A simple method for visualizing the differences between related receptor sites Pastor and Cruciani [J. Med. Chem. 38 (1995) 4637] and Kastenholz et al. [J. Med. Chem. 43 (2000) 3033] pioneered methods for comparing related receptors, with the ultimate goal of designing selective ligands. Such methods start with a reasonable superposition of high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) structures of the receptors. Next, molecular field maps are calculated for each receptor. Then the maps are analyzed to determine which map features are correlated with a particular subset of receptors. We present a method FLOGTV, based on the trend vector paradigm [J. Chem. Inf. Comput. Sci. 25 (1985) 64] to perform the analysis. This is mathematically simpler than the GRID/CPCA method of Kastenholz et al. and allows for the simultaneous comparison of many receptor structures. Also, the trend vector paradigm provides a method of selecting isopotential contours that are well above noise. We demonstrate the method on four examples: HIV proteases versus two-domain acid proteases, thrombin versus trypsin and factor Xa, bacterial dihydrofolate reductases (DHFRs) versus vertebrate DHFRs, and P38 versus ERK protein kinases.

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


Variable structure control for power systems stabilization The application of variable structure control (VSC) for power systems stabilization is studied in this paper. It is the application, aspects and constraints of VSC which are of particular interest. A variable structure control methodology has been proposed for power systems stabilization. The method is implemented using thyristor controlled series compensators. A three machine power system is stabilized using a switching line control for large disturbances which becomes a sliding control as the disturbance becomes smaller. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the methodology proposed as an useful tool to suppress the oscillations in power systems.

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

variable structure control
power systems stabilization


Design of miniaturized LTCC baluns In this article, lumped-element loaded methods are examined for the purpose of achieving miniaturized low-temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) baluns. These methods have proven to be very efficient in reducing the size occupied by the baluns in these designs. Several miniaturized LTCC balun structures are analyzed using the even-odd mode analysis method and the design curves are plotted. Based on the design curves, two design examples in the LTCC environment are presented in order to demonstrate our analysis. The proposed analysis process is validated by the simulated and measured results. (C) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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


customized geospatial workflows for e-government services The past decade has experienced a phenomenal growth in the electronic delivery of business services. This has led to an elevation in the expectations of citizens for fast and efficient delivery of governmental services. Recently, workflow systems have gained importance as an effective= infrastructure for automating the business processes within and across government agencies. Government services, such as permit processing for the development or preservation of land, can be modeled as workflow. They must consider geographic locations and the geodata that include location-specific data, documents and information. We call such workflows dependent upon locations and their geodata Geospatial workflows . We argue that geospatial workflows vary widely from one case to another, and therefore cannot be represented as a generic workflow. We demonstrate, with concrete examples, that there is a compelling need for customized geospatial workflows and propose a system that is capable of generating such customized workflows by capturing the user requirements and extracting the relevant governmental regulations. Our system also provides users with decision support functionalities comprising of various GIS layers, by which users can evaluate and identify a suitable workflow among various possible scenarios. Geospatial workflows can be used by government agencies to automate the delivery of their services. We present the features of a preliminary prototype.

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

geospatial workflow
customization
e-government services


hierarchical spatial gossip for multi-resolution representations in sensor networks In this paper we propose a lightweight algorithm for constructing multi-resolution data representations for sensor networks. We compute, at each sensor node u , O (log n ) aggregates about exponentially enlarging neighborhoods centered at u . The i th aggregate is the aggregated data among nodes approximately within 2 i hops of u . We present a scheme, named the hierarchical spatial gossip algorithm, to extract and construct these aggregates, for all sensors simultaneously, with a total communication cost of O ( n polylog n ). The hierarchical gossip algorithm adopts atomic communication steps with each node choosing to exchange information with a node distance d away with probability 1 / d 3 . The attractiveness of the algorithm attributes to its simplicity, low communication cost, distributed nature and robustness to node failures and link failures. Besides the natural applications of multi-resolution data summaries in data validation and information mining, we also demonstrate the application of the pre-computed spatial multi-resolution data summaries in answering range queries efficiently.

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


Low-power memory mapping through reducing address bus activity Arrays in behavioral specifications that are too large to fit into on-chip registers are usually mapped to off-chip memories during behavioral synthesis, We address the problem of system power reduction through transition count minimization on the memory address bus when these arrays are accessed from memory. We exploit regularity and spatial locality in the memory accesses and determine the mapping of behavioral array references to physical memory locations to minimize address bus transitions. We describe array mapping strategies for two important memory configurations: all behavioral arrays mapped to a single off-chip memory and arrays mapped into multiple memory modules drawn from a library. For the single memory configuration, we describe a heuristic for selecting a memory mapping scheme to achieve low power for each behavioral array. For mapping into a library of multiple memory modules, we formulate the problem as three logical-to-physical memory mapping subtasks and present experiments demonstrating the transition count reductions based on our approach. Our experiments on several image processing benchmarks show power savings of up to 63%, through reduced transition activity on the memory address bus in the single memory case. We also observe a further transition count reduction by a factor of 1.5-6.7 over a straightforward mapping scheme in the multiple memories configuration.

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

low-power design
memory addressing
memory architecture
tiling


Reliable femoral frame construction based on MRI dedicated to muscles position follow-up In vivo follow-up of muscle shape variation represents a challenge when evaluating muscle development due to disease or treatment. Recent developments in muscles reconstruction techniques indicate MRI as a clinical tool for the follow-up of the thigh muscles. The comparison of 3D muscles shape from two different sequences is not easy because there is no common frame. This study proposes an innovative method for the reconstruction of a reliable femoral frame based on the femoral head and both condyles centers. In order to robustify the definition of condylar spheres, an original method was developed to combine the estimation of diameters of both condyles from the lateral antero-posterior distance and the estimation of the spheres center from an optimization process. The influence of spacing between MR slices and of origin positions was studied. For all axes, the proposed method presented an angular error lower than 1 with spacing between slice of 10mm and the optimal position of the origin was identified at 56% of the distance between the femoral head center and the barycenter of both condyles. The high reliability of this method provides a robust frame for clinical follow-up based on MRI .

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


An improved OPDT model in high angular resolution diffusion imaging Orientation probability density transform (OPDT) is a single-shell high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) estimator proposed by Tristn-Vega et al. for orientation probability density function (OPDF), i.e. marginal orientation distribution function (ODF) of white matter fibers in the brain. Unlike ODF in Q-Ball imaging (QBI), the Jacobian of the spherical coordinate is included in OPDF. OPDT is based on the Funk-Radon transform (FRT), so there is blurring introduced by FRT. Aganj et al. have proved that the radial part of the OPDF equals a constant, which is independent of the diffusion signal. With this consideration, we propose an improved form of OPDT with a closed form expression, which can reduce the FRT blurring in OPDT by replacing the radial part (a non-constant function) with its mean value over the sphere. Compared with OPDT, the proposed FRT-based single-shell HARDI estimator improves the angular resolution, and almost maintains the higher angular accuracy, robustness to noise and computational efficiency. Results on synthetic data and real human brain data are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

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

diffusion-magnetic resonance imaging (dmri)

high angular resolution diffusion imaging (hardi)


Semantic overlay network for large-scale spatial information indexing A semantic overlay network for large-scale spatial information indexing is proposed. An effective semantic clustering strategy is introduced. A fast construction protocol of overlay network is designed. The theoretical analysis for spatial information indexing is described. Results show our network works well under a massive number of concurrent users.

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

semantic similarity
overlay networks
self-organizing algorithms
distributed systems


Keypoint-based 4-Points Congruent Sets Automated marker-less registration of laser scans We propose a method to automatically register two point clouds acquired with a terrestrial laser scanner without placing any markers in the scene. What makes this task challenging are the strongly varying point densities caused by the line-of-sight measurement principle, and the huge amount of data. The first property leads to low point densities in potential overlap areas with scans taken from different viewpoints while the latter calls for highly efficient methods in terms of runtime and memory requirements. A crucial yet largely unsolved step is the initial coarse alignment of two scans without any simplifying assumptions, that is, point clouds are given in arbitrary local coordinates and no knowledge about their relative orientation is available. Once coarse alignment has been solved, scans can easily be fine-registered with standard methods like least-squares surface or Iterative Closest Point matching. In order to drastically thin out the original point clouds while retaining characteristic features, we resort to extracting 3D keypoints. Such clouds of keypoints, which can be viewed as a sparse but nevertheless discriminative representation of the original scans, are then used as input to a very efficient matching method originally developed in computer graphics, called 4-Points Congruent Sets (4PCS) algorithm. We adapt the 4PCS matching approach to better suit the characteristics of laser scans. The resulting Keypoint-based 4-Points Congruent Sets (K-4PCS) method is extensively evaluated on challenging indoor and outdoor scans. Beyond the evaluation on real terrestrial laser scans, we also perform experiments with simulated indoor scenes, paying particular attention to the sensitivity of the approach with respect to highly symmetric scenes.

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

point cloud registration
terrestrial laser scanning
3d keypoint extraction
congruent point sets
geometric matching


On the evolutionary design of heterogeneous Bagging models Bagging is a popular ensemble algorithm based on the idea of data resampling. In this paper, aiming at increasing the incurred levels of ensemble diversity, we present an evolutionary approach for optimally designing Bagging models composed of heterogeneous components. To assess its potentials, experiments with well-known learning algorithms and classification datasets are discussed whereby the accuracy, generalization and diversity levels achieved with heterogeneous Bagging are matched against those delivered by standard Bagging with homogeneous components.

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

ensembles
heterogeneous models
genetic algorithms


a surfaceless pen-based interface Freehand drawing on a computer screen allows users to provide input through a natural mode of human interaction. With this freedom of expression, however, there exists a paradoxical limitation: the user is bound through the existing interface to the fixed drawing surface. In this work, we overcome this limitation by presenting a surfaceless pen-based interface with an application in the field of sketch recognition. A pilot study was conducted to examine the usability of the surfaceless pen-based interface. Results indicated that learning to use the device is relatively straightforward, but that interaction difficulty increases in a directly proportionally manner with drawing complexity.

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

surfaceless user interface
pen-based technology


Green's functions in orthotropic thermoelastic diffusion media The aim of the present paper is to study the Green's function in orthotropic thermoelastic diffusion media. With this objective, firstly the two-dimensional general solution in orthotropic thermoelastic diffusion media is derived. On the basis of general solution, the Green's function for a steady point heat source in the interior of semi-infinite orthotropic thermoelastic diffusion material is constructed by four newly introduced harmonic functions. The components of displacement, stress, temperature distribution and mass concentration are expressed in terms of elementary functions. From the present investigation, a special case of interest is also deduced, to depict the effect of diffusion on components of stress and temperature distribution.

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


Automatic Quantification of Tibio-Femoral Contact Area and Congruity We present methods to quantify the medial tibio-femoral (MTF) joint contact area (CA) and congruity index (CI) from low-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Firstly, based on the segmented MTF cartilage compartments, we computed the contact area using the Euclidian distance transformation. The CA was defined as the area of the tibial superior surface and the femoral inferior surface that are less than a voxel width apart. Furthermore, the CI is computed point-by-point by assessing the first-and second-order general surface features over the contact area. Mathematically, it is the inverse distance between the local normal vectors (first-order features) scaled by the local normal curvatures (second-order features) along the local direction of principal knee motion in a local reference coordinate system formed by the directions of principal curvature and the surface normal vector. The abilities of the CA and the CI for diagnosing osteoarthritis (OA) at different levels (disease severity was assessed using the Kellgren and Lawrence Index, KL) were cross-validated on 288 knees at baseline. Longitudinal analysis was performed on 245 knees. The precision quantified on 31 scan-rescan pairs (RMS CV) for CA was 13.7% and for CI 7.5%. The CA increased with onset of the disease and then decreased with OA progression. The CI was highest in healthy and decreased with the onset of OA and further with disease progression. The CI showed an AUC of 0.69 (p 0. For separating KL 1 knees, the AUC for CI was 0.73 (p < 0.0001). The CA demonstrated longitudinal responsiveness (SRM) at all stages of OA, whereas the CI did for advanced OA only. Eventually, the quantified CA and the CI might be suitable to help explaining OA onset, diagnosis of (early) OA, and measuring the efficacy of DMOADs in clinical trials.

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

congruity
contact area
magnetic resonance imaging


Bayesian resolution enhancement of compressed video Super-resolution algorithms recover high-frequency information from a sequence of low-resolution observations. In this paper, we consider the impact of video compression on the super-resolution task. Hybrid motion-compensation and transform coding schemes are the focus, as these methods provide observations of the underlying displacement values as well as a variable noise process. We utilize the Bayesian framework to incorporate this information and fuse the super-resolution and post-processing problems. A tractable solution is defined, and relationships between algorithm parameters and information in the compressed bitstream are established. The association between resolution recovery and compression ratio is also explored. Simulations illustrate the performance of the procedure with both synthetic and nonsynthetic sequences.

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

image coding
image restoration
post-processing
super-resolution
video coding


A Novel Approach Against Reactive Jamming Attacks There exist many studies against reactive jamming attacks, however, these methods, i.e. frequency hopping or channel surfing, require excessive computational capabilities on wireless devices. To avoid the problems in existing methods, we propose a novel approach against reactive jamming attacks by identifying the trigger nodes, whose transmissions activate any reactive jammers. The identification of these trigger nodes can help us (i) carefully design a better routing protocol by switching these nodes into only receivers to avoid activating jammers and (ii) locate the jammers based on the trigger nodes, thus providing an alternative mechanism against reactive jamming attacks. In this paper, we provide an efficient method to identify the trigger nodes by utilizing the group testing techniques and minimum collection of disjoint disk covers. The theoretical analysis and experimental results show that our solution performs well in terms of time and message complexities, which provides a good approach to defend reactive jamming attacks.

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

algorithms
wireless network
denial of service
security


Robust Ordinal Regression for Dominance-based Rough Set Approach to multiple criteria sorting Method for multiple criteria sorting using decision rule preference model. Preference information given as assignment examples. Algorithm for generation of all minimal-cover sets of rules. Analysis of necessary and possible assignments as well as acceptability indices. Selection of a representative minimal-cover set of rules and indication of decisive rules.

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

multiple criteria sorting
decision rule preference model

dominance-based rough set approach (drsa)


The Design and Implementation of CoGaDB: A Column-oriented GPU-accelerated DBMS Nowadays, the performance of processors is primarily bound by a fixed energy budget, the power wall. This forces hardware vendors to optimize processors for specific tasks, which leads to an increasingly heterogeneous hardware landscape. Although efficient algorithms for modern processors such as GPUs are heavily investigated, we also need to prepare the database optimizer to handle computations on heterogeneous processors. GPUs are an interesting base for case studies, because they already offer many difficulties we will face tomorrow.

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

dbms architecture
gpu acceleration
co-processing
main-memory


Increased

Abdominal

Obesity

in

Subjects

with

a

Mutation

in

the

Receptor

Gene

Promoter

In

the

present

study,

we

examined

the

potential

impact

of

the

promoter

polymorphism

on

obesity

and

estimates

of

insulin,

glucose,

and

lipid

metabolism

as

well

as

circulating

hormones,

including

salivary

cortisol,

in

unrelated

Swedish

men

born

in

The

subjects

were

genotyped

by

using

PCR

amplification

of

the

promoter

region

of

the

gene

for

followed

by

digestion

with

the

restriction

enzyme

MspI.

The

frequencies

were

for

allele

and

for

allele

Homozygotes

for

the

allele

had,

in

comparison

with

subjects,

higher

body

mass

index

(BMI),

waist-to-hip

ratio

(WHR),

and

abdominal

sagittal

diameter.

Moreover,

cortisol

escape

from

mg

dexamethasone

suppression

was

found

in

subjects

with

the

genotype.

Serum

leptin,

fasting

insulin

and

glucose,

as

well

as

serum

lipids

were

not

different

across

the

genotype

groups.

From

these

results,

we

suggest

the

possibility

that

an

abnormal

production

rate

of

the

gene

product

might

lead

to

the

development

of

abdominal

obesity.

The

pathophysiology

could

involve

stress

factors

that

destabilize

the

serotonin-hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal

systems

in

those

with

genetic

vulnerability

in

the

serotonin

receptor

gene.

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

abdominal obesity
dexamethasone
polymorphism
salivary cortisol
serotonin receptor


data base recovery at cmic Several techniques have been combined to provide for data base recovery at CMIC. The CMIC environment is presented first in order to identify the constraints which data base recovery must satisfy.A technique is described for updating mass-storage structures (a B-tree in this case) in such a way that all information already addressable through the mass-storage structure can always be addressed through the mass-storage structure, even while the mass-storage structure is being updated. Audit trail recovery points are defined to be records on the audit trail tape with the property that all preceeding data base updates have been written to mass storage. Because of the mass-storage updating technique, any data base update not addressable through the data base mass-storage B-tree could not have been written to mass storage. Therefore, by the definition of a recovery point, the update must have occurred after the most recent recovery point.The audit trail is always updated before the data base. In the event of a failure which does not destroy mass storage (a soft crash), the data base mass-storage allocation is recovered by a tree walk through the B-tree ("hot start"). Then any updates which occurred after the last recovery point on the audit trail are restored from the audit trail.Finally, the problem of program restart after data base recovery is discussed. The question of whether deadlock is a reasonable price to pay for data base rollback is explained, but not answered. This question will have to be addressed as more data base systems try to support concurrent transaction and batch updates, distributed data bases, or data bases shared by independent host computers.

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

deadlock
tree
point
order
recovery
event
price
definition
soft crash
case
program restart
audit trail
failure
records
transaction
structure
systems
data base
storage
support
audit
distributed
update

"hot start"
leaf-first rule
data base recovery
computation
track splitting
on-line data base
hard crash
reload and restore
constraint
storage allocation
informal
sharing
b-tree
environments
vsam
concurrency


Mobile charging information management for smart grid networks With today's electric charging technology, charging time of an electric vehicle (EV) is much longer than that for a gasoline vehicle, and therefore the queueing effect at an EV charging station (CS) may be serious. That is, when an EV arrives at an overloaded CS, it is likely that the EV will wait for a long time before it is charged. This paper investigates the waiting problem for EV charging. We propose a Mobile CS (MCS) management system to dynamically distribute charging pole support that reduces the waiting times of EVs incurred in a fixed CS. A Mobile Charging Information Management System (MC-IMS) is presented to describe the execution flow of the MCS service. Simulation experiments are conducted to investigate the waiting time performance for the proposed mechanism. Our study indicates that the MCS-based MC-IMS provides effective EV charging with short waiting times.

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

mobile charging information management system

smart grid network
mobile charging station


Designing fault tolerant algorithms for reconfigurable This paper proposes a procedure to design fault tolerant algorithms for the R-Mesh and some of its restrictive variations. This procedure first identifies a healthy sub-mesh from a faulty model using the bypass and removal fault model. Then it uses scalable algorithms to simulate the larger faulty model on the resulting healthy sub-mesh. The algorithms for the bypass model tolerates n faults in an n x n R-Mesh (LR-Mesh) and runs in O(T log n) (O(T)) time, where T is the execution time on the original mesh without faults. For the removal model, we design fault tolerant algorithms for some interesting variations of the R-Mesh, specifically, the NXR-Mesh and the NXLR-Mesh. We propose the first scaling simulations for these models and present a simulation of the R-Mesh on the NXR-Mesh. The results of this paper enable us to consider certain reconfigurable models in a more practical environment than previously allowed.

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

reconfigurable architectures
r-mesh
fault tolerance


Anchor points in DEA Anchor points play an important role in DEA theory and application. They define the transition from the efficient frontier to the free-disposability portion of the boundary. Our objective is to use the geometrical properties of anchor points to design and test an algorithm for their identification. We focus on the variable returns to scale production possibility set; our results do not depend on any particular DEA LP formulation, primal/dual form or orientation. Tests on real and artificial data lead to unexpected insights into their role in the geometry of the DEA production possibility set.

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

data envelopment analysis
linear programming
convex analysis
efficient and inefficient boundary


a restful architecture for adaptive and multi-device application sharing In this paper we introduce a practical approach to share the user interface of MVC compatible interactive applications with remote devices that have the ability to adapt the user interface to their specific look and feel. We present the system architecture and the methodology to model the user interface as a set of RESTful resources. The remote user interface and the application state are synchronized using an Web-based event-driven system.

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

rest
user interface adaptation
event driven system


side channel analysis of avr xmega crypto engine AVR XMEGA is the recent general-purpose 8-bit microcontroller from Atmel featuring symmetric crypto engines. We analyze the resistance of XMEGA crypto engines to side channel attacks. We reveal the relatively strong side channel leakage of the AES engine that enables full 128-bit AES secret key recovery in a matter of several minutes with a measurement setup cost about 1000 USD. 3000 power consumption traces are sufficient for the successful attack. Our analysis was performed without knowing the details of the crypto engine internals; quite the contrary, it reveals some details about the implementation. We sketch other feasible side channel attacks on XMEGA and suggest the counter-measures that can raise the complexity of the attacks but not fully prevent them.

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


Cache-aware multigrid methods for solving Poisson's equation in two dimensions Conventional implementations of iterative numerical algorithms, especially multigrid methods, merely reach a disappointing small percentage of the theoretically available CPU performance when applied to representative large problems. One of the most important reasons for this phenomenon is that the need for data locality due to poor main memory latency and limited bandwidth is entirely neglected by many developers designing numerical software. Only when most of the data to be accessed during the computation are found in the system cache (or in one of the caches if the machine architecture comprises a cache hierarchy) fast program execution can be expected. Otherwise, i.e. in case of a significant rate of cache misses, the processor must stay idle until the necessary operands are fetched from main memory, whose cycle time is in general extremely large compared to the time needed to execute a floating point instruction. In this paper, we describe program transformation techniques developed to improve the cache performance of two-dimensional multigrid algorithms. Although we merely consider the solution of Poisson's equation on the unit square using structured grids, our techniques provide valuable hints towards the efficient treatment of more general problems.

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

cache memories
iterative methods
high performance computing
code optimization


A novel approach for distributed application scheduling based on prediction of communication events The evolution of commodity computing lead to the possibility of efficient usage of interconnected machines to solve computationally-intensive tasks, which were previously solvable only by using expensive supercomputers. This, however, required new methods for process scheduling and distribution, considering the network latency, communication cost, heterogeneous environments and distributed computing constraints. An efficient distribution of processes over such environments requires an adequate scheduling strategy, as the cost of inefficient process allocation is unacceptably high. Therefore, a knowledge and prediction of application behavior is essential to perform effective scheduling. In this paper, we overview the evolution of scheduling approaches, focusing on distributed environments. We also evaluate the current approaches for process behavior extraction and prediction, aiming at selecting an adequate technique for online prediction of application execution. Based on this evaluation, we propose a novel model for application behavior prediction, considering chaotic properties of such behavior and the automatic detection of critical execution points. The proposed model is applied and evaluated for process scheduling in cluster and grid computing environments. The obtained results demonstrate that prediction of the process behavior is essential for efficient scheduling in large-scale and heterogeneous distributed environments, outperforming conventional scheduling policies by a factor of 10, and even more in some cases. Furthermore, the proposed approach proves to be efficient for online predictions due to its low computational cost and good precision.

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

distributed applications
knowledge acquisition
neural nets
chaotic systems


fpga-friendly code compression for horizontal microcoded custom ips Shrinking time-to-market and high demand for productivity has driven traditional hardware designers to use design methodologies that start from high-level languages. However, meeting timing constraints of automatically generated IPs is often a challenging and time-consuming task that must be repeated every time the specification is modified. To address this issue, a new generation of IP-design technologies that is capable of generating custom datapaths as well as programming an existing one is developed. These technologies are often based on Horizontal Microcoded Architectures. Large code size is a well-know problem in HMAs, and is referred to as "code bloating" problem.In this paper, we study the code size of one of the new HMA-based technologies called NISC. We show that NISC code size can be several times larger than a typical RISC processor, and we propose several low-overhead dictionary-based code compression techniques to reduce the code size. Our compression algorithm leverages the knowledge of "don't care" values in the control words to better compress the content of dictionary memories. Our experiments show that by selecting proper memory architectures the code size of NISC can be reduced by 70\% (i.e. 3.3 times) at cost of only 9\% performance degradation. We also show that some code compression techniques may increase number of utilized block RAMs in FPGA-based implementations. To address this issue, we propose combining dictionaries and implementing them using embedded dual-port memories.

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

fpga
dictionary-based compression
no-instruction-set computer
memory optimization


LTAG-spinal and the treebank We introduce LTAG-spinal, a novel variant of traditional Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with desirable linguistic, computational and statistical properties. Unlike in traditional LTAG, subcategorization frames and the argument-adjunct distinction are left underspecified in LTAG-spinal. LTAG-spinal with adjunction constraints is weakly equivalent to LTAG. The LTAG-spinal formalism is used to extract an LTAG-spinal Treebank from the Penn Treebank with Propbank annotation. Based on Propbank annotation, predicate coordination and LTAG adjunction structures are successfully extracted. The LTAG-spinal Treebank makes explicit semantic relations that are implicit or absent from the original PTB. LTAG-spinal provides a very desirable resource for statistical LTAG parsing, incremental parsing, dependency parsing, and semantic parsing. This treebank has been successfully used to train an incremental LTAG-spinal parser and a bidirectional LTAG dependency parser.

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

tree adjoining grammar
treebank
dependency parsing


Blind Deconvolution Using Generalized Cross-Validation Approach to Regularization Parameter Estimation In this paper, we propose and present an algorithm for total variation (TV)-based blind deconvolution. Both the unknown image and blur can be estimated within an alternating minimization framework. With the generalized cross-validation (GCV) method, the regularization parameters associated with the unknown image and blur can be updated in alternating minimization steps. Experimental results confirm that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better than variational Bayesian blind deconvolution algorithms with Student's-t priors or a total variation prior.

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

alternating minimization
blind deconvolution
regularization parameters

generalized cross validation (gcv)
total variation (tv)


A new reasoning scheme for efficient redundancy addition and removal Redundancy addition and removal is a rewiring technique which, for a given target wire w(t), finds a redundant alternative wire w(a). The addition of w(a) makes w(t) redundant and, hence, removable without changing the overall circuit functionality. Incremental logic restructuring based on this technique has been used in many applications. However, in the earlier methods, the search for valid alternative wires required trial-and-error redundancy testing of a potentially large set of candidate wires. Here, we study the fundamental theory behind this technique and propose a new reasoning scheme (RAMFIRE), which directly identifies alternative wires without performing trial-and-error tests. Experimental results show speedup of up to 15 times than that of the best techniques in the literature.

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

logic synthesis
physical synthesis
timing optimization


Data quality assessment in context: A cognitive perspective In organizations today, the risk of poor information quality is becoming increasingly high as larger and more complex information resources are being collected and managed. To mitigate this risk, decision makers assess the quality of the information provided by their IS systems in order to make effective decisions based on it. To do so, they may rely on quality metadata: objective quality measurements tagged by data managers onto the information used by decision makers. Decision makers may also gauge information quality on their own, subjectively and contextually assessing the usefulness of the information for solving the specific task at hand. Although information quality has been defined as fitness for use, models of information quality assessment have thus far tended to ignore the impact of contextual quality on information use and decision outcomes. Contextual assessments can be as important as objective quality indicators because they can affect which information gets used for decision making tasks. This research offers a theoretical model for understanding users' contextual information quality assessment processes. The model is grounded in dual-process theories of human cognition, which enable simultaneous evaluation of both objective and contextual information quality attributes. Findings of an exploratory laboratory experiment suggest that the theoretical model provides an avenue for understanding contextual aspects of information quality assessment in concert with objective ones. The model offers guidance for the design of information environments that can improve performance by integrating both objective and subjective aspect of users' quality assessments.

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

dual-process theory
information quality management
information quality dimensions
decision support


Effect of boundary (support) conditions on piezoelectric damping in the case of SSDI vibration control technique Piezoelectric transducers in conjunction with appropriate electric networks can be used as a mechanical energy dissipation device. If a piezoelectric element is attached to a structure, it is strained as the structure deforms and converts a portion of the vibration energy into electrical energy that can be dissipated through a shunt network in the form of heating. These vibration control devices experienced a great development in recent years, due to their performances and advantages compared with active techniques. One of them is the synchronized switch damping (SSD) and derived techniques, which were developed in the field of piezoelectric damping, and which lead to a very good trade-off between the simplicity, the required power supply and their performances. This technique consists in a non-linear processing of the piezoelectric voltage, which induces an increase in electromechanical energy conversion. The control law consists in triggering the inverting switch on each extremum of voltage (or displacement). In this study, the proposed method for the switching sequence is based on the statistical evaluation of structural deflection. The purpose of this paper is to present an experimental study of the synchronized switch damping on inductance (SSDI) control technique sensitivity to the system boundary conditions. It is observed that the fundamental natural frequency greatly depends on these conditions. The effect of these constraints is distributed all over the system and significantly affects the results.

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

ssdi control technique
piezoelectric
support conditions


Fully homomorphic encryption based two-party association rule mining Association rule mining (ARM) is one of the popular data mining methods that discover interesting correlations amongst a large collection of data, which appears incomprehensible. This is known to be a trivial task when the data is owned by one party. But when multiple data sites collectively engage in ARM, privacy concerns are introduced. Due to this concern, privacy preserving data mining algorithms have been developed to attain the desired result, while maintaining privacy. In the case of two party privacy preserving ARM for horizontally partitioned databases, both parties are required to compare their itemset counts securely. This problem is comparable to the famous millionaire problem of Yao. However, in this paper, we propose a secure comparison technique using fully homomorphic encryption scheme that provides a similar level of security to the Yao based solution, but promotes greater efficiency due to the reuse of resources.

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

data mining
security
homomorphic encryption


On expressiveness of the chain graph interpretations We study the expressiveness of the different chain graph interpretations in terms of representable independence models. We show how an MCMC sampling algorithm can be used to sample chain graph models. We show that chain graphs can represent exponentially many more independence models compared to Bayesian networks. We show (numerically) that the average number of chain graphs per chain graph model appears to converge. We show that AMP and MVR chain graphs are more expressive than LWF chain graphs.

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

expressibility of probabilistic graphical models


Alternative time representation in dopamine models Dopaminergic neuron activity has been modeled during learning and appetitive behavior, most commonly using the temporal-difference (TD) algorithm. However, a proper representation of elapsed time and of the exact task is usually required for the model to work. Most models use timing elements such as delay-line representations of time that are not biologically realistic for intervals in the range of seconds. The interval-timing literature provides several alternatives. One of them is that timing could emerge from general network dynamics, instead of coming from a dedicated circuit. Here, we present a general rate-based learning model based on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks that learns a time representation when needed. Using a nave network learning its environment in conjunction with TD, we reproduce dopamine activity in appetitive trace conditioning with a constant CS-US interval, including probe trials with unexpected delays. The proposed model learns a representation of the environment dynamics in an adaptive biologically plausible framework, without recourse to delay lines or other special-purpose circuits. Instead, the model predicts that the task-dependent representation of time is learned by experience, is encoded in ramp-like changes in single-neuron activity distributed across small neural networks, and reflects a temporal integration mechanism resulting from the inherent dynamics of recurrent loops within the network. The model also reproduces the known finding that trace conditioning is more difficult than delay conditioning and that the learned representation of the task can be highly dependent on the types of trials experienced during training. Finally, it suggests that the phasic dopaminergic signal could facilitate learning in the cortex.

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

reward
interval-timing
reinforcement learning
representation learning


A method for ranking fuzzy numbers and its application to decision-making Since fuzzy numbers represent uncertain numeric values, it is difficult to rank them according to their magnitude, In this paper, a new method for ranking fuzzy numbers is proposed. The method considers the overall possibility distributions of fuzzy numbers in their evaluations for ranking and provides users with a method changing viewpoints for evaluations. Users represent their viewpoints with fuzzy sets. The method evaluates fuzzy numbers with a satisfaction function and the viewpoint given by users and then ranks the numbers according to their evaluation values, The satisfaction function is a measure of comparisons between fuzzy numbers,In order to illustrate the ranking method, two numeric examples are shown, and for the comparative study, our method is compared with four existing ranking methods through eight examples,ps an example of potential applications, the proposed method is applied to a decision-making problem: a two-person game with fuzzy profit and loss. The ranking method is used to analyze player choices.

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


Local frequency representations for robust multimodal image registration Automatic registration of multimodal images involves algorithmically estimating the coordinate transformation required to align the data sets. Most existing methods in the literature are unable to cope with registration of image pairs with large nonoverlapping field of view (FOV). We propose a robust algorithm, based on matching dominant local frequency image representations, which can cope with image pairs with large nonoverlapping FOV. The local frequency representation naturally allows for processing the data at different scales/resolutions, a very desirable property from a computational efficiency view point Our algorithm involves minimizing-over all rigid/affine transformations-the integral of the squared error (ISE or L(2)E) between a Gaussian model of the residual and its true density function. The residual here refers to the difference between the local frequency representations of the transformed (by an unknown transformation) source and target data. We present implementation results for image data sets, which are misaligned magnetic resonance (MR) brain scans obtained using different image acquisition protocols as well as misaligned MR-computed tomography scans. We experimently show that our L(2)E-based scheme yields better accuracy over the normalized mutual information.

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

l(2)b
normalized mutual information (mi)
robust image reigstration


Parallel OLAP with the Sidera server Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) has become a primary component of todays pervasive Decision Support systems. As the underlying databases grow into the multi-terabyte range, however, single CPU OLAP servers are being stretched beyond their limits. In this paper, we present a comprehensive model for a fully parallelized OLAP server. Our multi-node platform actually consists of a series of largely independent sibling servers that are glued together with a lightweight MPI-based Parallel Service Interface (PSI). Physically, we target the commodity-oriented, shared nothing Linux cluster, an architecture that provides an extremely cost effective alternative to the shared everything commercial platforms often used in high-end database environments. Experimental results demonstrate both the viability and robustness of the design.

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


the effect of node synchronization times in ultra wideband wireless networks Ultra-wideband wireless (UWB) can provide the physical layer for high capacity personal area networks. When UWB is used for communication between many nodes, relatively long acquisition times are needed when dropping and re-establishing wireless links between the nodes. This paper describes the development and use of mathematical and simulation models to investigate the impact on average packet delay of dropping and reacquiring links between nodes to directly transmit packets versus simply forwarding packets through intervening nodes without breaking the established wireless links. The work presented here assumes that no specific MAC layer protocol, such as WiMedia UWB MAC, is operating. The paper describes the models, explains the selection of modeling parameters used, compares the average packet delay for a network of three simple UWB nodes, and explains the use of these results for network design engineers.

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

ultra-wideband
average delay
servers with vacations


Making music in a group: synchronization and shared experience To consider the full impact of musical learning on the brain, it is important to study the nature of everyday, non-expert forms of musical behavior alongside expert instrumental training. Such informal forms of music making tend to include social interaction, synchronization, body movements, and positive shared experiences. Here, I propose that when designing music intervention programs for scientific purposes, such features may have advantages over instrumental training, depending on the specific research aims, contexts, and measures. With reference to a selection of classroom approaches to music education and to the shared affective motion experience (SAME) model of emotional responses to music, I conclude that group learning may be particularly valuable in music pedagogy.

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

music
pedagogy
group learning
social
synchronization
shared experience


Handling asymmetry in power heterogeneous ad hoc networks Traditional MAC and routing protocols, which are primarily designed for homogeneous networks wherein all nodes transmit with the same power, suffer performance degradations when employed in power heterogeneous networks. The observed degradations are due to link asymmetry, which arises as high power nodes that do not sense the transmissions of low power nodes can potentially initiate transmissions that interfere with the low power communications. Link layer asymmetry in power heterogeneous networks not only disrupts the functioning of the routing protocol in use, but also results in unfairness in medium access. In this paper, we develop a cross-layer framework to effectively address the link asymmetry problem at both the MAC and the routing layers. At the MAC layer, the framework intelligently propagates low power control messages to the higher power nodes, so as to preclude them from initiating transmissions while there are low power communications in progress within their sensing range. At the routing layer, the framework facilitates the efficient use of unidirectional links. We perform extensive simulations to study the performance of our proposed framework in various settings, and show that the overall throughput in power heterogeneous networks is enhanced by as much as 25% over traditional layered approaches. In addition, we show that our schemes are also beneficial in power homogeneous settings, as they reduce the extent of false link failures that arise when the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol is used. In summary, our framework offers a simple yet effective and viable approach for medium access control and for supporting routing in power heterogeneous ad hoc networks.

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

power control
link asymmetry
mac
routing

power-heterogeneous ad hoc networks
cross-layer design


Information About a Given Entity: From Semantics Towards Automated Deduction The standard method to retrieve information can be formally defined as follows. To ask a query, one gives the properties of the entities to be retrieved, and the answer is the set of all the entities that satisfy the query. Another method, is to ask the overall information about a given entity, and the answer is the corresponding information. An example of the first kind of query is: 'who are the persons who have had a car accident?', an example of the second kind is: 'what is the overall information about a given person?'. This latter method has deserved very few researches though it has great potential practical applications. However, it raises many non-trivial issues that are investigated here. The first one is to find a precise definition of the fact that a piece of information 'is about' a given entity. We propose a new formal definition of this notion of aboutness for query languages in first-order logic with function symbols, and the main properties that follow from this definition are presented. The second one is to define a bridge between this abstract semantic definition and automated deduction methods based on Resolution Principle. Deduction strategies are defined in this direction and it is proved that they are complete.

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


Analysis of the effects of reflectance and refraction generated by wafers made from fused silica, ALOxNy and TiSixNy under different light sources on pattern length and best focus In semi-conductor photo-lithography processing, line-width is constantly shrinking. That is why process window requirements are becoming stricter. Under these strict conditions, the influences of focus and pattern length are more important. This investigation tries to explore the deviation of best focus and the variation in pattern length resulting from the reflectance and refraction of fused silica, ALOxNy and TiSixNy wafers are coated with the same thickness of SEPR 432 PR (Photo Resist). Experimental results indicate that after excluding the influence of photo resist impacts, the refraction generated by the auto focus light source(halogens lamp) causes deviation of the best focus, and the extent of deviation has a directly proportion relationship with refraction, and no direct relationship exists between exposure light source (laser) and the deviation of best focus. The reflectance generated by exposure light source only changes the measures of pattern length, and an inverse relationship exists between reflectance and pattern length; that is, received pattern length reduces with increasing wafer reflectance.

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


Design of a data model for social network applications A social network defines the structure of a social community like an organization or institution, covering its members and their inter-relationships. Social relationships among the members of a community can be of different types like friendship, kinship, professional, academic, and so forth. Traditionally, a social network is represented by a directed graph. Analysis of graph structure representing a social network is done by the sociologists to study a community. Hardly any effort has been made to design a data model to store and retrieve social-network-related data. In this paper, an object-relational graph data model has been proposed for modeling a social network. The objective is to illustrate the power of this generic model to represent the common structural and node-based properties of different social network applications. A novel, multi-paradigm architecture has been proposed to efficiently manage the system. New structural operators have been defined in the paper and the application of these operators has been illustrated through query examples. The completeness and the minimality of the operators have also been shown.

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

multi-paradigm architecture
object-relational data model


Adaptive-window indicator kriging: A thresholding method for computed tomography images of porous media Image segmentation is a crucial step in understanding the structure of porous materials, subsequent analyses being profoundly dependent upon segmentation accuracy. Computed tomography images of naturally occurring heterogeneous materials such as soils are particularly challenging to segment reliably, due to the prevalence of partial volume effects, noise, and other artefacts induced during the image acquisition process. As a result, boundaries between classes of objects, typically pore versus solid in the case of soil, are difficult to identify. Indicator kriging can address these problems in a robust fashion but the computational cost can be very great under some circumstances; this is particularly true under conditions that occur regularly in images of soil. The kriging window size parameter is decisive in obtaining a good quality result at reasonable cost, but is difficult to estimate for an image exhibiting significant heterogeneity. This work demonstrates that, allowing the kriging window size to adapt locally throughout the image provides a very efficient solution. Moreover, it is shown that this can be achieved using a conceptually simple mechanism that involves negligible extra processing cost. The adaptive-window indicator kriging method described in this study achieves easily an order of magnitude improvement in computational performance over a fixed size window implementation without sacrificing quality. In addition, it is shown that, by improving the locality of estimation, the new method is robust when applied to soil images.

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

local segmentation
x-ray
microtomography


Multiple cameras for audio-visual speech recognition in an automotive environment Audio-visual speech recognition, or the combination of visual lip-reading with traditional acoustic speech recognition, has been previously shown to provide a considerable improvement over acoustic-only approaches in noisy environments, such as that present in an automotive cabin. The research presented in this paper will extend upon the established audio-visual speech recognition literature to show that further improvements in speech recognition accuracy can be obtained when multiple frontal or near-frontal views of a speaker's face are available. A series of visual speech recognition experiments using a four-stream visual synchronous hidden Markov model (SHMM) are conducted on the four-camera AVICAR automotive audio-visual speech database. We study the relative contribution between the side and central orientated cameras in improving visual speech recognition accuracy. Finally combination of the four visual streams with a single audio stream in a five-stream SHMM demonstrates a relative improvement of over 56% in word recognition accuracy when compared to the acoustic-only approach in the noisiest conditions of the AVICAR database. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

avicar database
speech recognition
automotive environment


Performance of a multi-story structure with a resilient-friction base isolation system Complex frequency response functions and excitationresponse relations for stationary random process are formulated to estimate responses of multi-story superstructures isolated with resilient-friction base isolation (R-FBI) system. The equivalent linearization technique is also used to linearize the nonlinear governing equations of motion of R-FBI system occurred between the parallel actions of the resiliency of rubber and friction of Teflon-coated plates. In this approach, the spectral density functions for both the relative displacement response and absolute acceleration response of N degrees of freedom systems are derived. The applicability and accuracy of the proposed methodology are examined by comparing the resulting responses obtained from this study with those calculated from time history analysis based method. These two studies demonstrate good agreement in terms of characteristics of peak responses. Extensive sensitivity analysis to find the influence of various important structural parameters on the behavior of structures isolated with R-FBI system is also carried out.

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

relative displacement response spectral density

absolute acceleration response spectral density


Optimizing content placement in a peer-assisted VoD architecture Recently, a new peer-assisted architecture to build content delivery systems has been presented. This architecture is based on the use of the storage capacity of end-users' set-top boxes (STBs), connected in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner in order to help the content servers in the delivery process. In these systems, the contents are usually split into a set of smaller pieces, called sub-streams, which are randomly injected at the STBs. The present paper is focused on Video on Demand (VoD) streaming and it is assumed that the STB-based content delivery system is deployed over the global Internet, where the clients are distributed over different ISP networks. In this scenario, three different strategies are studied for increasing the percentage of data uploaded by peers, in order to offload the content servers as much as possible. First of all, a new mechanism is presented which determines which sub-stream has to be placed at which STB by a Non-Linear Programming (NLP) formulation. A different strategy for reducing the content server load is to take advantage of the available bandwidth in the different ISP networks. In this sense, two new mechanisms for forwarding the VoD requests to different ISP networks are presented. Finally, the present paper also shows that in some situations the available uplink bandwidth is associated with STBs that do not have the required sub-streams. Regarding this concern, a new mechanism has been designed that dynamically re-allocates some streams, which are being transmitted from specific STBs, to different STBs, in order to find the necessary resources to start new streaming sessions.

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

p2p streaming
set-top box
bandwidth reallocation
performance evaluation
simulation


quorum-based consistency management among replicas in ad hoc networks with data update In this paper, we propose a consistency management method that constructs quorums with a small number of mobile hosts in ad hoc networks. In this method, when a mobile host discovers paths to other mobile hosts that construct quorums, it restricts the propagation area of query packets. As a result, this method can reduce the communication overhead while keeping the strict consistency among replicas.

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


From conceptual models to schemata: An object-process-based data warehouse construction method Data warehouse modeling is a complex task, which involves knowledge of business processes of the domain of discourse, understanding the structural and behavioral system's conceptual model, and familiarity with data warehouse technologies. The suitability of current data warehouse modeling methods for large-scale systems is questionable, as they require multiple manual actions to discover measures and relevant dimensional entities and they tend to disregard the system's dynamic aspects. We present an Object-process-based Data Warehouse Construction (ODWC) method that overcomes these limitations of existing methods by utilizing the operational system conceptual model to construct a corresponding data warehouse schema. We specify the ODWC method, apply it on a case study, evaluate it, and compare it to existing methods.

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

data warehousing
data models
database design
conceptual modeling
object-process methodology


TEST SIGNAL GENERATION FOR SERVICE DIAGNOSIS BASED ON LOCAL STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES The paper presents a new approach to the generation of test signals used in service diagnosis. The tests make it possible to isolate faults, which are isolable only if the system is brought into specific operating points. The basis for the test signal selection is a structure graph that represents the couplings among the external and internal signals of the system and the fault signals. Graph-theoretic methods are used to identify edges that disappear under certain operating conditions and prevent a fault from changing the system behavior at this operating point. These operating conditions are identified by validuals, which are indicators obtained during the graph-theoretic analysis. The test generation method is illustrated by a process engineering example.

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


Blogging and globalization: the blurring of the public/private spheres Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to show how the blurring of public and private spheres is among the changes associated with the phenomenon of blogging. In linking this to theories of globalization shows more clearly how new media transformations have macro as well as micro significance. Design/methodology/approach - An assessment of blogging is undertaken in the context of theories of globalization, with specific focus on issues related to public/private linkages, the aim, being to make theory-practice connections to enhance understanding of the wider implications of blogging. Findings - The analysis identifies how theories of globalization offer foundational understanding for investigating blogging as a social rather than purely new media development. This relates to the spatial reconfigurations of social, political, economic and cultural life, which have been characteristic of processes of globalization. The ways in which blogging demonstrates the blurring of public and private spheres is usefully understood within this broader spatial framework. Research limitations/implications - This is a primarily conceptual and theoretical approach with substantive reference to blogging, which remains at the general level rather than looking in detail at different kinds of blogs and their implications. Its contribution is therefore located primarily in the conceptual and theoretical domains. Practical implications - This form of analysis foregrounds public/private sphere boundaries in relation to blogging and could contribute to critical thinking about the social implications of blogging for bloggers and readers alike. Originality/value - Conceptual and theoretical linkages between theories of globalization, especially in relation to spatial issues, blogging and the blurring of public and private.

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


Queue layouts of iterated line directed graphs In this paper, we study queue layouts of iterated line directed graphs. A k-queue layout of a directed graph consists of a linear ordering of the vertices and an assignment of each arc to exactly one of the k queues so that any two arcs assigned to the same queue do not nest. The queuenumber of a directed graph is the minimum number of queues required for a queue layout of the directed graph. We present upper and lower bounds on the queuenumber of an iterated line directed graph Lk(G) L k ( G ) of a directed graph G. Our upper bound depends only on G and is independent of the number of iterations k . Queue layouts can be applied to three-dimensional drawings. From the results on the queuenumber of Lk(G) L k ( G ) , it is shown that for any fixed directed graph G , Lk(G) L k ( G ) has a three-dimensional drawing with O(n) O ( n ) volume, where n is the number of vertices in Lk(G) L k ( G ) . These results are also applied to specific families of iterated line directed graphs such as de Bruijn, Kautz, butterfly, and wrapped butterfly directed graphs. In particular, the queuenumber of k-ary butterfly directed graphs is determined if k is odd.

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

queue layout
iterated line directed graphs
butterfly directed graphs

three-dimensional drawing
interconnection networks
de bruijn directed graphs
kautz directed graphs


Convolution Products for Hypercomplex Fourier Transforms Hypercomplex Fourier transforms are increasingly used in signal processing for the analysis of higher-dimensional signals such as color images. A main stumbling block for further applications, in particular concerning filter design in the Fourier domain, is the lack of a proper convolution theorem. The present paper develops and studies two conceptually new ways to define convolution products for such transforms. As a by-product, convolution theorems are obtained that will enable the development and fast implementation of new filters for quaternionic signals and systems, as well as for their higher dimensional counterparts.

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

hypercomplex analysis
generalized fourier transform
clifford-fourier transform
geometric fourier transform
quaternionic fourier transform
convolution product
color image processing


whitened lda for face recognition Over the years, many Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) algorithms have been proposed for the study of high dimensional data in a large variety of problems. An intrinsic limitation of classical LDA is the so-called "small sample size (3S) problem" that is, it fails when all scatter matrices are singular. Many LDA extensions were proposed in the past to overcome the 3S problems. However none of the previous methods could solve the 3S problem completely in the sense that it can keep all the discriminative features with a low computational cost. By applying LDA after whitening data, we proposed the Whitened LDA (WLDA) which can find the most discriminant features without facing the 3S problem. In WLDA, only eigenvalue problems instead of generalized eigenvalue problems are performed, leading to the low computation cost of WLDA. Experimental results are shown using two most popular Yale and ORL databases. Comparisons are given against Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Direct LDA (DLDA), Null space LDA (NLDA) and several matrix-based subspace analysis approaches developed recently. We show that our method is always the best.

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


An improved hybrid-stress element approach to torsion of shafts A four-noded torsional element with only four stress parameters is developed based on the HellingerReissner principle by optimizing element trial stresses through the introduction of incompatible displacements. Two boundary hybrid-stress elements with six stress parameters are also developed to meet the traction-free condition on one or two adjacent sides of a four-noded element, respectively. Numerical results show that these elements give accurate results for the warping displacement, the angle of twist per unit length, as well as the shear stresses for shafts with a polygonal cross-section. Comparison with alternative displacement and stress elements shows that the present elements give results of the same accuracy with a coarser mesh. The elements are shown to be insensitive to mesh distortion and to exhibit rapid convergence with h-refinement.

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

st venant's torsion of shaft
optimization of hybrid-stress element
hybrid-stress torsional element
boundary hybrid-stress element


DARE: a system for distributed abductive reasoning Abductive reasoning is a well established field of Artificial Intelligence widely applied to different problem domains not least cognitive robotics and planning. It has been used to abduce high-level descriptions of the world from robot sense data, using rules that tell us what sense data would be generated by certain objects and events of the robots world, subject to certain constraints on their co-occurrence. It has also been used to abduce actions that might result in a desired goal state of the world, using descriptions of the normal effects of these actions, subject to constraints on the action combinations. We can generalise these applications to a multi-agent context. Several robots can collaboratively try to abduce an agreed higher-level description of the state of the world from their separate sense data consistent with their collective constraints on the abduced description. Similarly, multi-agent planning can be accomplished by the abduction of the actions of a collective plan where each agent uses its own description of the effect of its actions within the plan, such that the constraints on the actions of all the participating agents are satisfied. To address this class of problems, we need to generalise the single agent abductive reasoning algorithm to a distributed abductive inference algortihm. In addition, if we want to investigate applications in which the set of collaborating robots/agents is open, we need an algorithm that allows agents to join or leave the collaborating group whilst a particular inference is under way, but which still produces sound abductive inferences. This paper describes such a distributed abductive reasoning system, which we call DARE, and its implementation in the multi-threaded Qu-Prolog variant of Prolog. We prove the soundness of the algorithm it uses and we discuss its completeness in relation to non-distributed abductive reasoning. We illustrate the use of the algorithm with a multi-agent meeting scheduling example. The task is open in that the actual agents who need to attend is not determined in advance. Each individual agent has its own constraints on the possible meeting time and concerning which other agents must or must attend the meeting, if it attends. The algorithm selects the agents to attend and ensures that the constraints of each of the attending agents are satisfied.

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

distributed inference
multi-thread prolog


Multi-pulse LPC modeling of articulatory movements The frame-by-frame variation of tongue profiles derived from X-ray film data is described in terms of the temporal patterns of four articulatory parameters. The temporal variation of each parameter, i.e., movement, is assumed to be the output of a time-invariant auto-regressive filter. Each filter is excited by a sequence of pulses, representing articulatory commands. The filter coefficients, and the position and amplitude of the pulses are determined by applying an MLPC method. The curve of synthesis error for each movement shows a rapid decrease up to a number of pulses corresponding to that of the syllables in the sentence and then the decreasing rate becomes distinctively slower suggesting the presence of syllable-size motor organization. The minimum number of pulses is determined by using an acoustic criterion. It depends on the number of the phonetic features, in the sentence, of which their realization is crucially related to their pertinent parameters.

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

speech production
articulatory movement modeling
multi-pulse lpc


Process Socio Space Discovery Based on Semantic Logs While the cyber physical society (CPS) describes the future environment of collaboration and coordination between the cyber space and the socio space, nowadays, business process management systems (BPMS) are coined to specify how the computational resources can coordinate and collaborate by aligning all aspects of an organization through a set of activities, performed by their relevant collaborators, to purposefully achieve a common business goal. Generally, cyber physical systems promise a tight integration between the cyber space and the socio space in their interactions. In this paper, we focus on how leveraging existing BPMS for achieving this integration by discovering process socio space based on log analysis. Concretely, we propose an Organizational Ontology specifying the organizational socio space model. This ontology is used to semantically annotate logs and establish a knowledge base that will be used to semantically discover relationships between performers in the process socio space. Our approach has been implemented within the ProM framework.

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process mining
socio space organizational ontology
process log analysis


Support vector machines of interval-based features for time series classification In previous works, a time series classification system has been presented. It is based on boosting very simple classifiers, formed only by one literal. The used literals are based on temporal intervals. The obtained classifiers were simply a linear combination of literals, so it is natural to expect some improvements in the results if those literals were combined in more complex ways. In this work we explore the possibility of using the literals selected by the boosting algorithm as new features, and then using a SVM with these metafeatures. The experimental results show the validity of the proposed method. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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Sampling Point Selection Scheme for Fractional Sampling-OFDM Receivers on Fast Time-Varying Multipath Channels Fractional sampling (FS) and Doppler diversity equalization in OFDM receivers can achieve two types of diversity (path diversity and frequency diversity) simultaneously on time varying multipath channels. However FS with a higher sampling rate requires the large amount of complexity in demodulation. In this paper a novel sampling point selection (SPS) scheme with MMSE equalization in FS OFDM receivers is proposed. On fast time varying multipath channels the proposed scheme selects the appropriate samples from the fractionally sampled signals. Through the computer simulation it is demonstrated that with the proposed scheme both path diversity gain and Doppler diversity gain can increase as compared to a conventional non SPS scheme.

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sampling point selection
doppler diversity
mmse equalization


Learning parametric dynamic movement primitives from multiple demonstrations Learning from demonstration has shown to be a suitable approach for learning control policies (CPs). However, most previous studies learn CPs from a single demonstration, which results in limited scalability and insufficient generalization toward a wide range of applications in real environments. This paper proposes a novel approach to learn highly scalable CPs of basis movement skills from multiple demonstrations. In contrast to conventional studies with a single demonstration, i.e., dynamic movement primitives (DMPs), our approach efficiently encodes multiple demonstrations by shaping a parametric-attractor landscape in a set of differential equations. Assuming a certain similarity among multiple demonstrations, our approach learns the parametric-attractor landscape by extracting a small number of common factors in multiple demonstrations. The learned CPs allow the synthesis of novel movements with novel motion styles by specifying the linear coefficients of the bases as parameter vectors without losing useful properties of the DMPs, such as stability and robustness against perturbations. For both discrete and rhythmic movement skills, we present a unified learning procedure for learning a parametric-attractor landscape from multiple demonstrations. The feasibility and highly extended scalability of DMPs are demonstrated on an actual dual-arm robot.

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