base cases, and a complete set of rewrite rules is derived for other operators. Automata splitting is introduced for an efficient implementation of the eventually! operator.

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

verification
automata
hardware
emulation
assertion checkers

algorithms psl
assertion-based verification


on the importance of model comparison tools for the automatic evaluation of the correctness of model transformations The transformation judge is a novel system for the automatic evaluation and comparison of model transformations that have been submitted as solutions for common model transformation tasks. Its most important feature is the correctness check that is done by black-box-testing. This paper discusses why model comparison tools are crucial for the judge and which of their features are most important in this scenario. We also describe how a first model comparison tool has been integrated into our system and how the judge could be used to compare comparison tools.

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

web services
online judge
black-box test


Prognostic factors for the effects of two interventions for work-related neckshoulder complaints: Myofeedback training and ergonomic counselling To explore prognostic factors for the effects of two interventions (myofeedback training in combination with ergonomic counselling (Mfb/EC) and ergonomic counselling alone (EC)) on discomfort and disability in work-related neckshoulder complaints. Thirty-six females completed the interventions. Discomfort and disability were assessed at baseline, immediately after the intervention, and at 3-month follow-up. Potential sociodemographic and psychological prognostic factors were assessed using questionnaires. Data were analysed using multiple regression and general linear modelling. Changes in discomfort were best predicted by baseline discomfort levels. Changes in disability were predicted by baseline disability levels, patient profile, and coping strategy ignoring sensations. A significant difference between the Mfb/EC and EC group was found for coping strategy ignoring sensations, which appeared to be a predictor for changes in disability at 3-month follow-up in the Mfb/EC group only. Subjects with high levels of initial discomfort and disability and specific psychological patient profiles benefit most from interventions. Myofeedback training contributes a specific quality to those who ignore pain sensations.

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


The role of online and offline features in sustaining virtual communities: an empirical study Purpose-By expanding the technology acceptance model, the purpose of this paper is to provide a research model to examine the impact of online (information quality, system quality and service quality) and offline (offline activities) features on the sustainability of virtual communities. Design/methodology/approach-Based on a survey of 165 community members, the paper uses structural equation modeling approach to investigate the research model. Findings-The findings indicate that perceived of usefulness, perceived ease of use and offline activities are determinants of sustainability of virtual communities. In addition, information quality affects perceived usefulness, while system-quality and service quality influence both perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of virtual communities. Research limitations/implications-Since this study only considered non-profit virtual communities, it is unclear whether these analytical results can be generalized to other virtual communities. Further research can apply this research model to examine profit-oriented virtual communities, such as eBay.com.tw or brand communities. Practical implications-To sustain a successful virtual community, attention must be paid to enhance both online and offline interactions, including content management, specific sets of web site functions and offline communication. Virtual community providers can apply the findings of this study to focus on the determinants of success for their virtual communities. Originality/value-Theoretically, while drawing upon the extended TAM, this paper provides a model that is capable of understanding the determinants of sustainability of virtual communities. From a managerial perspective, the findings should provide further insight into member behaviors, leading to more effective strategies for expanding the virtual community.

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

internet
communication technologies
information exchange


Estimation of load-sharing ratios for piled rafts in sands that includes interaction effects A key design component for piled rafts is the proportion of load carried by the raft and piles, as both contribute to the load-carrying behavior of piled rafts. The analysis in the present study of the load-sharing behavior of piled rafts embedded in sands includes consideration of the pileraft interaction effect. For this purpose, 3D finite element analyses were performed for various foundation and soil conditions. Due to the interactions between raft and piles, the load-carrying capacities of the raft and piles, once combined into a piled raft, become different from those of unpiled rafts and group piles. As pile spacing increased, the load proportion of piles became higher. Based on the results from finite element analyses, a normalized load-sharing model was proposed that introduced the load capacity interaction factor ?. Values of ? were evaluated, and a design equation was proposed. The values of ? decreased logarithmically with increasing settlement, showing a marked decrease within the initial settlement range. Case examples were introduced to confirm the validity of the proposed method. Reasonably close agreement was observed between measured and calculated load-sharing behaviors.

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

piled rafts
group piles
interaction effects

load-sharing behavior
sand
loadsettlement curves


Proof over promise: towards a more inclusive ranking of Dutch academics in Economics & Business The Dutch Economics top-40, based on publications in ISI listed journals, isto the best of our knowledgethe oldest ranking of individual academics in Economics and is well accepted in the Dutch academic community. However, this ranking is based on publication volume, rather than on the actual impact of the publications in question. This paper therefore uses two relatively new metrics, the citations per author per year (CAY) metric and the individual annual h-index (hIa) to provide two alternative, citation-based, rankings of Dutch academics in Economics & Business. As a data source, we use Google Scholar instead of ISI to provide a more comprehensive measure of impact, including citations to and from publications in non-ISI listed journals, books, working and conference papers. The resulting rankings are shown to be substantially different from the original ranking based on publications. Just like other research metrics, the CAY or hIa-index should never be used as the sole criterion to evaluate academics. However, we do argue that the hIa-index and the related CAY metric provide an important additional perspective over and above a ranking based on publications in high impact journals alone. Citation-based rankings are also shown to inject a higher level of diversity in terms of age, gender, discipline and academic affiliation and thus appear to be more inclusive of a wider range of scholarship.

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

rankings
citations
isi
google scholar
economics


Coupled inductor, constant resistance, broadband delay filter This paper develops a three-terminal delay filter whose topology is an interconnection of only ideally lossless, coupled inductors and capacitors. In the absence of significant capacitive loading at the input and/or output ports, the proposed filter emulates an allpass network whose low frequency delay is twice that afforded by the poles of the proposed circuit. Moreover, the driving point input and output impedances of the structure are frequency invariant resistances whose values over the frequency spectra of interest are independent of the envelope delays achieved. These impedance characteristics allow for the convenient implementation of a cascade of match-terminated delay filter sections, thereby allowing for reasonably large envelope delays without incurring bandwidth penalties in either the magnitude or the delay responses. An example demonstrates the feasibility of designing a filter providing zero frequency delays in the mid-hundreds of picoseconds that remain nominally constant for signal frequencies extending through a few gigahertz. Correspondingly, the magnitude responses of these delay structures offer 3-dB bandwidths that can be significantly larger than the frequencies at which the observed envelope delays decay monotonically to a user-defined percentage of their respective zero frequency values.

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

deay filter
maximally flat delay
allpass circuits
modified bessel filter
peak delay
delay bandwidth
constant resistance filter


GPEC: A Cytoscape plug-in for random walk-based gene prioritization and biomedical evidence collection Finding genes associated with a disease is an important issue in the biomedical area and many gene prioritization methods have been proposed for this goal. Among these, network-based approaches are recently proposed and outperformed functional annotation-based ones. Here, we introduce a novel Cytoscape plug-in, GPEC, to help identify putative genes likely to be associated with specific diseases or pathways. In the plug-in, gene prioritization is performed through a random walk with restart algorithm, a state-of-the art network-based method, along with a gene/protein relationship network. The plug-in also allows users efficiently collect biomedical evidence for highly ranked candidate genes. A set of known genes, candidate genes and a gene/protein relationship network can be provided in a flexible way.

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

gene prioritization
random walk with restart algorithm
biomedical evidence collection


Resolution proof transformation for compression and interpolation Verification methods based on SAT, SMT, and theorem proving often rely on proofs of unsatisfiability as a powerful tool to extract information in order to reduce the overall effort. For example a proof may be traversed to identify a minimal reason that led to unsatisfiability, for computing abstractions, or for deriving Craig interpolants. In this paper we focus on two important aspects that concern efficient handling of proofs of unsatisfiability: compression and manipulation. First of all, since the proof size can be very large in general (exponential in the size of the input problem), it is indeed beneficial to adopt techniques to compress it for further processing. Secondly, proofs can be manipulated as a flexible preprocessing step in preparation for interpolant computation. Both these techniques are implemented in a framework that makes use of local rewriting rules to transform the proofs. We show that a careful use of the rules, combined with existing algorithms, can result in an effective simplification of the original proofs. We have evaluated several heuristics on a wide range of unsatisfiable problems deriving from SAT and SMT test cases.

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

resolution system
craig interpolation
proof compression
formal verification


Reduced Interval Type-2 Neural Fuzzy System Using Weighted Bound-Set Boundary Operation for Computation Speedup and Chip Implementation This paper proposes a reduced interval type-2 neural fuzzy system using weighted bound-set boundaries (RIT2NFS-WB) for the simplification of type-reduction operations. The objective of this simplification is to reduce the system training time in software implementation and chip size in hardware implementation, especially when the number of rules is large. The antecedent part in the RIT2NFS-WB uses interval type-2 fuzzy sets (IT2FSs), and the consequent part can be of the Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) or Mamdani type. The RIT2NFS-WB is built through an online structure and parameter learning to improve model accuracy. In addition, the interpretability of the RIT2NFS-WB is improved by considering distributions of the IT2FSs in input variables. A distinguishability-oriented cost function is used in parameter learning to generate distinguishable IT2FSs and improve semantics-based interpretability. For highly overlapped IT2FSs, they are merged to reduce the number of IT2FSs and improve complexity-based interpretability. The software-implemented TSK-type RIT2NFS-WB is hardware-implemented on a field-programmable gate array chip. To accelerate the chip execution speed, the chip utilizes not only the parallel execution properties of fuzzy rules and bound-set boundaries but the pipeline technique as well. In particular, the flexibility of the chip is considered so that no redesign of the circuits is required when the RIT2NFS-WB is applied to different problems. The characteristics of the software-and hardware-implemented RIT2NFS-WB are verified through various examples and comparisons with various type-1 and interval type-2 fuzzy models.

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

distinguishable fuzzy sets
interpretable fuzzy systems
neural fuzzy systems (nfss)
type-2 fuzzy chips
type-2 fuzzy systems
type reduction


A GeoAgent-based framework for knowledge-oriented representation: Embracing social rules in GIS While current Geographic Information Systems (GISs) can represent observational spatial data well, they have limited capabilities in representing some non-observational social elements and goal-driven behaviours that can be important factors in a wide range of geographic issues. Such social components may include laws, regulations, polices, plans, culture, and customs, as well as their relations and interactions with the geographic environment at different scales. Getting beyond traditional data-centred approaches, this research presents a knowledge-oriented strategy in order to address these issues within a GIS context. We incorporate two major conceptual elements. First, extending from conventional agent notions and their geographic applications, geographic agents (GeoAgents) are considered as a basic representation component to specifically address social rules and goal-driven behaviours that impact the Earth and environmental systems. Second, in order to incorporate GeoAgents with current space-time representation, a new conceptual representation framework, called 'fields, objects, time, GeoAgents, and relations' (FOTAR), is introduced to address the cross-scale processes of both social and natural interactions. A Java-based prototype, GeoAgent-based Knowledge System (GeoAgentKS), is described to implement this framework by integrating agent technologies with multiple data and knowledge representation techniques, such as expert systems, concept maps, mathematical models, and geospatial databases. The application of this prototype in a case study is also presented, investigating scale-dependent human-environment interactions under different emergency situations for community water systems in Central Pennsylvania, USA. In this case study, a systematic set of methodologies of knowledge acquisition, representation, and confirmation for constructing GeoAgents' knowledge bases by using expert systems were explored to formalize high-level knowledge and social behaviours in the FOTAR-based representations. The results show that the proposed conceptual representation framework is achievable at both implementation and application levels, and the prototype tool is demonstrated to be valuable in facilitating knowledge sharing, policymaking, municipal management, and decision-making, especially for real-world emergency management.

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

representation
geoagents
social rules
expert systems
emergency management


Dynamic layer management in superpeer architectures Superpeer unstructured P2P systems have been found to be very effective by dividing the peers into two layers, superlayer and leaf-layer, in which message flooding is only conducted among superlayer and all leaf-peers are represented by corresponding superpeers. However, current superpeer systems do not employ any effective layer management schemes, so the transient and low-capacity peers are allowed to act as superpeers. Moreover, the lack of an appropriate size ratio maintenance mechanism on superlayer to leaf-layer makes the system's search performance far from being optimal. We present one workload model aimed at reducing the weighted overhead of a network. Using our proposed workload model, a network can determine an optimal layer size ratio between leaf-layer and superlayer. We then propose a Dynamic Layer Management algorithm, DLM, which can maintain an optimal layer size ratio and adaptively elect and adjust peers between superlayer and leaf-layer. DLM is completely distributed in the sense that each peer decides to be a superpeer or a leaf-peer independently without global knowledge. DLM could effectively help a superpeer P2P system maintain the optimal layer size ratio and designate peers with relatively long lifetime and large capacities as superpeers, and the peers with short lifetime and low capacities as leaf-peers under highly dynamic network situations. We demonstrate that the quality of a superpeer system is significantly improved under the DLM scheme by comprehensive simulations.

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

unstructured peer-to-peer
superpeer architecture
workload analysis
adaptive algorithms


Cybernetics in the 2000th year Discusses twentieth-century cybernetics seen as a science of dynamic systems. Considers the make-up of systems and cybernetics in the new millennium.

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


Simulating diffusion processes in discontinuous media: A numerical scheme with constant time steps In this article, we propose new Monte Carlo techniques for moving a diffusive particle in a discontinuous media. In this framework, we characterize the stochastic process that governs the positions of the particle. The key tool is the reduction of the process to a Skew Brownian motion (SBM). In a zone where the coefficients are locally constant on each side of the discontinuity, the new position of the particle after a constant time step is sampled from the exact distribution of the SBM process at the considered time. To do so, we propose two different but equivalent algorithms: a two-steps simulation with a stop at the discontinuity and a one-step direct simulation of the SBM dynamic. Some benchmark tests illustrate their effectiveness.

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

divergence form operators
stochastic differential equation
monte carlo simulation
euler scheme
geophysics
diffusive media with interfaces


Customer-adapted coupon targeting using feature selection? ? The management of coupon promotions is an important issue for marketing managers since it still is the major promotion medium. However, the distribution of coupons does not go without problems. Although manufacturers and retailers are investing heavily in the attempt to convince as many customers as possible, overall coupon redemption rate is low. This study improves the strategy of retailers and manufacturers concerning their target selection since both parties often end up in a battle for customers. Two separate models are built: one model makes predictions concerning redemption behavior of coupons that are distributed by the retailer while another model does the same for coupons handed out by manufacturers. By means of the feature-selection technique Relief-F the dimensionality of the models is reduced, since it searches for the variables that are relevant for predicting the outcome. In this way, redundant variables are not used in the model-building process. The model is evaluated on real-life data provided by a retailer in Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). The contributions of this study for retailers as well as manufacturers are three-fold. First, the possibility to classify customers concerning their coupon usage is shown. In addition, it is demonstrated that retailers and manufacturers can stay clear of each other in their marketing campaigns. Finally, the feature-selection technique Relief-F proves to facilitate and optimize the performance of the models.

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


Computational modeling of face-to-face social interaction using nonverbal behavioral cues On January 25,2011 the author successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled Computational modeling of face-to-face social interaction using nonverbal behavioral cues.

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

small group
face-to-face interactions
nonverbal cues
automatic social inference
group conversational context
group behavior discovery
topic models


The asymptotic behavior of some indices of iterated line graphs of regular graphs In this paper, we consider the asymptotic behavior of the number of spanning trees and the Kirchhoff index of iterated line graphs and iterated para-line graphs (or clique-inserted graphs) of a regular graph G G . We show that the asymptotic behavior of these indices (except the Kirchhoff index of the iterated para-line graphs) is independent of the structure of the regular graph G G .

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

line graph
para-line graph
spanning tree


The controllability of fractional control systems with control delay ? This paper discusses the controllability of fractional control systems with control delay. We firstly give the solution expression for fractional control systems with control delay, then give the necessary and sufficient conditions for the controllability of fractional control systems with control delay.

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

controllability
fractional control systems
control delay


The laser shaping of ceramic by a fracture machining technique A new laser machining technique for ceramic shaping, based on the concept of fracture mechanics, is proposed in this paper. The principle of fracture machining technique is investigated. A focused laser is used to scribe two groove-cracks at the two intersecting surfaces of the rectangular substrate. Then, a defocused laser beam is applied throughout the length of the groove-cracks to generate a great thermal stress, which makes the two groove-cracks link together. The material removal is due to the linkage of the groove-cracks. Conventional laser machining requires high laser power to evaporate the materials. The high temperature gradient would induce the formation of micro-cracks, which leads to a remarkable reduction in strength. The laser power required in the method proposed is only a tenth of what is required in the conventional method under the same material removal rate, and in addition, the amount of the micro-crack is smaller. The experimental specimens are alumina ceramics, and the laser sources are a CO2 laser and a Nd:YAG laser. The fracture machining technique can be successfully employed for step shaping and blind corner shaping for a thick ceramic substrate. The relationships of machining parameters such as groove-crack depth, material removal rate, laser scanning speed, and laser power are discussed. Finally, the measurement of the surface roughness and the inspection of crack defects are examined thoroughly.

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


Smoothing approach to alleviate the meager rating problem in collaborative recommender systems In this paper, an integrated recommendation approach using Radial Basis Function Network (RBFN) and Collaborative Filtering (CF) is proposed. Radial basis function network is a neural network approximation method used to improve the accuracy of the recommendations. The proposed system RBFN_KFCM has offline and online phases. During offline, the system uses RBFN for smoothing and kernel fuzzy c c -means (KFCM) method for clustering. During online recommendation, KFCM based approach is proposed. At the end of each session the clusters are updated by replacing the smoothed rating by the original rating. A comparison is made with benchmark recommender systems such as item-based, user-based systems, singular value decomposition (SVD) and also popular machine learning techniques such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) using backpropagation algorithm, in terms of accuracy, decision-support measures and computational time. Empirical evaluation is carried out by using movielens dataset.

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

collaborative filtering
meager rating problem

cold start problem
fuzzy radial basis function network


Efficient reliability-based design optimization using a hybrid space with application to finite element analysis The design of high technology structures aims to define the best compromise between cost and safety. The Reliability-Based Design Optimization (RBDO) allows us to design structures which satisfy economical and safety requirements. However, in practical applications, the coupling between the mechanical modelling, the reliability analyses and the optimization methods leads to very high computational time and weak convergence stability. Traditionally, the solution of the RBDO model is achieved by alternating reliability and optimization iterations. This approach leads to low numerical efficiency, which is disadvantageous for engineering applications on real structures. In order to avoid this difficulty, we propose herein a very efficient method based on the simultaneous solution of the reliability and optimization problems. The procedure leads to parallel convergence for both problems in a Hybrid Design Space (HDS). The efficiency of the proposed methodology is demonstrated on the design of a steel hook, where the RBDO is combined with Finite Element Analysis (FEA).

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 B I I O

reliability-based design optimization
reliability analysis


A ternary model of decompression sickness in rats This study developed a ternary model of predicting probability of decompression sickness in rats. A dataset was compiled from 15 studies using 22 dive profiles and two strains of both sexes. Using ordinal logistic regression, model-fit was optimised by maximum log likelihood. The model predicted cases of DCS with 75% accuracy and 92.5% were within 95% confidence intervals. This model is reliable for predicting DCS within the range of parameters used to optimise the model.

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

decompression illness
modelling
marginal decompression sickness
animal model
trinary outcome


Passivity analysis and passification of uncertain Markovian jump systems with partially known transition rates and mode-dependent interval time-varying delays ? In this paper, the problem of delay-dependent robust passivity analysis and robust passification of uncertain Markovian jump linear systems (MJLSs) with partially known transition rates and mode-dependent time-varying delays are investigated. In the deterministic model, the time-varying delay is in a given range and the uncertainties are assumed to be norm bounded. By constructing an appropriate LyapunovKrapunov functional (LKF) combining with Jensens inequality and the free-weighting matrix method, delay-dependent passification conditions are obtained in term of linear matrix inequalities(LMIs). For the robust passification problem, desired passification controllers are designed, which guarantee that the closed-loop MJLS is passive. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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

markovian jump systems
partially known transition rates

passivity and passification
time-varying delay
linear matrix inequality


On a problem related to the Vandermonde determinant This short note describes new properties of the elementary symmetric polynomials, and reveals that the properties give an answer to the conjecture raised by El-Mikkawy in [M.E.A. El-Mikkawy, On a connection between the Pascal, Vandermonde and Stirling matricesII, Appl. Math. Comput. 146 (2003) 759769].

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


Understanding user perceptions of World-wide web environments Abstract The purpose of this study was to develop and test a conceptual model of individual perceptions of Web technology as a use and training tool. The model presents a perspective of users' attitudes toward Web environments. This model integrates the Technical Acceptance Model, Social Cognitive Theory, individual attitudes, motivation and self-efficacy perspectives to develop a new aspect of users' perceptions toward Web technology acceptance and use. The study provides some evidence that the conceptual model helps the understanding of user perceptions to Web environments. In addition, training and educational programmes on computers may foster a positive feeling towards the Web. Furthermore, the more individuals have self-efficacy towards Web technology, the more individuals have motivation to use the Web.

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

self-efficacy
technology acceptance model
questionnaire
undergraduate
world-wide web


Avoiding unfairness of Owen allocations in linear production processes This paper deals with cooperation situations in linear production problems in which a set of goods are to be produced from a set of resources so that a certain benefit function is maximized, assuming that resources not used in the production plan have no value by themselves. The Owen set is a well-known solution rule for the class of linear production processes. Despite their stability properties, Owen allocations might give null payoff to players that are necessary for optimal production plans. This paper shows that, in general, the aforementioned drawback cannot be avoided allowing only allocations within the core of the cooperative game associated to the original linear production process, and therefore a new solution set named EOwen is introduced. For any player whose resources are needed in at least one optimal production plan, the EOwen set contains at least one allocation that assigns a strictly positive payoff to such player.

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 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

cooperative games
linear production games


Appropriateness of ICNP in Korean home care nursing ICNP is not useful as a tool for home care nursing in its present form. Finer granularity of ICNP is needed in home care nursing. Specific concepts to home care nursing need to be added in the focus and action axes. Adding frequent concepts into the focus axis may increase the mapping rate to 90%.

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

icnp (international classification for nursing practice)


A new approach in road sign recognition based on fast fractal coding The tasks of traffic signs are notifying drivers about the current state of the road and giving them other important information for navigation. In this paper, a new approach for detection, tracking, and recognition such objects is presented. Road signs are detected using color thresholding, after that candidate blobs that have specific criteria are classified based on their geometrical shape and are tracked trough successive frames based on a new similarity measure. Candidate blobs that successfully pass the tracking module are processed for extracting their fractal features, and final recognition is done based on support vector machines with kernel function. Results validate effectiveness of newly employed fractal feature and show high accuracy with a low false hit rate of this method and its robustness to illumination changes and road sign occlusion or scale changes. Also results indicate that compared to the other pictogram feature representation techniques, this approach shows a more proper description of road signs.

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 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

road sign recognition
support vector machines

computer vision-based driver assistance
fractal feature extraction
road sign tracking


Percutaneous lung biopsy: comparison between an augmented reality CT navigation system and standard CT-guided technique Percutaneous lung biopsies (PLBs) performed for the evaluation of pulmonary masses require image guidance to avoid critical structures. A new CT navigation system (SIRIO, Sistema robotizzato assistito per il puntamento intraoperatorio) for PLBs was validated.

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

optical tracking
ct scan
virtual navigation guidance


Extending Sledgehammer with SMT Solvers Sledgehammer is a component of Isabelle/HOL that employs resolution-based first-order automatic theorem provers (ATPs) to discharge goals arising in interactive proofs. It heuristically selects relevant facts and, if an ATP is successful, produces a snippet that replays the proof in Isabelle. We extended Sledgehammer to invoke satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solvers as well, exploiting its relevance filter and parallel architecture. The ATPs and SMT solvers nicely complement each other, and Isabelle users are now pleasantly surprised by SMT proofs for problems beyond the ATPs' reach.

O O 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 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 O O O O O O O


Telemetry system for slow wave measurement from the small bowel A telemetry capsule system was designed and implemented to measure the slow wave activity of the small bowel, which is an important parameter for the diagnosis of gastric diseases. The capsule amplified the slow wave signal from the intraluminal electrodes, and transmitted the digitally sampled data by means of a radio frequency transmitter. The implemented capsule (1121mm2) was smaller than a commercially available capsule endoscope, and it can remain active for more than 18h. The feasibility of using this capsule was investigated by conducting in vitro experiments, and the average motility signals of the ileum, jejunum, and colon were measured as 6.1, 10.2, and 1.5 cycles per minute, respectively.

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

capsule endoscope
telemetry
slow wave
small bowel


trust transferability among similar contexts Trust is a fundamental concern in electronic transactions and behavior of people are influenced by the situation. Motivated by that we present a state-of-the-art survey of context representation in trust management and provide main directions along which research efforts have been done. We propose a generalized model which considers different aspects of the relationship between context-awareness and trust management.

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


Applicability of high-absorbance MIR spectroscopy in industrial quality control of reformed gasolines Partial least squares (PLS), polynomial partial least squares (polynomial-PLS), locally weighted regression (LWR) and genetic inside neural network (GINN) algorithms were used to develop models for predicting motor octane number (MON) from non-leaded and catalytically reformed gasolines. Medium infrared (mid-infrared) spectra were obtained on liquid samples and chemometrically processed in order to get acceptable predictive models which allow their use for routine industrial quality monitoring. As MIR spectra currently present peaks with high absorbances, the presence and influence of nonlinearities was sought comparing the broadly-used PLS method with several other algorithms specially designed to cope with such influences (polynomial-PLS, local regression and neural networks). Their prediction abilities; i.e., stability and global prediction error when predicting new samples as well as their usefulness for routine industrial control were studied. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V, All rights reserved.

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

partial least squares
neural networks
local regression
quality control


Solving multi-criteria scheduling flow shop problem through compromise programming and satisfaction functions The multi-criteria scheduling problem is one of the main research subjects in the field of multiple objectives programming. Several procedures have been developed to deal with this type of problem where some conflicting criteria have to be optimized simultaneously. The aim of our paper is to propose an aggregation procedure that integrates three different criteria to find the best sequence in a flow shop production environment. The compromise programming model and the concept of satisfaction functions will be utilized to integrate explicitly the managers preferences according to the deviations between the achievement and the aspiration levels of the following criteria: Makespan, total flow time and total tardiness.

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

flow shop
compromise programming
satisfaction functions
managers preferences


Optimal compensation for directionality in processes with a saturating actuator For discrete-time input-constrained systems, the notion of directionality is defined, and an optimal directionality compensator is presented. According to the definition, a single-input single-output (SISO) process may exhibit the directionality. Two examples of such processes are given and simulated. Given a controller output, the compensator calculates an optimal constrained (feasible) process input that results in a process response as 'close' as possible to the response of the process to the controller output. The compensator can be used for both linear and nonlinear processes, irrespective of the type of controller being used. For processes whose nonsingular characteristic (decoupling) matrix is independent of manipulated inputs and can be made diagonal by row or column rearrangements, the optimal directionality compensation is identical to clipping; this class of processes does not exhibit the directionality over very short time horizons. By three examples the performance of the optimal directionality compensator is shown and compared with those of clipping and direction preservation. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

actuator saturation
input saturation
optimal directionality compensation
nonlinear systems


pattern ranking for semi-automatic ontology construction When developing semantic applications, the construction of ontologies is a crucial part. We are developing a semiautomatic ontology construction approach, OntoCase, relying on ontology patterns as additional resources. A crucial part of this approach is how to select the appropriate patterns based on the input representation extracted from a text corpus. In this paper, we suggest a pattern ranking and selection approach with the ability to partially bridge the gap between abstract patterns and specific terms, as well as being specifically tuned to the characteristics of ontology patterns. Compared to existing ontology ranking schemes our approach adds indirect matching of terms as well as relation matching. An initial experiment indicates that OntoCase ranking performs better, especially when ranking small and abstract patterns, than existing ranking approaches.

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

ontology learning
ontology engineering
ontology pattern