Occupation and Breast Cancer A local collaborative process was launched in Windsor, Ontario, Canada to explore the role of occupation as a risk factor for cancer. An initial hypothesis-generating study found an increased risk for breast cancer among women aged 55 years or younger who had ever worked in farming. On the basis of this result, a 2-year casecontrol study was undertaken to evaluate the lifetime occupational histories of women with breast cancer. The results indicate that women with breast cancer were nearly three times more likely to have worked in agriculture when compared to the controls (OR = 2.80 [95% CI, 1.64.8]). The risk for those who worked in agriculture and subsequently worked in automotive-related manufacturing was further elevated (OR = 4.0 [95% CI, 1.79.9]). The risk for those employed in agriculture and subsequently employed in health care was also elevated (OR = 2.3 [95% CI, 1.14.6]). Farming tended to be among the earlier jobs worked, often during adolescence. While this article has limitations including the small sample size and the lack of information regarding specific exposures, it does provide evidence of a possible association between farming and breast cancer. The findings indicate the need for further study to determine which aspects of farming may be of biological importance and to better understand the significance of timing of exposure in terms of cancer risk

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


A probabilistic model for optimal insurance contracts against security risks and privacy violation in IT outsourcing environments Day by day the provision of information technology goods and services becomes noticeably expensive. This is mainly due to the high labor cost for the service providers, resulting from the need to cover a vast variety of application domains and at the same time to improve or/and enhance the services offered in accordance to the requirements set by the competition. A business model that could ease the problem is the development or/and provision of the service by an external contractor on behalf of the service provider; known as Information Technology Outsourcing. However, outsourcing a service may have the side effect of transferring personal or/and sensitive data from the outsourcing company to the external contractor. Therefore the outsourcing company faces the risk of a contractor who does not adequately protect the data, resulting to their non- deliberate disclosure or modification, or of a contractor that acts maliciously in the sense that she causes a security incident for making profit out of it. Whatever the case, the outsourcing company is legally responsible for the misuse of personal data or/and the violation of an individual's privacy. In this paper we demonstrate how companies adopting the outsourcing model can protect the personal data and privacy of their customers through an insurance contract. Moreover a probabilistic model for optimising, in terms of the premium and compensation amounts, the insurance contract is presented.

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


run-time generation of hps microinstructions from a vax instruction stream The VAX architecture is a popular ISP architecture that has been implemented in several different technologies targeted to a wide range of performance specifications. However, it has been argued that the VAX has specific characteristics which preclude a very high performance implementation. We have developed a microarchitecture (HPS) which is specifically intended for implementing very high performance computing engines. Our model of execution is a restriction on fine granularity data flow. In this paper, we concentrate on one particular aspect of an HPS implementation of the VAX architecture: the generation of HPS microinstructions (i.e. data flow nodes) from a VAX instruction stream.

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

aspect generation technologies architecture performance implementation instruction flow data paper model microarchitecture

streams
high-performance
high performance computing
timing


Broadcast scheduling in wireless multihop networks using a neural-network-based hybrid algorithm In wireless multihop networks, the objective of the broadcast scheduling problem is to find a conflict free transmission schedule for each node at different time slots in a fixed length time cycle, called TDMA cycle. The optimization criterion is to find an optimal TDMA schedule with minimal TDMA cycle length and maximal node transmissions. In this paper we propose a two-stage hybrid method to solve this broadcast scheduling problem in wireless multihop networks. In the first stage, we use a sequential vertex-coloring algorithm to obtain a minimal TDMA frame length. In the second stage, we apply the noisy chaotic neural network to find the maximum node transmission based on the results obtained in the previous stage. Simulation results show that this hybrid method outperforms previous approaches, such as mean field annealing, a hybrid of the Hopfield neural network and genetic algorithms, the sequential vertex coloring algorithm, and the gradual neural network. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

broadcast scheduling problem
wireless multihop networks
sequential vertex coloring
noisy chaotic neural network


a binary method for fast computation of inter and intra cluster similarities for combining multiple clusterings In this paper, we introduce a novel binary method for fast computation of an objective function to measure inter and intra class similarities, which is used for combining multiple clusterings. Our method has the advantages of using less memory and CPU time. Moreover, compared with the conventional technique, we reduce the time complexity of the problem considerably. Experimental test results demonstrate the effectiveness of our new method.

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 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

binary techniques
clustering algorithms
clustering


Information ratio test for model misspecification on parametric structures in stochastic diffusion models We develop a hypothesis testing approach to checking model misspecification on parametric structures in continuous-time stochastic diffusion models. The key idea behind the development of our test statistic is rooted in a ratio of two types of information matrices, the negative sensitivity matrix and the variability matrix, in the context of martingale estimating equations. We propose a bootstrap resampling method to implement numerically the proposed diagnostic procedure. Through intensive simulation studies, we compare the proposed approach with several currently popular methods and show that our approach is advantageous in the aspects of type I error control, power improvement as well as computational efficiency. Two real-world data examples are included to illustrate the practical use of our proposed testing procedure.

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

bartlett identity
drift
godambe information
information unbiasedness
martingale estimating functions
volatility


Extended integral control for load frequency control with the consideration of generation-rate constraints This paper presents an extended integral control to load frequency control (LFC) scheme with the presence of generation rate constraints (GRC) in order to get rid of overshoot of the conventional proportional-integral (PI) control. The conventional LFC scheme does not yield adequate control performance with the consideration of the singularities of speed-governor such as rate limits on valve position and GRC. In order to overcome this drawback, an extended integral control is developed for the PI control of the speed governor in the presence of GRC. The key idea of the extended integral control is using a decaying factor to reduce the effects of the error in the past. The decaying factor greatly affects the control performance, and should be carefully selected. This study determines the decaying factor in proportion to the degree of deviation in several levels. The computer simulation has been conducted for the single machine system with various load changes. The simulation results show that the proposed controller based on extended integral control yields much improved control performance, compared to the conventional PI controller.

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

extended integral control
lfc
grc
decaying factor


local approximation schemes for topology control This paper presents a distributed algorithm for wireless ad-hoc networks that runs in polylogarithmic number of rounds in the size of the network and constructs a lightweight, linear size, (1+?)-spanner for any given ? > 0. A wireless network is modeled by a d -dimensional ?-quasi unit ball graph (?-UBG), which is a higher dimensional generalization of the standard unit disk graph (UDG) model. The d -dimensional ?-UBG model goes beyond the unrealistic "flat world" assumption of UDGs and also takes into account transmission errors, fading signal strength, and physical obstructions. The main result in the paper is this: for any fixed ? > 0, 0 < ? ? 1, and d ? 2 there is a distributed algorithm running in O (log n log* n ) communication rounds on an n -node, d -dimensional ?-UBG G that computes a (1+?)-spanner G' of G with maximum degree ?( G' ) = O (1) and total weight w ( G' ) = O ( w ( MST ( G )). This result is motivated by the topology control problem in wireless ad-hoc networks and improves on existing topology control algorithms along several dimensions. The technical contributions of the paper include a new, sequential, greedy algorithm with relaxed edge ordering and lazy updating, and clustering techniques for filtering out unnecessary edges.

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 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

unit ball graphs
spanners
wireless ad-hoc networks


on theme location discovery for travelogue services In this paper, we aim to develop a travelogue service that discovers and conveys various travelogue digests, in form of theme locations, geographical scope, traveling trajectory and location snippet, to users. In this service, theme locations in a travelogue are the core information to discover. Thus we aim to address the problem of theme location discovery to enable the above travelogue services. Due to the inherent ambiguity of location relevance, we perform location relevance mining (LRM) in two complementary angles, relevance classification and relevance ranking, to provide comprehensive understanding of locations. Furthermore, we explore the textual (e.g., surrounding words) and geographical (e.g., geographical relationship among locations) features of locations to develop a co-training model for enhancement of classification performance. Built upon the mining result of LRM, we develop a series of techniques for provisioning of the aforementioned travelogue digests in our travelogue system. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on collected travelogues to evaluate the performance of our location relevance mining techniques and demonstrate the effectiveness of the travelogue service.

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

travelogue services
ranking
classification


Automatically improving image quality using tensor voting A novel corrupted region detection technique based on tensor voting is proposed to automatically improve the image quality. This method is suitable for restoring degraded images and enhancing binary images. First, the input images are converted into layered images in which each layer contains objects having similar characteristics. By encoding the pixels in the layered images with second-order tensors and performing voting among them, the corrupted regions are automatically detected using the resulting tensors. These corrupted regions are then restored to improve the image quality. The experimental results obtained from automatic image restoration and binary image enhancement applications show that our method can successfully detect and correct the corrupted regions.

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


New secure bilateral transaction determination and study of pattern under contingencies and UPFC in competitive hybrid electricity markets In the competitive electricity environment, the flexibility of power transactions is expected to drastically increase among the trading partners and can compromise the system security and reliability. These transactions are to be evaluated ahead of their scheduling in a day-ahead and hour-ahead market to avoid congestion and ensure their feasibility with respect to the system operating conditions. The security of the transactions has become essential in the new environment for better planning and management of competitive electricity markets. This paper proposes a new method of secure bilateral transaction determination using AC distribution factors based on the full Jacobian sensitivity and considering the impact of slack bus for pool and bilateral coordinated markets. The secure bilateral transactions have also been determined considering critical line outage contingencies cases. The bilateral transaction matrix pattern has also been determined in the presence of unified power flow controller (UPFC). The optimal location of UPFC has been determined using mixed integer non-linear programming approach. The proposed technique has been applied on IEEE 24-bus reliability test system (RTS).

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

transaction matrix pattern
ac distribution factors

secure transaction matrix
mixed integer non-linear programming
upfc location


On retrieving intelligently plagiarized documents using semantic similarity A novel semantic similarity measure for retrieving potentially plagiarized documents. An architecture for fast retrieval of plagiarized documents. Build a dataset for plagiarism detection with intelligently paraphrased contents. Compare our results with plagiarism detection software Turnitin and search engines.

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

plagiarism detection
semantic similarity

support vector machine
information retrieval


Patch layout generation by detecting feature networks A hybrid framework that can extract patch layouts that are better than the state-of-the-art. A novel criterion to evaluate the quality of patch layouts. Improved algorithms for smoothing curves on surfaces.

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


Direct imprinting on a polycarbonate substrate with a compressed air press for polarizer applications In this study, simple two-step processes were used to fabricate the wire-grid polarizer (WGP) on a polycarbonate (PC) sheet. The PC gratings were fabricated by direct imprinting of the PC sheet onto a silicon mold with a compressed air press (CAP). No additional imprinted polymer was required in the imprinting step. The applied pressure of 5bar was much lower than the pressure reported in the literature, which was due to the use of the CAP. The WGP was further fabricated with an oblique aluminum (Al) sputtering on the PC grating. The rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA) was performed to explain and verify the experimental results. The fabricated WGP should have potential application in the infrared region.

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

nanoimprint
flexible substrate
wire-grid polarizer


A decomposition of the universal embedding space for the near polygon H-n Let H-n, n >= 1, be the near 2n-gon defined on the 1-factors of the complete graph on 2n + 2 vertices, and let e denote the absolutely universal embedding of Hn into PG(W), where W is a 1/n((2n +2)(n + 1))-dimensional vector space over the field F-2 with two elements. For every point z of H-n and every i is an element of N, let Delta(i) (z) denote the set of points of H-n at distance i from z. We show that for every pair {x, y} of mutually opposite points of H-n, W can be written as a direct sum W-0 circle plus W-1 ... circle plus W-n such that the following four properties hold for every i is an element of {0,..., n}: (1) = PG(W-i); (2) = PG(W-0 circle plus ... circle plus W-i); (3) = PG(Wn-i circle plus Wn-i+ 1 circle plus ... circle plus W-n); (4) dim(W-i) = |Delta(i) (x) boolean AND Delta(n-i)(y)| = ((n)(i)) - ((n)(i-1)).((n)(i+1)).

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


Tolerating late memory traps in dynamically scheduled processors In the past few years, exception support for memory functions such as virtual memory, informing memory operations, software assist for shared memory protocols, or interactions with processors in memory has been advocated in various research papers. These memory traps may occur on a miss in the cache hierarchy or on a local or remote memory access. However, contemporary, dynamically scheduled processors only support memory exceptions detected in the TLB associated with the first-level cache. They do not support memory exceptions taken deep in the memory hierarchy. In this case, memory traps may be late, in the sense that the exception condition may still be undecided when a long-latency memory instruction reaches the retirement stage. In this paper we evaluate through simulation the overhead of memory traps in dynamically scheduled processors, focusing on the added overhead incurred when a memory trap is late. We also propose some simple mechanisms to reduce this added overhead while preserving the memory consistency model. With more aggressive memory access mechanisms in the processor we observe that the overhead of all memory traps-either early or late-is increased while the lateness of a trap becomes largely tolerated so that the performance gap between early and late memory traps is greatly reduced. Additionally, because of caching effects in the memory hierarchy, the frequency of memory traps usually decreases as they are taken deeper in the memory hierarchy and their overall impact on execution times becomes negligible. We conclude that support for memory traps taken throughout the memory hierarchy could be added to dynamically scheduled processors at low hardware cost and little performance degradation.

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

microarchitecture
memory system
simulations
instruction-level parallelism
prefetching


The Tire as an Intelligent Sensor Active safety systems are based upon the accurate and fast estimation of the value of important dynamical variables such as forces, load transfer, actual tire-road friction (kinetic friction) mu(k), and maximum tire-road friction available (potential friction) mu(p). Measuring these parameters directly from tires offers the potential for improving significantly the performance of active safety systems. We present a distributed architecture for a data-acquisition system that is based on a number of complex intelligent sensors inside the tire that form a wireless sensor network with coordination nodes placed on the body of the car. The design of this system has been extremely challenging due to the very limited available energy combined with strict application requirements for data rate, delay, size, weight, and reliability in a highly dynamical environment. Moreover, it required expertise in multiple engineering disciplines, including control-system design, signal processing, integrated-circuit design, communications, real-time software design, antenna design, energy scavenging, and system assembly.

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

automotive safety
energy efficiency
heterogeneous systems
intelligent systems
platform-based design
ultrawideband
wireless sensors


Defining and evaluating network communities based on ground-truth Nodes in real-world networks organize into densely linked communities where edges appear with high concentration among the members of the community. Identifying such communities of nodes has proven to be a challenging task due to a plethora of definitions of network communities, intractability of methods for detecting them, and the issues with evaluation which stem from the lack of a reliable gold-standard ground-truth. In this paper, we distinguish between structural and functional definitions of network communities. Structural definitions of communities are based on connectivity patterns, like the density of connections between the community members, while functional definitions are based on (often unobserved) common function or role of the community members in the network. We argue that the goal of network community detection is to extract functional communities based on the connectivity structure of the nodes in the network. We then identify networks with explicitly labeled functional communities to which we refer as ground-truth communities. In particular, we study a set of 230 large real-world social, collaboration, and information networks where nodes explicitly state their community memberships. For example, in social networks, nodes explicitly join various interest-based social groups. We use such social groups to define a reliable and robust notion of ground-truth communities. We then propose a methodology, which allows us to compare and quantitatively evaluate how different structural definitions of communities correspond to ground-truth functional communities. We study 13 commonly used structural definitions of communities and examine their sensitivity, robustness and performance in identifying the ground-truth. We show that the 13 structural definitions are heavily correlated and naturally group into four classes. We find that two of these definitions, Conductance and Triad participation ratio, consistently give the best performance in identifying ground-truth communities. We also investigate a task of detecting communities given a single seed node. We extend the local spectral clustering algorithm into a heuristic parameter-free community detection method that easily scales to networks with more than 100million nodes. The proposed method achieves 30% relative improvement over current local clustering methods.

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

ground-truth communities
modularity
community scoring function


Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE2012) Report On December 12-13 2012, CAIDA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted the (invitation-only) 3rd interdisciplinary Workshop on Internet Economics (WIE) at the University of California's San Diego Supercomputer Center. The goal of this workshop series is to provide a forum for researchers, commercial Internet facilities and service providers, technologists, economists, theorists, policy makers, and other stakeholders to empirically inform current and emerging regulatory and policy debates. The theme for this year's workshop was "Definitions and Data". This report describes the discussions and presents relevant open research questions identified by participants. Slides presented at the workshop and a copy of this final report are available at [2].

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

legal aspects
management
network management


outdoors augmented reality on mobile phone using loxel-based visual feature organization We have built an outdoors augmented reality system for mobile phones that matches camera-phone images against a large database of location-tagged images using a robust image retrieval algorithm. We avoid network latency by implementing the algorithm on the phone and deliver excellent performance by adapting a state-of-the-art image retrieval algorithm based on robust local descriptors. Matching is performed against a database of highly relevant features, which is continuously updated to reflect changes in the environment. We achieve fast updates and scalability by pruning of irrelevant features based on proximity to the user. By compressing and incrementally updating the features stored on the phone we make the system amenable to low-bandwidth wireless connections. We demonstrate system robustness on a dataset of location-tagged images and show a smart-phone implementation that achieves a high image matching rate while operating in near real-time.

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

local search
mobile computing
geo-referenced photos
photo collections
image search


On the matching polynomial of subdivision graphs Let G G be a simple graph and let S(G) S ( G ) be the subdivision graph of G G , which is obtained from G G by replacing each edge of G G by a path of length two. In this paper, by the Principle of Inclusion and Exclusion we express the matching polynomial and Hosoya index of S(G) S ( G ) in terms of the matchings of G G . Particularly, if G G is a regular graph or a semi-regular bipartite graph, then the closed formulae of the matching polynomial and Hosoya index of S(G) S ( G ) are obtained. As an application, we prove a combinatorial identity.

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

subdivision
matching polynomial
hosoya index


OPTIMIZATION OF HIGH-CROWD-DENSITY FACILITIES BASED ON DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION Crowd modelling and simulation has been utilized over the last few decades to study crowd behaviour, estimate evacuation time, and assess safety requirements. In this study, the flow of people in and out of public utilities (washrooms) of a highly populated mosque is simulated. A typical washroom consists of four underground levels located outside the mosque building and can be accessed using staircases or escalators. To study the effect of crowd flow in and out of the washroom during peak times, a new model is built according to the access characteristics to each level. The model is based on Discrete Event Simulation (DES) approach. DES provides the crowd flow behaviour and optimization is performed based on the simulation to obtain the optimized washroom facility to serve the population. The simulation results shows that during peak times when the number of people visiting Haram could reach one-million; the washroom units of the Haram could serve up to about 11.6% of this population. However, the optimization results, given the current washroom layouts, show that if the number of toilets and ablution places are increased by a factor 1.2 the total number of people served would increase to 12.35%. This result is used to make some recommendations which can be further implemented for better layout arrangements, evacuation planning during emergency and public awareness on safety aspects.

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

crowd modelling and simulation
discrete event simulation
evacuation time


An emotionally biased ant colony algorithm for pathfinding in games Pathfinding is one of the tasks, apart from graphics rendering, requiring most CPU resources. Although there are many approaches to effectively solve pathfinding problems, they are becoming less suitable as more and more games have larger game worlds that dynamically change during the game play. These new games have more visually realistic graphics that increase the game characters realism but all these efforts may be useless if game characters perform dumb movements or follow inappropriate paths such as repeatedly walking close to an enemy or a predator while moving from one location to another. To tackle this problem we present in this paper an ant colony algorithm for path finding that takes into account the emotions of the game characters and we show how our approach is used in an augmented-reality educational game. The proposed algorithm is implemented on a GPU processor to demonstrate its scalability with large problem sizes when compared to its corresponding CPU version.

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 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

ant colony optimization
affective interaction
augmented reality
edutainment


Visual attention guided features selection with foveated images Visual attention is a very important task in autonomous robotics, but, because of its complexity, the processing time required is significant. We propose an architecture for feature selection using foveated images that is guided by visual attention tasks and that reduces the processing time required to perform these tasks. Our system can be applied in bottomup or topdown visual attention. The foveated model determines which scales are to be used on the feature extraction algorithm. The system is able to discard features that are not extremely necessary for the tasks, thus, reducing the processing time. If the fovea is correctly placed, then it is possible to reduce the processing time without compromising the quality of the tasks' outputs. The distance of the fovea from the object is also analyzed. If the visual system loses the tracking in topdown attention, basic strategies of fovea placement can be applied. Experiments have shown that it is possible to reduce up to 60% the processing time with this approach. To validate the method, we tested it with the feature algorithm known as speeded up robust features (SURF), one of the most efficient approaches for feature extraction. With the proposed architecture, we can accomplish real time requirements of robotics vision, mainly to be applied in autonomous robotics.

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


A two-component rectilinearity measure Recently several approaches for measuring the rectilinearity of shapes have been published [P.L. Rosin, J. uni?, Measuring rectilinearity, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 99(2) (2005) 175188; J. uni?, P.L. Rosin, Rectilinearity measurements for polygons, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 25(9) (2003) 11931200]. This paper generalises the R1 R 1 and R2 R 2 measures defined by uni? and Rosin [J. uni?, P.L. Rosin, Rectilinearity measurements for polygons, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 25(9) (2003) 11931200] to detect rectilinearity in two new situations: (1) the polygon has been skewed and (2) the shape contains two rectilinear components oriented differently to each other.

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


gdss: a brief look at a new concept in decision support An exciting new concept is emerging in the area of decision support. This involves the development of computer-based systems for use by groups of people who are jointly responsible for making decisions. Known as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) they can be useful to committees, review panels, executive board meetings, task forces, and groups of managers who work together on either a regular or one-time basis. The precise design of a GDSS will vary depending on the proximity of group members to one another and the duration of the decision-making session. This paper presents an overview of the GDSS concept.

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

precise
review
task
use
systems
design
concept
group
paper
decision support

meeting
decision making
decision support system
proximics
developer
computation
timing
management


Short term stock selection with case-based reasoning technique We proposed an intelligent stock selection method based on case-based reasoning. Fundamental and technical indicators are used to identify the winning stock. CBR method is compared with other artificial intelligence techniques. We showed that CBR outperforms the other techniques.

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

case-based reasoning
intelligent system
computational intelligence
genetic algorithms
earning analysis


Energy Efficiency of Heterogeneous Networks in LTE-Advanced Traditionally mobile operators have met the surge in mobile data traffic and the growing number of rural subscribers by deploying more macro base stations. This increases overall energy consumption, operational costs and carbon footprint of cellular networks. In this paper we investigate solutions for reducing the number and size of active macrocells following traffic load conditions in both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. Results are presented as overall energy reduction gains for homogeneous macro-only and micro-only networks and heterogeneous joint macro-relay and micro-relay networks, using long-term-evolution-advanced technology. Results show that reducing the number of active cells using sleep mode at base stations, in low to medium traffic load conditions, combined with the deployment of small cells offer energy gains in both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. However, the most significant gains are observed in heterogeneous networks.

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

heterogeneous networks
sleep mode
traffic load
small cells
energy consumption


database selection for processing k nearest neighbors queries in distributed environments We consider the processing of digital library queries, consisting of a text component and a structured component in distributed environments. The text component can be processed using techniques given in previous papers such as [7, 8, 11]. In this paper, we concentrate on the processing of the structured component of a distributed query. Histograms are constructed and algorithms are given to provide estimates of the desirabilities of the databases with respect to the given query. Databases are selected in descending order of desirability. An algorithm is also given to select tuples from the selected databases. Experimental results are given to show that the techniques provided here are effective and efficient.

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

select
order
environments
k nearest neighbors
text
queries
algorithm
paper
database selection
distributed
query
component

histogram
nearest neighbor
structure
efficiency
experimentation
query processing
process
digital libraries
effect
database
distributed databases


Motion Synthesis for Sports Using Unobtrusive Lightweight Body-Worn and Environment Sensing The ability to accurately achieve performance capture of athlete motion during competitive play in near real-time promises to revolutionize not only broadcast sports graphics visualization and commentary, but also potentially performance analysis, sports medicine, fantasy sports and wagering. In this paper, we present a highly portable, non-intrusive approach for synthesizing human athlete motion in competitive game-play with lightweight instrumentation of both the athlete and field of play. Our data-driven puppetry technique relies on a pre-captured database of short segments of motion capture data to construct a motion graph augmented with interpolated motions and speed variations. An athlete's performed motion is synthesized by finding a related action sequence through the motion graph using a sparse set of measurements from the performance, acquired from both worn inertial and global location sensors. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in a challenging application scenario, with a high-performance tennis athlete wearing one or more lightweight body-worn accelerometers and a single overhead camera providing the athlete's global position and orientation data. However, the approach is flexible in both the number and variety of input sensor data used. The technique can also be adopted for searching a motion graph efficiently in linear time in alternative applications.

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

motion synthesis
global position
motion graph

data-driven
viterbi
wearable devices
i
0 [computer graphics]: general


Reducing the conservatism of LMI-based stabilisation conditions for TS fuzzy systems using fuzzy Lyapunov functions In this article, the fuzzy Lyapunov function approach is considered for stabilising continuous-time Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy systems. Previous linear matrix inequality (LMI) stability conditions are relaxed by exploring further the properties of the time derivatives of premise membership functions and by introducing slack LMI variables into the problem formulation. The relaxation conditions given can also be used with a class of fuzzy Lyapunov functions which also depends on the membership function first-order time-derivative. The stability results are thus extended to systems with large number of rules under membership function order relations and used to design parallel-distributed compensation (PDC) fuzzy controllers which are also solved in terms of LMIs. Numerical examples illustrate the efficiency of the new stabilising conditions presented.

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

ts fuzzy systems
fuzzy lyapunov functions
pdc fuzzy controllers

stability analysis
linear matrix inequalities


Increased bradykinesia in Parkinsons disease with increased movement complexity: elbow flexionextension movements The present research investigates factors contributing to bradykinesia in the control of simple and complex voluntary limb movement in Parkinsons disease (PD) patients. The functional scheme of the basal ganglia (BG)thalamocortical circuit was described by a mathematical model based on the mean firing rates of BG nuclei. PD was simulated as a reduction in dopamine levels, and a loss of functional segregation between two competing motor modules. In order to compare model simulations with performed movements, flexion and extension at the elbow joint is taken as a test case. Results indicated that loss of segregation contributed to bradykinesia due to interference between competing modules and a reduced ability to suppress unwanted movements. Additionally, excessive neurotransmitter depletion is predicted as a possible mechanism for the increased difficulty in performing complex movements. The simulation results showed that the model is in qualitative agreement with the results from movement experiments on PD patients and healthy subjects. Furthermore, based on changes in the firing rate of BG nuclei, the model demonstrated that the effective mechanism of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) in STN may result from stimulation induced inhibition of STN, partial synaptic failure of efferent projections, or excitation of inhibitory afferent axons even though the underlying methods of action may be quite different for the different mechanisms.

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

parkinsons disease
basal ganglia
bradykinesia
loss of functional segregation
deep brain stimulation


An efficient and distributed file search in unstructured peer-to-peer networks Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks are gaining increased attention from both the scientific community and the larger Internet user community. Data retrieval algorithms lie at the center of P2P networks, and this paper addresses the problem of efficiently searching for files in unstructured P2P systems. We propose an Improved Adaptive Probabilistic Search (IAPS) algorithm that is fully distributed and bandwidth efficient. IAPS uses ant-colony optimization and takes file types into consideration in order to search for file container nodes with a high probability of success. We have performed extensive simulations to study the performance of IAPS, and we compare it with the Random Walk and Adaptive Probabilistic Search algorithms. Our experimental results show that IAPS achieves high success rates, high response rates, and significant message reduction.

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

unstructured peer-to-peer
ant colony
success rate
information retrieval


Properties and performance modelling of finite buffer M/G/1/K networks Finite buffer, single-server queueing systems and networks are difficult to analyze since the length of time a customer spends in the system does not follow the Markovian property. A two-moment approximation schema is developed for the probability distribution of M/G/1/K systems and extended to the analysis of M/G/1/K queueing networks. The general purpose of this paper is to develop a flexible and practical transform-free approach for computing the probability distribution and performance measures of the system as well as identify the underlying properties of these systems. It is shown that for most performance measures, a sigmoid or S-shaped curve with an inflection point at ?=1 ? = 1 appears as K?? K ? ? . This has direct implications for the analysis and optimization of such systems. The performance modelling of the M/G/1/K queueing networks of general topologies along with extensive numerical results accompany the paper along with the linear concave performance measures for these systems.

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


Locality-Based Discriminant Neighborhood Embedding In this article, we develop a linear supervised subspace learning method called locality-based discriminant neighborhood embedding (LDNE), which can take advantage of the underlying submanifold-based structures of the data for classification. Our LDNE method can simultaneously consider both 'locality' of locality preserving projection (LPP) and 'discrimination' of discriminant neighborhood embedding (DNE) in manifold learning. It can find an embedding that not only preserves local information to explore the intrinsic submanifold structure of data from the same class, but also enhances the discrimination among submanifolds from different classes. To investigate the performance of LDNE, we compare it with the state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction techniques such as LPP and DNE on publicly available datasets. Experimental results show that our LDNE can be an effective and robust method for classification.

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

dimensionality reduction
subspace learning
manifold learning


Net-Centric Adapter for Legacy Systems The Net-Centric Adapter for Legacy Systems (NCALS) is a software technology that makes legacy system data and services available in near real-time to the military Global Information Grid (GIG). The intent of NCALS is to lower the cost and risk, and to decrease the time required for legacy systems to comply with U. S. Department of Defense (DoD) net-centric technical standards. Many different systems could use a common, configurable NCALS software component to comply with these standards. The benefit to the warfighter is improved interoperability with joint and coalition forces. NCALS enables legacy systems to move to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) compatible with the GIG without requiring a costly and risky re-architecture of their legacy software. In addition, NCALS enables mission critical systems such as weapon systems to segregate their real-time, mission critical software from enterprise integration software. This maintains the safety and security required by such systems, while accommodating rapid changes in Internet-based, enterprise technologies. This paper will discuss the legacy system challenge and describe a technology prototype developed by the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) Dahlgren to realize the NCALS concept. The prototype works automatically, behind the scenes, to expose legacy data to the GIG and to make GIG data available to legacy systems.

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

mission-critical systems
service-oriented architecture
software engineering
systems engineering


Gaussian, Lobatto and Radau positive quadrature rules with a prescribed abscissa For a given \(\theta \in (a,b)\), we investigate the question whether there exists a positive quadrature formula with maximal degree of precision which has the prescribed abscissa \(\theta \) plus possibly \(a\) and/or \(b\), the endpoints of the interval of integration. This study relies on recent results on the location of roots of quasi-orthogonal polynomials. The above positive quadrature formulae are useful in studying problems in one-sided polynomial \(L_1\) approximation.

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

positive quadrature formulas
lobattoradau quadrature formulas
orthogonal polynomials
interlacing property
65d32
33c25


Mixed-signal template-based reduction scheme for stimulus artifact removal in electrical stimulation Simultaneous electrical stimulation and recording are used to gain insights into the function of neuronal circuitry. However, artifacts produced by the electrical stimulation pulses prevent the recording of neural responses during, and a short period after, the stimulation duration. In this work, we describe a mixed-signal recording topology with template subtraction for removing the artifact during the stimulation pulse. Emulated artifacts generated from a lumped electrical circuit model and experimental artifacts in cardiac cell cultures are used to evaluate the topology. The simulations show that delays between the emulated artifact and its estimated compensation template represent the largest error source of the analog template subtraction. The quantization error appears like random noise and determines the threshold level for the action potential detection. Simulations show that removal of the artifacts is possible, allowing the detection of action potentials during the stimulation pulsing period, even for high-amplitude saturating artifacts. Measurement results with artifacts elicited in cardiac cell cultures show feasible applications of this topology. The proposed topology therefore promisingly opens up a previously unavailable detection window for improving the analysis of the neuronal activity.

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

template subtraction
electrical stimulation

artifact reduction
system analysis and design
biomedical engineering


Impact of multi-species gas injection on trailing-edge noise An investigation of a prospective technique to reduce trailing-edge noise is presented. The computational approach based on large-eddy simulations (LES) and solutions of the acoustic perturbation equations (APE) is applied to trailing-edge noise of a flat plate at a freestream Mach number 0.6 and a Reynolds number of 12,000 based on the boundary-layer thickness at the inflow boundary. At two locations, i.e., upstream of and at the trailing edge, gases at different thermodynamic properties, i.e., air, carbon dioxide, and helium, are injected as a silencing fluid into the external flow field. The modified velocity and density fields influence the corresponding acoustic sources. The results include the analysis of turbulent structures, which are responsible for the noise generation and the mechanism defining the noise source. The injection at the trailing edge yields a reduced rate of change of the turbulent scales in the streamwise and spanwise direction defining an acoustically soft trailing edge. For the same mass flow rate of injected fluid the largest noise reduction is achieved by the light fluid, i.e., the helium mixture. The overall sound pressure level decreases by 2 dB compared to the no-injection configuration. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

acoustic perturbation equations
silencing fluid

trailing-edge noise
large-eddy simulation
turbulence convection


Structure-camphor odour relationships using the Generation and Selection of Pertinent Descriptors approach Structure-camphor odour relationships were carried out using GSPD (Generation and Selection of Pertinent Descriptors) or GESDEM (Generation et Selection de Descripteurs et Elaboration de Motifs). This methodology consists in constructing descriptors from fragments. Their size (called order) is increased stepwise to obtain an optimum order giving a best classification. The set of studied compounds included 99 aliphatic alcohols, for which olfactory properties have been described by Schnabel et al. [K.O. Schnabel, H.D. Belitz, C.V. Ranson, Untersuchungen zur Struktur-Aktivitats-Beziehung bei Geruchsstoffen, Z. Lebensm.-Unters.-Forsch. 187 (1988) 215-223]. Classification of compounds was tested by means of artificial neural network (NN) with back-propagation algorithm, Kth nearest neighbour (KNN) and discriminant analysis (DA). After GSPD, all compounds were well-classified and 93% of them were well-predicted by means of leave-one-out method using NN. A new test sample composed of 42 alcohols (25 camphor and 17 non-camphor) with structures analogue to these of training set was collected from Belstein and trained on weight matrix of network which served in classification phase. The results of prediction were at 90.5% in agreement with those of literature. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science 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 B I O O O O O O O B O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

neural network
knn
discriminant analysis


paintbrush rendering of lines using hmms We propose a new method that emulates the expressive appearance of paintbrush strokes on paper. In our system, brush footprint characteristics are modeled using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). Once the model is trained by a data set of given strokes, it estimates the most likely sequence of footprints for a given input line. The main difference between our method and other ones that use direct texture mapping lies in the estimation of the dynamic behavior of the footprints with respect to input lines. Since our method models simultaneously the physical characteristics of the brush and the drawing styles, it transforms input lines to aesthetic strokes which are really close to true ones, made with a real brush on a paper.

O O 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


Adaptive forwarding using network coding in vector-based wireless sensor networks Network Coding (NC) has been applied in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) where major improvements have been achieved. In this paper, we propose a network coding routing mechanism in WSNs that is based on Vector-Based Forwarding (VBF). The goal of the proposed routing mechanism is to decrease the total number of transmissions needed to deliver data to the destination. Decreasing the total number of transmissions is achieved by varying the number of transmissions performed by each sensor node in a particular way that does not sacrifice the reliability of data delivery. Decreasing the number of transmissions decreases the traffic forwarded in the process of delivering data and enhances power savings which prolong the lifetime of the WSN. Simulation results show major improvements achieved by the proposed routing mechanism.

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

adaptive network coding
vector-based forwarding
forwarding ratio


Content annotation for the semantic web: an automatic web-based approach Semantic Annotation is required to add machine-readable content to natural language text. A global initiative such as the Semantic Web directly depends on the annotation of massive amounts of textual Web resources. However, considering the amount of those resources, a manual semantic annotation of their contents is neither feasible nor scalable. In this paper we introduce a methodology to partially annotate textual content of Web resources in an automatic and unsupervised way. It uses several well-established learning techniques and heuristics to discover relevant entities in text and to associate them to classes of an input ontology by means of linguistic patterns. It also relies on the Web information distribution to assess the degree of semantic co-relation between entities and classes of the input domain ontology. Special efforts have been put in minimizing the amount of Web accesses required to evaluate entities in order to ensure the scalability of the approach. A manual evaluation has been carried out to test the methodology for several domains showing promising results.

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


Digitally Continuous Multivalued Functions, Morphological Operations and Thinning Algorithms In a recent paper (Escribano et al. in Discrete Geometry for Computer Imagery 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4992, pp. 81-92, 2008) we have introduced a notion of continuity in digital spaces which extends the usual notion of digital continuity. Our approach, which uses multivalued functions, provides a better framework to define topological notions, like retractions, in a far more realistic way than by using just single-valued digitally continuous functions. In this work we develop properties of this family of continuous functions, now concentrating on morphological operations and thinning algorithms. We show that our notion of continuity provides a suitable framework for the basic operations in mathematical morphology: erosion, dilation, closing, and opening. On the other hand, concerning thinning algorithms, we give conditions under which the existence of a retraction F:XaY Xa-D guarantees that D is deletable. The converse is not true, in general, although it is in certain particular important cases which are at the basis of many thinning algorithms.

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

mathematical morphology
retraction
thinning

digital space
continuous function
simple point


Ni/AuAl2O3 gate stack prepared by low-temperature ALD and lift-off for MOS HEMTs The metal-oxide gate stack was realized by a single photolitographic step. Low temperature ALD Al2O3 layer was used for MOS gate stack. Plasma enhancement and thermal modes were compared. MOS devices were evaluated by DC, pulse and CV measurements.

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

hemt
low-temperature ald
mos hemt
atomic layer deposition


On the strongly generic undecidability of the Halting Problem It has been shown in [J.D. Harnkins, A. Miasnikov, The halting problem is decidable on a set of asymptotic probability one, Notre Dame J. Formal Logic 47(4) (2006) 515-524] that the classical Halting Problem for Turing machines with one-way tape is decidable on a "large" set of Turing machines (a so-called generic set). However, here we prove that the Halting Problem remains undecidable when restricted to an arbitrary "very large" set of Turing machines (a so-called strongly generic set). Our proof is independent of a Turing machine model. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V All rights reserved.

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


Enabling Efficient Peer-to-Peer Resource Sharing in Wireless Mesh Networks Wireless mesh networks are a promising area for the deployment of new wireless communication and networking technologies. In this paper, we address the problem of enabling effective peer-to-peer resource sharing in this type of networks. Starting from the well-known Chord protocol for resource sharing in wired networks, we propose a specialization that accounts for peculiar features of wireless mesh networks: namely, the availability of a wireless infrastructure, and the 1-hop broadcast nature of wireless communication, which bring to the notions of location awareness and MAC layer cross-layering. Through extensive packet-level simulations, we investigate the separate effects of location awareness and MAC layer cross-layering, and of their combination, on the performance of the P2P application. The combined protocol, MESHCHORD, reduces message overhead of as much as 40 percent with respect to the basic Chord design, while at the same time improving the information retrieval performance. Notably, differently from the basic Chord design, our proposed MESHCHORD specialization displays information retrieval performance resilient to the presence of both CBR and TCP background traffic. Overall, the results of our study suggest that MESHCHORD can be successfully utilized for implementing file/resource sharing applications in wireless mesh networks.

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

community networks
distributed hash tables
peer-to-peer resource sharing
cross-layering


Minimum cost path problems with relays The minimum cost path problem with relays (MCPPR) consists of finding a minimum cost path from a source to a destination, along which relay nodes are located at a certain cost, subject to a weight constraint. This paper first models the MCPPR as a particular bicriteria path problem involving an aggregated function of the path and relay costs, as well as a weight function. A variant of this problem which takes into account all three functions separately is then considered. Formulating the MCPPR as a part of a bicriteria path problem allows the development of labeling algorithms in which the bound on the weight of paths controls the number of node labels. The algorithm for this constrained single objective function version of the problem has a time complexity of O(Wm+Wnlog(max{W,n})) O ( Wm + Wn log ( max { W , n } ) ) , where n is the number of nodes, m is the number of arcs and W is the weight upper bound. Computational results on random instances with up to 10000 nodes and 100000 arcs, are reported.

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

shortest path problem
bicriteria optimization


General theory of stigmergy: Modelling stigma semantics Stigmergy is a biological term used when discussing a sub-set of insect swarm-behaviour describing the apparent organisation seen during their activities. Stigmergy describes a communication mechanism based on environment-mediated signals which trigger responses among the insects. This phenomenon is demonstrated in the behaviour of ants and their food gathering process when following pheromone trails, where the pheromones are a form of environment-mediated communication. What is interesting with this phenomenon is that highly organised societies are achieved without an apparent management structure. Stigmergy is also observed in human environments, both natural and engineered. It is implicit in the Web where sites provide a virtual environment supporting coordinative contributions. Researchers in varying disciplines appreciate the power of this phenomenon and have studied how to exploit it. As stigmergy becomes more widely researched we see its definition mutate as papers citing original work become referenced themselves. Each paper interprets these works in ways very specific to the research being conducted. Our own research aims to better understand what improves the collaborative function of a Web site when exploiting the phenomenon. However when researching stigmergy to develop our understanding we discover a lack of a standardised and abstract model for the phenomenon. Papers frequently cited the same generic descriptions before becoming intimately focused on formal specifications of an algorithm, or esoteric discussions regarding sub-facets of the topic. None provide a holistic and macro-level view to model and standardise the nomenclature. This paper provides a content analysis of influential literature documenting the numerous theoretical and experimental papers that have focused on stigmergy. We establish that stigmergy is a phenomenon that transcends the insect world and is more than just a metaphor when applied to the human world. We present from our own research our general theory and abstract model of semantics of stigma in stigmergy. We hope our model will clarify the nuances of the phenomenon into a useful road-map, and standardise vocabulary that we witness becoming confused and divergent. Furthermore, this paper documents the analysis on which we base our next paper: Special Theory of Stigmergy: A Design Pattern for Web 2.0 Collaboration.

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

swarm intelligence
multi-agent systems
complex-adaptive systems
emergence
self-organisation


A mixed EulerianLagrangian method for modelling metal extrusion processes A mixed EulerianLagrangian approach for the computational modelling of metal extrusion processes in complex three dimensional geometries is presented. The approach involves the representation of the workpiece as a pseudo-fluid, and requires the solution of non-Newtonian fluid flow equations in an Eulerian context, using a free-surface algorithm to track its extreme deformation during its extrusion. The solid mechanics equations associated with the tools are solved in a conventional Lagrangian context. Thermal interactions between the workpiece and tools are modelled and a fluidstructure interaction technique is employed to capture the effect of the fluid traction load imposed by the workpiece on the tools, and especially the subsequent adaption of the Eulerian mesh to account for the impact of die deformation. Two extrusion test cases are investigated and the results obtained show the potential of the model with regard to representing the physics of the process, the advantages of the model over a more loosely coupled approach, and the parallel scalability of the resulting software.

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

eulerian
lagrangian
fluidstructure interaction


A Catalog of Aspect Refactorings for Spring/AOP The importance of enterprise applications in current organizations makes it necessary to facilitate their maintenance and evolution along their life. These kind of systems are very complex and they have several requirements that orthogonally crosscut the system structure (called crosscutting concerns). Since many of the enterprise systems are developed with the Spring framework, can be taken advantage of the benefit provided by the aspect-oriented module of Spring in order to encapsulate the crosscutting concerns into aspects. In this way, the maintenance and evolution of the enterprise systems will be improved. However, most of the aspect refactorings presented in the literature are not directly applicable to Spring systems. Along this line, in this work we present an adaptation of a catalog of aspect refactorings, initially presented for AspectJ, to be used with Spring/AOP. Also, we conduct a case study in which two enterprise applications developed with the Spring framework are refactored in order to encapsulate their crosscutting concerns into aspects.

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

separation of concerns
refactoring
aspect-oriented programming


SIMPLE ENVIRONMENT FOR DEVELOPING METHODS OF CONTROLLING CHAOS IN SPATIALLY DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS The paper presents a simple mathematical model called a coupled map lattice (CML). For some range of its parameters, this model generates complex, spatiotemporal behavior which seems to be chaotic. The main purpose of the paper is to provide results of stability analysis and compare them with those obtained from numerical simulation. The indirect Lyapunov method and Lyapunov exponents are used to examine the dependence on initial conditions. The net direction phase is introduced to measure the symmetry of the system state trajectory. In addition, a real system, which can be modeled by the CML, is presented. In general, this article describes basic elements of environment, which can be used for creating and examining methods of chaos controlling in systems with spatiotemporal dynamics.

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

coupled map lattice
lyapunov exponents
net direction phase


Profile-based routing and traffic engineering We present a new algorithm and framework for dynamic routing of bandwidth-guaranteed flows. The problem is motivated by the need to set up bandwidth-guaranteed paths in carrier and ISP networks dynamically. Traditional routing algorithms such as minimum-hop or widest-path routing do not take advantage of any knowledge about the traffic distribution or ingress-egress pairs, and therefore can often lead to severe network underutilization. Our work is inspired by the recently proposed Minimum Interference Routing Algorithm (MIRA) of Kodialam and Lakshman, but it improves on their approach in several ways. Our main idea is to use a `traffic profile' of the network, obtained by measurements or service-level agreements as a rough predictor of the future traffic distribution. We use this profile to solve a multi-commodity network flow problem, whose output is used both to guide our online path-selection algorithm as well as to impose admission control. The offline multi-commodity solution seems very effective at distributing the routes and avoiding bottlenecks around hot spots. In particular, our algorithm can anticipate a flow's blocking effect on groups of ingress-egress pairs, whereas, MIRA only considers one ingress-egress pair at a time. Our simulation results show that the new algorithm outperforms shortest-path, widest-path, and minimum interference routing algorithms on several metrics, including the fraction of requests routed and the fraction of requested bandwidth routed. Finally, the framework is quite general and can be extended in numerous ways to accommodate a variety of traffic management priorities in the network. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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

flow routing
label switching
multi-protocol label-switched


scoring two-species local alignments to try to statistically separate neutrally evolving from selected dna segments We construct several score functions for use in locating unusually conserved regions in a genome-wide search of aligned DNA from two species. We test these functions on regions of the human genome aligned to the mouse genome. These score functions are derived from properties of neutrally evolving sites on the mouse and human genome, and can be adjusted to the local background rate of conservation. The aim of these functions is to try to identify regions of the human genome that are conserved by evolutionary selection, because they have an important function, rather than by chance. We use them to get a very rough estimate of the amount of DNA in the human genome that is under selection.

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

mutual information
cpg effect
evolutionary models
dinucleotide dependence
context-dependent base substitutions
comparative genomics
ancestral repeat
neutral evolution
mouse-human alignments


a self-paced first course in computer science As demand for a first course in computer science increases, more efficient and effective approaches to such a course become increasingly desirable. This paper describes the development and use of a completely self-paced CAI course at The Evergreen State College. Use of behavioral objectives in designing the course is explained, the content of the course is outlined, the process used to develop the course is described, experiences with 256 students are reported, and some general observations on implementing CAI courses are offered.

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

computer science
use
process
general
paper

observability contention efficiency developer behavior object experience effect student


THE SUM OF D SMALL-BIAS GENERATORS FOOLS POLYNOMIALS OF DEGREE D We prove that the sum of d small-bias generators L : F(s) -> F(n) fools degree-d polynomials in n variables over a field F, for any. fixed degree d and. field F, including F = F(2) = {0, 1}. Our result builds on, simplifies, and improves on both the work by Bogdanov and Viola (FOCS '07) and the follow-up by Lovett (STOC '08). The. first relies on a conjecture that turned out to be true only for some degrees and. fields, while the latter considers the sum of 2(d) small-bias generators (as opposed to d in our result).

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

polynomial
pseudorandom generator
small-bias


Influence of discretization in image space on Hough transform The manner by which the short line segments are connected to approximate the ideal straight line in digital image space will influence the performance of Hough transform. The peak spreading can be avoided when Delta rho satisfies a certain condition. Consequently, a new approach called a variable-Delta rho Hough transform having Delta rho as a function of theta is proposed. For the probabilistic Hough transforms (PHT) it is shown that although one of their advantages is the ability to avoid direct quantization of parameter space but the influence of the discretization in image space becomes more serious. To avoid this problem, a suitable tolerance parameter delta as a function of rho and theta is required. (C) 1999 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

image discretization
line detection
parameter quantization
peak distortion


The deeper, the better? Effect of online brand community activity on customer purchase frequency Customer brand community participation behavior are in different levels. Participation level is not the only factor that influences purchase frequency. Regulatory focus is a moderator variable that affects this relationship.

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

online brand community
community participation
purchase frequency

regulatory focus theory
prevention versus promotion


Self-control of the time complexity of a constraint satisfaction problem solver program This paper presents the self-controlling software paradigm and reports on its use to control the branch and bound based constraint satisfaction problem solving algorithm. In this paradigm, an algorithm is first conceptualized as a dynamical system and then a feedback control loop is added to control its behavior. The loop includes a Quality of Service component that assesses the performance of the algorithm during its run time and a controller that adjusts the parameters of the algorithm in order to achieve the control goal. Although other approaches generally termed as self-* make use of control loops, this use is limited to the structure of the software system, rather than to its behavior and its dynamics. This paper advocates the analysis of dynamics of any program with control loops. The self-controlling software paradigm is evaluated on two different NP-hard constraint satisfaction and optimization problems. The results of the evaluation show an improvement in the performance due to the added control loop for both of the tested constraint satisfaction problems.

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

self-controlling software
branch and bound algorithm
pid controller
job scheduling problem
fixture design problem


Recommendation using neighborhood methods with preference-relation-based similarity Selecting appropriate items from a list consisting of a large number of items provided by a product website can be difficult and time-consuming for the potential customers. The development of recommender systems should be an important solution that will help users to select items easily according to their preferences. For recommender systems, the main aim of the popular collaborative filtering approaches is to recommend items that users with similar preferences have liked in the past. Because there is a certain degree to which one alternative is not worse than another in decision making, it would be interesting to make further use of the preference relation to design a similarity measure by measuring the overall strength of one users preference over that of another. The proposed similarity of one user to another user is therefore dependent on the strength of the preference of the former over the latter. In contrast to traditional similarity measures for neighborhood methods in collaborative filtering, the proposed preference-relation-based similarity is not symmetric for any two users. Experimental results have demonstrated that the generalization ability of the proposed multi-criteria neighborhood method performs well in comparison to other single-criterion and multi-criteria neighborhood methods.

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

preference relation
neighborhood method
collaborative filtering


A multi-objective chaotic ant swarm optimization for environmental/economic dispatch Since the environmental issues caused by the pollutant emissions from fossil-fueled power plants are concerned, it is necessary to develop the conventional economic dispatch (ED) into environmental/economic dispatch (EED) which considers both economic and environmental issues. This paper developed a multi-objective chaotic ant swarm optimization (MOCASO) method for solving the multi-objective EED problems of thermal generators in power systems. The proposed MOCASO method was applied to three test power systems. Simulation results demonstrated that the MOCASO method can obtain feasible and effective solutions and it is a promising alternative approach for solving the EED problems in practical power systems.

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 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

environmental/economic dispatch
multi-objective optimization
ant colony algorithm
swarm intelligence


Hashing and data integrity: Reliability of hashing and granularity size reduction Data assurance have come under scrutiny due to attacks on hashing schemes. This article explores a methodology for increasing the attack difficulty as well as reducing the size of the suspect area in those cases in which assurance is not based on a totality of a file (such as a document in which only a single paragraph may be suspect).

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

md5
data assurance data recovery
forensic integrity hashcode


A model for availability of quality of service in distributed multimedia systems In this paper we introduce a new model for the definition and the implementation of quality of service (QoS) in distributed multimedia systems. The model provides both the users and the provider/manager of the system with a framework for the high level description of the system's configuration and operation, as well as with an application/user specific definition of QoS. The model maps this high level QoS description to quality requirements for the individual resources that compose the overall service. The implementation of the QoS of the overall service is done by providing probability of availability guarantees for certain levels of QoS. Given some constraints on the total assets available for the implementation of a specific service, the model optimally allocates these assets to the system resources in order to implement a specific user/application QoS profile. The model is reduced to a General Asset Allocation Problem (GA(2)P) and we solve the GA(2)P in a provably optimal way for a wide range of realistic services.

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

availability
quality of service
asset allocation


DEMPSTER-SHAFER EVIDENCE THEORY-BASED UPDATING RULE FOR CONTINUOUS OPINIONS AND DISCRETE ACTIONS The opinion of an individual about a given problem is determined by the quantity and the degree of certainty of knowledge mastered by the individual. The knowledge and information from other individuals might bring some conflicts with the individual's internal knowledge, which would make the individual become uncertain about its opinion. Based on Dempster-Shafer (D-S) evidence theory, a new opinion updating rule is proposed for individuals to form their opinion as the process of reasoning from the internal or the external knowledge in real life. Many computer simulations are conducted under different situations. It is found that the common phenomena such as consensus, fragment opinions can be observed among the individuals on square lattices during the evolution of opinion, and that information is spread from the higher certainty to the lower certainty, and the influence of opinion leaders become weaken during the spread of information, and the range of influence is determined by the threshold of individual acceptance of uncertainty of information.

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

opinion dynamics
d-s evidence theory
ignorance
opinion leader


A new implementation of common matrix approach using third-order tensors for face recognition In the classical common matrix approach (CMA), the common matrix for each individual face class is obtained using basis matrices calculated by GramSchmidt orthogonalization of the class covariance matrix. This common matrix represents the common or invariant properties of a given face class. The CMA idea relies on the concept of basis matrices of a face class which span the, so called, difference subspace of that class. In this paper, an alternative method to obtain the basis matrices for CMA is proposed. The basis matrices are obtained using the higher order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) of a third-order tensor constructed with face images and these basis matrices are utilized in the construction of CMA. In order to exemplify the improvements in the recognition rates, face recognition experiments are carried out via the AR face database. The original face matrices, as well as 2DPCA-, 2DSVD-, and 2DFDA-based feature matrices are applied as the input matrices for the two different implementations of CMA in the experimental studies. The results indicate that the recognition rates obtained by the proposed method are slightly higher than those obtained using the basis matrices calculated by GramSchmidt orthogonalization.

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


Multisensor image registration via implicit similarity This paper presents an approach to the registration of significantly dissimilar images, acquired by sensors of different modalities. A robust matching criterion is derived by aligning the locations of gradient maxima. The alignment is achieved by iteratively maximizing the magnitudes of the intensity gradients of a set of pixels in one of the images, where the set is initialized by the gradient maxima locations of the second image. No explicit similarity measure that uses the intensities of both images is used. The computation utilizes the full spatial information of the first image and the accuracy and robustness of the registration depend only on it. False matchings are detected and adaptively weighted using a directional similarity measure. By embedding the scheme in a "coarse to fine" formulation, we were able to estimate affine and projective global motions, even when the images were characterized by complex space varying intensity transformations. The scheme is especially suitable when one of the images is of considerably better quality than the other ( noise, blur, etc.). We demonstrate these properties via experiments on real multisensor image sets.

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

global motion estimation
multisensor registration
multimodality image alignment


Global consistency, local sparsity and pixel correlation: A unified framework for face hallucination We improve our previous method to produce an initial high-resolution (HR) image. We propose a unified framework that contains the global and local priors together. We devise the local sparsity model, which recovers local details in patch-wise. The pixel correlation model further compensates the local structure in pixel-wise. With the initial HR image, we generate the final HR image by an iterative process.

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

regularization framework
sparse representation
pca position dictionary


the information environments program - a new design based it degree The University of Queensland has recently established a new design-focused, studio-based IT degree at a new flexible-learning campus. The Bachelor of Information Environments degree integrates the core subjects of the Bachelor of Information Technology degree along with a stream of design-based subjects covering Visual Thinking, Human Computer Interaction, Interactive Multimedia and Interaction Design. The core of the degree is the studio-stream, modelled on the architectural studio, in which students undertake open-ended design projects every semester. Studio-based learning immerses the students in the learning experience and involves teamwork, collaborative learning, interactive problem solving, presentations, and peer review. The studio projects also require the students to apply knowledge and skills gained in other subjects in new contexts, hence integrating and reinforcing previous learning. This paper describes the degree program, its curriculum and rationale, and reports on experiences in the first year of delivery.

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

design-based it degree
studio-based learning