a key management solution for overlay-live-streaming Confidential communication of live-generated multimedia data distributed via application level multicast (ALM) still remains a mostly unaddressed subject even though some important usage scenarios, e.g. paid subscription services or personal video-streaming, are anticipated to gain more widespread use as the Internet continues to evolve into the common transport platform for all kinds of services. In this article, we examine the specific requirements for key management schemes to be used in ALM-based distribution systems and analyze existing key management approaches with respect to these requirements [1, 2, 3]. Based on the results of this analysis, we design a new key management scheme that combines ideas of the Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) protocol [4, 5] and the Iolus approach [6]. We compare the resulting scheme to a simple approach that is based on pairwise keys between neighboring nodes without further key-hierarchy based optimization and that serves as a benchmark. Our results of a comparative simulation study clearly indicate the suitability of our scheme for ALM-based livestreaming.

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

content distribution
dh
application-layer multicast
peer-to-peer


Expert condition monitoring on hydrostatic self-levitating bearings Neural network based functional approximation techniques associated with rule based techniques are applied on the condition monitoring task of rotating machines equipped with hydrostatic self levitating bearings. Based on fluid online measured characteristic data, including pressures and temperature, the inherent hydraulic pumping system and the self levitating shaft is monitored and diagnosed applying vibration analysis carried out using virtual measurements. Required signals are achieved by conversion of measured data (fluid temperatures and pressures) into virtual data (vibration magnitudes) by means of neural network functional approximation techniques. Previous to the condition monitoring task (vibration analysis), a supervision task of the system behaviour is carried out in order to validate the information being processed. It is concluded that the vibration analysis based on the analysis of the dynamic behaviour of oil pressure (non accelerometer based signals) subjected to disturbances such as changes in oil operating conditions including viscosity, is successfully feasible.

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

condition monitoring
functional approximation
virtual data
vibration analysis

fault diagnosis
feedforward neural networks


A combined punctuation generation and speech recognition system and its performance enhancement using prosody A punctuation generation system which combines prosodic information with acoustic and language model information is presented. Experiments have been conducted for both the reference text transcriptions and speech recogniser outputs. For the reference transcription, prosodic information of acoustic data is shown to be more useful than language model information. Several straightforward modifications of a conventional speech recogniser allow the system to produce punctuation and speech recognition hypotheses simultaneously. The multiple hypotheses produced by the automatic speech recogniser are then re-scored using prosodic information. When the prosodic information is incorporated, the F-measure (defined as harmonic mean of recall and precision) can be improved. This speech recognition system including punctuation gives a small reduction in word error rate on the 1-best speech recognition output including punctuation. An alternative approach for generating punctuation from the un-punctuated 1-best speech recognition output is also proposed. The results from these two alternative schemes are compared.

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

punctuation generation
speech recognition
prosody

classification and regression tree (cart)


An architecture for dynamic QoS management at Layer 2 for DOCSIS access networks using OpenFlow Over the last few years, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged as one of the most disruptive and profitable novelties in networking. SDN was originally conceived to improve performance and reduce costs in Ethernet-based networks and it has been widely adopted in data center and campus networks. Similarly, thanks to the introduction of SDN concepts, access networks will benefit from the higher control, the lower maintenance costs and the better remote access to devices of SDN. However, its application to access networks is not straightforward and imposes great challenges to vendors and network operators, since current SDN technologies are not prepared to handle the provisioning of user equipment, specific port management or QoS requirements of common access networks. Most recent trends dealing with the SDN-ization of access networks advocate for the use of simple devices at the customer premises and the virtualization of the networking functionalities, requiring the provisioning of Layer 2 services in many cases. In such a scenario, this paper presents an architecture that brings SDN to common access networks using legacy equipment. In a nutshell, the architecture is based on the abstraction of the access network as a wide area OpenFlow switch where QoS-enabled pipes are dynamically created leveraging the high granularity of the OpenFlow protocol for packet classification. Furthermore, the OpenFlow protocol itself has been extended in order to support the advanced QoS requirements that are common to most access networks. The architecture has been implemented for DOCSIS access networks and it has been validated and evaluated using a real testbed deployed at our laboratory. The obtained results show that the architecture remains compliant with the ITU-T QoS recommendations and that the cost of introducing the elements required by the architecture in terms of service performance is negligible.

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

software-defined networking
virtual customer premises equipment


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

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

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


Group shared protection for spare capacity reconfiguration in optical networks This paper introduces GSP, a group shared protection scheme, for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) mesh networks with dynamically arrived connection requests. Based on the (M:N)n control architecture, GSP has n mutually independent protection groups (PGs), each of which containing N shared risk link groups (SRLG) disjoint working paths protected by M protection paths. Due to the SRLG-disjointedness of the working paths in each PG, GSP not only allows the spare capacity to be totally sharable among the corresponding working paths, but also reduces the number of working paths affected due to a single link failure. Based on the framework, an integer linear program (ILP) formulation that can optimally reconfigure the spare capacity for a specific PG whenever a workingprotection path-pair joins is proposed. This approach is appropriate for a dynamic traffic scenario where inter-arrival time is large and where arriving request can tolerate some delay, but may not be suitable where traffic arrival rate is high and incoming requests need to be served within a few seconds. To trade the performance (i.e., capacity efficiency) with the computation complexity, two heuristics, namely ring-shared protection (RSP) and link-shared protection (LSP) are proposed. The proposed schemes are compared with an exiting one, namely the successive survivable routing (SSR). The simulation results show that LSP, RSP and SSR yield similar performance in terms of resource sharing, whereas ILP outperforms all of them by 616%. Due to the limited number of working paths in each PG, ILP can handle dynamically arrived connection requests in a reasonable amount of time. Also, we find that the number of affected working paths in GSP is about half of that in SSR. We conclude that GSP provides a scalable and efficient solution for dynamic spare capacity reconfiguration following the (M:N)n control architecture.

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

optical networks
spare capacity reconfiguration

shared path protection
shared risk link group
(m:n)n protection architecture
integer linear programming (ilp)


a self-organising solution to the collective sort problem in distributed tuple spaces Coordination languages and models are recently moving towards the application of techniques coming from the research context of complex systems: adaptivity and self-organisation are exploited in order to tackle typical features of systems to coordinate, such as openness, dynamism and unpredictability. In this paper we focus on a paradigmatic problem we call collective sort , where autonomous agents are assigned the task of moving tuples across different tuple spaces with the goal of reaching perfect clustering: tuples of the same kind are to be collected in the same, unique tuple space. We describe a self-organising solution to this problem, where each agent moves tuples according to partial observations, still making complete sorting emerge from any initial tuple configuration.

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


An alternative to model selection in ordinary regression The weaknesses of established model selection procedures based on hypothesis testing and similar criteria are discussed and an alternative based on synthetic (composite) estimation is proposed. It is developed for the problem of prediction in ordinary regression and its properties are explored by simulations for the simple regression. Extensions to a general setting are described and an example with multiple regression is analysed. Arguments are presented against using a selected model for any inferences.

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

mean squared error
single-model based estimator
synthetic estimator
two-stage procedure


generalized reliability-oriented energy management for real-time embedded applications DVFS remains an important energy management technique for embedded systems. However, its negative impact on transient fault rates has been recently shown. In this paper, we propose the Generalized Shared Recovery (GSHR) technique to optimally use the DVFS technique in order to achieve a given reliability goal for real-time embedded applications. Our technique determines the optimal number of recoveries to deploy as well as task-level processing frequencies to minimize the energy consumption while achieving the reliability goal and meeting the timing constraints. The recoveries may be shared among tasks, improving the prospects of DVFS compared to existing reliability-aware power management frameworks. The experimental evaluation points to the close-to-optimal energy savings of our proposed technique.

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


On combining classifiers for speaker authentication ? Speaker verification and utterance verification are examples of techniques that can be used for speaker authentication purposes. Speaker verification consists of accepting or rejecting the claimed identity of a speaker by processing samples of his/her voice. Usually, these systems are based on HMM models that try to represent the characteristics of the speakers vocal tracts. Utterance verification systems make use of a set of speaker-independent speech models to recognize a certain utterance. If the utterances consist of passwords, this can be used for identity verification purposes. Up to now, both techniques have been used separately. This paper is focused on the problem of how to combine these two sources of information. New architectures are presented to join an utterance verification system and a speaker verification system in order to improve the performance in a speaker verification task.

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

speaker authentication
speaker verification

utterance authentication
gaussian mixture models
verbal information verification
neural networks
classifier combination


Symbolic analysis of bounded Petri nets This work presents a symbolic approach for the analysis of bounded Petri nets. The structure and behavior of the Petri net is symbolically modeled by using Boolean functions, thus reducing reasoning about Petri nets to Boolean calculation. The set of reachable markings is calculated by symbolically firing the transitions in the Petri net. Highly concurrent systems suffer from the state explosion problem produced by an exponential increase of the number of reachable states. This state explosion is handled by using Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) which are capable of representing large sets of markings with small data structures. Petri nets have the ability to model a large variety of systems and the flexibility to describe causality, concurrency, and conditional relations. The manipulation of vast state spaces generated by Petri nets enables the efficient analysis of a wide range of problems, e.g., deadlock freeness, liveness, and concurrency. A number of examples are presented in order to show how large reachability sets can be generated, represented, and analyzed with moderate BDD sizes. By using this symbolic framework, properties requiring an exhaustive analysis of the reachability graph can be efficiently verified.

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

formal verification
symbolic methods
binary decition diagrams


Smart box architecture: a hybrid solution for IP QoS provisioning This work proposes a hybrid solution, called the smart box architecture (SBoX), that provides quality of service (QoS) in internet protocol (IP)-based networks. SBoX architecture consists of SBoX servers, which are located at the network boundary, and SBoX routers, which are add-on label switching routers (LSR), which are located at interior network nodes. This approach combines the advantages of three existing technologies: integrated services (Intserv), differentiated services (Diffserv), and multi-protocol label switching (MPLS). SBoX aggregates traffic in three levels: commodity-flows, macro-flows and micro-flows. Commodity-flows aggregate flow between every pair of edge points. The packets of the same commodity-flow are marked by an MPLS label. Commodity-flows are composed of macro-flows, which aggregate the traffic of a particular enterprise. Macro-flows are associated with an explicit service level agreement (SLA), which is offered to users. Macro-flows are composed of micro-flows, which are the traffic associated with a particular individual in an enterprise or a particular application. SBoX servers provide Diffserv like SLA to users, and use class-based queuing (CBQ) with a hierarchy of flow aggregation. SBoX servers manage macro-flows and commodity-flows only, and leave the management of micro-flows to the enterprise/users which signed the SLA for the macro-flow. SBoX routers perform MPLS routing of commodity-flows in interior network nodes. SBoX routers can be combined with existing best-effort routers to provide QoS in a network that lacks end-to-end deployment of LSRs. This paper describes the SBoX architecture and its operation in detail. It also reports experimental results obtained on a prototype network. The results indicate that the SBoX architecture can indeed provide guaranteed performance in a congested network, and that SBoX routers can be combined with commodity best-effort routers to enable QoS in a heterogeneous network.

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

quality of service
diffserv
intserv
mpls
cbq
label switching routers
sbox routers
sbox servers


Applications of mathematical software packages for modelling and simulations in environmental engineering education Modelling and simulation of the oxygen-sag model are used to demonstrate the potential benefits of the application of user friendly numerical software packages in environmental engineering education and practice. The simulation is used to obtain the profiles of oxygen concentration, oxygen deficit, as well as de-oxygenation and re-oxygenation rates as function of distance for a steady river velocity. Simulations are carried out for various organic loads and ambient temperatures. It is shown that the solution profiles obtained by numerical simulation demonstrate the processes involved more than the point values provided by analytical solution. The use of the user friendly software packages encourages the students to ask what if questions, to carry out parametric studies and to learn by discovery. Due to the many benefits of modelling and simulation we can envision rapid spread of the use of simulation in environmental, chemical and biotechnology engineering education and practice.

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

education
environmental engineering
modelling
simulation

oxygen sag
polymath
wastewater treatment


Understanding the product information inference process in electronic word-of-mouth: An objectivity-subjectivity dichotomy perspective We examined the actions of a customer when inferring product information from electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) material at a website. We developed a customer purchase intention model and simulated various eWOM levels within this, adopting an objectivity-subjectivity dichotomy, and considering quality and preference as the major antecedents of customer purchase intention. We inferred the information that the customers had obtained from the eWOM by categorizing the customers' responses. The eWOM was parameterized using mean and variance: products that were categorized into quality and preference goods. We considered four cases in which customers infer different product information and exhibit different reactions. Items for quality and preference goods were developed by using a card-sorting method. An experimental survey was conducted on 121 Korean Internet shopping mall users. The hypotheses were partially supported using a Partial Least Squares path comparison method. Overall, our study should provide guidance to firms in their managing eWOM systems by identifying how customers react to them at various levels. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

electronic word-of-mouth (ewom)
customer's purchase intention
product type
pls


A parallel fast algorithm for computing the Helmholtz integral operator in 3-D layered media In this paper, we propose a parallel fast algorithm for computing the product of the discretized Helmholtz integral operator in layered media and a vector in O ( N q N z 2 N x N y log N x N y ) operations. Here NxNyNz N x N y N z is the number of sources and Nq N q is the number of quadrature points used in the evaluation of the Sommerfeld integral in the definition of layered media Greens function (for problems in thin-layer media, Nz=O(1) N z = O ( 1 ) ). Such a product forms the key step of many iterative solvers (such as the Krylov subspace based GMRES and BiCGSTAB) for linear systems arising from the integral equation methods for the Helmholtz equations. The fast solver is based on two important techniques which reduce the cost of quadrature summations in the Sommerfeld contour integral for Greens functions in 3-D layered media. The first technique is the removal of surface pole effects along the real axis integration contour by identifying the pole locations with a discrete wavelet transform; In the second technique, we apply a window-based high frequency filter to shorten the contour length. As a result, the integral operator for the 3-D layered media can be efficiently written as a sum of 2-D Hankel cylindrical integral operators, and the latter can be calculated by either a tree-code or a 2-D wideband fast multipole method in a fast manner. Numerical results show the efficiency and parallelism of the proposed fast algorithm.

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

layered media
greens function
fast multipole method

helmholtz equation
window function
tree-code


Grasp quality measures: review and performance The correct grasp of objects is a key aspect for the right fulfillment of a given task. Obtaining a good grasp requires algorithms to automatically determine proper contact points on the object as well as proper hand configurations, especially when dexterous manipulation is desired, and the quantification of a good grasp requires the definition of suitable grasp quality measures. This article reviews the quality measures proposed in the literature to evaluate grasp quality. The quality measures are classified into two groups according to the main aspect they evaluate: location of contact points on the object and hand configuration. The approaches that combine different measures from the two previous groups to obtain a global quality measure are also reviewed, as well as some measures related to human hand studies and grasp performance. Several examples are presented to illustrate and compare the performance of the reviewed measures.

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


Java-ML: A Machine Learning Library Java-ML is a collection of machine learning and data mining algorithms, which aims to be a readily usable and easily extensible API for both software developers and research scientists. The interfaces for each type of algorithm are kept simple and algorithms strictly follow their respective interface. Comparing different classifiers or clustering algorithms is therefore straightforward, and implementing new algorithms is also easy. The implementations of the algorithms are clearly written, properly documented and can thus be used as a reference. The library is written in Java and is available from http://java-ml.sourceforge.net/under the GNU GPL license.

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

open source
java library
feature selection
classification


THE ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXTS, CONTROLS AND IMPLEMENTATION OF E-BUSINESS A control framework for successful business-to-consumer information systems (B2CIS) implementation was developed based on IS controls and implementation studies. Our research model suggests that top management support, system compatibility, IS infrastructure, IS expertise, and perceived importance of IS security affect four control modes: controls for system continuity, access controls, communication controls and informal controls. Furthermore, it posits that B2CIS controls affect B2CIS implementation, which has three dimensions: volume, sophistication, and information contents. Empirical tests indicated that IS infrastructure and perceived importance of IS security affect the usage of four modes of B2CIS controls, while system compatibility affects the usage of all these control modes except communication controls. The controls for system continuity are the most important controls for B2CIS implementation. This study provides insights into the adequacy of security measures undertaken under specific organizational circumstances for systems implementation.

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

business-to-consumer information systems (b2cis)


Augmented vessels for quantitative analysis of vascular abnormalities and endovascular treatment planning Endovascular treatment plays an important role in the minimally invasive treatment of patients with vascular diseases, a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Given a segmentation of an angiography, quantitative analysis of abnormal structures can aid radiologists in choosing appropriate treatments and apparatuses. However, effective quantitation is only attainable if the abnormalities are identified from the vasculature. To achieve this, a novel method is developed, which works on the simpler shape of normal vessels to identify different vascular abnormalities (viz. stenotic atherosclerotic plaque, and saccular and fusiform aneurysmal lumens) in an indirect fashion, instead of directly manipulating the complex-shaped abnormalities. The proposed method has been tested on three synthetic and 17 clinical data sets. Comparisons with two related works are also conducted. Experimental results show that our method can produce satisfactory identification of the abnormalities and approximations of the ideal post-treatment vessel lumens. In addition, it can help increase the repeatability of the measurement of clinical parameters significantly.

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

angiography
endovascular treatment planning
quantitative analysis


human pol ii promoter prediction by using nucleotide property composition features RNA polymerase II (Pol II) promoter is a key region that regulates differential transcription of protein coding genes. The identification of the RNA polymerase II (Pol II) promoter is one of the most challenging problems in genome annotation. Though many promoter prediction methods and tools have been developed, they have not yet extracted informative features from large-scale DNA sequences to improve predictive accuracy. A prediction method ProPolyII, which involves mining informative nucleotide property composition (NPC) features, is proposed to design a support vector machine-based classifier. An existing data set HumP (1872 human promoters and 1870 non-promoters) is used to evaluate ProPolyII for promoter prediction. ProPolyII yields 70 informative NPC features with training and test accuracies of 99.1\% and 95.1\%, respectively. The 70 NPC features consist of 46 4-mer motifs, 3 nucleotide properties and 21 global descriptors. The accuracies are better than those of Prom-Machine (94.9\% and 91.1\%) and M1 (97.4\% and 93.6\%) which uses top 128 4-mer motifs and 36 global descriptors, respectively. The high predictive performance indicates that ProPolyII can be beneficial in the identification of promoters comparative to other methods.

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

promoter
global descriptors
nucleotide property


admissible orderings and finiteness criteria for differential standard bases We prove that any admissible ordering on ordinary differential monomials in one differential indeterminate can be specified by a canonical set of matrices. The relations between some classes of these orderings are studied. We give criteria of finiteness of differential standard bases and propose an algorithm that computes such bases if they are finite.

B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 partitioning-based parallel irregular reductions Different parallelization methods for irregular reductions on shared memory multiprocessors have been proposed in the literature in recent years. We have classified all these methods and analyzed them in terms of a set of properties: data locality, memory overhead, exploited parallelism, and workload balancing. In this paper we propose several techniques to increase the amount of exploited parallelism and to introduce load balancing into an important class of these methods. Regarding parallelism, the proposed solution is based on the partial expansion of the reduction array. Load balancing is discussed in terms of two techniques. The first technique is a generic one, as it deals with any kind of load imbalance present in the problem domain. The second technique handles a special case of load imbalance which occurs whenever a large number of write operations are concentrated on small regions of the reduction arrays. Efficient implementations of the proposed optimizing solutions for a particular method are presented, experimentally tested on static and dynamic kernel codes, and compared with other parallel reduction methods. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

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

irregular reductions
data locality
workload balancing

shared-memory multiprocessor
numa machines


Semi-closed cube: An effective approach to trading off data cube size and query response time The results of data cube will occupy huge amount of disk space when the base table is of a large number of attributes. A new type of data cube, compact data cube like condensed cube and quotient cube, was proposed to solve the problem. It compresses data cube dramatically. However, its query cost is so high that it cannot be used in most applications. This paper introduces the semi-closed cube to reduce the size of data cube and achieve almost the same query response time as the data cube does. Semi-closed cube is a generalization of condensed cube and quotient cube and is constructed from a quotient cube. When the query cost of quotient cube is higher than a given threshold, semi-closed cube selects some views and picks a fellow for each of them. All the tuples of those views are materialized except those closed by their fellows. To find a tuple of those views, users only need to scan the view and its fellow. Thus, their query performance is improved. Experiments were conducted using a real-world data set. The results show that semi-closed cube is an effective approach of data cube.

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

warehousing
olap (on-line analytical processing)


Optimal gene subset selection using the modified SFFS algorithm for tumor classification A reliable and precise classification of tumors is essential for successful treatment of cancer. Gene selection is an important step for improved diagnostics. The modified SFFS (sequential forward floating selection) algorithm based on weighted Mahalanobis distance, called MSWM, is proposed to identify optimal informative gene subsets taking into account joint discriminatory power for accurate discrimination in this study. Firstly, we make use of the one-dimensional weighted Mahalanobis distance to perform a preliminary selection of genes and then make use of the modified SFFS method and multidimensional weighted Mahalanobis distance to obtain the optimal informative gene subset for tumor classification. Finally, we used the k nearest neighbor and naive Bayes methods to classify tumors based on the optimal gene subset selected using the MSWM method. To validate the efficiency, the proposed MSWM method is applied to classify two different DNA microarray datasets. Our empirical study shows that the MSWM method for tumor classification can obtain better effectiveness of classification than the BWR (the ratio of between-groups to within-groups sum of squares) and IVGA_I (independent variable group analysis I) methods. It suggests that the MSWM gene selection method is ability to obtain correct informative gene subsets taking into account genes joint discriminatory power for tumor classification.

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

optimal gene subset selection
modified sffs
weighted mahalanobis distance
joint discriminatory power
tumor classification


A simple model and a distributed architecture for realizing one-stop e-government In this paper, we propose a generic model for one-stop e-government and a distributed architecture for its implementation. The model follows a very basic paradigm: the public administration is composed of an unstructured network of entities that upload and download information objects to/from each other and to/from service repositories in order to deliver client-centered services. The architecture is based on widely available technologies such as HTTP, SSL, XML and PKI and it supports the implementation of life events, single access points, concurrent providers and integrated delivery channels. We argue that the proposed architecture permits the interconnection of almost any kind of government body and that it establishes a common ground upon which new standardization levels can be built. As a starting point, we also define a set of general requirements for one-stop e-government. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

e-government
one-stop government
electronic services
web services
e-government models and architectures


Mixed dimensional coupling in finite element stress analysis Many analysis models utilize finite elements of reduced dimension. However, to capture stress concentrations at local details, it would be desirable to combine the reduced dimensional element types with higher dimensional elements in a single finite element model. It is therefore important in such cases to integrate into the analyses some scheme for coupling the element types that conforms to the governing equations of the problem. In this paper, a novel method that can correctly couple beams to solids, beams to shells and shells to solids for elastic problems is presented. The approach adopted is to equate the work done on either side of the interface between dimensions, and this leads to multipoint constraint equations, thus providing a relationship among nodal degrees of freedom between the differing element types. Example results show that the proposed technique does not introduce any spurious stresses at the dimensional interfaces.

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

finite elements
mixed dimensional coupling

dimensional reduction
multi-point constraint equations


A fuzzy model for managing natural noise in recommender systems Focus on natural noise management in collaborative filtering recommender systems. The natural noise management is improved through fuzzy tools. The proposal detects the noisy ratings by analysing the user's and item's tendencies. Noisy ratings are corrected by predicting their value with a noise free dataset. The proposal is evaluated on three widely-used recommendation datasets on movies domain and it shows improvements compared with other techniques.

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


Approximating the weighted pseudospectra of large matrices In different applications it is necessary to compute the pseudospectra of matrices in an energy or weighted norm. In this work we develop a practical method to convert an Arnoldi factorization based on the Euclidean inner product into another Arnoldi factorization in a weighted inner product. We also propose how to use this approach to find a portion of the weighted pseudospectra of large matrices. Numerical results on different test problems are presented. (c) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

spectrum
pseudospectrum
weighted pseudospectrum
arnoldi method
weighted arnoldi factorization


Parametric study of the aeroelastic response of mistuned bladed disks Mistuning, imperfections in the cyclical symmetry of bladed disks, is unavoidable due to many factors, including manufacturing tolerances and in-service wear and tear. Even small mistuning levels can cause large changes in the dynamics of bladed disks because mistuning destroys cyclic symmetry. In particular, mistuning can cause mode localization and a drastic increase of the maximum forced response level. To study mistuning, classical finite element analyses (FEA) approaches become computationally expensive because mistuning requires the analysis of the full disk model. Recently, compact and accurate reduced order models (ROMs) of mistuned bladed disks considering only structural coupling between sectors have been developed. However, the incorporation of unsteady aerodynamic effects into these ROMs is limited despite the fact that accurately accounting for the aerodynamic blade-to-blade coupling is essential for predicting mistuning effects in turbomachinery. Previous studies by the authors have shown that aerodynamic coupling can have important effects on the dynamics of bladed disks for subsonic flows. In particular, differences in the aerodynamic damping affect significantly the forced response amplification factor, and aeroelastic mistuned mode shapes differ significantly from the structural ones. These phenomena are accentuated in the transonic regime, where the presence of the shock creates a stronger blade-to-blade coupling than in the subsonic regime, as demonstrated herein. Parametric studies are conducted for various inflow Mach numbers and incidence angles. It is shown that the effect of aerodynamic coupling diminishes when the inflow Mach number is smaller, while the differences in the aerodynamic damping values still affect significantly the dynamics of mistuned bladed disks. Also, severe mistuned mode localizations are observed for modes having separated frequencies due to frequency veering.

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

mistuning
aerodynamic coupling
aerodynamic damping
mode localization
turbomachinery


More than ink Realization of a data-embedding pen In this paper we present a novel digital pen device, called data-embedding pen, for enhancing the value of handwriting on physical paper. This pen produces an additional ink-dot sequence along a written stroke during writing. This ink-dot sequence represents arbitrary information, such as writers name and writing date. Since the information is placed on the paper as an ink-dot sequence, it can be retrieved just by scanning or photographing the paper. In addition to the hardware of the data-embedding pen, this paper also proposes a coding scheme for reliable data-embedding and retrieval. In fact, the physical data-embedding on a paper will undergo various severe errors and therefore a robust coding scheme is necessary. Through experiments on data written by two writers, we show that we can embed 32 bits on short and simple or even on more complex patterns and finally retrieve them with a high reliability.

O O O 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


Nonlinear behavior of reactor-separator-recycle systems The nonlinear behavior of reactor-separator-recycle systems is studied. The dimensionless mole-balance equations are parameterized by the plant Damkohler number (Da) and the separation specifications. Reactant accumulation does not occur if Da > Da(cr). Da(cr) corresponds to a bifurcation point of the mole-balance equations and depends on separation performance. For one reactant recycle and high purity separation, Da(cr) = 1. When two reactants are recycled, multiple steady states are possible. In this case, Da(cr) depends also on the control structure. Close to Da(cr), control structures must change the reaction volume or temperature in order to reject effectively the disturbances. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

design
nonlinear analysis
reactor-separator-recycle


A Testbed for MANETs: Implementation, Experiences and Learned Lessons In this paper, we present the implementation, experiences and lessons learned of our tesbed for Ad-hoc networks and Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). We used OLSR protocol for real experimental evaluation. We investigate the effect of mobility and topology changing in the throughput of a MANET. We study the impact of best-effort traffic for Mesh Topology and Linear Topology. In this work, we consider eight experimental models and we assess the performance of our testbed in terms of throughput, round trip time and packet loss. We found that some of the OLSR's problems can be solved, for instance the routing loop, but this protocol still has the self-interference problem. Also, there is an intricate interdependence between MAC layer and routing layer. We carried out the experiments considering stationary nodes of an Ad-hoc network and the node mobility of MANETs. We found that throughput of TCP was improved by reducing Link Quality Window Size (LQWS). For TCP data flow, we got better results when the LQWS value was 10. Moreover, we found that the node join and leave operations increase the packet loss. The OLSR protocol has a good performance when the source node is moving. However, the performance is not good when the relay nodes are moving.

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

manet testbed
network protocols
performance analysis


A heuristic hierarchical scheme for academic search and retrieval We present PubSearch, a new system for academic search and retrieval. PubSearch is based on a cascade hierarchy of three heuristics. The heuristics include Term-Frequency, citation distribution and topics inter-relations. We compare PubSearch performance against ACM Portal on 58 user queries. The system outperforms ACM Portal in terms of ERR, NDCG & LEX metric by large margin.

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

search and retrieval
heuristic document re-ranking


Mechanistic study of palladium-catalyzed telomerization of 1,3-butadiene with methanol The Pd-catalyzed telomerization in the presence of phosphine and carbene ligands has been computed. It is shown that the C-C coupling of the less stable complex A with one trans- and one cis-butadiene in syn orientation forms the most stable intermediate B and is favorable both kinetically and thermodynamically. Protonation of B leads to equilibrium of the two most stable isomers of intermediate C. The overall regioselectivity is favored thermodynamically.

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


Two-dimensional characteristic boundary conditions for open boundaries in the lattice Boltzmann methods Two-dimensional (2-D) characteristic boundary conditions (CBC) based on the characteristic analysis are formulated for the lattice Boltzmann methods (LBM). In this approach, the classical locally-one dimensional inviscid (LODI) relations are improved by recovering multi-dimensional effects on flows at open boundaries. The 2-D CBC are extended to a general subsonic flow configuration in the LBM and the effects of the transverse terms are clarified. From the vortex convection and vortex shedding problems, it is verified that the improved CBC shows better performance in accuracy compared to the conventional CBC approaches.

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

characteristic boundary conditions (cbc)

locally one-dimensional inviscid (lodi) relations


Parallel Two-Sided Matrix Reduction to Band Bidiagonal Form on Multicore Architectures The objective of this paper is to extend, in the context of multicore architectures, the concepts of tile algorithms [Buttari et al., 2007] for Cholesky, LU, and QR factorizations to the family of two-sided factorizations. In particular, the bidiagonal reduction of a general, dense matrix is very often used as a preprocessing step for calculating the Singular Value Decomposition. Furthermore, in the Top500 list of June 2008, 98 percent of the fastest parallel systems in the world were based on multicores. This confronts the scientific software community with both a daunting challenge and a unique opportunity. The challenge arises from the disturbing mismatch between the design of systems based on this new chip architecture-hundreds of thousands of nodes, a million or more cores, reduced bandwidth and memory available to cores-and the components of the traditional software stack, such as numerical libraries, on which scientific applications have relied for their accuracy and performance. The many-core trend has even more exacerbated the problem, and it becomes critical to efficiently integrate existing or new numerical linear algebra algorithms suitable for such hardware. By exploiting the concept of tile algorithms in the multicore environment (i.e., high level of parallelism with fine granularity and high-performance data representation combined with a dynamic data-driven execution), the band bidiagonal reduction presented here achieves 94 Gflop/s on a 12; 000 x 12; 000 matrix with 16 Intel Tigerton 2.4 GHz processors. The main drawback of the tile algorithms approach for the bidiagonal reduction is that the full reduction cannot be obtained in one stage. Other methods have to be considered to further reduce the band matrix to the required form.

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

bidiagonal reduction
singular value decomposition
tile algorithms
multicores


Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system for classification of ECG signals using Lyapunov exponents This paper describes the application of adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) model for classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. Decision making was performed in two stages: feature extraction by computation of Lyapunov exponents and classification by the ANFIS trained with the backpropagation gradient descent method in combination with the least squares method. Four types of ECG beats (normal beat, congestive heart failure beat, ventricular tachyarrhythmia beat, and atrial fibrillation beat) obtained from the PhysioBank database were classified by four ANFIS classifiers. To improve diagnostic accuracy, the fifth ANFIS classifier (combining ANFIS) was trained using the outputs of the four ANFIS classifiers as input data. The proposed ANFIS model combined the neural network adaptive capabilities and the fuzzy logic qualitative approach. Some conclusions concerning the saliency of features on classification of the ECG signals were obtained through analysis of the ANFIS. The performance of the ANFIS model was evaluated in terms of training performance and classification accuracies and the results confirmed that the proposed ANFIS model has potential in classifying the ECG signals.

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

adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (anfis)


A new current-mode synthesis method for dynamic translinear filters and its applications in hearing instruments A new current mode synthesis method for dynamic translinear filters is proposed. As a design example, we have considered an ultra-low power second order filter working in audio frequency range, for hearing aids application, and using subthreshold MOS devices. It has a nominal supply voltage of 1.2 V and works down to 1 Volt. It has a power consumption of 5 mu W. The filter cut-off frequency and its Q factor can be tuned respectively from 600 Hz to 13 kHz and from 0.6 to 1.1. Mismatch problems are investigated on the circuit level and an on-chip compensation method is proposed.

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

dynamic translinear
subthreshold mos
hearing instruments

low voltage
low power
filter design
audiofrequency


A social network matrix for implicit and explicit social network plates We consider (online) implicit social networks. We propose a social network matrix to measure the implicit relationships among the entities in various social networks. We derive several indicators to characterize the dynamics in online social networks.

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

implicit social network
online social network


Introduction to the Fractality Principle of Consciousness and the Sentyon Postulate Recently, consciousness research has gained much attention. Indeed, the question at stake is significant: Why is the brain not just a computing device, but generates a perception from within? Ambitious endeavors trying to simulate the entire human brain assume that the algorithm will do the trick: as soon as we assemble the brain in a computer and increase the number of operations per time, consciousness will emerge by itself. I disagree with this simplistic representation. My argument emerges from the atomism paradox: the irreducible space of the consciously perceived world, the endospace is incompatible with the reducible and decomposable architecture of the brain or a computer. I will first discuss the fundamental challenges in current consciousness models and then propose a new model based on the fractality principle: the whole is in each of its parts. This new model copes with the atomism paradox by implementing an iterative mapping of information from higher-order brain structures to smaller scales on the cellular and molecular level, which I will refer to as fractalization. This information fractalization gives rise to a new form of matter that is conscious (bright matter). Bright matter is composed of conscious particles or units named sentyons. The internal fractality of these sentyons will close a loop (the psychic loop) in a recurrent fractal neural network (RFNN) that allows for continuous and complete information transformation and sharing between higher-order brain structures and the endpoint substrate of consciousness at the molecular level.

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


a general framework for automatic on-line replay detection in sports video Replay detection is a pivotal step for sports video highlight extraction, which is a very promising application of multimedia analysis. In this paper, a general framework, which is based on a Bayesian network, is proposed to make full use of the multiple clues, including shot structure, gradual transition pattern, slow-motion, and sports scene. A novel algorithm based on motion vector reliability classification is proposed to analyze the gradual transition patterns, so that the replay detector can meet the requirements of automatic on-line applications. This is the first integrated general replay detection framework proposed in the literature. Extensive experiments on diversified sports games have proven the scheme efficient, accurate and robust.

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

replay detection
motion vector reliability
bayesian network


Enhanced qualitative probabilistic networks for resolving trade-offs Qualitative probabilistic networks were designed to overcome, to at least some extent, the quantification problem known to probabilistic networks. Qualitative networks abstract from the numerical probabilities of their quantitative counterparts by using signs to summarise the probabilistic influences between their variables. One of the major drawbacks of these qualitative abstractions, however, is the coarse level of representation detail that does not provide for indicating strengths of influences. As a result, the trade-offs modelled in a network remain unresolved upon inference. We present an enhanced formalism of qualitative probabilistic networks to provide for a finer level of representation detail. An enhanced qualitative probabilistic network differs from a basic qualitative network in that it distinguishes between strong and weak influences. Now, if a strong influence is combined, upon inference, with a conflicting weak influence, the sign of the net influence may be readily determined. Enhanced qualitative networks are purely qualitative in nature, as basic qualitative networks are, yet allow for resolving some trade-offs upon inference. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

probabilistic reasoning
qualitative reasoning
trade-off resolution


Holistic verification of handwritten phrases In this paper, we describe a system for rapid verification of unconstrained off-line handwritten phrases using perceptual holistic features of the handwritten phrase image. The system is used to verify handwritten street names automatically extracted from live U.S. mail against recognition results of analytical classifiers. Presented with a binary image of a street name and an ASCII street name, holistic features (reference lines, large gaps and local contour extrema) of the street name hypothesis are "predicted" from the expected features of the constituent characters using heuristic rules. A dynamic programming algorithm is used to match the predicted features with the extracted image features. Classes of holistic features are matched sequentially in increasing order of cost, allowing an ACCEPT/REJECT decision to be arrived at in a time-efficient manner. The system rejects errors with 98 percent accuracy at the 30 percent accept level, while consuming approximately 20/msec per image on the average on a 150 MHz SPARC 10.

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

word verification
holistic approaches
word shape matching
handwritten word recognition
address interpretation


LSTRKFALTG A forward modeling program to compute theoretical gravity anomalies of strike limited listric fault structures with prescribed vertical variation in density ? A method to compute the gravity anomalies of strike limited listric fault structures among which the density contrast varies continuously with depth is presented along with a program, LSTRKFALTG. The expression for the gravity anomaly due to a listric fault structure having finite strike length is derived in the space domain using both analytical and numerical approaches. The main program is supported with a subroutine SIMP. Calculation of gravity anomalies at different offsets across a synthetic fault structure reveals the fact that the offset of the profile controls the magnitude of the gravity anomaly. Sample input and output data files pertaining to a synthetic fault model are presented. The validity and efficacy of the method is demonstrated with a real field example.

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

listric fault structure
finite strike
offset
forward modeling
gravity anomaly


Parameter estimation for SAR moving target in complex image domain Based on the proposed parametric model of SAR ground moving target in the complex image domain, this paper derives the Cramer-Rao bounds (CRB) for the unknown model parameters estimation and obtains the inherent limitations for the moving target motion estimation in the SAR complex image domain. Firstly, the relationships are analyzed among the estimation performance and the target's scattering intensity, Doppler parameters, motion parameters, as well as the power spectra of the target and the clutter. Furthermore, the parameter estimation performance is compared in the signal domain and the complex image domain (CID) to draw some useful conclusions. Besides, the reduction resolution processing is proposed to improve the parameter estimation, and its performance improvement is also presented with analytic expressions. For the homogeneous background, it is shown that the accurate parameter estimation and azimuth location may be realized for SAR ground moving target in the complex image domain. Finally, some numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

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

moving target
complex image domain
parameter estimation

synthetic aperture radar (sar)
cramer-rao bound (crb)
reduce resolution processing (rrp)


Concentric Circular Arrays for Stratospheric High-Altitude Platforms Wireless Sensor Networks In this paper, a concentric circular array (CCA) is designed to provide feasible link between High-Altitude Platform (HAP)which acts as a sink stationto sensor nodes placed on ground to form a Wireless Sensor Network. The proposed array design technique provides two types of coverage cells namely; wider coverage cell of 30km radius and another smaller cell of 8km radius. The link feasibility is examined for practical sensor models at two different frequencies (2.4GHz and 868MHz) and two corresponding bit rates (250 and 38.4kbps) and shows the possibility of communications between the HAP and sensors at all scenarios. The CCA is optimized to improve the power gain inside the cell and reduce the out-of-cell sidelobe radiation using a modified Dolph-Chebyshev CCA. The comparison with conventional antenna models that give the same coverage radii shows that the link performance in terms of bit energy to noise power spectral density ratio can be improved by 11.37dB for cells of 8km radius and by 16.8dB in the case of 30km radius cells which make the link at 2.4GHz to be feasible and realizable compared to using conventional antenna techniques.

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 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

wireless sensor network
concentric circular arrays

high altitude platforms
directional antennas


The PascolettiSerafini Scalarization Scheme and Linear Vector Optimization The PascolettiSerafini scalarization scheme for general vector optimization problems is studied. It is specified to linear vector optimization to give minimal representation formulae for the weakly efficient solution set and the efficient solution set. Several facts on connectedness of the solution sets of PascolettiSerafinis scalar auxiliary problems, both for linear vector optimization and for nonlinear vector optimization, are established.

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

linear vector optimization
thepascolettiserafini scalarization
representation formula
solutionconnectedness


identifying bridging rules between conceptual clusters A bridging rule in this paper has its antecedent and action from different conceptual clusters. We first design two algorithms for mining bridging rules between clusters in a database, and then propose two non-linear metrics for measuring the interestingness of bridging rules. Bridging rules can be distinct from association rules (or frequent itemsets). This is because (1) bridging rules can be generated by infrequent itemsets that are pruned in association rule mining; and (2) bridging rules are measured by the importance that includes the distance between two conceptual clusters, whereas frequent itemsets are measured by only the support.

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


Constructing the virtual Jing-Hang Grand Canal with onto-draw Constructing virtual 3D historical scenes from literature and records is a very challenging problem due to the difficulty in incorporating different types of domain knowledge into the modeling system. The domain knowledge comes from different experts, including: architects, historians, rendering artists, user interface designers and computer engineers. In this paper we investigate the problem of automatically generating drawings of ancient scenes by ontologies extracted from these domains. We introduce a framework called onto-draw to generate semantic models of desired scenes by constructing hierarchical ontology concept domains. Inconsistencies among them are resolved via an iterative refinement algorithm. We implement the onto-draw based ontology design approach and inconsistency removal technique in the virtual Jing-Hang Grand Canal construction project ( Chen et al., 2010) and achieve encouraging results.

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

designing complex ontology in collaboration


An introduction to multipoint flux approximations for quadrilateral grids Control-volume discretizations using multipoint flux approximations (MPFA) were developed in the last decade. This paper gives an introduction to these methods for quadrilateral grids in two and three dimensions. The introduction is kept on a basic level, and a brief summary to more advanced results is given. Only the O-method with surface midpoints as continuity points is discussed. Flux expressions are derived both in physical and in curvilinear space. Equations for calculation of the transmissibility coefficients are given, and an explicit solution is shown for constant coefficients. K-orthogonality, stability and monotonicity are discussed, and an iterative solution technique is presented. Two numerical examples close the paper.

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

anisotropy
control-volume discretizations
inhomogeneity


Self-organised dynamic recognition states for chaotic neural networks Chaos offers several advantages to the Engineer over other non-chaotic dynamics. One is that chaotic systems are often significantly easier to control than other linear or non-linear systems, requiring only small, appropriately timed perturbations to constrain them within specific unstable periodic orbits (UPOs). Another is that chaotic attractors contain an infinite number of these UPOs. If individual UPOs can be made to represent specific internal states of a system, then a chaotic attractor can be turned into an infinite state machine. In this paper we investigate this possibility with respect to chaotic neural networks. We present a method by which a network can self-select UPOs in response to specific input values. These UPOs correspond to network recognition states for these input values.

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 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


Double threshold autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic model building by genetic algorithms Asymmetric behaviour in both mean and variance is often observed in real time series. The approach we adopt is based on double threshold autoregressive conditionally heteroscedastic (DTARCH) model with normal innovations. This model allows threshold nonlinearity in mean and volatility to be modelled as a result of the impact of lagged changes in assets and squared shocks, respectively. A methodology for building DTARCH models is proposed based on genetic algorithms (GAs). The most important structural parameters, that is regimes and thresholds, are searched for by GAs, while the remaining structural parameters, that is the delay parameters and models orders, vary in some pre-specified intervals and are determined using exhaustive search and an Asymptotic Information Criterion (AIC) like criterion. For each structural parameters trial set, a DTARCH model is fitted that maximizes the (penalized) likelihood (AIC criterion). For this purpose the iteratively weighted least squares algorithm is used. Then the best model according to the AIC criterion is chosen. Extension to the double threshold generalized ARCH (DTGARCH) model is also considered. The proposed methodology is checked using both simulated and market index data. Our findings show that our GAs-based procedure yields results that comparable to that reported in the literature and concerned with real time series. As far as artificial time series are considered, the proposed procedure seems to be able to fit the data quite well. In particular, a comparison is performed between the present procedure and the method proposed by Tsay [Tsay, R.S., 1989, Testing and modeling threshold autoregressive processes. Journal of the American Statistical Association, Theory and Methods, 84, 231-240.] for estimating the delay parameter. The former almost always yields better results than the latter. However, adopting Tsay's procedure as a preliminary stage for finding the appropriate delay parameter may save computational time specially if the delay parameter may vary in a large interval.

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


Simplified fuzzy inference rule-based genetically optimized Hybrid Fuzzy Neural Networks In this study, we introduce an advanced architecture of genetically optimized Hybrid Fuzzy Neural Networks (gHFNN) and develop a comprehensive design methodology supporting their construction. A series of numeric experiments is included to illustrate the performance of the networks. The construction of gHFNN exploits fundamental technologies of Computational Intelligence (CI), namely fuzzy sets, neural networks, and genetic algorithms (GAs). The architecture of the gHFNNs results from a synergistic usage of the genetic optimization-driven hybrid system generated by combining Fuzzy Neural Networks (FNN) with Polynomial Neural Networks (PNN). In this tandem, a FNN supports the formation of the condition part of the rule-based structure of the gHFNN. The conclusion part of the gHFNN is designed using PNNs. We distinguish between two types of the simplified fuzzy inference rule-based FNN structures showing how this taxonomy depends upon the type of a fuzzy partition of input variables. As to the conclusion part of the gHFNN, the development of the PNN dwells on two general optimization mechanisms: the structural optimization is realized via GAs whereas in case of the parametric optimization we proceed with a standard least square method-based learning. To evaluate the performance of the gHFNN, we experimented with three representative numerical examples. A comparative analysis demonstrates that the proposed gHFNN come with higher accuracy as well as superb predictive capabilities when compared with other neurofuzzy models.

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

genetically optimized hybrid fuzzy neural networks (ghfnn)

fuzzy inference rule-based fuzzy neural networks (fnn)

genetically optimized polynomial neural networks (gpnn)


Comprehensive evaluation of aperiodic checkpointing and rejuvenation schemes in operational software system ? This paper examines comprehensive evaluation of aperiodic time-based checkpointing and rejuvenation schemes maximizing the steady-state system availability in an operational software system. We consider two kinds of maintenance policies: checkpointing prior to rejuvenating (CPTR) and rejuvenating prior to checkpointing (RPTC). These schemes are complementary from each other to schedule checkpoints and rejuvenation points. In addition, under a periodic full maintenance operation, we show that aperiodic checkpointing or rejuvenation scheme is optimal to maximize the steady-state system availability by applying the dynamic programming. In numerical examples, CPTR and RPTC are comparatively examined with same overhead parameters, and the effects of CPTR and RPTC on maximizing the steady-state system availability are investigated.

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

software rejuvenation
software aging
steady-state system availability


An efficient XML encoding and labeling method for query processing and updating on dynamic XML data In this paper, we propose an efficient encoding and labeling scheme for XML, called EXEL, which is a variant of the region labeling scheme using ordinal and insert-friendly bit strings. We devise a binary encoding method to generate the ordinal bit strings, and an algorithm to make a new bit string inserted between bit strings without any influences on the order of preexisting bit strings. These binary encoding method and bit string insertion algorithm are the bases of the efficient query processing and the complete avoidance of re-labeling for updates. We present query processing and update processing methods based on EXEL. In addition, the Stack-Tree-Desc algorithm is used for an efficient structural join, and the String B-tree indexing is utilized to improve the join performance. Finally, the experimental results show that EXEL enables complete avoidance of re-labeling for updates while providing fairly reasonable query processing performance. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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


Three kinds of normative behaviour: minimal requirements for feedback models We present an analysis for modelling social norms. In social psychology three different normative behaviours have been identified: obedience, conformity and compliance. We show that this triad is a useful conceptualisation of normative behaviour and that current models only ever deal with conformity and obedience two, neglecting compliance. We argue that this is a result from modelling having so far focussed too much on agent behaviour rather than agent knowledge and that cognitive models of normative behaviour are needed to capture this third and arguably most interesting normative behaviour.

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

social influence research
agent-based modelling


Tighter bounds on preemptive job shop scheduling with two machines We consider the preemptive job shop scheduling problem with two machines, with the objective to minimize the makespan. We present an algorithm that finds a schedule of length at most P-max/12 greater than the optimal schedule length, where P-max is the length of the longest job.

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


Pair-wise discrimination based on a stroke importance measure The pair-wise discriminator is a binary classifier that verifies the outcome of the recognizer if it belongs to a class in a pre-defined confusion pair database. It is difficult to discriminate a pair of characters that are very similar in shape except for a small difference, because the small difference can be overridden by the writing variation. This paper proposes a pair-wise discrimination method that discriminates similar characters by focusing on the structural difference between the two characters. It discriminates a pair of characters by comparing their matching scores between the input character and the models of the two characters. When the stroke matching scores are combined to compute the overall matching score, each stroke is assigned a weight to reflect its importance in discriminating the character pair. By assigning large weights to the discriminative strokes, the difference between the characters is emphasized. The stroke weights are systematically obtained by a neural network training algorithm. In the experiments, the recognition performance was significantly improved by applying the proposed method.

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

character recognition
postprocessing
pair-wise discrimination
stroke weighting


A mechatronic positioning system actuated using a micro DC-motor-driven propeller-thruster One of the greatest challenges facing designers in the mechatronics field is the development of autonomous systems capable of guiding an airborne object along a given trajectory or maintaining its position in a specified location. Nonetheless, developing such ability is essential to support emerging UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) requirements in the civil and military domains. Accordingly, this study commences by constructing a mechatronic system featuring a manipulator arm actuated by a DC-motor-driven constant-pitch propeller and then develops suitable control schemes to regulate the power supplied to the DC motor such that the manipulator arm is driven through a specified rotational displacement. Three different control schemes are implemented to regulate the displacement of the manipulator arm, namely a fixed gain PID controller, a function-based variable gain PID controller and a fuzzy gain-mixing PID controller. The feasibility of the three control systems is evaluated both numerically and experimentally. It is shown that the fixed gain PID controller results in a significant overshoot of the manipulator arm and leads to a loss of control. However, the function-based variable gain PID controller and the fuzzy gain-mixing PID controller both ensure an accurate tracking performance, even when the manipulator arm is manually perturbed during rotation. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

positioning
dc motor
propeller
manipulator


Optimal multi-degree reduction of Bezier curves with constraints of endpoints continuity Given a Bezier curve of degree n, the problem of optimal multi-degree reduction (degree reduction of more than one degree) by a Bezier curve of degree m (m 0) orders can be preserved at two endpoints respectively. The method in the paper performs multi-degree reduction at one time and does not need the stepwise computing. When applied to the multi-degree reduction with endpoints continuity of any orders, the MDR by L-2 obtains the best least squares approximation. Comparison with another method of multi-degree reduction (MDR by L-infinity), which achieves the nearly best uniform approximation with respect to L-infinity norm, is also given. The approximate effect of the MDR by L2 is better than that of the MDR by L-infinity. Explicit approximate error analysis of the multi-degree reduction methods is presented. (C) 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

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

optimal approximation
endpoint continuity


Evaluating and comparing language workbenches: Existing results and benchmarks for the future We describe the challenges posed by the 4 Language Workbench Challenges run so far. We establish a feature model that captures the design space of language workbenches. We classify 10 language workbenches according to our feature model. We present empirical data on 10 implementations of a questionnaire DSL. We propose benchmark problems to be used in future Language Workbench Challenges.

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

domain-specific languages
questionnaire language
survey


Fast asynchronous systems in dense time A testing scenario in the sense of De Nicola and Hennessy is developed to measure the worst-case efficiency of asynchronous systems using dense time. For all three variants considered, it is shown that one can equivalently use discrete time; in the discrete versions, one variant coincides with an approach based on discrete time in Vogler (CONCUR95, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 962, Springer, Berlin, 1995, pp. 299-312), and thus we can clarify the assumptions behind this approach. The resulting testing-preorders are characterized with some kind of refusal traces and shown to satisfy some properties that make them attractive as faster-than relations. The three testing preorders are incomparable in general, but for some interesting classes of systems implications are shown. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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


A New Watermarking Method for 3D Models Based on Integral Invariants In this paper, we propose a new semifragile watermarking algorithm for the authentication of 3D models based on integral invariants. A watermark image is embedded by modifying the integral invariants of some of the vertices. In order to modify the integral invariants, the positions of a vertex and its neighbors are shifted. To extract the watermark, all the vertices are tested for the embedded information, and this information is combined to recover the watermark image. The number of parts of the watermark image that can be recovered will determine the authentication decision. Experimental tests show that this method is robust against normal use modifications introduced by rigid transformations, format conversions, rounding errors, etc., and can be used to test for malicious attacks such as mesh editing and cropping. An additional contribution of this paper is a new algorithm for computing two kinds of integral invariants.

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

semifragile watermark
3d model watermarking


Optimal soft combination for multiple antenna energy detection under primary user emulation attacks One of common threats imposed to the cognitive radio (CR) network is primary user emulation attack (PUEA), where some malicious users try to mimic the primary signal and deceive secondary users to prevent them from accessing the vacant frequency. Here, we propose a cooperative spectrum sensing scheme based on energy detection for CR networks in the presence of multiple smart PUEAs with spectrum sensing capability. In particular, we assume that the CR receiver has a number of L antennas and the CR transmitter sends combined information to the fusion center using beamforming with a single antenna. Soft combination of the observed energies from different CR users is investigated. By employing the NeymanPearson criterion, an optimal soft combination scheme is designed to maximize the cognitive signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (CSINR) for a given false alarm probability. Comparative simulation results validate the superiority of our proposed method in terms of detection accuracy compared to conventional methods.

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

cognitive radio
cooperative spectrum sensing
primary user emulation attack
energy detection
soft combination


Recognition of Adult Images, Videos, and Web Page Bags In this article, we develop an integrated adult-content recognition system which can detect adult images, adult videos, and adult Web page bags, where a Web page bag consists of a Web page and a predefined number of Web pages linked to it through hyperlinks. In our adult image-recognition algorithm, we model skin patches rather than skin pixels, resulting in better results than state-of-the-art algorithms which model skin pixels. In our adult video-recognition algorithm, information from the accompanying audio section around an image in an adult video is used to obtain a prior classification of the image. The algorithm achieves a better performance than the ones which use image information alone or audio information alone. The adult Web page bag recognition is carried out using multi-instance learning based on the combination of classifying texts, images and videos in Web pages. Both the speed and the accuracy for recognizing the Web adult content are increased, in contrast to recognizing Web pages one-by-one.

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

design
human factors
skin patch modeling
recognition of adult videos
recognition of adult web page bags


Optimized Schwarz methods without overlap for highly heterogeneous media In this paper an original variant of the Schwarz domain decomposition method is introduced for heterogeneous media. This method uses new optimized interface conditions specially designed to take into account the heterogeneity between the sub-domains on each sides of the interfaces. Numerical experiments illustrate the dependency of the proposed method with respect to several parameters, and confirm the robustness and efficiency of this method based on such optimized interface conditions. Several mesh partitions taking into account multiple cross points are considered in these experiments.

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

heterogeneous media
domain decomposition method

schwarz algorithm
interface condition
coarse space correction


A primal DPG method without a first-order reformulation ? We show that it is possible to apply the DPG methodology without reformulating a second-order boundary value problem into a first-order system, by considering the simple example of the Poisson equation. The result is a new weak formulation and a new DPG method for the Poisson equation, which has no numerical trace variable, but has a numerical flux approximation on the element interfaces, in addition to the primal interior variable.

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

primal hybrid
discontinuous
petrovgalerkin
laplacian
least squares


Properties incompleteness evaluation by functional verification Verification engineers cannot guarantee the correctness of the system implementation by model checking if the set of proven properties is incomplete. However, the use of model checking lacks widely accepted coverage metrics to evaluate the property completeness. The already existing metrics are based on time-consuming formal approaches that cannot be efficiently applied to medium/large systems. In this context, the paper proposes a coverage methodology based on a combination of static and dynamic verification that allows us to reduce the evaluation time with respect to pure formal approaches. The joining point between static and dynamic verification is represented by a fault model targeting functional descriptions. Functional fault simulation and dynamic automatic test pattern generation are used to quickly estimate the capability of properties in detecting functional faults. This provides a first estimation of the property completeness. Then, if necessary, model checking is used to complete the analysis, avoiding the underestimation of the property coverage that can be obtained due to the lack of exhaustiveness of dynamic verification. The proposed approach is theoretically founded and its effectiveness is compared with already existing techniques. In addition, experimental results to confirm the theoretical results are provided.

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

model checking
property coverage
functional verification