Adaptive mesh finite-volume calculation of 2D lid-cavity corner vortices An anisotropic refinement criterion suitable for Finite-Volume methods is presented and NavierStokes solutions are reported for the lid-driven cavity flow configuration at Re=1000 Re = 1000 with adaptive anisotropic meshes (h-refinement). The a posteriori error estimation criterion is based on the assessment of the goodness-of-fit of the least squares regression used to perform the variables profile reconstruction and it is capable of detecting both large-scale and small-scale flow phenomena. The criterion allowed to capture in detail the large-scale flow structure and also the sequence of creeping flow small sharp corners [1] eddies, up to the fourth corner vortex in addition to the primary cavity vortex. The smallest corner vortex detected is O(10-16) O ( 10 - 16 ) smaller in velocity magnitude compared with the cavity primary recirculation flow.

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

a posteriori error estimation
cavity flow

anisotropic h-refinement
finite-volume
incompressible fluid


Electricity price forecasting in deregulated markets: A review and evaluation The main methodologies used in electricity price forecasting have been reviewed in this paper. The following price-forecasting techniques have been covered: (i) stochastic time series, (ii) causal models, and (iii) artificial intelligence based models. The quantitative analysis of the work done by various authors has been presented based on (a) time horizon for prediction, (b) input variables, (c) output variables, (d) results, (e) data points used for analysis, (f) preprocessing technique employed, and (g) architecture of the model. The results have been presented in the form of tables for ease of comparison. Classification of various price-influencing factors used by different researchers has been done and put for reference. Application of various models as applied to different electricity markets is also presented for consideration.

O B I 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 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

price forecasting
stochastic time series
deregulated markets


Usage of artificial intelligence methods in free flowing gated closed conduits for estimation of oxygen transfer efficiency Oxygen transfer is the process which oxygen is transferred from the gaseous to the liquid phase. The oxygen transfer efficiency depends almost entirely on the amount of surface contact between the air and water. This surface contact can be increased by conduit flow that involves airwater mixture flow. In reality, the physical structure of the airwater interface is complex and still awaits clarification. In the past few years, many artificial intelligence methods have been successfully applied to the solution of complex problems. In this study, models based on Adaptive Network based Fuzzy Inference Systems and Least Squares Support Vector Machines methods were developed to predict oxygen transfer efficiency in free flowing gated closed conduits. Experimental results were compared with the results of these artificial intelligence methods. The best performance was obtained with the Least Squares Support Vector Machine model. Average correlation coefficient (R2) and average root mean square error (RMSE) in the Least Squares Support Vector Machine model were achieved equal to 0.9927 and 0.0073, respectively. Extremely good agreement between the predicted and measured values proves the validity of the Least Squares Support Vector Machine model.

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


Managing a community shared vocabulary for hydrologic observations The CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System provides a community vocabulary for describing hydrologic observations. The community vocabulary promotes semantic consistency in published observations. The community vocabulary simplifies use of variable names and other attributes. The community vocabulary supports data publication, discovery, and interpretation. Software for community maintenance of the vocabulary is described.

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

data publication
hydrologic observations


A survey on Arabic character segmentation Arabic character segmentation is a necessary step in Arabic Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The cursive nature of Arabic script poses challenging problems in Arabic character recognition; however, incorrectly segmented characters will cause misclassifications of characters which in turn may lead to wrong results. Therefore, off-line Arabic character segmentation is a difficult research problem and little research has been achieved in this area in the past few decades. This is due to both the cursive nature of Arabic writing in both printed and handwritten forms and the scarcity of Arabic databases and dictionaries. Most of the character recognition methods used in the recognition of Arabic characters are adopted from available methods used on handwritten Latin and Chinese characters; however, other methods are developed only for Arabic character segmentation. This survey presents the description of the Arabic script characteristics with an overview on OCR systems and a comprehensive review mainly on off-line printed Arabic character segmentation techniques.

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

arabic ocr
off-line recognition
cursive script
arabic ocr software


a rule-based tool for gradual granular data aggregation In order to keep more detailed data available for longer periods, old data has to be reduced gradually to save space and improve query performance, especially on resource-constrained systems with limited storage and query processing capabilities. In this regard, some hand-coded data aggregation solutions have been developed; however, their actual usage have been limited, for the reason that hand-coded data aggregation solutions have proven themselves too complex to maintain. Maintenance need to occur as requirements change frequently and the existing data aggregation techniques lack flexibility with regards to efficient requirements change management. This paper presents an effective rule-based tool for data reduction based on gradual granular data aggregation. With the proposed solution, data can be maintained at different levels of granularity. The solution is based on high-level data aggregation rules. Based on these rules, data aggregation code can be auto-generated. The solution is effective, easy-to-use and easy-to-maintain. In addition, the paper also demonstrates the use of the proposed tool based on a farming case study using standard database technologies. The results show productivity of the proposed tool-based solution in terms of initial development time, maintenance time and alteration time as compared to a hand-coded solution.

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

gradual data aggregation
rule-based data aggregation


An adaptive multi-start graph partitioning algorithm for structuring cellular networks In mobile network design, the problem of assigning network elements to controllers when defining network structure can be modeled as a graph partitioning problem. In this paper, a comprehensive analysis of a sophisticated graph partitioning algorithm for grouping base stations into packet control units in a mobile network is presented. The proposed algorithm combines multi-level and adaptive multi-start schemes to obtain high quality solutions efficiently. Performance assessment is carried out on a set of problem instances built from measurements in a live network. Overall results confirm that the proposed algorithm finds solutions better than those obtained by the classical multi-level approaches and much faster than classical multi-start approaches. The analysis of the optimization surface shows that the best local minima values follow a Gumbel distribution, which justifies the stagnation of naive multi-start approaches after a few attempts. Likewise, the analysis shows that the best local minima share strong similarities, which is the reason for the superiority of adaptive multi-start approaches. Finally, a sensitivity analysis shows the best internal parameter settings in the algorithm.

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

mobile network
optimization
graph partitioning

multi-level refinement
adaptive multi-start


authenticity by tagging and typing We propose a type and effect system for authentication protocols built upon a tagging scheme that formalizes the intended semantics of ciphertexts. The main result is that the validation of each component in isolation is provably sound and fully compositional : if all the protocol participants are independently validated, then the protocol as a whole guarantees authentication in the presence of Dolev-Yao intruders. The highly compositional nature of the analysis makes it suitable for multi-protocol systems, where different protocols might be executed concurrently.

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


Robust H-infinity Filter Design for Uncertain Linear Systems Over Network with Network-Induced Delays and Output Quantization This paper investigates a convex optimization approach to the problem of robust H-infinity filtering for uncertain linear systems connected over a common digital communication network. We consider the case where quantizers are static and the parameter uncertainties are norm bounded. Firstly, we propose a new model to investigate the effect of both the output quantization levels and the network conditions. Secondly, by introducing a descriptor technique, using Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and a suitable change of variables, new required sufficient conditions are established in terms of delay-dependent linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) for the existence of the desired network-based quantized filters with simultaneous consideration of network induced delays and measurement quantization. The explicit expression of the filters is derived to satisfy both asymptotic stability and a prescribed level of disturbance attenuation for all admissible norm bounded uncertainties.

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

filter design
network
output quantization


social robots as mediators between users and smart environments In this paper we propose the use of a social robot as mediator between the user and a smart environment. Since the speech is considered one of the more natural and immediate input channel in human-robot interaction we discuss the importance of recognizing both the linguistic content of the spoken sentence and the valence of the user tone of voice in order to infer properly the user's intent in communication during the interaction.

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


Flow simulation of NAL experimental supersonic airplane/booster separation using overset unstructured grids The overset unstructured grid method developed for multiple-body problems is applied to a flow simulation about an experimental supersonic airplane separation from a rocket booster. An unstructured grid around the rocket booster is overset on the stationary grid around the airplane and moves with time to simulate the separation process. Detailed components of the rocket booster are faithfully reproduced by the unstructured grid. This capability of the unstructured grid reduces the number of required overset grids and significantly simplifies the overset procedure. The computed result of the airplane/booster separation clearly simulates the complex reflection patterns of shock waves between two bodies during the separation process. The computed lift and pitching moment coefficients are compared with the wind tunnel results. The computational accuracy of the aerodynamic coefficients is improved by including the detailed components of the airplane and rocket. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


Approximation on non-tensor domains including squircles, Part III: Polynomial hyperinterpolation and radial basis function interpolation on Chebyshev-like grids and truncated uniform grids Single-domain spectral methods have been largely restricted to tensor product bases on a tensor product grid. To break the tensor barrier, we study approximation in a domain bounded by a squircle, the zero isoline of B(x,y)=x2?+y2??1 B ( x , y ) = x 2 ? + y 2 ? ? 1 . The boundary varies smoothly from a circle [?=1 ? = 1 ] to the square [?=? ? = ? ]. Polynomial least-squares hyperinterpolation converges geometrically as long as the number of points P is (at least) double the number of basis functions N. The polynomial grid was made denser near the boundaries (Chebyshev-like) by depositing grid points along wisely chosen contours of B . Gaussian radial basis functions (RBFs) were more robust in the sense that they, too, converged geometrically, but hyperinterpolation (P>N P > N ) and a Chebyshevized grid were unnecessary. A uniform grid, truncated to include only those points within the squircle, was satisfactory even without interpolation points on the boundary (although boundary points are a cost-effective improvement). For a given number of points P , however, RBF interpolation was only slightly more accurate than polynomial hyperinterpolation, and needed twice as many basis functions. Interpolation costs can be greatly reduced by exploiting the invariance of the squircle-bounded domain to the eight elements D4 D 4 dihedral group.

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

hyperinterpolation
radial basis functions
dihedral group

pseudospectral
chebyshev polynomials
zernike polynomials
group theory
d4 d 4 d4 d 4 d4 d 4 d 4


Estimation of static force coefficients of bridge deck from acceleration responses The feasibility of estimating the static force coefficients of a median span box-section bridge deck from the acceleration response of a structure under the wind load action is studied. The fluctuating wind field is simulated with the Auto-Regressive (AR) model including the spatial coherence of the independent Gaussian stochastic processes with uncertainties in the fluctuating components of wind velocities. The proposed method is illustrated with a three-span continuous concrete box-girder bridge deck located in open terrain. The static force coefficients are identified from a few noisy acceleration measurements with different combinations of sensors. The effects of model error in the structure and uncertainties in the fluctuating components of wind velocities are studied. The proposed method may be possibly generalized in future into an alternative to conventional wind tunnel test including all the on-site conditions in the analysis.

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

static force coefficients
bridge
model error

identification
wind buffeting
uncertainty


NIST digital library of mathematical functions The National Institute of Standards and Technology is preparing a Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF) to provide useful data about special functions for a wide audience. The initial products will be a published handbook and companion Web site, both scheduled for completion in 2003. More than 50 mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists from around the world are participating in the work. The data to be covered include mathematical formulas, graphs, references, methods of computation, and links to software. Special features of the Web site include 3D interactive graphics and an equation search capability. The information technology tools that are being used are, of necessity, ones that are widely available now, even though better tools are in active development. For example, LaTeX files are being used as the common source for both the handbook and the Web site. This is the technology of choice for presentation of mathematics in print but it is not well suited to equation search, for example, or for input to computer algebra systems. These and other problems, and some partially successful work-arounds, are discussed in this paper and in the companion paper by Miller and Youssef.

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 B I 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 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

mathematics
special functions
handbook
digital library


A heuristic personality-based bilateral multi-issue bargaining model in electronic commerce Our everyday lives and specially our commercial transactions involve complex negotiations that incorporate decision-making in a multi-issue setting under utility constraints. Negotiation as a key stage in all commercial transactions has been proliferated by applying decision support facilities that AI techniques provide. Recently, Distributed Artificial Intelligence techniques have been evolved towards multi-agent systems (MASs) where each agent is an intelligent system that solves a specific problem. Incorporating MAS into e-commerce negotiation and bargaining has brought even more potential improvement in efficiency and effectiveness of business systems by automating several of the most time consuming and repetitive stages of the buying process. In bargaining, participants with opposing interests communicate and try to find mutually beneficial agreements by exchanging compromising proposals. However, recent studies on commercial bargaining and negotiation in MASs lack a personality model. Indeed, adding personality to intelligent agents makes them more human-like and increases their flexibility. We investigate the role of personality behaviors of participants in multi-criteria bilateral bargaining in a single-good e-marketplace, where both parties are OCEAN agents based on the five-factor (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Negative emotions) model of personality. We do not aim to determine strategies that humans should use in negotiation, but to present a more human-like model to enhance the realism of rational bargaining behavior in MASs. First, this study presents a computational approach based on a heuristic bargaining protocol and a personality model, and second, considers the issue of what personality traits and behaviors should be investigated in relation to automated negotiations. We show the results obtained via the simulation on artificial stereotypes. The results suggest and model compound personality style behaviors appropriate to gain the best overall utility in the role of buyer and seller agents and with regard to social welfare and market activeness. This personality-based approach can be used as a predictive or descriptive model of human behavior to adopt in appropriate situations in many areas involving negotiation and bargaining (e.g., commerce, business, politics, military, etc.) for conflict prevention and resolution. This model can be applied as a testbed for comparing personality models against each other based on human data in different negotiation domains.

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

decision-making
e-commerce
five-factor model of personality
fuzzy inference
multi-criteria two-person bargaining


Raloxifene: Risks and Benefits Raloxifene, a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM), was designed to have the expected benefits of long-term estrogen replacement therapy without the risks. This paper reviews the clinical trial evidence for raloxifene benefits and risks, and how they compare with those of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and relate to the choices of postmenopausal women.

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

selective estrogen receptor modulators (serms)


James Watt: The steam engine and the commercialization of patents Great Britain (GB) was the first country to undergo an Industrial Revolution (17601850) and, in consequence, the first where patents for inventions evolved from an occasional curiosity to a powerful commercial tool. It is argued that this paradigm shift was largely caused by the later development of the steam engine and especially the first patent of James Watt (17361819). Despite extensive litigation, this proved extremely lucrative and thereby convinced GBs rapidly growing industry of the importance of strong patent protection. In an annex, the author notes that 2008 is the 200th anniversary of the demonstration of the first practical steam railway engine, Richard Trevithicks Catch me who can on a circular track in London.

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

james watt
steam engine
industrial revolution

historical
thomas newcomen
richard trevithick
matthew boulton
patent litigation


Bipartite Matching in the Semi-streaming Model We present the first deterministic 1+epsilon approximation algorithm for finding a large matching in a bipartite graph in the semi-streaming model which requires only O((1/epsilon)(5)) passes over the input stream. In this model, the input graph G = (V, E) is given as a stream of its edges in some arbitrary order, and storage of the algorithm is bounded by O(npolylog n) bits, where n = | V |. The only previously known arbitrarily good approximation for general graphs is achieved by the randomized algorithm of McGregor (Proceedings of the InternationalWorkshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems and Randomization and Computation, Berkeley, CA, USA, pp. 170-181, 2005), which uses Omega((1/epsilon) 1/epsilon) passes. We show that even for bipartite graphs, McGregor's algorithm needs Omega(1/epsilon)(Omega(1/epsilon)) passes, thus it is necessarily exponential in the approximation parameter. The design as well as the analysis of our algorithm require the introduction of some new techniques. A novelty of our algorithm is a new deterministic assignment of matching edges to augmenting paths which is responsible for the complexity reduction, and gets rid of randomization. We repeatedly grow an initial matching using augmenting paths up to a length of 2k + 1 for k = [2/epsilon]. We terminate when the number of augmenting paths found in one iteration falls below a certain threshold also depending on k, that guarantees a 1 + epsilon approximation. The main challenge is to find those augmenting paths without requiring an excessive number of passes. In each iteration, using multiple passes, we grow a set of alternating paths in parallel, considering each edge as a possible extension as it comes along in the stream. Backtracking is used on paths that fail to grow any further. Crucial are the so-called position limits: when a matching edge is the ith matching edge in a path and it is then removed by backtracking, it will only be inserted into a path again at a position strictly lesser than i. This rule strikes a balance between terminating quickly on the one hand and giving the procedure enough freedom on the other hand.

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

bipartite graph matching
streaming algorithms
approximation schemes


Intuitionistic fuzzy soft rings and intuitionistic fuzzy soft ideals In this paper, the notions of intuitionistic fuzzy soft ring and intuitionistic fuzzy soft (left, right) ideal are given. The properties of their union, intersection and (alpha, delta)-level set are studied for each alpha, delta is an element of [0, 1]. Finally, homomorphic image and homomorphic inverse image of them are discussed.

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 B I O B I I O O O O

intuitionistic fuzzy soft ring
homomorphic image
homomorphic inverse image

intuitionistic fuzzy soft ideal
(alpha, delta)-level set


Reactivity-based approaches to improve web systems' Quality of Service Understanding the characteristics of Internet services workloads is a crucial step to improve the Quality of Service (QoS) offered to Web users. Moreover, studying and modeling the user behavior is important to analyze the performance and the scalability of web servers. This knowledge may be used, for instance, to build workload generators that help evaluating the performance of those servers. Current workload generators are typically memory-less, being unable to mimic actual user interaction with the system. As the basis of this work, we propose a hierarchical characterization and simulation model focused on the user behavior, named USAR. In fact, there is strong evidence that a significant part of the user behavior depends on its satisfaction. Users reactions may affect the load of a server, establishing successive interactions where the user behavior affects the system behavior and vice-versa. It is important to understand this interactive process to design systems more suited to user requirements. In fact, the user reactivity., that is, how the users react to variable server response time, is usually neglected during performance evaluation. In this work we study and explain how this reactive interaction is performed by users and how it affects the system's performance. Web applications demand requirements, such as performance and scalability, in order to guarantee QoS to users. Due to these requirements, QoS has become a special topic of interest and many mechanisms to provide it have been proposed. In this work, we address the use of reactivity to improve Internet services. We propose and evaluate new admission control and scheduling mechanisms. We designed and implemented the USAR-QoS simulator that allows the evaluation of the new strategies considering the dynamic interaction between client and server sides in Internet services. We simulate the new strategies using a TPC-W-based workload. The experiments show the benefits of the reactive policies which can result in better QoS for Internet Services, improving the user satisfaction. We also propose a hybrid admission control and scheduling mechanism that combines both reactive approaches. The results show benefits in terms of response time and user satisfaction.

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

web systems
qos
characterization
performance
user behavior
reactivity


Large-scale machine learning based on functional networks for biomedical big data with high performance computing platforms Currently, the exponential growth of biomedical data along with the complexities of managing high dimensionality, imbalanced distribution, sparse attributes instigates a difficult challenge of effectively applying functional networks as a new large-scale predictive modeling in healthcare and biomedicine. This article proposes functional networks based on propensity score and Newton Raphson-maximum-likelihood optimizations as a new large-scale machine learning classifier to enhance its performance in addressing these challenges within big biomedical data. Different use-cases scenarios based on integrated phenotypic and genomics big biomedical data were proposed: real-life biomedical data, (i) optimal design of cancer chemotherapy; (ii) identify inpatient-admission of individuals with primary diagnosis of cancer; (iii) identify severe asthma exacerbation children using integrated phenotypic and SNP repository data; and (iv) mixture models simulation studies. Comparative studies were carried to compare the performance of the new paradigm versus the common state-of-the-art of machine learning, data mining, and statistics schemes. The results of performance of the new classifier with the most common classifiers on the four benchmark databases have been recorded in tables and graphs. The obtained results of the new classifier outperform most of existing state-of-the art statistical machine learning schemes with reliable and efficient performance. The new predictive modeling classifier is saving the computational time and having reliable performances along with future avenue for extension to deal with next generation sequencing data on high performance computing platforms.

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

machine learning
functional networks
propensity score
big data

large scale high performance computing
biomedical data and healthcare
mapreduce
google sibyl
spark


New oscillation criteria for first-order delay difference equations In this paper, some new oscillation criteria are obtained for the first-order delay difference equation x(n+1) - x(n) + k(k)/(k + 1)(k+1) x(n-k) + f(n, x(n-l1), . . . , x(n-ls)) = 0, n = 0, 1, 2, . . . , where k, l(1), l(2), . . . , l(s) are positive integer numbers, f is a function. Our results improve the known results in the literature. And some examples are given to demonstrate the advantage of our results. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


Special Interest Messaging: A Comparison of IGM Approaches Hundreds of technical, special interest Internet weblogs are already generating thousands of niche articles worldwide, and many institutions are starting to create internal blogs for team collaboration. As this style of communication becomes more pervasive in the lives of employees and researchers, the difficulty of finding relevant information only grows with the number of authors and articles. To reduce the load, we propose using implicit group messaging (IGM) to automatically deliver relevant content to readers grouped by shared characteristics or interests. In this paper, we outline a context-aware application suited to special interest messaging and describe three alternative delivery models including our peer-to-peer (P2P) design called SPICE and a broker-based design. We investigate the advantages and disadvantages of each approach through detailed simulations driven by realistic data and actual national/global network topologies. We find that although a broker-based design is generally the most network efficient and lowest latency, a structured P2P system can offer exceptionally low and fair loading across peers and network links without relying on specialized broker nodes.

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


Interacting explicit evidence systems Logic of proofs LP, introduced by S. Artemov, originally designed for describing properties of formal proofs, now became a basis for the theory of knowledge with justification (cf. S. Artemov, Evidence-based common knowledge, Technical report TR-2004018, CUNY Ph.D. Program in Computer Science, 2005). So far, in epistemic systems with justification the corresponding "evidence part", even for multi-agent systems, consisted of a single explicit evidence logic. In this paper we introduce logics describing two interacting explicit evidence systems. We find an appropriate formalization of the intended semantics and prove the completeness of these logics with respect to both symbolic and arithmetical models. Also, we find the forgetful projections for the two-agent justification logics which are extensions of the bimodal logic S4(2).

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

justification logic
multi-modal logic
epistemic logic


Trusted Online Social Network (OSN) services with optimal data management ? Online Social Network (OSN) services have rapidly grown into a wide network and offer users a variety of benefits. However, they also bring new threats and privacy issues to the community. Unfortunately, there are attackers that attempt to expose OSN users' private information or conceal the information that the user desire to share with other users. Therefore, in this research we develop a framework that can provide trusted data management in OSN services. We first define the data types in OSN services and the states of shared data with respect to Optimal, Under-shared, Over-shared, and Hybrid states. We also identify the facilitating, detracting, and preventive parameters that are responsible for the state transition of the data. In a reliable OSN service, we address that a user should be able to set up his or her desired level of information sharing with a certain group of other users. However, it is not always clear to the ordinary users how to determine how much information they should reveal to others. In order to support such a decision, we propose an approach for helping OSN users to determine their optimum levels of information sharing, taking into consideration the payoffs (potential Reward or Cost) based on the Markov decision process (MDP). As an extension of the MDP-based approach, we also introduce a game theoretic approach, considering the interactions of OSN users and attackers with conflicting interests whose decisions affect each other's. Finally, after developing the framework for the optimal data sharing on OSNs, we conduct several experiments with attack simulation based on the proposed ideas and discuss the results. Our proposed approach has the capability to allow a large amount of variables to be altered to suit particular setups that an organization might have.

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

online social networks
privacy protection
security


A comparative analysis of the usage and infusion of wiki and non-wiki-based knowledge management systems Antecedents of adoption and diffusion in time-honored models such as the technology acceptance model and innovation diffusion theory may not provide sufficient measures for newer Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis. This research examines two potential extensions to the basic tenets of user acceptance: reciprocity expectation and personal innovativeness in information technology (IT). The research also examines an advancing technology: wiki technology-based knowledge management systems. Based on the results of an online survey, partial least squares analysis is used to evaluate the proposed model and provide comparative results for traditional knowledge management systems and wikis. Of the 170 respondents, 46 indicated wiki-based systems as their primary knowledge management system, while 124 indicated non-wiki-based systems as the primary system. The results indicate the set of factors influencing usage are different than the factors influencing infusion. Further, non-wiki-based versus newer wiki-based knowledge management systems have different sets of factors affecting usage and infusion. Both extensions to the base model have a greater impact on wiki-based systems as opposed to non-wiki-based systems. Reciprocity expectation was found to have a contradictory significant negative influence on infusion of wikis. Additionally, personal innovativeness in IT moderates the usage and infusion of wikis more so than for traditional knowledge management systems. These results support a more robust model for analyzing the utilization of such technologies.

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

innovation diffusion theory
knowledge management
personal innovativeness in it
reciprocity expectation
wikis

empirical research
technology usage
technology infusion
web 2.0


Fracture modeling in computer graphics A review of existing techniques in computer graphics dealing with the simulation of cracks and fractures. The state-of-the-art is organized into three main categories: physically based, geometrybased and example-based. A careful analysis of open issues and avenues for further research is presented.

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


High-quality multimodal volume rendering for preoperative planning of neurosurgical interventions Surgical approaches tailored to an individual patient's anatomy and pathology have become standard in neurosurgery. Precise preoperative planning of these procedures, however, is necessary to achieve an optimal therapeutic effect. Therefore, multiple radiological imaging modalities are used prior to surgery to delineate the patient's anatomy, neurological function, and metabolic processes. Developing a three-dimensional perception of the surgical approach, however, is traditionally still done by mentally fusing multiple modalities. Concurrent 3D visualization of these datasets can, therefore, improve the planning process significantly. In this paper we introduce an application for planning of individual neurosurgical approaches with high-quality interactive multimodal volume rendering. The application consists of three main modules which allow to (1) plan the optimal skin incision and opening of the skull tailored to the underlying pathology; (2) visualize superficial brain anatomy, function and metabolism; and (3) plan the patient-specific approach for surgery of deep-seated lesions. The visualization is based on direct multi-volume raycasting on graphics hardware, where multiple volumes from different modalities can be displayed concurrently at interactive frame rates. Graphics memory limitations are avoided by performing raycasting on bricked volumes. For preprocessing tasks such as registration or segmentation, the visualization modules are integrated into a larger framework, thus supporting the entire workflow of preoperative planning.

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 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

hardware assisted raycasting
surgery planning


ensemble pruning via individual contribution ordering An ensemble is a set of learned models that make decisions collectively. Although an ensemble is usually more accurate than a single learner, existing ensemble methods often tend to construct unnecessarily large ensembles, which increases the memory consumption and computational cost. Ensemble pruning tackles this problem by selecting a subset of ensemble members to form subensembles that are subject to less resource consumption and response time with accuracy that is similar to or better than the original ensemble. In this paper, we analyze the accuracy/diversity trade-off and prove that classifiers that are more accurate and make more predictions in the minority group are more important for subensemble construction. Based on the gained insights, a heuristic metric that considers both accuracy and diversity is proposed to explicitly evaluate each individual classifier's contribution to the whole ensemble. By incorporating ensemble members in decreasing order of their contributions, subensembles are formed such that users can select the top $p$ percent of ensemble members, depending on their resource availability and tolerable waiting time, for predictions. Experimental results on 26 UCI data sets show that subensembles formed by the proposed EPIC (Ensemble Pruning via Individual Contribution ordering) algorithm outperform the original ensemble and a state-of-the-art ensemble pruning method, Orientation Ordering (OO).

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


HJWFTAC: software for HantushJacob analysis of variable-rate, multiple-extraction well pumping tests ? Analytical well test solutions are a powerful approach to aquifer characterization and the parameterization of comprehensive numerical models. In addition, wellfield drawdown tests, which consist of coordinated pumping and data collection at a suite of monitoring and operating production wells, are of growing significance due to increasing pressures upon groundwater resources and the consequent management and planning requirement for superior hydrogeologic characterization of existing production wellfields. However, few pumping test analysis codes accommodate the multiple extraction wells involved, particularly for more sophisticated analytic aquifer test solutions. We present and demonstrate here a FORTRAN code for analysis of drawdown at a monitor well due to simultaneous variable-rate pumping at multiple independent production wells, which we developed in response to a need to refine an existing numerical, coupled groundwater/surface water resource management model. Spatial and temporal superposition are used to accommodate the typical operational properties of wellfield pumping tests. The software invokes the well-accepted HantushJacob method for semiconfined or leaky aquifers in a forward simulation procedure and effectively assumes homogeneity in applicable aquifer parameters (transmissivity, coefficient of storage, and leakance). Intended for both professionals and students, the code is widely applicable and straightforward to use as written. However, it can be modified with relative ease to use alternative well test solutions and/or formal inverse modeling techniques, or to accommodate spatial hydrogeologic variability. An application to a pumping test conducted in a karst limestone aquifer at the Cross Bar Ranch wellfield in Tampa Bay, Florida, demonstrates the utility of the software.

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

aquifer
wellfield
semiconfined
leaky
water resource management


three-phase magnitude-phased-locked loop using fpga A novel three-phase magnitude-phase-locked-loop system (3MPLL) which is implemented in the field programmable gate array (FPGA) for use in the general area of three-phase (power, energy and power electronic) systems is introduced. The 3MPLL is used as a three-phase nonlinear anti-aliasing filter with no phase-shift and no amplitude bias. Three unique features of such a filter are frequency adaptivity, unbalance mitigation, and structural simplicity or robustness. The paper presents the Hardware Implementation of the 3MPLL in SPARTAN-3 FPGAs. Characteristics of the 3MPLL including its mathematical equations as well as steady-state and dynamic responses are also discussed in this paper. From experimental results it can be concluded that the proposed 3MPLL suppresses the noise and distortion from the input signal, mitigates the unbalance, and synthesizes the instantaneous positive-sequence component of the input signal; thus it operates as a nonlinear adaptive notch (or band-pass) filter. The 3MPLL also adaptively tracks and estimates the magnitude, phase angle, and frequency of the input signal; thus its operates as a nonlinear state estimator. Structural simplicity and robustness of the 3MPLL system are its further features which make it desirable. The proposed 3MPLL has applications which require smooth and adaptive synthesis of the instantaneous symmetrical components.

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

anti-aliasing filter
adaptive notch filter


Improving document clustering in a learned concept space Most document clustering algorithms operate in a high dimensional bag-of-words space. The inherent presence of noise in such representation obviously degrades the performance of most of these approaches. In this paper we investigate an unsupervised dimensionality reduction technique for document clustering. This technique is based upon the assumption that terms co-occurring in the same context with the same frequencies are semantically related. On the basis of this assumption we first find term clusters using a classification version of the EM algorithm. Documents are then represented in the space of these term clusters and a multinomial mixture model (MM) is used to build document clusters. We empirically show on four document collections, Reuters-21578, Reuters RCV2-French, 20Newsgroups and WebKB, that this new text representation noticeably increases the performance of the MM model. By relating the proposed approach to the Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) model we further propose an extension of the latter in which an extra latent variable allows the model to co-cluster documents and terms simultaneously. We show on these four datasets that the proposed extended version of the PLSA model produces statistically significant improvements with respect to two clustering measures over all variants of the original PLSA and the MM models.

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 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


Evaluation and design of highly reliable and highly utilized cloud computing systems Cloud computing paradigm has ushered in the need to provide resources to users in a scalable, flexible, and transparent fashion much like any other utility. This has led to a need for developing evaluation techniques that can provide quantitative measures of reliability of a cloud computing system (CCS) for efficient planning and expansion. This paper presents a new, scalable algorithm based on non-sequential Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) to evaluate large scale cloud computing system (CCS) reliability, and it develops appropriate performance measures. Also, a new iterative algorithm is proposed and developed that leverages the MCS method for the design of highly reliable and highly utilized CCSs. The combination of these two algorithms allows CCSs to be evaluated by providers and users alike, providing a new method for estimating the parameters of service level agreements (SLAs) and designing CCSs to match those contractual requirements posed in SLAs. Results demonstrate that the proposed methods are effective and applicable to systems at a large scale. Multiple insights are also provided into the nature of CCS reliability and CCS design.

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

cloud computing
reliability
monte carlo simulation


Chaotic fruit fly optimization algorithm Development of new method named chaotic fruit fly optimization algorithm (CFOA). Fruit fly algorithm (FOA) is integrated with ten different chaos maps. Novel algorithm is tested on ten different well known benchmark problems. CFOA is compared with FOA, FOA with Levy distribution, and similar chaotic methods. Experiments show superiority of CFOA in terms of obtained statistical results.

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


Human performance under two different command and control paradigms A simulated command and control task was performed thirty times by two teams who were structured differently. Due to the inherent instability of the human/system interaction a strong differential learning effect took place. The hierarchical command and control team were faster but less accurate than the network enabled team. The common one shot cross-sectional psychology experiment would not have detected these differences.

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

system design and evaluation
time series analysis


Teaching and learning of robot tasks via observation of human performance Within this paper, an approach for teaching a humanoid robot is presented that will enable the robot to learn typical tasks required in everyday household environments. Our approach, called Programming by Demonstration, which is implemented and successfully used in our institute to teach a robot system is presented. Firstly, we concentrate on an analysis of human actions and action sequences that can be identified when watching a human demonstrator. Secondly, sensor aid systems are introduced which augment the robots perception capabilities while watching a humans demonstration and the robots execution of tasks respectively. The main focus is then layed on the knowledge representation in order to be able to abstract the problem solution strategies and to transfer them onto the robot system.

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 I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

robot tasks
programming by demonstration


Study on the mathematical model of the effects of NPK on winter cauliflower In order to study the effects of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) on the yield, the appearance eligibility ratio and the contents of total glucosinolates and glucoraphanin of cauliflower, the 311-A optimization regression design was used to conduct field experiments of N, P, K fertilizer treatments using winter cauliflower variety "HB16". The models of the balanced application for N, P and K fertilizers were set up. According to the different production targets, the different optimal combinations of applying NPK fertilizers could be carried out. The results showed that the optimal combination of applying fertilizer was 372.83 kg/hm(2) N, 89.65 kg/hm(2) P(2)O(5) and 201.41 kg/hm(2) K(2)O, the highest yield was 19089.25 kg/hm(2). When the optimal combination of applying fertilizers was 434.20 kg/hm(2) N, 90.11 kg/hm(2) P(2)O(5), 213.92 kg/hm(2) K(2)O, the eligibility products ratio could reach the highest at 84.95%. It was found that there were significant effects on the contents of total glucosinolates and glucoraphanin by applying N fertilizer, but not by P and K fertilizers. When N fertilizer application reached 408.78 kg/hm(2) and 394.62 kg/hm(2), total glucosinolates and glucoraphanin content would get to maximum, respectively. (c) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

cauliflower
glucosinolates
mathematical model


An ILP formulation and genetic algorithm for the Maximum Degree-Bounded Connected Subgraph problem A general instance of a Degree-Constrained Subgraph problem may be found in an edge-weighted or vertex-weighted graph G G whereas the objective is to find an optimal weighted subgraph, subject to certain degree constraints on the vertices of the subgraph. This class of combinatorial problems has been extensively studied due to its numerous applications in network design. If the input graph is bipartite, these problems are equivalent to classical transportation and assignment problems in operational research. This paper is an illustration of a research of the NP N P -hard Maximum Degree-Bounded Connected Subgraph problem (MDBCS). It is a classical NP N P -complete problem. Moreover this paper offers a first integer linear programming formulation of the (MDBCS), and a formal proof that it is correct. A genetic algorithm for obtaining the optimal solution of (MDBCS) has also been provided. The proposed solution comprises a genetic algorithm (GA) that uses binary representation, fine-grained tournament selection, one-point crossover, simple mutation with frozen genes and caching technique.

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

connected subgraph
integer linear programming
genetic algorithm


Modeling of the dynamic response of a Francis turbine The paper presents a detailed numerical model of the dynamic behaviour of a Francis turbine installed in a hydroelectric plant. The model considers in detail the Francis turbine with all the electromechanical subsystems, such as the main speed governor, the controller and the servo actuator of the turbine distributor, and the electrical generator. In particular, it reproduces the effects of pipeline elasticity in the penstock, the water inertia and the water compressibility on the turbine behaviour. The dynamics of the surge tank on low frequency pressure waves is also modelled together with the main governor speed loop and the position controllers of the distributor actuator and of the hydraulic electrovalve. Model validation has been made by means of experimental data of a 75MW470m hydraulic headFrancis turbine acquired during some starting tests after a partial revamping, which also involved the control system of the distributor.

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


Active guided evolution strategies for large-scale vehicle routing problems with time windows We present a new and effective metaheuristic algorithm, active guided evolution strategies, for the vehicle routing problem with time windows. The algorithm combines the strengths of the well-known guided local search and evolution strategies metaheuristics into an iterative two-stage procedure. More precisely, guided local search is used to regulate a composite local search in the first stage and the neighborhood of the evolution strategies algorithm in the second stage. The vehicle routing problem with time windows is a classical problem in operations research, where the objective is to design least cost routes for a fleet of identical capacitated vehicles to service geographically scattered customers within pre-specified time windows. The presented algorithm is specifically designed for large-scale problems. The computational experiments were carried out on an extended set of 302 benchmark problems. The results demonstrate that the suggested method is highly competitive, providing the best-known solutions to 86% of all test instances within reasonable computing times. The power of the algorithm is confirmed by the results obtained on 23 capacitated vehicle routing problems from the literature.

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

vehicle routing
time windows
evolution strategies
guided local search


towards scalable flow and context sensitive pointer analysis Pointer analysis, a classic problem in software program analysis, has emerged as an important problem to solve in design automation, at a time when complex designs, specified in the form of C code, need to be synthesized or verified. However, precise pointer analysis algorithms that are both context and flow sensitive (FSCS), have not been shown to scale. In this paper, we report a new solution for FSCS analysis, which can evaluate the program states of all program points under billions of different calling paths. Our solution extends the recently proposed symbolic pointer analysis (SPA) technology, which exploits the efficiency of Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs). With our new strategy of problem solving, called superposed symbolic computation, and its application on our generic pointer analysis framework, we are able to report the first result on all SPEC2000 benchmarks that completes context sensitive, flow insensitive analysis in seconds, and context sensitive, flow sensitive analysis in minutes.

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

pointer analysis
binary decision diagrams


A new steganographic method for color and grayscale image hiding In this paper, we present a steganographic method for embedding a color or a grayscale image in a true color image. Three types of secret images can be carried by the proposed method: hiding a color secret image, hiding a palette-based 256-color secret image, and hiding a grayscale image in a true color image. Secret data are protected by the conventional crypto system DES. We compare the image quality and hiding capacity of the proposed method with those of the scheme in Lin et al.s scheme. According to the experimental results, the image quality of the proposed method is better than that of the Lin et al.s scheme. In addition, annotation data can be hidden with the secret image in the host image. The hiding capacity of the proposed method is greater than that of other compared schemes. The experimental results show that the proposed method is a secure steganographic method that provides high hiding capacity and good image quality.

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

steganography
color quantization
color image hiding
stego-image


Information aggregation in double auctions: Rational expectations and the winner's curse This paper inquires about the ability of double auction institutions to aggregate information in the context of a "common value" information structure that is known to produce the winner's curse in sealed bid environments. While many fundamental features of the economic trading mechanism are different from those studied in the context of sealed bids, the pattern of information distributed to the population of traders is the same. This gives us an opportunity to determine if the behaviors reported in sealed bid environments can be detected in the more active market environment. As such, the experiments are also a test of the robustness of earlier experiments that demonstrate that in economies with homogeneous preferences single compound securities organized by double auctions are able to aggregate information. The basic result is that a severe winner's curse is not observed. The irrationality observed in sealed bids does not extend itself to the double auction environment. Information aggregation is observed and the rational expectations model receives support.

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

information aggregation
rational expectations


Development and comparison of four sleep spindle detection methods The objective of the present work was to develop and compare methods for automatic detection of bilateral sleep spindles. All-night sleep electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings of 12 healthy subjects with a median age of 40 years were studied. The data contained 6043 visually scored bilateral spindles occurring in frontopolar or central brain location. In the present work a new sigma index for spindle detection was developed, based on the fast Fourier transform (FFT) spectrum, aiming at approximating our previous fuzzy spindle detector. The sigma index was complemented with spindle amplitude analysis, based on finite impulse response (FIR) filtering, to form of a combination detector of bilateral spindles. In this combination detector, the spindle amplitude distribution of each recording was estimated and used to tune two different amplitude thresholds. This combination detector was compared to bilaterally extracted sigma indexes and fuzzy detections, which aim to be independent of absolute spindle amplitudes. As a fourth method a fixed spindle amplitude detector was included. The combination detector provided the best overall performance; in S2 sleep a 70% true positive rate was reached with a specificity of 98.6%, and a false-positive rate of 32%. The bilateral sigma indexes provided the second best results, followed by fuzzy detector, while the fixed amplitude detector provided the poorest results so that in S2 sleep a 70% true positive rate was reached with a specificity of 97.7% and false-positive rate of 46%. The spindle amplitude distributions automatically determined for each recording by the combination detector were compared to amplitudes of visually scored spindles and they proved to correspond well. Inter-hemispheric amplitude variation of visually scored bilateral spindles is also presented. Flexibility is beneficial in the detection of bilateral spindles. The present work advances automated spindle detection and increases the knowledge of bilateral sleep spindle characteristics.

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


Local maxima error intensity functions and its application to time delay estimator in the presence of shot noise interference This paper concentrates on the model useful for analyzing the error performance of M-estimators of a single unknown signal parameter: that is the error intensity model. We develop the point process representation for the estimation error, the conditional distribution of the estimator, and the distribution of error candidate point process. Then the error intensity function is defined as the probability density of the estimate and the general form of the error intensity function is derived. We compute the explicit form of the intensity functions based on the local maxima model of the error generating point process. While the methods described in this paper are applicable to any estimation problem with continuous parameters, our main application will be time delay estimation. Specifically, we will consider the case where coherent impulsive interference is involved in addition to the Gaussian noise. Based on numerical simulation results, we compare each of the error intensity model in terms of the accuracy of both error probability and mean squared error (MSE) predictions, and the issue of extendibility to multiple parameter estimation is also discussed.

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

error intensity function
local maxima
time delay
shot noise


a new variable---length genome genetic algorithm for data clustering in semeiotics This paper focuses on the introduction of a new evolutionary algorithm for data clustering, the Self-sizing Genome Genetic Algorithm. It is akin to a messy Genetic Algorithm and does not use a priori information about the number of clusters. A new recombination operator, gene-pooling , is introduced, while fitness is based on simultaneously maximizing intra-cluster homogeneity and inter-cluster separability. This algorithm is applied to clustering in dermatological semeiotics. Moreover, a Pathology Addressing Index is defined to quantify utility of found clusters in unambiguously addressing towards pathologies. Comparison with other clustering tools is performed.

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Continuous HMM applied to quantization of on-line Korean character spaces This paper demonstrates the effectiveness of a continuous HMM (CHMM) for quantizing on-line Korean character spaces. Vector quantization (VQ) error is a major factor that affects the performance of pattern recognition. Accordingly, a CHMM is used to classify on-line Korean character space into clusters where each cluster is represented by a CHMM state Gaussian function. The experimental results show that the proposed CHMM vector quantization decreases the quantization distortion in the VQ stage compared to other methods and thereby improves the performance of a discrete HMM-based recognition system.

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


automatic generation of e-government forms from semantic descriptions Currently there are numerous initiatives for applying Semantic Web technologies to e-Government. Most of these efforts concentrate on the definition, discovery, orchestration and execution of Semantic Web services. The focus is thereby often on system-to-system communication and less on human-computer interaction. In this paper we present a way to generate web-forms out of an existing semantic description. The core difference to most of the existing similar approaches is that our semantic description does not focus on web-service description: it simply utilizes Semantic Web technologies to provide a logic description of Public Administration Services and relevant parts of the e-Government domain. The idea is to automatically identify relevant input for a Public Administration Service based on the semantic description of the service and its business rules that must be applied to create the particular results. According to the relevant input a web-form is generated to gather the needed information from the citizen. This input is interactively checked against the procedure's business rules. If the provided data is correct and conforms to the ontology's restriction, the data, represented as XML and RDF, can be consumed by any application supporting the data interchange standard including Semantic Web services.

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


wizard of oz prototyping of computer vision based action games for children This paper describes the use of the Wizard of Oz (WOz) method in the design of computer vision based action games controlled with body movements. A WOz study was carried out with 34 children of ages 7 to 9 in order to find out the most intuitive movements for game controls and to evaluate the relationship between avatar and player actions. Our study extends the previous Wizard of Oz studies by showing that WOz prototyping of perceptive action games is feasible despite the delay caused by the wizard. The results also show that distinctive movement categories and gesture patterns can be found by observing the children playing games controlled by a human wizard. The approach minimizes the need for fully functional prototypes in the early stages of the design and provides video material for testing and developing computer vision algorithms, as well as guidelines for animating the game character.

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

computer games
wizard-of-oz method
perceptual user interfaces
physical interaction


Synthesis of robust tunable oscillators using mitogen activated protein kinase cascades Mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascade is evolutionally preserved in all eukaryotic cells, and regulates various cellular activities such as gene expression, mitosis, differentiation, and apoptosis. Recently, Bashor et al. have shown that Ste5 scaffold protein can be used to reshape the MAPK cascade through engineered feedback loops, and have used heuristic tuning mechanisms to synthesize the feedback. A problem of interest is to determine whether information regarding the underlying biochemical reactions can be used to synthesize robust feedback that will ensure that the resultant circuit has the desired properties. In this paper, we consider the problem of engineering feedback in MAPK cascade to synthesize an oscillator of the desired frequency. Our approach builds on the MAPK cascade model derived by Chikarmane et al. who have exploited the existence of a Hopf bifurcation point in the Markevich model of the MAPK cascade to synthesize the exciting kinase as a function of the doubly phosphorylated protein. We show how the \(\mathcal{L}_1\)-control theory can be used for a robust synthesis of the oscillator and present the simulation results.

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


Left ventricle volume measurements in cardiac micro-CT: The impact of radiation dose and contrast agent Micro-CT-based cardiac function estimation in small animals requires measurement of left ventricle (LV) volume at multiple time points during the cardiac cycle. Measurement accuracy depends on the image resolution, its signal and noise properties, and the analysis procedure. This work compares the accuracy of the Otsu thresholding and a region sampled binary mixture approach, for live mouse LV volume measurement using 100?m resolution datasets. We evaluate both analysis methods after varying the volume of injected contrast agent and the number of projections used for CT reconstruction with a goal of permitting reduced levels of both X-ray and contrast agent doses.

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

small animal imaging
micro-ct
phenotyping
segmentation


Synchronization based on mixture alignment for sound source separation in wireless acoustic sensor networks We study the effects of misalignment over BSS algorithms in WASN. A theoretical synchronization relaxes the constraint over the time frame length. Two novel alignment methods are inspired in the theoretical synchronization. The proposed methods synchronize the mixtures with a reduced transmission bandwidth.

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

speech separation
short-term log-energy
wireless acoustic sensor network


Predicting daily ozone concentration maxima using fuzzy time series based on a two-stage linguistic partition method Air pollution is a result of global warming, greenhouse effects, and acid rain. Especially in highly industrialization areas, air pollution has become a major environmental issue. Poor air quality has both acute and chronic effects on human health. The detrimental effects of ambient ozone on human health and the Earths ecosystem continue to be a national concern in Taiwan. The pollutant standard index (PSI) has been adopted to assess the degree of air pollution in Taiwan. The standardized daily air quality report provides a simple number on a scale of 0 to 500 related to the health effects of air quality levels. The report focuses on health and the current PSI subindices to reflect measured ozone (O3) concentrations. Therefore, this study uses the O3 attribute to evaluate air quality. In an effort to forecast daily maximum ozone concentrations, many researchers have developed daily ozone forecasting models. However, this continuing worldwide environmental problem suggests the need for more accurate models. This paper proposes two new fuzzy time series based on a two-stage linguistic partition method to predict air quality with daily maximum O3 concentration: Stage 1, use the fuzzy time series based on the cumulative probability distribution approach (CPDA) to partition the universe of discourse into seven intervals; Stage 2, use two linguistic partition methods, the CPDA and the uniform discretion method (UDM), to repartition each interval into three subintervals. To verify the forecasting performance of the proposed methods in detail, the practical collected data is used as and evaluating dataset; five other methodologies (AR, MA, ARMA, Chens and Yus) are used as comparison models. The proposed methods both show a greatly improved performance in daily maximal ozone concentration prediction accuracy compared with the other models.

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


Interactive curve resolution by using latent projections in polar coordinates The problem of resolving bilinear two-way data into the contributions from the underlying mixture components is of great interest for all hyphenated analytical techniques. The fact that the optimal solution to this problem at least to some extent depends on the nature of the data under study has lead to a numerous different approaches. One of the seminal publications in this area was contributed by Olav M. Kvalheim and Yi-Zeng Liang in 1992. They not only provided valuable Heuristic Evolving Latent Projections (HELP) but also enlightened many important aspects of curve resolution in this and numerous subsequent publications. Here we extend their key concept of HELP, that is the use of latent projective graphs for identifying one-component regions, by using polar coordinates for these analyses and thereby creating a simple, intuitive exploratory tool for directly solving the curve resolution problem for two and three components graphically. Our approach is demonstrated with simulated data, an example from reaction monitoring with broadband ultrafast spectroscopy and one chemometric standard data set. Copyright (c) 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

curve resolution
heuristic evolving latent projections
polar coordinates


Does Wireless Sensor Network Scale? A Measurement Study on GreenOrbs Sensor networks are deemed suitable for large-scale deployments in the wild for a variety of applications. In spite of the remarkable efforts the community put to build the sensor systems, an essential question still remains unclear at the system level, motivating us to explore the answer from a point of real-world deployment view. Does the wireless sensor network really scale? We present findings from a large-scale operating sensor network system, GreenOrbs, with up to 330 nodes deployed in the forest. We instrument such an operating network throughout the protocol stack and present observations across layers in the network. Based on our findings from the system measurement, we propose and make initial efforts to validate three conjectures that give potential guidelines for future designs of large-scale sensor networks. 1) A small portion of nodes bottlenecks the entire network, and most of the existing network indicators may not accurately capture them. 2) The network dynamics mainly come from the inherent concurrency of network operations instead of environment changes. 3) The environment, although the dynamics are not as significant as we assumed, has an unpredictable impact on the sensor network. We suggest that an event-based routing structure can be trained and thus better adapted to the wild environment when building a large-scale sensor network.

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

wireless sensor networks
network measurement
critical nodes
environment dynamics


EditorialEvidence based library and information practice Whilst many of us engage in supporting clinicians in identifying, appraising and using evidence, how many of us adopt the same approach to our own work? A recent survey by the UK LIS Research Coalition indicated that 60% of respondents use research reports as a source of information whilst a similar proportion of health library respondents use professional events such as conferences as a source of information. This summer sees the 6th International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP6) being held at the University of Salford, UK between 27th-30th June which will go some way to satisfying this latter information need whilst the Health Information and Libraries Journal can help satisfy the need for research reports. Whatever youre doing this summer, lets make it evidence based.

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evidence based library and information practice


learning to rank relevant and novel documents through user feedback We consider the problem of learning to rank relevant and novel documents so as to directly maximize a performance metric called Expected Global Utility (EGU), which has several desirable properties: (i) It measures retrieval performance in terms of relevant as well as novel information, (ii) gives more importance to top ranks to reflect common browsing behavior of users, as opposed to existing objective functions based on set-coverage, (iii) accommodates different levels of tolerance towards redundancy, which is not taken into account by existing evaluation measures, and (iv) extends naturally to the evaluation of session-based retrieval comprising multiple ranked lists. Our ground truth is defined in terms of "information nuggets", which are obviously not known to the retrieval system when processing a new user query. Therefore, our approach uses observable query and document features (words and named entities) as surrogates for nuggets, whose weights are learned based on user feedback in an iterative search session. The ranked list is produced to maximize the weighted coverage of these surrogate nuggets. The optimization of such coverage-based metrics is known to be NP-hard. Therefore, we use a greedy algorithm and show that it guarantees good performance due to the submodularity of the objective function. Our experiments on Topic Detection and Tracking data show that the proposed approach represents an efficient and effective retrieval strategy for maximizing EGU, as compared to a purely-relevance based ranking approach that uses Indri, as well as a MMR-based approach for non-redundant ranking.

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


Graded cellular bases for TemperleyLieb algebras of type A and B We show that the TemperleyLieb algebra of type A and the blob algebra (also known as the TemperleyLieb algebra of typeB) at roots of unity are \(\mathbb{Z}\)-graded algebras. We moreover show that they are graded cellular algebras, thus making their cell modules, or standard modules, graded modules for the algebras.

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khovanovlaudarouquier algebra
cellular basis
decomposition numbers


Can fuzzy entropies be effective measures for evaluating the roughness of a rough set? The roughness of a rough set arises from the existence of its boundary region. In such a boundary region, each object has a non-zero rough membership degree. When an objects rough membership degree is regarded as its fuzzy membership degree, a rough set can induce a fuzzy set. This relationship motivates us to assert that there may exist some inherent relations between the roughness of a rough set and the fuzziness of the fuzzy set induced from the rough set. This assertion leads us to the question: Can the existing fuzzy entropies be used to evaluate the roughness of a rough set? To answer this question, we first analyze how the boundary region varies when the partition of the universe becomes coarser, and then exploit this analysis in the introduction of a more appropriate definition on the roughness of a rough set. To determine whether a fuzzy entropy can be used to evaluate the roughness of a rough set or not, we develop three methods for estimating the ability of a fuzzy entropy to measure the roughness. The experiments show that these methods are very effective and can be applied to select a fuzzy entropy as a measure of the roughness of a rough set.

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

rough set
fuzzy set
roughness
fuzzy entropy


Progress Toward the Genetic Treatment of the ?-Thalassemias Abstract: The ?-thalassemias are congenital anemias that are caused by mutations that reduce or abolish expression of the ?-globin gene. They can be cured by allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantation, but this therapeutic option is not available to most patients. The transfer of a regulated ?-globin gene in autologous HSCs is a highly attractive alternative treatment. This strategy, which is simple in principle, raises major challenges in terms of controlling expression of the globin transgene, which ideally should be erythroid specific, differentiation- and stage-restricted, elevated, position independent, and sustained over time. Using lentiviral vectors, May et al. demonstrated in 2000 that an optimized combination of proximal and distal transcriptional control elements permits lineage-specific and elevated ?-globin expression, resulting in therapeutic hemoglobin production and correction of anemia in ?-thalassemic mice. Several groups have by now replicated and extended these findings to various mouse models of severe hemoglobinopathies, thus fueling enthusiasm for a potential treatment of ?-thalassemia based on globin gene transfer. Current investigation focuses on safety issues and the need for improved vector production methodologies. The safe implementation of stem cell-based gene therapy requires the prevention of the formation of replication-competent viral genomes and minimization of the risk of insertional oncogenesis. Importantly, globin vectors, in which transcriptional activity is highly restricted, have a lesser risk of activating oncogenes in hematopoietic progenitors than non-tissue-specific vectors, by virtue of their late-stage erythroid specificity. As such, they provide a general paradigm for improving vector safety in stem cell-based gene therapy.

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


the incremental deployability of rtt-based congestion avoidance for high speed tcp internet connections Our research focuses on end-to-end congestion avoidance algorithms that use round trip time (RTT) fluctuations as an indicator of the level of network congestion. The algorithms are referred to as delay-based congestion avoidance or DCA. Due to the economics associated with deploying change within an existing network, we are interested in an incrementally deployable enhancement to the TCP/Reno protocol. For instance, TCP/Vegas, a DCA algorithm, has been proposed as an incremental enhancement. Requiring relatively minor modifications to a TCP sender, TCP/Vegas has been shown to increase end-to-end TCP throughput primarily by avoiding packet loss. We study DCA in today's best effort Internet where IP switches are subject to thousands of TCP flows resulting in congestion with time scales that span orders of magnitude. Our results suggest that RTT-based congestion avoidance may not be reliably incrementally deployed in this environment. Through extensive measurement and simulation, we find that when TCP/DCA (i.e., a TCP/Reno sender that is extended with DCA) is deployed over a high speed Internet path, the flow generally experiences degraded throughput compared to an unmodified TCP/Reno flow. We show (1) that the congestion information contained in RTT samples is not sufficient to predict packet loss reliably and (2) that the congestion avoidance in response to delay increase has minimal impact on the congestion level over the path when the total DCA traffic at the bottleneck consumes less than 10\% of the bottleneck bandwidth.

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


proving a ws-federation passive requestor profile Currently, influential industrial players are in the process of realizing identity federation, in particular the authentication of browser users across administrative domains. WS-Federation is a joint protocol framework for Web Services clients and browser clients. While browser-based federation protocols, including Microsoft Passport, OASIS SAML, and Liberty besides WS-Federation, are already widely deployed, their security is still unproven and has been challenged by several analyses. One reason is a lack of cryptographically precise protocol definitions, which impedes explicit design for security as well as proofs. Another reason is that the security properties depend on the browser and even on the browser user. We rigorously formalize a strict instantiation of the current WS-Federation Passive Requestor Interop profile and make explicit assumptions for its general use. On this basis, we prove that the protocol provides authenticity and secure channel establishment in a realistic trust scenario. This constitutes the first positive security result for a browser-based identity federation protocol.

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federated identity management
web browser
ws-federation passive requestor profile
wsfpi
security proof of protocols
browser-based
single signon
web service security