Dynamic Routing and Spectrum Assignment in Spectrum-Flexible Transparent Optical Networks The continual growth of Internet traffic necessitates a high-capacity transmission platform and also highlights the importance of a multi-granularity transport network due to the flexible bitrates of Internet traffic. To meet these challenges, a spectrum-flexible optical network based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission technologies has been proposed as a promising solution because of its large transport capacity and bandwidth flexibility. In spectrum-flexible optical networks, we focus on the complete dynamic routing and spectrum assignment (RSA) problem, which integrates the signal format selection subproblem, the routing subproblem, and the spectrum assignment subproblem. In the complete RSA problem, we jointly consider the spectrum continuity constraints, the transmission distance constraints, and the relationship between the traffic bitrate and the signal bandwidth. A nonlinear programing model is presented to state the complete RSA problem. To solve the problem, we introduce a decomposition approach that divides the nonlinear problem into three steps: selecting the modulation format, solving the linear basic RSA problem, and checking the transmission distances. Based on the decomposition, we propose two heuristic approaches: modulation level fixed and adaptive RSA approaches for the complete RSA problem. Through analysis of the approaches, we prove that, in theory, the modulation level adaptive RSA approach can find the optimal solution to the complete RSA problem. The two approaches are implemented and compared in simulations. The results prove that the modulation level adaptive approaches achieve a lower capacity blocking probability than the modulation level fixed approaches.

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

modulation format
routing and spectrum assignment
spectrum continuity constraints
transmission distance constraints


planning for code buffer management in distributed virtual execution environments Virtual execution environments have become increasingly useful in system implementation, with dynamic translation techniques being an important component for performance-critical systems. Many devices have exceptionally tight performance and memory constraints (e.g., smart cards and sensors in distributed systems), which require effective resource management. One approach to manage code memory is to download code partitions on-demand from a server and to cache the partitions in the resource-constrained device (client). However, due to the high cost of downloading code and re-translation, it is critical to intelligently manage the code buffer to minimize the overhead of code buffer misses. Yet, intelligent buffer management on the tightly constrained client can be too expensive. In this paper, we propose to move code buffer management to the server, where sophisticated schemes can be employed. We describe two schemes that use profiling information to direct the client in caching code partitions. One scheme is designed for workloads with stable run-time behavior, while the other scheme adapts its decisions for workloads with unstable behaviors. We evaluate and compare our schemes and show they perform well, compared to other approaches, with the adaptive scheme having the best performance overall.

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

adaptive code cache
program partitioning
generational cache
distributed environments


On the issue of separability for problem decomposition in cooperative neuro-evolution Cooperative coevolution divides an optimisation problem into subcomponents and employs evolutionary algorithms for evolving them. Problem decomposition has been a major issue in using cooperative coevolution for neuro-evolution. Efficient problem decomposition methods group interacting variables into the same subcomponents. It is important to find out which problem decomposition methods efficiently group subcomponents and the behaviour of neural network during training in terms of the interaction among the synapses. In this paper, the interdependencies among the synapses are analysed and a problem decomposition method is introduced for feedforward neural networks on pattern classification problems. We show that the neural network training problem is partially separable and that the level of interdependencies changes during the learning process. The results confirm that the proposed problem decomposition method has improved performance compared to its counterparts.

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

cooperative coevolution
feedforward neural networks
evolutionary algorithms

neuro-evolution
genetic algorithms and separability


Efficient evaluation of query rewriting plan over materialized XML view The query rewriting plan generation over XML views has received wide attention recently. However, little work has been done on efficient evaluation of the query rewriting plans, which is not trivial since the plan may contain an exponential size of sub-plans. This paper investigates the reason for the potentially exponential number of sub-plans, and then proposes a new space-efficient form called ABCPlan (Plan with Automata Based Combinations) to equivalently represent the original query rewriting plan. ABCPlan contains a set of buckets containing suffix paths in the query tree and an automata to indicate the combination of the suffix paths from different buckets as valid query rewriting sub-plans. We also design an evaluation method called ABCScan, which constructs a unified evaluation tree for the ABCPlan and handles the evaluation tree in one scan of the XML view. In the evaluation, we introduce node existence automata to encode the structure of the sub-tree and convert the satisfaction of the ABCPlan into the intersection problem of deterministic finite automata. The experiments show that ABCPlan based method outperforms existing methods significantly in terms of scalability and efficiency.

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


Teleoperation of multi-agent systems with nonuniform control input delays Consensus and coordination of multiple teleoperated agents has been a control topic of growing interest over the last decade due, in part, to its many potential applications and related complex challenges. One of these challenges is to guarantee stability and motion coordination in the presence of inherent communication and input delays as well as system nonlinearities in the multi-agent system. Addressing this challenge herein, we report on a model reference robust control framework that guarantees stability, motion coordination, and formation control of N output strictly passive, nonlinear Lagrangian systems with arbitrarily large, nonuniform control input delays. The control framework is comprised of a reference model coupled to the nonlinear systems via the use of N modified scattering transformation blocks. It is shown that the overall control architecture is stable for any large constant delay, robust to system uncertainties, and that the control parameters are delay-independent. A numerical example with four nonlinear planar manipulators and another example with six ground vehicles are finally presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed controller.

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

networked control systems
multi-agent systems
time delay systems
robotics


Assessing the efficiency of resource allocations in bandwidth-sharing networks Resource allocation in bandwidth-sharing networks is inherently complex: the distributed nature of resource allocation management prohibits global coordination for efficiency, i.e.,aiming at full resource usage at all times. In addition, it is well recognized that resource efficiency may conflict with other critical performance measures, such as flow delay. Without a notion of optimal (or near-optimal) behavior, the performance of resource allocation schemes cannot be assessed properly. In previous work, we showed that optimal workload-based (or queue-length based) strategies have certain structural properties (they are characterized by so-called switching curves), but are too complex, in general, to be determined exactly. In addition, numerically determining the optimal strategy often requires excessive computational effort. This raises the need for simpler strategies with near-optimal behavior, that can serve as a sensible bench-mark to test resource allocation strategies. We focus on flows traversing the network, sharing the resources on their common path with (independently generated) cross-traffic. Assuming exponentially distributed flow sizes, we show that in many scenarios optimizing under a fluid scaling gives a simple linear switching strategy, that accurately approximates the optimal strategy. When two nodes on the flow path are equally congested, however, fluid scaling is not appropriate, and the corresponding strategy may not even ensure stability. In such cases, we show that the appropriate scaling for efficient workload-based allocations follows a square-root law. Armed with these, we then assess the potential gain that any sophisticated strategy can achieve over standard ? ? -fair strategies, which are representations of common distributed allocation schemes, and confirm that ? ? -fair strategies perform excellently among non-anticipating policies. In particular, we can approximate the optimal policy with a weighted ? ? -fair strategy.

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

bandwidth-sharing networks
switching strategies
linear network
square-root scaling
weighted alpha-fair strategies


Application of imperialist competitive algorithm with its modified techniques for multi-objective optimal power flow problem: A comparative study One of the major tools for power system operators is Optimal Power Flow (OPF) problem which is designed to optimize a certain objective over power network variables under certain constraints. One of the simplest but most powerful optimization algorithms is imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) outperforming many of the already existing optimization techniques. The original ICA method often converges to local optima. Therefore, in order to avoid this shortcoming, the interaction effects of colonies on each other are modeled to improve local search near the global optima. Also, a series of modifications is purposed to the assimilation policy rule of ICA method in order to further enhance algorithms rate of convergence for achieving a better solution quality. This article investigates the possibility of using recently emerged evolutionary-based approach as a solution for the OPF problems which is based on ICA method with its modified techniques for optimal settings of OPF control variables. The performance of this approach is studied and evaluated on the standard IEEE 57-bus test system with different objective functions and is compared to methods reported in the literature recently. The proposed modified techniques for ICA method provide better results compared to the original ICA and other methods recently reported in the literature as demonstrated by simulation results.

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

optimal power flow (opf)
imperialist competitive algorithm (ica)
modified technique


some virtues and limitations of action inferring interfaces An action inferring facility for a multimodal interface called Edward is described. Based on the actions the user performs, Edward anticipates future actions and offers to perform them automatically. The system uses inductive inference to anticipate actions. It generalizes over arguments and results, and detects patterns on the basis of a small sequence of user actions, e.g. copy a lisp file; change extension of original file into .org; put the copy in the backup folder. Multimodality (particularly the combination of natural language and simulated pointing gestures) and the reuse of patterns are important new features. Some possibilities and problems of action inferring interfaces in general are addressed. Action inferring interfaces are particularly useful for professional users of general-purpose applications. Such users are unable to program repetitive patterns because either the applications do not provide the facilities or the users lack the capabilities.

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

programming by example
multimodal interfaces
demonstrational interfaces


(2D)(2) LDA: An efficient approach for face recognition Although 2DLDA algorithm obtains higher recognition accuracy, a vital unresolved problem of 2DLDA is that it needs huge feature matrix for the task of face recognition. To overcome this problem, this paper presents an efficient approach for face image feature extraction, namely, (2D)(2)LDA method. Experimental results on ORL and Yale database show that the proposed method obtains good recognition accuracy despite having less number of coefficients. (c) 2006 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

principal component analysis
linear discriminant analysis


Efficient and Deterministic Parallel Placement for FPGAs We describe a parallel simulated annealing algorithm for FPGA placement. The algorithm proposes and evaluates multiple moves in parallel, and has been incorporated into Altera's Quartus II CAD system. Across a set of 18 industrial benchmark circuits, we achieve geometric average speedups during the quench of 2.7x and 4.0x on four and eight processors, respectively, with individual circuits achieving speedups of up to 3.6x and 5.9x. Over the course of the entire anneal, we achieve speedups of up to 2.8x and 3.7x, with geometric average speedups of 2.1x and 2.4x. Our algorithm is the first parallel placer to optimize for criteria other than wirelength, such as critical path length, and is one of the few deterministic parallel placement algorithms. We discuss the challenges involved in combining these two features and the new techniques we used to overcome them. We also quantify the impact of maintaining determinism on eight cores, and find that while it reduces performance by approximately 15% relative to an ideal speedup of 8.0x, hardware limitations are a larger factor and reduce performance by 30-40%. We then suggest possible enhancements to allow our approach to scale to 16 cores and beyond.

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

algorithms
performance
fpgas
parallel placement


MTCProv: a practical provenance query framework for many-task scientific computing Scientific research is increasingly assisted by computer-based experiments. Such experiments are often composed of a vast number of loosely-coupled computational tasks that are specified and automated as scientific workflows. This large scale is also characteristic of the data that flows within such many-task computations (MTC). Provenance information can record the behavior of such computational experiments via the lineage of process and data artifacts. However, work to date has focused on lineage data models, leaving unsolved issues of recording and querying other aspects, such as domain-specific information about the experiments, MTC behavior given by resource consumption and failure information, or the impact of environment on performance and accuracy. In this work we contribute with MTCProv, a provenance query framework for many-task scientific computing that captures the runtime execution details of MTC workflow tasks on parallel and distributed systems, in addition to standard prospective and data derivation provenance. To help users query provenance data we provide a high level interface that hides relational query complexities. We evaluate MTCProv using an application in protein science, and describe how important query patterns such as correlations between provenance, runtime data, and scientific parameters are simplified and expressed.

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

many-task computing
database queries
parallel and distributed computing


computations modulo regular chains The computation of triangular decompositions involve two fundamental operations: polynomial GCDs modulo regular chains and regularity test modulo saturated ideals. We propose new algorithms for these core operations based on modular methods and fast polynomial arithmetic. We rely on new results connecting polynomial subresultants and GCDs modulo regular chains. We report on extensive experimentation, comparing our code to pre-existing M aple implementations, as well as more optimized M agma functions. In most cases, our new code outperforms the other packages by several orders of magnitude.

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

fast polynomial arithmetic
subresultants

regular gcd
regular chain
polynomial systems
triangular decomposition


Randomized RANSAC with Td,d test Many computer vision algorithms include a robust estimation step where model parameters are computed from a data set containing a significant proportion of outliers. The ransac algorithm is possibly the most widely used robust estimator in the field of computer vision. In the paper we show that under a broad range of conditions, ransac efficiency is significantly improved if its hypothesis evaluation step is randomized. A new randomized (hypothesis evaluation) version of the ransac algorithm, r-ransac, is introduced. Computational savings are achieved by typically evaluating only a fraction of data points for models contaminated with outliers. The idea is implemented in a two-step evaluation procedure. A mathematically tractable class of statistical preverification test of samples is introduced. For this class of preverification test we derive an approximate relation for the optimal setting of its single parameter. The proposed pre-test is evaluated on both synthetic data and real-world problems and a significant increase in speed is shown.

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

randomized algorithm
epipolar geometry estimation


document clustering via dirichlet process mixture model with feature selection One essential issue of document clustering is to estimate the appropriate number of clusters for a document collection to which documents should be partitioned. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, namely DPMFS, to address this issue. The proposed approach is designed 1) to group documents into a set of clusters while the number of document clusters is determined by the Dirichlet process mixture model automatically; 2) to identify the discriminative words and separate them from irrelevant noise words via stochastic search variable selection technique. We explore the performance of our proposed approach on both a synthetic dataset and several realistic document datasets. The comparison between our proposed approach and stage-of-the-art document clustering approaches indicates that our approach is robust and effective for document clustering.

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

document clustering
feature selection
dirichlet process mixture model


Fragment-based prediction of cytochromes P450 2D6 and 1A2 inhibition by recursive partitioning The evaluation of the ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion) properties of drug candidates is an important stage in drug discovery. To speed up the numerous tests carried out on large databases of compounds, the help of robust and accurate in silico filters is increasingly required. We propose here a method to build predictive and interpretable models for the prediction of cytochrome P450 (CYP) 1A2 and 2D6 inhibition using recursive partitioning (RP), a well-known technique for the construction of decision trees. The originality of the work is the use of several descriptions of the molecules in terms of fragments, i.e. the MACCS keys and five in-house fingerprints based on the electron density properties of fragments, employed to draw easily understandable structure-activity models. The classifiers reached performances of 87.5% and 76.5% of prediction on a validation set for CYP1A2 and CYP2D6, respectively. The analysis of the first nodes of the RP trees permits us to highlight some relations between the structural fragments and the inhibition of CYPs.

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

recursive partitioning
cytochrome p450
structural fragments
electron density


Continuous logic I. Basic concepts A general description of a continuous (-valued) logic is given, basic operations of the logic are defined, and some problems and particulars of their solutions are discussed. First, toe define algebra of continuous logic and enumerate its basic unary, binary and tel nary Junctions. All laws of continuous logic are compared with laws of discrete binary logic. We discuss how to enumerate all Junctions of continuous logic with specified number of variables and how to represent Me Junctions in a standard form. Procedures of minimization of continuous logical Junctions and their decomposition info the Junctions with less clarity are exploited The procedures are compared with their counterparts from binary logic. We also tackle problems of analysis and synthesis of continuous logical Junctions, and show that the problem of synthesis may not have a solution. Basics of differential and integral calculus are applied to continuous valued logic. We demonstrate that any continuous logical function has the points where a derivative does not exist. At the end of the paper we briefly discuss an incompleteness problem of continuous logic, application of continuous logic ill mathematics, engineering and economy, give examples, draw a perspective of further development and supply extensive bibliography of Russian works in the field.

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


A Self-Evolving Interval Type-2 Fuzzy Neural Network With Online Structure and Parameter Learning This paper proposes a self-evolving interval type-2 fuzzy neural network (SEIT2FNN) with online structure and parameter learning. The antecedent parts in each fuzzy rule of the SEIT2FNN are interval type-2 fuzzy sets and the fuzzy rules are of the Takagi-Sugeno-Kang (TSK) type. The initial rule base in the SEIT2FNN is empty, and the online clustering method is proposed to generate fuzzy rules that flexibly partition the input space. To avoid generating highly overlapping fuzzy sets in each input variable, an efficient fuzzy set reduction method is also proposed. This method independently determines whether a corresponding fuzzy set should be generated in each input variable when a new fuzzy rule is generated. For parameter learning, the consequent part parameters are tuned by the rule-ordered. Kalman filter algorithm for high-accuracy learning performance. Detailed learning equations on applying the rule-ordered Kalman filter algorithm to the SEIT2FNN consequent part learning, with rules being generated online, are derived. The antecedent part parameters are learned by gradient descent algorithms. The SEIT2FNN is applied to simulations on nonlinear plant modeling, adaptive noise cancellation, and chaotic signal prediction. Comparisons with other type-1 and type-2 fuzzy systems in these examples verify the performance of the SEIT2FNN.

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

evolving system
fuzzy neural networks (fnns)
online fuzzy clustering
structure learning
type-2 fuzzy systems


can we build software faster and better and cheaper? "Faster, Better, Cheaper" (FBC) was a development philosophy adopted by the NASA administration in the mid to late 1990s. that lead to some some dramatic successes such as Mars Pathfinder as well as a number highly publicized mission failures, such as the Mars Climate Orbiter & Polar Lander. The general consensus on FBC was "Faster, Better, Cheaper? Pick any two". According to that view, is impossibly to optimize on all three criteria without compromising the third. This paper checks that view using an AI search tool called STAR. We show that FBC is indeed feasible and produces similar or better results when compared to other methods However, for FBC to work, there must be a balanced concern and concentration on the quality aspects of a project. If not, "FBC" becomes "CF" (cheaper and faster) with the inevitable lose in project quality.

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 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

predictor models
software engineering
simulated annealing
cocomo
software processes


non-model self-learning control of nonlinear system In this paper, one method of non-model error self-learning control of inverse system based on BP networks is presented. The input and output of the system is identified rapidly by BP networks and its momentum BP algorithm. Error controller is constructed simultaneity. The weight matrix of the error controller is dynamically adjusted and transferred to reality self-learning and adaptive control of unknown non-linear systems. The non-linear system simulation example based on MATLAB7.0 shows this control method is effective.

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


Improving iterative repair strategies for scheduling with the SVM The resource constraint project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is an NP-hard benchmark problem in scheduling which takes into account the limitation of resources' availabilities in real life production processes and subsumes open-shop, job-shop, and flow-shop scheduling as special cases. We present here an application of machine learning to adapt simple greedy strategies for the RCPSP. Iterative repair steps are applied to an initial schedule which neglects resource constraints. The rout-algorithm of reinforcement learning is used to learn an appropriate value function which guides the search. We propose three different ways to define the value function and we use the support vector machine (SVM) for its approximation. The specific properties of the SVM allow to reduce the size of the training set and SVM shows very good generalization behavior also after short training. We compare the learned strategies to the initial greedy strategy for different benchmark instances of the RCPSP.

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

rcpsp
svm
reinforcement learning
scheduling


Real Time Related Key Attack on Hummingbird-2 Hummingbird is a lightweight encryption and message authentication primitive published in RISC'09 and WLC'10. In FSE'11, Markku-Juhani O.Saarinen presented a differential divide-and-conquer method which has complexity upper bounded by 2(64) operations and requires processing of few megabytes of chosen messages under two related nonces (IVs). The improved version, Hummingbird-2, was presented in RFIDSec 2011. Based on the idea of differential collision, this paper discovers some weaknesses of the round function WD16. Combining with the simple key loading algorithm, a related-key chosen-IV attack which can recover the full secret key is proposed. Under 15 pairs of related keys, the 128 bit initial key can be recovered, requiring 2(27) chosen IV and the computational complexity is O(2(27)). In average, the attack needs several minutes to recover the full 128-bit secret key on a PC. The experimental result corroborates our attack. The result shows that the Hummingbird-2 cipher can't resist related key attack.

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

cryptanalysis
hummingbird-2
lightweight cipher
hybrid symmetric cipher


Polynomial-time computing over quadratic maps I: Sampling in real algebraic sets Given a quadratic map Q : K-n &RARR; K-k defined over a computable subring D of a real closed field K; and p &ISIN; D[Y-1,...,Y-k] of degree d, we consider the zero set Z = Z(p(Q(X)); K-n) &SUBE; K-n of p(Q(X-1,...,X-n)) &ISIN; D[X-1,...,X-n]. We present a procedure that computes, in (dn)(O(k)) arithmetic operations in D, a set S of (real univariate representations of) sampling points in Kn that intersects nontrivially each connected component of Z: As soon as k = o(n); this is faster than the known methods that all have exponential dependence on n in the complexity. In particular, our procedure is polynomial-time for constant k. In contrast, the best previously known procedure is only capable of deciding in n(O(k2)) operations the nonemptiness ( rather than constructing sampling points) of the set Z in the case of p(Y) = &USigma;Y-i(i)2 and homogeneous Q. A by-product of our procedure is a bound (dn)(O(k)) on the number of connected components of Z. The procedure consists of exact symbolic computations in D and outputs vectors of algebraic numbers. It involves extending K by infinitesimals and subsequent limit computation by a novel procedure that utilizes knowledge of an explicit isomorphism between real algebraic sets.

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

symbolic computation
semialgebraic set
univariate representation
infinitesimal deformation


Modelling of the distributed databases. A viewpoint mechanism of the MVDB model's methodology Over the past years, most of the research dealing with the object multiple representation and evolution has proposed to enrich the monolithic vision of the classical object approach in which an object belongs to one hierarchy class. In databases, much work has been done towards extending models with advanced tools such as view technology, schema evolution support, multiple classification, role modelling and viewpoints. In particular, the integration of the viewpoint mechanism to the conventional object-oriented data model gives it flexibility and allows one to improve the modeling power of objects. The viewpoint paradigm refers to the multiple description, the distribution, and the evolution of object. Also, it can be an undeniable contribution for a distributed design of complex databases. The motivation of this paper is to define an object data model integrating viewpoints in databases and to present a federated database architecture integrating multiple viewpoint sources following a local-as-extended-view data integration approach.

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

object-oriented data model
oql language
viewpoint schema
laev data integration approach
mvdb model
federated databases
local-as-view strategy


automating transfer function design for comprehensible volume rendering based on 3d field topology analysis (case study) This paper describes initial results of a 3D field topology analysis for automating transfer function design aiming at comprehensible volume rendering. The conventional Reeb graph-based approach to describing topological features of 3D surfaces is extended to capture the topological skeleton of a volumetric field. Based on the analysis result, which is represented in the form of a hyper Reeb graph , a procedure is proposed for designing appropriate color/opacity transfer functions. Two analytic volume datasets are used to preliminarily prove the feasibility of the present design methodology.

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 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

critical surface
volume visualization
isosurface
direct volume rendering
comprehensible rendering


Secure neighbor discovery and wormhole localization in mobile ad hoc networks ? Neighbor discovery is an important part of many protocols for wireless adhoc networks, including localization and routing. When neighbor discovery fails, communications and protocols performance deteriorate. In networks affected by relay attacks, also known as wormholes, the failure may be more subtle. The wormhole may selectively deny or degrade communications. In this article we present Mobile Secure Neighbor Discovery (MSND), which offers a measure of protection against wormholes by allowing participating mobile nodes to securely determine if they are neighbors, and a wormhole localization protocol, which allows nodes that detected the presence of a wormhole to determine wormholes location. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to secure neighbor discovery in mobile adhoc networks and to localize a wormhole. MSND leverages concepts of graph rigidity for wormhole detection. We prove security properties of our protocols, and demonstrate their effectiveness through extensive simulations and a real system evaluation employing Epic motes and iRobot robots.

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

security
neighbor discovery
wormhole localization
mobile ad hoc networks


a ultra low power cmos pa/v transconductor and its application to wavelet filters Two topologies of ultra low-power CMOS triode transconductor are proposed. Its input transistors are kept in the triode region to benefit from the lowest gm/ID ratio. The gm is adjusted by a well defined (W/L) and VDS, the latter a replica of the tuning voltage VTUNE. Transconductance down to hundreds of pA/V are obtained and used to implement a 6th order wavelet filter. The resulting design complies with a 1.5V supply and a 0.35m CMOS process. The total power consumption of the wavelet filters using the first and second topology of transconductor equals 51nW and 114nW, respectively.

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


Econometrics in R: Past, present and future Recently, computational methods and software have been receiving more attention in the econometrics literature, emphasizing that they are integral components of modern econometric research. This has also promoted the development of many new econometrics software packages written in R and made available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network. This special volume on "Econometrics in R" features a selection of these recent activities that includes packages for econometric analysis of cross-section, time series and panel data. This introduction to the special volume highlights the contents of the contributions and embeds them into a brief overview of other past, present, and future projects for econometrics in R.

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


Designing Chaotic Mathematical Circuits for Solving Practical Problems We introduce the paradigm of chaotic mathematical circuitry which shows some similarity to the paradigm of electronic circuitry, especially in the frame of chaotic attractors for solving practical problems (generating hyperchaos; developing chaos based pseudo random number generator (CPRNG) and chaotic multistream PRNG; secure communication via synchronization). They can also be used in cryptography, generic algorithms in optimization, control, etc.

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

chaotic mathematical circuit
circuit modeling
chuas circuit
pseudo-random number generator


Seeing the forest through the trees: A review of integrated environmental modelling tools We conduct a systematic review on reusability for integrated modelling tools. We group eligible studies in viewpoints according to well-known software techniques. Reusability may increase by accounting for not only models but their context as first-class citizens. Reusability may increase by adhering to the concept of aggregation.

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

integrated modelling
environmental modelling
reusability


Projective dualities for quasiconvex problems We study two dualities that can be applied to quasiconvex problems. They are conjugacies deduced from polarities. They are characterized by the polar sets of sublevel sets. We give some calculus rules for the associated subdifferentials and we relate the subdifferentials to known subdifferentials. We adapt the general duality schemes in terms of Lagrangians or in terms of perturbations to two specific problems. First a general mathematical programming problem and then a programming problem with linear constraints.

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

conjugacy
optimality conditions
quasiconvex function
subdifferential


Type checking with open type functions We report on an extension of Haskell with open type-level functions and equality constraints that unifies earlier work on GADTs, functional dependencies, and associated types. The contribution of the paper is that we identify and characterise the key technical challenge of entailment checking; and we give a novel, decidable, sound, and complete algorithm to solve it, together with some practically-important variants. Our system is implemented in GHC, and is already in active use.

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


A Node Revocation Scheme Using Public-Key Cryptography in Wireless Sensor Networks Generally deployed in an unattended environment, a sensor network can be easily assaulted or compromised by adversaries. Network security becomes a major problem. A distributed node revocation scheme is effective in reducing the damages a compromised node may cause to a sensor network, but its operation tends to consume large-scale memory space of the hardware-constrained sensor nodes. To reduce such complexity, this paper presents a new distributed voting revocation scheme based on the one-way hash chain, the certificate revocation list and the public-key cryptography. Performance evaluation shows that our scheme taper forms the other tar get schemes in enhancing network security at reasonable calculation cost which is acceptable to the sensor nodes.

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

wireless sensor networks
network security
performance evaluation

distributed node revocation schemes
one-way hash chains
certificate revocation lists
public-key cryptography


Image restoration for quantifying TFT-LCD defect levels Though machine vision systems for automatically detecting visual defects, called mura, have been developed for thin flat transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) panels, they have not yet reached a level of reliability which can replace human inspectors. To establish an objective criterion for identifying real defects, some index functions for quantifying defect levels based on human perception have been recently researched. However, while these functions have been verified in the laboratory, further consideration is needed in order to apply them to real systems in the field. To begin with, we should correct the distortion occurring through the capturing of panels. Distortion can cause the defect level in the observed image to differ from that in the panel. There are several known methods to restore the observed image in general vision systems. However, TFT-LCD panel images have a unique background degradation composed of background non-uniformity and vignetting effect which cannot easily be restored through traditional methods. Therefore, in this paper we present a new method to correct background degradation of TFT-LCD panel images using principal component analysis (PCA). Experimental results show that our method properly restores the given observed images and the transformed shape of muras closely approaches the original undistorted shape.

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

image restoration
principal component analysis
mura


Conservation in Aspergillus fumigatus of pH-signaling seven transmembrane domain and arrestin proteins, and implications for drug discovery Adaptation to extracellular pH is a major challenge to fungal pathogens that infect mammalian hosts. Among pH responses mounted by diverse fungal pathogens there is a high degree of molecular conservation. This, coupled with the absence of such signaling pathways in mammalian cells, suggests that this crucial fungal survival mechanism might provide a useful means of limiting a broad spectrum of infectious fungal growth. PacC/Rim signaling converts extracellular cues, perceived by the fungal cell at extremes of ambient pH, into a cellular signal moderating the activation and/or derepression of multiple pH-sensitive gene functions including enzymes, permeases, and transporters. Signal transduction via the fungal PacC/Rim pathway involves a seven transmembrane domain (7TMD) receptorarrestin protein complex. This review will discuss, with particular attention to Aspergillus fumigatus (the major mold pathogen of humans), the conservation of PacC/Rim signal reception proteins, and protein domains, required for tolerance of pH change, and pathogenicity, and the significance of such molecules as targets for interventive therapies.

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

aspergillus
arrestin
signal transduction


Managing knowledge on the Web Extracting ontology from HTML Web In recent years, the Internet has become one of the most important sources of information, and it is now imperative that companies are able to collect, retrieve, process, and manage information from the Web. However, due to the sheer amount of information available, browsing web content by searches using keywords is inefficient, largely because unstructured HTML web pages are written for human comprehension and not for direct machine processing. For the same reason, the degree of web automation is limited. It is recognized that semantics can enhance web automation, but it will take an indefinite amount of effort to convert the current HTML Web into the Semantic Web. This study proposes a novel ontology extractor, called OntoSpider, for extracting ontology from the HTML Web. The contribution of this work is the design and implementation of a six-phase process that includes the preparation, transformation, clustering, recognition, refinement, and revision for extracting ontology from unstructured HTML pages. The extracted ontology provides structured and relevant information for applications such as e-commerce and knowledge management that can be compared and analyzed more effectively. We give detailed information on the system and provide a series of experimental results that validate the system design and illustrate the effectiveness of OntoSpider.

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

knowledge management applications
intelligent web services


On Bounded Leg Shortest Paths Problems Let V be a set of points in a d-dimensional l(p)-metric space. Let s, t epsilon V and let L be a real number. An L-bounded leg path from s to t is an ordered set of points which connects s to t such that the leg between any two consecutive points in the set has length of at most L. The minimal path among all these paths is the L-bounded leg shortest path from s to t. In the s-t Bounded Leg Shortest Path (stBLSP) problem we are given two points s and t and a real number L, and are required to compute an L-bounded leg shortest path from s to t. In the All-Pairs Bounded Leg Shortest Path (apBLSP) problem we are required to build a data structure that, given any two query points from V and a real number L, outputs the length of the L-bounded leg shortest path (a distance query) or the path itself (a path query). In this paper we obtain the following results: 1. An algorithm for the apBLSP problem in any l(p)-metric which, for any fixed epsilon > 0, computes in O(n(3)(log(3) n + log(2) n center dot epsilon(-d))) time a data structure which approximates any bounded leg shortest path within a multiplicative error of (1 + epsilon). It requires O(n(2) log n) space and distance queries are answered in O(log log n) time. An algorithm for the stBLSP problem that, given s, t epsilon V and a real number L, computes in O(n center dot polylog(n)) the exact L-bounded shortest path from s to t. This algorithm works in l(1) and l(infinity) metrics. In the Euclidean metric we also obtain an exact algorithm but with a running time of O(n(4/3+epsilon) ), for any epsilon > 0. For any weighted directed graph we give a data structure of size O(n (2.5)log n) which is capable of answering path queries with a multiplicative error of (1 + epsilon) in O(log log n + l) time, where l is the length of the reported path.

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

bounded leg shortest problem
geometric spanners


Fair Intelligent Admission Control over resource-feedback DiffServ network The basic DiffServ model lacks mechanisms to prevent itself from being overloaded and to inform its internal capability to the external world. This paper addresses the problem by presenting a Fair Intelligent Admission Control (FIAC) over an enhanced-DiffServ architecture. The central idea is to make admission decision based on both informed internal network QoS states and the external traffic QoS requirements at the edge node. This model has several advantages: (1) it is backward compatible with DiffServ, (2) it adapts to traffic load and network QoS state changes, and (3) it provides interactive communication between the external QoS requirements and the internal DiffServ network capability. In this paper, we use simulation to evaluate the performance of DiffServ with or without FIAC. The performance demonstrates that the new scheme is able to admit traffic fairly and achieve edge-to-edge QoS under heavy traffic conditions and network state changes. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V.

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


On the numerical solution of Kronecker-based infinite level-dependent QBD processes Infinite level-dependent quasi-birth-and-death (LDQBD) processes can be used to model Markovian systems with countably infinite multidimensional state spaces. Recently it has been shown that sums of Kronecker products can be used to represent the nonzero blocks of the transition rate matrix underlying an LDQBD process for models from stochastic chemical kinetics. This paper extends the form of the transition rates used recently so that a larger class of models including those of call centers can be analyzed for their steady-state. The challenge in the matrix analytic solution then is to compute conditional expected sojourn time matrices of the LDQBD model under low memory and time requirements after truncating its countably infinite state space judiciously. Results of numerical experiments are presented using a Kronecker-based matrix-analytic solution on models with two or more countably infinite dimensions and rules of thumb regarding better implementations are derived. In doing this, a more recent approach that reduces memory requirements further by enabling the computation of steady-state expectations without having to obtain the steady-state distribution is also considered.

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

markov chain
level-dependent qbd process
kronecker product
matrix analytic method
steady-state expectation
call center


Evolutionary search for faces from line drawings Single 2D line drawing is a straightforward method to illustrate 3D objects. The faces of an object depicted by a line drawing give very useful information for the reconstruction of its 3D geometry. Two recently proposed methods for face identification from line drawings are based on two steps: finding a set of circuits that may be faces and searching for real faces from the set according to some criteria. The two steps, however, involve two combinatorial problems. The number of the circuits generated in the first step grows exponentially with the number of edges of a line drawing. These circuits are then used as the input to the second combinatorial search step. When dealing with objects having more faces, the combinatorial explosion prevents these methods from finding solutions within feasible time. This paper proposes a new method to tackle the face identification problem by a variable-length genetic algorithm with a novel heuristic and geometric constraints incorporated for local search. The hybrid GA solves the two combinatorial problems simultaneously. Experimental results show that our algorithm can find the faces of a line drawing having more than 30 faces much more efficiently. In addition, simulated annealing for solving the face identification problem is also implemented for comparison.

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

face identification
line drawing
simulated annealing

three-dimensional object reconstruction
genetic algorithms
minimal edge face phenomenon


Queues with boundary assistance: the effects of truncation We study a system of two queues with boundary assistance, represented as a continuous-time Quasi-Birth-and-Death process (QBD). Under our formulation, this QBD has a 'doubly infinite' number of phases. We determine the convergence norm of Neuts' R-matrix and, consequently, the interval in which the decay rate of the infinite system can lie. We next consider four sequences of finite-phase approximations to the original system in which the Nth approximation has 2N + 1 phases; one is derived by truncating the infinite system without augmentation, the others are obtained by using different augmentation schemes that ensure that the generator of the QBD remains conservative. The sequences of matrices {R(N)} for the truncated system without augmentation and one of the sequences with augmentation have monotonically increasing spectral radii that approach the convergence norm of the infinite-phase R as the truncation point tends to infinity; the two other sequences of matrices {R(N)} have spectral radii that are constant irrespective of the truncation size, and not equal to the convergence norm of the infinite R.

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

qbd processes
infinite-phase qbd
truncation and augmentation
queueing theory


A new sensitivity-preferred strategy to build prediction rules for therapy response of cancer patients using gene expression data Pre-therapeutic prediction of therapy response and clinical outcome is an important field in medicine and poses new challenges to statisticians. Statistical prediction rules for two-class problems are generally designated to maximize the overall correct classification rate and to reflect an optimal balance of sensitivity and specificity. In some clinical situations, however, correct prediction of one particular class is more important than of the other class. We therefore propose a new strategy of building prediction rules, which are designed to increase the sensitivity, while losing some specificity. This strategy is applied to artificial simulation data and to gene expression data from primary colon cancers. Our concept is generally applicable to most common classification methods.

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

sensitivity
specificity
therapy response

gene expression profiling
class prediction
personalized medicine


Ant-based IP traceback The denial-of-service (DoS) attacks with the source IP address spoofing techniques has become a major threat to the Internet. An intrusion detection system is often used to detect DoS attacks and to coordinate with the firewall to block them. However, DoS attack packets consume and may exhaust all the resources, causing degrading network performance or, even worse, network breakdown. A proactive approach to DoS attacks is allocating the original attack host(s) issuing the attacks and stopping the malicious traffic, instead of wasting resources on the attack traffic. In this paper, an ant-based traceback approach is proposed to identify the DoS attack origin. Instead of creating a new type or function or processing a high volume of fine-grained data used by previous research, the proposed traceback approach uses flow level information to identify the origin of a DoS attack. Two characteristics of ant algorithm, quick convergence and heuristic, are adopted in the proposed approach on finding the DoS attack path. Quick convergence efficiently finds out the origin of a DoS attack; heuristic gives the solution even though partial flow information is provided by the network. The proposed method is evaluated through simulation on various network environments and two simulated real networks, NSFNET and DFN. The simulation results show that the proposed method can successfully and efficiently find the DoS attack path in various simulated network environments, with full and partial flow information provided by the networks.

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


Personalized identification of abdominal wall hernia meshes on computed tomography An abdominal wall hernia is a protrusion of the intestine through an opening or area of weakness in the abdominal wall. Correct pre-operative identification of abdominal wall hernia meshes could help surgeons adjust the surgical plan to meet the expected difficulty and morbidity of operating through or removing the previous mesh. First, we present herein for the first time the application of image analysis for automated identification of hernia meshes. Second, we discuss the novel development of a new entropy-based image texture feature using geostatistics and indicator kriging. Third, we seek to enhance the hernia mesh identification by combining the new texture feature with the gray-level co-occurrence matrix feature of the image. The two features can characterize complementary information of anatomic details of the abdominal hernia wall and its mesh on computed tomography. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed study. The new computational tool has potential for personalized mesh identification which can assist surgeons in the diagnosis and repair of complex abdominal wall hernias.

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 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

abdominal wall hernia mesh
pattern classification
geostatistical entropy
co-occurrence matrix
information fusion


Empirical study of light source selection for palmprint recognition Most of the current palmprint recognition systems use an active light to acquire images, and the light source is a key component in the system. Although white light is the most widely used light source, little work has been done on investigating whether it is the best illumination for palmprint recognition. This study analyzes the palmprint recognition performance under seven different illuminations, including the white light. The experimental results on a large database show that white light is not the optimal illumination, while yellow or magenta light could achieve higher palmprint recognition accuracy than the white light.

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


Learning expectation in insects: A recurrent spiking neural model for spatio-temporal representation Insects are becoming a reference point in Neuroscience for the study of biological aspects at the basis of cognitive processes. These animals have much simpler brains with respect to higher animals, showing, at the same time, impressive capability to adaptively react and take decisions in front of complex environmental situations. In this paper we propose a neural model inspired by the insect olfactory system, with particular attention to the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. This architecture is a multilayer spiking network, where each layer is inspired by the structures of the insect brain mainly involved in olfactory information processing, namely the Mushroom Bodies, the Lateral Horns and the Antennal Lobes. In the Antennal Lobes layer olfactory signals lead to a competition among sets of neurons, resulting in a pattern which is projected to the Mushroom Bodies layer. Here a competitive reactiondiffusion process leads to a spontaneous emerging of clusters. The Lateral Horns have been modeled as a delayed input-triggered resetting system. Using plastic recurrent connections, with the addition of simple learning mechanisms, the structure is able to realize a top-down modulation at the input level. This leads to the emergence of an attentional loop as well as to the arousal of basic expectation behaviors in case of subsequently presented stimuli. Simulation results and analysis on the biological plausibility of the architecture are provided and the role of noise in the network is reported.

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


Challenging minds? Students perceptions of computer-based World Class Tests of problem solving World Class Arena is a British government initiative to assess and develop the skills of gifted and talented children. Part of the strategy is to use computer-based tests. Students attempt tasks that require them to engage in higher-order problem solving, often in interactive, realistic, contexts. This study reports observations and interviews in schools. Students found tasks engaging and motivating, despite the unfamiliarity of the problem types and the challenging nature of the items. Students had no problems working with computers. They were sometimes distracted by attractive graphics, and sometimes used poor heuristics when attempting tasks. The study provides evidence that a computer environment can provide new ways to assess the problem solving skills of highly able students.

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


A new method for spatial and temporal analysis of risk in water resources management Uncertainty in water resources management is in part about variability and in part about ambiguity. Both are associated with lack of clarity because of the behavior of all system components, lack of data, lack of detail, lack of structure to consider the water resources management problems, working and framing assumptions being used to consider the problems, known and unknown sources of bias, and ignorance about how much effort it is worth expending to clarify the management situation. The two major sources of variability are temporal and spatial heterogeneity. Temporal variability occurs when values fluctuate with time. Other values which are affected by spatial variability are dependent upon location of an area. A major part of the water resources management risk confusion relates to an inadequate distinction between the objective risk (real, physical) and subjective (perceived) risk. Because of the confusion between the two concepts, many characteristics of subjective risk are believed to be valid also for objective risk. The main objective of this paper is to initiate a discussion of the possible methodology for the reliability analysis of water resources systems that will be capable of: (a) addressing water resources uncertainty caused by variability and ambiguity, (b) integrating objective and subjective risk and (c) assisting the water resources management based on better understanding of temporal and spatial variability of risk.

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


On modeling of fuzzy hybrid systems A hybrid system is a system containing a mixture of discrete event components and continuous variable components. The existing hybrid system modeling methods are effective to handle crisp cases but can be difficult to represent deterministic uncertainties and subjectivity inherited in many real-world applications. We generalize the crisp hybrid system framework to a fuzzy hybrid system framework by using fuzzy set theory; the latter contains the former as a special case. We utilize fuzzy sets, type-1 and type-2, to capture and represent uncertainties in the hybrid system's states and variables. We develop algorithms to calculate fuzzy states and their transitions and propose a parallel composition method for modeling a (complex) fuzzy hybrid system through composing its components. This new formal, mathematical framework, capable of modeling a hybrid system with fuzzy states and various types of continuous dynamic processes, regardless whether they are available explicitly or implicitly (e. g., fuzzy systems and neural networks), establishes a basis for systematic study of the fuzzy hybrid systems. It can also be employed for computer simulation investigation, analogous to the discrete event simulation methodology. An example fuzzy hybrid system involving fuzzy differential equations as continuous variable component is provided to illustrate the new theory.

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

discrete event systems
continuous variable systems
type-2 fuzzy sets


SPACE PARTITIONING STRATEGIES FOR INDOOR WLAN POSITIONING WITH CASCADE-CONNECTED ANN STRUCTURES Position information in indoor environments can be procured using diverse approaches. Due to the ubiquitous presence of WLAN networks, positioning techniques in these environments are the scope of intense research. This paper explores two strategies for space partitioning when utilizing cascade-connected Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) structures for indoor WLAN positioning. A set of cascade-connected ANN structures with different space partitioning strategies are compared mutually and to the single ANN structure. The benefits of using cascade-connected ANNs structures are shown and discussed in terms of the size of the environment, number of subspaces and partitioning strategy. The optimal cascade-connected ANN structures with space partitioning show up to 50% decrease in median error and up to 12% decrease in the average error with respect to the single ANN model. Finally, the single ANN and the optimal cascade-connected ANN model are compared against other well-known positioning techniques.

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

artificial neural network
cascade-connected
location
radio


Connectivity in a random interval graph with access points We derive closed analytical formulae of connectivity for random interval graphs in the presence of fixed access points. We examine the influence of positions of access points on the graph accessible connectivity. The results developed in this paper are useful in the design and engineering of random wireless access network in the future. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

combinatorial problems
wireless network
random graph


An Iterated Greedy heuristic for the sequence dependent setup times flowshop problem with makespan and weighted tardiness objectives Iterated Greedy (IG) algorithms are based on a very simple principle, are easy to implement and can show excellent performance. In this paper, we propose two new IG algorithms for a complex flowshop problem that results from the consideration of sequence dependent setup times on machines, a characteristic that is often found in industrial settings. The first IG algorithm is a straightforward adaption of the IG principle, while the second incorporates a simple descent local search. Furthermore, we consider two different optimization objectives, the minimization of the maximum completion time or makespan and the minimization of the total weighted tardiness. Extensive experiments and statistical analyses demonstrate that, despite their simplicity, the IG algorithms are new state-of-the-art methods for both objectives.

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

iterated greedy
sequence dependent setup times
makespan
weighted tardiness

flowshop scheduling
stochastic local search
metaheuristics


Modeling the physiological glucoseinsulin system on normal and diabetic subjects This paper aims to present a mathematical model to describe the plasma glucose and insulin daily variations on normal and diabetic subjects. The proposed model consists of two delay differential equations (DDEs) where five adjustable parameters are used to characterize the respective dynamics and oscillation behavior of normal and diabetic subjects. Several clinical data tests demonstrate that the suggested model is practical to approach the daily-life glucose dynamics on normal, diabetic Type 1 and Type 2 subjects. Moreover, the corresponding parameters are fairly persuasive to identify the patients conditions of physiological functions.

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

human endocrinology
physiology
delay differential equations (ddes)
parametric estimation


Topology and routing optimization for congestion minimization in optical wireless networks Optical wireless networks have appealing features such as very high broadband data rates and cost effectiveness. They represent a potential alternative to the last mile (first mile) wireless access problem. However, they are also highly vulnerable to external disturbances such as adverse weather and building sway. In this paper, we develop robust and efficient methods for outdoor optical wireless networks by jointly considering topology optimization and survivability strategies. We propose linearized congestion minimization schemes with working and protection paths (LCMWP), in which a mixed integer linear program is formulated to choose the optimal working and protection paths for every OD pair such that the network congestion is minimized. In particular, the objective is to minimize the maximum amount of traffic on the links. To solve realistically sized problems, we consider a restricted version of the LCMWP, in which only limited sets of candidate working and protection paths are considered. A simple algorithm is developed to find candidate working and protection paths for each origin-destination (OD) pair. Implementation of our LCMWP schemes demonstrates the efficiency of our approach in terms of the number of constraints and solution time. It also shows that our approach is applicable to realistically sized networks.

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

mixed integer linear programming
topology control
survivable networks


An integrated information system for snowmelt flood early-warning based on internet of things Floods and water resource management are major challenges for human in present and the near future, and snowmelt floods which usually break out in arid or semi-arid regions often cause tremendous social and economic losses, and integrated information system (IIS) is valuable to scientific and public decision-making. This paper presents an integrated approach to snowmelt floods early-warning based on geoinformatics (i.e. remote sensing (RS), geographical information systems (GIS) and global positioning systems (GPS)), Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud services. It consists of main components such as infrastructure and devices in IoT, cloud information warehouse, management tools, applications and services, the results from a case study shows that the effectiveness of flood prediction and decision-making can be improved by using the IIS. The prototype system implemented in this paper is valuable to the acquisition, management and sharing of multi-source information in snowmelt flood early-warning even in other tasks of water resource management. The contribution of this work includes developing a prototype IIS for snowmelt flood early-warning in water resource management with the combination of IoT, Geoinformatics and Cloud Service, with the IIS, everyone could be a sensor of IoT and a contributor of the information warehouse, professional users and public are both servers and clients for information management and services. Furthermore, the IIS provides a preliminary framework of e-Science in resources management and environment science. This study highlights the crucial significance of a systematic approach toward IISs for effective resource and environment management.

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

integrated information system
internet of things
geoinformatics
cloud services


Multilayer cluster based energy efficient routing protocol for wireless sensor networks Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are one of the most promising technologies and have immense potential in both the military and civil field. WSNs offer a range of challenges for scientists and engineers of today. The biggest challenge among all is the energy constraint of these networks. In this context, various schemes have been presented in order to improve the life time of these networks and to overcome the energy constraint. One of the effective schemes is based on clustering of sensor nodes within a network in order to improve the network, life time and decrease communication latency. Clustering algorithms are believed to be the best for wireless sensor networks because they work on the principle of divide and conquer. This paper includes a brief survey of various existing clustering algorithms and present a new clustering algorithm based on nondetermistic finite automata which further divides the communication between cluster heads into multihop by using a few nodes from each cluster. Performance studies indicate that the proposed algorithm is more efficient in terms of energy consumption and network connectivity.

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

efficient routing in wireless sensor networks

multihop routing in wireless sensor networks


designing case libraries to encourage creative design Youngsters engaging in designing meaningful artifacts while browsing a case library produced creative artifacts. Our pilot study highlighted three factors that seem to promote creative designs: (1) making the design ideas and struggles of others available as designers are attempting to achieve personal design goals, (2) promoting exploration of these ideas, and (3) attaching to the case library resources to promote understanding of the scientific and technological concepts behind these ideas.

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

design-based learning
case-based reasoning


The Kripke schema in metric topology A form of Kripke's schema turns out to be equivalent to each of the following two statements from metric topology: every open subspace of a separable metric space is separable; every open subset of a separable metric space is a countable union of open balls. Thus Kripke's schema serves as a point of reference for classifying theorems of classical mathematics within Bishop-style constructive reverse mathematics.

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

kripke schema
constructive reverse mathematics
metric space
countable
separable


Variable neighborhood decomposition search for the optimization of power plant cable layout This paper deals with the optimization of cable layout, which is a problem encountered by Electricite de France (EDF) in power plant design. The problem consists in finding optimized cable routes connecting a set of pairs of facilities, respecting shelves' capacities and a number of other constraints. We show that the problem is equivalent to optimizing the cost of multiple paths subject to capacity constraints. This is a special case of the integer min-cost multicommodity flow problem. In this paper, we first give a description of the cable layout problem (CLP) and a modelization of the most important constraints. We then propose to solve this problem using the extension variable neighborhood decomposition search (VNDS) of the recent variable neighborhood search (VNS) metaheuristic. This metaheuristic combines local search with systematic changes of neighborhood in the descent phases to escape from local optima. In the cable layout problem, we define the kth neighborhood of a solution S as the set of solution S' which differs from S in k cable paths. The obtained results are validated by bounds provided by Lagrangian relaxation and compared to results obtained by a tabu search.

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

integer min-cost
cable lay-out
min. multipath


Playing into the wild: A gesture-based interface for gaming in public spaces Gestural-based interfaces have become one of the fundamental technologies that can determine the success of new computer games. In fact, computer games today offer interaction paradigms that go well beyond the use of remote controls, letting players directly perform exchanges with the objects and characters that compose the virtual worlds that are displayed in front of them. To perform such exchanges, new algorithms and technologies have been devised which include advanced visual recognition schemes, new video cameras and accelerometer sensors. At the same time, other important trends are also quietly emerging in the same domain: game designers, in fact, are slowly shifting their attention out of the walls of gaming fanatics homes, broadening their interests to computer games that can be played in public spaces, as exhibitions and museums. However, to the best of our knowledge, only a very limited amount of research experiences have taken into account the problem of producing computer games, based on gesture-based interfaces that well suit such settings. Hence, in this paper we address the problem of differentiating the design of a gesture-based interface for a console from the problem of designing it for a public space setting. Moreover, we will show that within a public space, it is possible to narrow down the vision algorithms that can well support the recognition of complex actions, whereas solely relying on a simple webcam. In particular, we will describe the design and implementation of an interface that well suits public immersive scenarios, since it is based on a simple and efficient set of algorithms which, combined with the intelligence given by the knowledge of the context of where a game is played, leads to a fast and robust interpretation of hand gestures. To witness this last aspect, we will report on the results obtained from the deployment of a computer game we specifically developed for public spaces, termed Tortellino X-Perience, which has been enjoyed by hundreds of visitors at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.

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 B I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 processing
immersive environments
action recognition algorithms
gesture following
tortellini pasta
shanghai 2010 world expo


Surface-Preserving Robust Watermarking of 3-D Shapes This paper describes a new statistical approach for watermarking mesh representations of 3-D graphical objects. A robust digital watermarking method has to mitigate among the requirements of watermark invisibility, robustness, embedding capacity and key security. The proposed method employs a mesh propagation distance metric procedure called the fast marching method (FMM), which defines regions of equal geodesic distance width calculated with respect to a reference location on the mesh. Each of these regions is used for embedding a single bit. The embedding is performed by changing the normalized distribution of local geodesic distances from within each region. Two different embedding methods are used by changing the mean or the variance of geodesic distance distributions. Geodesic distances are slightly modified statistically by displacing the vertices in their existing triangle planes. The vertex displacements, performed according to the FMM, ensure a minimal surface distortion while embedding the watermark code. Robustness to a variety of attacks is shown according to experimental results.

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

fast marching method (fmm)
robust 3-d shape watermarking
surface distortion minimization


Real time prediction of closing price and duration of B2B reverse auctions Nowadays, online auctions have become the most successful business model in the electronic marketplace. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no other work has been devoted to the prediction of closing price and duration of Business-to-Business (B2B) English reverse online auctions in which goods or service providers compete with each other to win contracts by lowering offering prices with each bid, which is conducted on a virtual platform hosted on the Internet. This research designs and proposes a new methodology to predict closing prices and duration within the first few bids of the corresponding auctions based on real time bidding information rather than static auction information. In this article, we employ real time information and prediction rules to forecast the behavior of live auctions. This is in contrast to the static prediction approach that takes into consideration only information available at the beginning of an auction such as products, item features, or the seller's reputation. This simulation is based on discretized auction data derived from a B2B online auction marketplace over a two-year period. Three measurements including accuracy, coverage, and benefit are used to evaluate the methodology. Results show that after observing the first 4 bids, this methodology can predict closing prices and duration with 84.6 and 71.9% accuracy, respectively.

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 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

data mining
closing price prediction
duration prediction
english reverse auctions
b2b auctions
electronic commerce


An Efficient Non-Moving Garbage Collector for Functional Languages Motivated by developing a memory management system that allows functional languages to seamlessly inter-operate with C, we propose an efficient non-moving garbage collection algorithm based on bitmap marking and report its implementation and performance evaluation. In our method, the heap consists of sub-heaps {H(i) vertical bar c <= i <= B} of exponentially increasing allocation sizes (H(i) for 2(i) bytes) and a special sub-heap for exceptionally large objects. Actual space for each sub-heap is dynamically allocated and reclaimed from a pool of fixed size allocation segments. In each allocation segment, the algorithm maintains a bitmap representing the set of live objects. Allocation is done by searching for the next free bit in the bitmap. By adding meta-level bitmaps that summarize the contents of bitmaps hierarchically and maintaining the current bit position in the bitmap hierarchy, the next free bit can be found in a small constant time for most cases, and in log(32)(segmentSize) time in the worst case on a 32-bit architecture. The collection is done by clearing the bitmaps and tracing live objects. The algorithm can be extended to generational GC by maintaining multiple bitmaps for the same heap space. The proposed method does not require compaction and objects are not moved at all. This property is significant for a functional language to inter-operate with C, and it should also be beneficial in supporting multiple native threads. The proposed method has been implemented in a full-scale Standard ML compiler. Our benchmark tests show that our non-moving collector performs as efficiently as a generational copying collector designed for functional languages.

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

algorithms
non-moving garbage collection
generational collectors
sml#


Numerical verification of solutions for a simplified Signorini problem We proposed some numerical methods for the automatic proof of existence of solutions for variational inequalities, i.e., obstacle problems and elastoplastic torsion problems. It is based on Nakao's method by using finite element approximation and its explicit error estimates for the problem. In this paper, we present a numerical verification algorithm of exact solutions for a simplified Signorini problem in a computer. A numerical example for the Signorini problem is presented. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

numerical verification
error estimates
signorini problem


Automatic feature extraction using genetic programming: An application to epileptic EEG classification This paper applies genetic programming (GP) to perform automatic feature extraction from original feature database with the aim of improving the discriminatory performance of a classifier and reducing the input feature dimensionality at the same time. The tree structure of GP naturally represents the features, and a new function generated in this work automatically decides the number of the features extracted. In experiments on two common epileptic EEG detection problems, the classification accuracy on the GP-based features is significant higher than on the original features. Simultaneously, the dimension of the input features for the classifier is much smaller than that of the original features. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

genetic programming
feature extraction
eeg classification

k-nearest neighbor classifier (knn)
discrete wavelet transform (dwt)
epilepsy