Decision Support Systems in action: Integrated application in a multicriteria decision aid process We describe a real application of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) in which several Decision Support Systems (DSSs) were harmoniously integrated in the interactive learning process of tackling the complex strategic problematic situation faced by the Santa Catarina textile industry, in the south of Brazil. We feel that two significant conclusions can be drawn from our conjoint use of Graphics COPE, MACBETH, V.I.S.A, and EQUITY in building a model of values: (1) Providing decision-support is much more than merely applying a technical tool to solve a well-defined decision problem; it is, at least it was in our case, a complex (but exciting) activity of someone (the facilitator) who, with the support of adequate methodological and technical tools, progressively tried to shed light on an initially ill-structured decision-making process. (2) Under a constructive attitude in decision-aid, DSSs became effective tools for helping the facilitators to help the decision-actors, both in the structuring and evaluation phases of the process, and in creating new decision opportunities. In particular, visual manmachine interaction greatly contributed to the actors' learning about their problem and values. Moreover, visually appealing sensitivity analyses increased the problem-owners' trust in the recommendations elaborated from the model.

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

multicriteria analysis
real-world application


Radio-frequency lesioning in brain tissue with coagulation-dependent thermal conductivity: modelling, simulation and analysis of parameter influence and interaction Radio-frequency brain lesioning is a method for reducing e.g. symptoms of movement disorders. A small electrode is used to thermally coagulate malfunctioning tissue. Influence on lesion size from thermal and electric conductivity of the tissue, microvascular perfusion and preset electrode temperature was investigated using a finite-element model. Perfusion was modelled as an increased thermal conductivity in non-coagulated tissue. The parameters were analysed using a 24-factorial design (n=16) and quadratic regression analysis (n=47). Increased thermal conductivity of the tissue increased lesion volume, while increased perfusion decreased it since coagulation creates a thermally insulating layer due to the cessation of blood perfusion. These effects were strengthened with increased preset temperature. The electric conductivity had negligible effect. Simulations were found realistic compared to in vivo experimental lesions.

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

electrosurgery
rf ablation
finite-element method


A simple method for excluding self-citation from the h-index: the b-index Purpose - The purpose of this conceptual paper is to present a simple, novel method for excluding self-citation from h-index values - the b-index. Design/methodology/approach - The work described assumes that relative self-citation rate is constant across an author's publications and that the citation profile of a set of papers follows a Zipfian distribution, and from this derives a simple mathematical expression for excluding self-citation from h-index values. Findings - It is shown that this new index is simply equal to the integer value of the author's external citation rate (non-self-citations) to the power three quarters, multiplied by their h-index. This value, called the b-index, does not require an extensive analysis of the self-citation rates of individual papers to produce, and appropriately shows the biggest numerical decreases, as compared to the corresponding h-index, for very high self-citers. Practical implications - The method presented allows the user to assess quickly and simply the effects of self-citation on an author's h-index. Originality/value - This paper provides a simple and novel method for excluding self-citation from the h-index and should be of interest to those interested in bibliometrics and databases of scientific literature.

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


Detection of event-related potentials in individual subjects using support vector machines Event-related potentials (ERPs) are tiny electrical brain responses in the human electroencephalogram that are typically not detectable until they are isolated by a process of signal averaging. Owing to the extremely smallsize of ERP components (ranging from less than 1?V to tens of ?V), compared to background brain rhythms, statistical analyses of ERPs are predominantly carried out in groups of subjects. This limitation is a barrier to the translation of ERP-based neuroscience to applications such as medical diagnostics. We show here that support vector machines (SVMs) are a useful method to detect ERP components in individual subjects with a small set of electrodes and a small number of trials for a mismatch negativity (MMN) ERP component. Such a reduced experiment setup is important for clinical applications. One hundred healthy individuals were presented with an auditory pattern containing pattern-violating deviants to evoke the MMN. Two-class SVMs were then trained to classify averaged ERP waveforms in response to the standard tone (tones that match the pattern) and deviant tone stimuli (tones that violate the pattern). The influence of kernel type, number of epochs, electrode selection, and temporal window size in the averaged waveform were explored. When using all electrodes, averages of all available epochs, and a temporal window from 0 to 900-ms post-stimulus, a linear SVM achieved 94.5% accuracy. Further analyses using SVMs trained with narrower, sliding temporal windows confirmed the sensitivity of the SVM to data in the latency range associated with the MMN.

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

support vector machine
event-related potentials
electroencephalography
diagnostic


Studying the impact of negotiation environments on negotiation teams' performance In this article we study the impact of the negotiation environment on the performance of several intra-team strategies (team dynamics) for agent-based negotiation teams that negotiate with an opponent. An agent-based negotiation team is a group of agents that joins together as a party because they share common interests in the negotiation at hand. It is experimentally shown how negotiation environment conditions like the deadline of both parties, the concession speed of the opponent, similarity among team members, and team size affect performance metrics like the minimum utility of team members, the average utility of team members, and the number of negotiation rounds. Our goal is identifying which intra-team strategies work better in different environmental conditions in order to provide useful knowledge for team members to select appropriate intra-team strategies according to environmental conditions. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

agreement technology
automated negotiation
collective decision making
multi-agent system


Program Control Language: a programming language for adaptive distributed applications Many distributed applications must meet stringent performance requirements even when the performance characteristics of the underlying systems and networks vary significantly at runtime. Runtime adaptation can be used to tolerate such changes, but sophisticated adaptive distributed programs can be extremely challenging to design, implement and debug. This paper proposes a language called Program Control Language (PCL) that provides a novel means of specifying adaptations in distributed applications. PCL is based on an abstract, global representation of a distributed program (a static task graph), which enables a programmer to reason about and to describe a wide range of application-specific adaptation strategies at a high level, using a few key mechanisms. PCL provides simple high-level syntax for local and remote adaptation operations, local and remote performance monitoring (and aggregation), and for performing adaptations synchronously or asynchronously with respect to the execution of the application process initiating the adaptation. The global task graph representation enables remote performance metrics and adaptation operations to be specified in simple global terms by any process, and the compiler and runtime system automatically perform the communication and synchronization required for the remote operations. The paper describes the conceptual adaptation framework, the PCL language, and our implementation of the PCL compiler and runtime system. The paper uses three adaptative applications examples to illustrate the capabilities and benefits of PCL, and to show experimentally that the performance overheads of using PCL for implementing an adaptive application are negligible. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

adaptive
distributed
program control language
runtime system
task graph

computational grid
parallel computing
performance metric


Ontologies for crisis contagion management in financial institutions What makes crisis management in financial institutions fairly unique and particularly complex is the accompanying crisis contagion or systemic risk. The subprime mortgage crisis currently happening in the USA is a typical example. In order to further deepen our understanding of how crisis contagion occurs and enhance information interchange and knowledge sharing among related entities, ontologies for crisis contagion management in financial institutions are proposed in this study. Three categories of ontologies, which include static ontology, dynamic ontology, and social ontology, are developed to deal with different perspectives in this domain. The three types of ontology are then united in the Ontology Web Language ( OWL) and the Semantic Web Rules Languages (SWRL) framework, both of which are machine readable. Finally, the case of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) is offered to demonstrate how the proposed ontologies are used in financial institutions.

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

crisis contagion management
ontology
owl
swrl


A self-adaptable query allocation framework for distributed information systems In large-scale distributed information systems, where participants are autonomous and have special interests for some queries, query allocation is a challenge. Much work in this context has focused on distributing queries among providers in a way that maximizes overall performance (typically throughput and response time). However, preserving the participants' interests is also important. In this paper, we make the following contributions. First, we provide a model to define the participants' perception of the system regarding their interests and propose measures to evaluate the quality of query allocation methods. Then, we propose a framework for query allocation called Satisfaction-based Query Load Balancing (SQLB, for short), which dynamically trades consumers' interests for providers' interests based on their satisfaction. Finally, we compare SQLB, through experimentation, with two important baseline query allocation methods, namely Capacity based and Mariposa-like. The results demonstrate that SQLB yields high efficiency while satisfying the participants' interests and significantly outperforms the baseline methods.

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

distributed information systems
query allocation
satisfaction


Orientation contrast model for boundary detection The orientation contrast model can differentiate step edge from texture edge. Using connected edge greatly reduced the edge fragmentation effects. The boundary detection accuracy has an improvement on Rug dataset.

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

edge detection
edge magnitude
edge density
suppression magnitude
edge smoothness
steerable filter


Seamless flipped learning: a mobile technology-enhanced flipped classroom with effective learning strategies The flipped classroom has been recognized by educators as an innovative and effective instructional approach. It totally overthrows traditional instruction by switching in-class instruction time with at-home practicing time. While the effectiveness of the flipped room has been identified, the challenges of applying it to school settings have also been pointed out, such as the need for effective in-class learning designs and the necessity of helping students learn across at-home and in-school contexts. In this paper, the challenges as well as the definition, characteristics, and educational objectives of flipped learning are introduced; moreover, the seamless flipped learning model is proposed by integrating the features of mobile and wireless communication technologies into the flipped classroom model to provide a guide for researchers and educators to develop effective flipped learning activities and plans for helping students learn seamlessly across contexts.

O O O O O O B I 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 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


Deep feature for text-dependent speaker verification Utilized as identity vector: Similar to the normal i-vector idea, deep features extracted from the deep models can be directly used as the speaker identity representations. All of these deep features belonging to the same speaker are averaged to form the target identity vector. Besides four kinds of back-end classifying methods are adopted with these deep feature based identity vectors, including cosine distance, LDA, PLDA, PLDA+LDA; The EER of the best system using the proposed multi-task joint-learned identity vector is 0.10%, only one fifteenth of that in the GMM-UBM baseline.

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

text-dependent speaker verification
deep neural networks
rsr2015


A game theory-based approach to the analysis of cooperative learning in design studios Design studios are set up for cooperative learning and encourage peer communication throughout the design process. However, cooperative learning is difficult to achieve, because students in a studio are also competitors who make every effort to outperform their peers. A theoretical model based on the Prisoner's Dilemma game theory is proposed to analyse the complex behaviours of cooperation and competition in design studios. The result of analysis suggests that inter-group competition, iterative peer assessment, and information transparency are critical factors in promoting cooperative learning in design studios.

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

design education
collaborative design
teamwork


The Menstrual Cycle Menstruation is the cyclic, orderly sloughing of the uterine lining on account of the interactions of hormones produced by the hypothalamus, pituitary, and ovaries. There is a tendency among parents and clinicians to view oligo-amenorrhea as a normal variant in the teen years. In fact, the 95th percentile for the time interval between cycles is 90 days. Thus, it is abnormal for an adolescent to be amenorrheic for greater than 3 months, even in the early gynecologic years. Identification of abnormal menstrual patterns throughout adolescence may permit early identification of potential health concerns for adulthood. Few problems in gynecologic endocrinology are as complex or challenging to the clinician as amenorrhea. However, thorough evaluation of menstrual cycle disorders in adolescence provides a window of opportunity for early diagnosis and treatment of conditions affecting the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian (HPO) axis. Here we discuss a systematic approach to the evaluation and treatment of amenorrhea in adolescents who do not have androgen excess. There is strong evidence that estrogen deficiency is a risk factor for later development of osteoporosis and hip fracture. Delay in the evaluation and treatment of disordered menses in some cases may contribute to reduced bone density. Both patients and clinicians need to view the ovary as an important endocrine organ that helps maintain health, especially bone health.

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

menstrual cycle
amenorrhea
bone health
estrogen deficiency

primary amenorrhea
secondary amenorrhea
hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarian axis
delay in diagnosis
hormone replacement therapy


inspiring women undergraduates This paper describes the conception, motivation, organization, and evaluation of a national, one-day event for women students of computing: the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that such events have value for women students of computing. We hope to show that through introducing these undergraduate women to high profile role models we can inspire them, and that through providing the students with a forum for presenting their own work, we can be inspired by them ourselves. We believe this is a successful and economical model for an event which could be re-used in other countries or regions.

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


Review of Existing Research on Microgravity Boiling and Two-Phase Flow This paper describes research objectives on boiling and two-phase flow under microgravity conditions from both scientific and technological points of view. Existing research for various systems in flow boiling are briefly reviewed and problems indicated for research conducted by available facilities with short microgravity duration. A wide range of experimental subjects that become possible by using different types of test sections is clarified and the validity of long term experiments is emphasized. A first step outline is described for a test loop with interchangeable test sections, such as transparent heated tubes, transparent flat heating surfaces, and narrow channels optimized for individual objectives and restricted by specifications of the facility.

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

pool boiling
two-phase flow
international space station


Multispectral image data fusion using POCS and super-resolution The problem of image data fusion coming from different sensors imaging the same object is to try to obtain a result that integrates the best characteristics of each one of those sensors. In this work, we want to combine the characteristics of multispectral (better spectral definition) and panchromatic (better space definition) images, using the bands from the satellites Landsat-7 (panchromatic) and CBERS-1China-Brazil Earth Resources Satellite (four multispectral bands). The process proposes solutions using projection onto convex sets (POCS) techniques divided in two steps: (a) interpolated image processing, regularizing the block artifacts and using super-resolution techniques based on POCS and (b) synthesis, obtained by sequential and parallel projections or by the least squares method.

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

remote sensing
images synthesis
image interpolation
projections onto convex sets
super-resolution


RIPsec Using reputation-based multilayer security to protect MANETs This paper examines the theory, application, and results for a Reputation-Based Internet Protocol Security (RIPsec) framework that provides security for a Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) operating in a hostile environment. While there has been significant research in MANET security, the research has tended to address subsets of the overall security challenge. RIPsec leverages existing technologies to provide an overarching layered security framework that provides a more comprehensive security solution than existing approaches. Protection from external threats is provided in the form of encrypted links and encryption-wrapped nodes while internal threats are mitigated by behavior grading that assigns reputations to nodes based on their demonstrated participation in the routing process. End-to-end message security using public and private certificates protects against both internal and external threats. Network availability is improved by behavior grading and round-robin multipath routing. Simulation results showed that the number of routing errors sent in a MANET was reduced by an average of 52% when using RIPsec. The cost in network performance for the security provided by RIPsec was a reduction in throughput. However, the reduction was acceptable given the increase in security. The network load was also reduced, decreasing the overall traffic introduced into the MANET and permitting individual nodes to perform more work without overtaxing their limited resources. The RIPsec framework was analyzed to demonstrate its robustness against a number of well-known attacks against ad-hoc networks. Of the four features incorporated into RIPsec (encryption, IPsec transport mode, behavior grading, and multipath routing), three other frameworks incorporated two of the features (encryption and behavior grading), and the remaining eight frameworks only incorporated one of the four security features. The incorporation of all four security features at multiple levels makes RIPsec very robust against attacks.

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


constructing efficient information extraction pipelines Information Extraction (IE) pipelines analyze text through several stages. The pipeline's algorithms determine both its effectiveness and its run-time efficiency. In real-world tasks, however, IE pipelines often fail acceptable run-times because they analyze too much task-irrelevant text. This raises two interesting questions: 1) How much "efficiency potential" depends on the scheduling of a pipeline's algorithms? 2) Is it possible to devise a reliable method to construct efficient IE pipelines? Both questions are addressed in this paper. In particular, we show how to optimize the run-time efficiency of IE pipelines under a given set of algorithms. We evaluate pipelines for three algorithm sets on an industrially relevant task: the extraction of market forecasts from news articles. Using a system-independent measure, we demonstrate that efficiency gains of up to one order of magnitude are possible without compromising a pipeline's original effectiveness.

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


Ambient Intelligence in Product Life-cycle Management To fulfil the increasing demands today the short innovation time and the high quality of production itself is not enough in production of goods, but all phases of a product (from idea to recycling) should be managed by advanced tools and means. Nowadays the competition among companies, joined to the environmental protection rules, is so compelling that they should not only be on the top of technology in the area, but also run their business according to life-long models. The emphasis on the product post-sale life is common for these models. The most popular model is Product Life-cycle Management, for manufacturing companies, or Service Engineering (SE), for service-oriented companies, and, for both, common paradigms are in maintenance, with conformance-to-use certification. The paper introduces some basic research results achieved in the application of Ambient Intelligence, and suggests considering maintenance as a cross section of the two business paradigms. The importance of SE is specially underlined in this work.

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

service engineering
ambient intelligence


adaptive mirroring of system of systems architectures In this paper, we identify an agent-based workflow system to mirror critical elements in large systems architectures. We propose the use of this light-weight agent-based service channel to complement existing systems. By pushing the adaptive smarts into critical application connectors, we believe that we can improve the ability of large systems to self-heal and scale.

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

self-healing architectures
agent architectures
service and contract workflow


Computer based screening of compound databases: 1. Preselection of benzamidine-based thrombin inhibitors We present a computational protocol which uses the known three-dimensional structure of a target enzyme to identify possible ligands from databases of compounds with low molecular weight. This is accomplished by first mapping the essential interactions in the binding site with the program GRID. The resulting regions of favorable interaction between target and ligand are translated into a database query, and with UNITY a flexible 3D database search is performed. The feasibility of this approach is calibrated with thrombin as the target. Our results show that the resulting hit lists are enriched with thrombin inhibitors compared to the total database.

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

active site mapping
flexible query
structure based screening


a working measured development plan for computer personnel Realistically, our Employee Development Plan for computer personnel consists of 187 working, measured, individual plans -- one for each employee within our Computer Systems Department.

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


A 16Hz160kHz memristor emulator circuit This paper reports experimental tests of a memristor emulator circuit employing a double output second generation current conveyor, a four quadrant analog multiplier, a capacitor and two resistors. First, the behavioral model of the proposed emulator circuit is derived, including parasitic elements and exhibiting that the memristance of a charge-controlled memristor is modeled as a first-order function. Subsequently, an analysis on the frequency performance is done, showing not only that the frequency-dependent pinched hysteresis loop in the current-versus-voltage plane holds up to 160kHz, but a guideline for choosing the numerical values of the passive elements according to the desired operating frequency is also given. Afterwards, the emulator circuit is built with commercially available devices, confirming good agreement among theoretical simulations, HSPICE results and experimental tests. Furthermore, we show that by using a simple switch, the emulator circuit can be configured as decremental or incremental memristor in order to be used in future applications such as sensors, cellular neural networks, chaotic systems, programmable analog circuits and nonvolatile memory devices.

O O B I 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 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

memristor emulator
pinched hysteresis loop
current conveyor


Equilibrium customer strategies in Markovian queues with partial breakdowns We consider equilibrium analysis of a single-server Markovian queueing system with working breakdowns. The system may become defective at any point of time when it is in operation. However, when the system is defective, instead of stopping service completely, the service continues at a slower rate. We assume that the arriving customers decide whether to join the system or balk based on a natural reward-cost structure. With considering waiting cost and reward, the balking behavior of customers is investigated and the corresponding Nash equilibrium strategies are derived. The effects of the information level on the equilibrium behavior are illustrated further via numerical experiments. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

nash equilibrium strategies
balking
partial breakdowns


Developing Data Literacy Programs: Working with Faculty, Graduate Students and Undergraduates EDITOR'S SUMMARY

information literacy
data curation
outreach service
educational activities
college students


Channel characteristics of MIMOWLAN communications at 60 GHz for various corridors A comparison of 4 4 multiple-input multiple-output wireless local area network wireless communication characteristics for six different geometrical shapes is investigated. These six shapes include the straight shape corridor with rectangular cross section, the straight shape corridor with arched cross section, the curved shape corridor with rectangular cross section, the curved shape corridor with arched cross section, the L-shape corridor, and the T-shape corridor. The impulse responses of these corridors are computed by applying shooting and bouncing ray/image (SBR/Image) techniques along with inverse Fourier transform. By using the impulse response of these multipath channels, the mean excess delay, root mean square (RMS) delay spread for these six corridors can be obtained. Numerical results show that the capacity for the rectangular cross section corridors is smaller than those for the arched cross section corridors regardless of the shapes. And the RMS delay spreads for the T-and the L-shape corridors are greater than the other corridors.

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

mimowlan
corridors
mean excess delay
rms delay spread


Genetic redundancy in evolving populations of simulated robots A number of authors have argued that redundancy in biological organisms contributes to their evolvability. We investigate this hypothesis via the experimental manipulation of genetic redundancy in evolving populations of simulated robots controlled by artificial neural networks. A genetic algorithm is used to simulate the evolution of robots with the ability to perform a previously studied task. Redundancy is measured using systematic lesioning. In our experiments, populations of robots with larger genotypes achieve systematically higher fitness than populations whose genotypes are smaller. It is shown that, in principle, robots with smaller genotypes have enough computational power to achieve optimal fitness. Populations with larger (redundant) genotypes appear, however, to be more evolvable and display significantly higher diversity. It is argued that this enhanced evolvability is a direct effect of genetic redundancy, which allows populations of redundant robots to explore neutral networks spanning large areas of genotype space. We conjecture that, where cost considerations allow, redundancy in functional or potentially functional components of the genome may make a valuable contribution to evolution in artificial and perhaps in biological systems. The methods described in the article provide a practical way of testing this hypothesis for the artificial case.

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


multiple aspect based task analysis (mabta) for user requirements gathering in highly-contextualized interactive system design Many traditional methods in the task analysis area are developed for analyzing the task structure of interactions involving individual users. Nowadays more issues have been raised in dealing with group work task analysis. Accommodating contextual information as a part of task modeling is a potentially fertile arena of exploration in this area. This paper proposes a mechanism, multiple aspect based task analysis (MABTA), as another new way to support a combination of emphasis on context with the method of task analysis, focusing on accommodating multiple aspects of users' group work situation into task analysis. The research goal is to identify and to analyze user interface design requirements through this new mechanism, MABTA. A case study was introduced in order to demonstrate the benefits of this mechanism.

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


Computational intelligence-based congestion prediction for a dynamic urban street network This paper develops a hybrid model for single point short term traffic flow forecasting in an urban traffic network. The hybrid model consists of two main modules: a fuzzy input fuzzy output filter (FIFO-filter) and a multi-layer feed-forward artificial neural network architecture optimized using evolution strategies (MLFN-ES). The FIFO-filter performs the data clustering operation and provides a rough forecasted prediction value based on the input data to the MLFN-ES associated with each cluster for modeling the inputoutput relation to provide accurate short term forecast value. The performance of the proposed model is demonstrated by predicting the traffic flow for an intersection in the central business district (CBD) area of Singapore. The hybrid model proposed in this paper gave a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 8.35% on weekdays and 9.73% on weekends for the test data. A comparison analysis shows improved performance of the proposed hybrid method in short term traffic prediction over popular approaches like ARIMA and artificial neural network based systems.

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

evolutionary computation
fuzzy logic
neural networks
traffic flow prediction


Exploring neighborhood and spatial information for improving scene classification ? Distant neighbors to the non-parametric transform improve scene representation. We consider distant neighbors without explode the size of the feature vector. The space arrangement of statistical information enhances scene representation. We consider contrast information of the pixels in a 33 3 3 window.

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

image descriptor
contextual information
non-parametric transform
spatial arrangement information


UPF: two-dimensional finite-element groundwater flow model for saturatedunsaturated soils ? A finite-element program for modeling water flow in saturatedunsaturated soils is presented. The program can handle non-uniform flow regions having irregular boundaries and local anisotropy. The flow domain can be either in a vertical or in a horizontal plane, or in a three dimensional system with radial symmetry. The flow equation is solved by using either a Galerkin finite-element (GFE), or a control-volume finite-element (CVFE) method. The discretization of the flow domain is obtained by using triangular finite elements and linear shape functions; the integration in time is performed by a finite-difference (FD) Picard scheme. Different schemes of the upstream and lumping procedures in computing, respectively, the conductivity and capacity matrices are compared, taking as evaluation parameters the global mass balance errors and the stability of the solutions. The listing of the FORTRAN 77 source code, along with the user manual, the description of the subroutines used in the code, and four input files for four test cases are available by anonymous FTP from ftp.iamg.org site or may be downloaded by Internet from http://www.iamg.org/CGEditor/index.htm.

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

numerical code
unsaturated flow
galerkin formulation
control-volume finite-element model


Covariance matrix formula for Birnbaum-Saunders regression models The Birnbaum-Saunders regression model is commonly used in reliability studies. We derive a simple matrix formula for second-order covariances of maximum-likelihood estimators in this class of models. The formula is quite suitable for computer implementation, since it involves only simple operations on matrices and vectors. Some simulation results show that the second-order covariances can be quite pronounced in small to moderate sample sizes. We also present empirical applications.

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

asymptotic expansion
birnbaum-saunders distribution
fatigue life distribution
lifetime data
maximum-likelihood estimation


MR images reconstruction based on TVWL2-L1 model Compressive sensing (CS) theory, which has been widely used in magnetic resonance (MR) image processing, indicates that a sparse signal can be reconstructed by the optimization programming process from non-adaptive linear projections. Since MR Images commonly possess a blocky structure and have sparse representations under certain wavelet bases, total variation (TV) and wavelet domain norm regularization are enforced together (TV-wavelet Ll method) to improve the recovery accuracy. However, the components of wavelet coefficients are different: low-frequency components of an image, that carry the main energy of the MR image, perform a decisive impact for reconstruction quality. In this paper, we propose a TV and wavelet L2-L1 model (TVWL2-L1) to measure the low frequency wavelet coefficients with 2 norm and high frequency wavelet coefficients with l(1) norm. We present two methods to approach this problem by operator splitting algorithm and proximal gradient algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate that our method can obviously improve the quality of MR image recovery comparing with the original TV-wavelet method. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

mr image reconstruction
convex optimization
wavelet transform


Particles and grid In this paper, hybrid methods involving particles have been investigated. First, the main characteristics of the particle method are briefly outlined and an example of application to a really complex case is presented. The particle/grid method which is also the basis for mixing particles with other methods is described. The two main alternatives: domain decomposition and perturbation formulation are then discussed and some examples are presented. (C) 2002 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O


The Activities of Antioxidant Enzymes and Monoamine Oxidase and Uncoupling Protein 1 Content in Brown Fat of Hypo- and Hyperthyroid Rats Abstract: We have studied the activities of antioxidant enzymes (AOE), namely, copper-zinc superoxide dismutase (CuZnSOD), manganese superoxide dismutase (MnSOD), and catalase (CAT), and the activity of catecholamine-degrading enzyme monoamine oxidase (MAO) and uncoupling protein 1 (UCP1) content in brown fat (BF) of hypo- and hyperthyroid rats. We found that hypothyroidism decreased BF UCP1 content and increased MAO, MnSOD, and CAT activities. T3 increased UCP1 content and MnSOD activity and decreased CuZnSOD, MAO, and CAT activities, while T4 significantly altered (decreased) only CAT activity. This study shows that UCP1 content and MAO and AOE activities in rat BF are notably affected by changed thyroid status.

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

brown fat
ucp1
monoamine oxidase
antioxidant enzymes


Modelling time-varying higher moments with maximum entropy density Since the introduction of the Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (ARCH) model of Engle [R. Engle, Autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity with estimates of the variance of United Kingdom inflation, Econometrica 50 (1982) 987-1007], the literature of modelling the conditional second moment has become increasingly popular in the last two decades. Many extensions and alternate models of the original ARCH have been proposed in the literature aiming to capture the dynamics of volatility more accurately. Interestingly, the Quasi Maximum Likelihood Estimator (QMLE) with normal density is typically used to estimate the parameters in these models. As such, the higher moments of the underlying distribution are assumed to be the same as those of the normal distribution. However, various studies reveal that the higher moments, such as skewness and kurtosis of the distribution of financial returns are not likely to be the same as the normal distribution, and in some cases, they are not even constant over time. These have significant implications in risk management, especially in the calculation of Value-at-Risk (VaR) which focuses on the negative quantile of the return distribution. Failed to accurately capture the shape of the negative quantile would produce inaccurate measure of risk, and subsequently lead to misleading decision in risk management. This paper proposes a solution to model the distribution of financial returns more accurately by introducing a general framework to model the distribution of financial returns using maximum entropy density (MED). The main advantage of MED is that it provides a general framework to estimate the distribution function directly based on a given set of data, and it provides a convenient framework to model higher order moments up to any arbitrary finite order k. However this flexibility conics with a high cost in computational time as k increases, therefore this paper proposes an alternative model that would reduce computation time substantially. Moreover, the sensitivity of the parameters in the MED with respect to the dynamic changes of moments is derived analytically. This result is important as it relates the dynamic structure of the moments to the parameters in the MED. The usefulness of this approach will be demonstrated using 5 min intra-daily returns of the Euro/USD exchange rate. (c) 2008 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

conditional higher moment
maximum entropy density


Capacity and token rate estimation for networks with token bucket shapers Many cloud computing applications are bandwidth-intensive, and thus the cloud bandwidth information is important for their tenants to manage and troubleshoot the application performance. However, current bandwidth estimation methods face great challenges with clouds. One important reason is that traffic shapers such as token bucket shapers are widely used as a building block for rate limiting in clouds. In this paper, we propose two methods called NarrowLinkCapacity and NarrowTokenRate to actively estimate the capacity and token rate, respectively, of a path in a network with potentially multiple token bucket shapers. The capacity of a path is the slowest link capacity among all links on the path, and the token rate of a path is the slowest token rate among all token bucket shapers in the path. They are two important path properties determining the average rate of a train of packets on a path. Our evaluation results show that our methods work well under a variety of network conditions.

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

capacity estimation
computer and network virtualization


Atomic layer etching of BeO using BCl3/Ar for the interface passivation layer of IIIV MOS devices Atomic layer etching of BeO as the interface passivation layer (IPL) has been studied. Precise etch depth control of BeO was achieved with the minimal GaAs substrate recess. Therefore, it results in self-limited one monolayer etch rate=about 0.75 (/cycle).

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

atomic layer etching
interface passivation layer


Magneto-hydrodynamic stability of plane-Poiseuille flow using multideck asymptotic technique The linear stability of plane-Poiseuille flow at high Reynolds numbers and in the presence of a transverse magnetic field is investigated theoretically using the multideck asymptotic approach due to [1,2]. It is observed that the magnetic field has a stabilizing effect on the flow and that this stability increases with an increase in Hartmann number. However, an increase in the small-disturbance wavenumber may have a destabilizing effect on the flow. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

magnetic field
hartmann number
multideck


Bispectral analysis for on-line monitoring of stamping operation Owing to the ever-increased demand for product quality improvement and production cost reduction, on-line monitoring of stamping operations has become a common practice in shop floors around the world today. Based on a market survey, for most stamping processes, monitoring systems use tonnage signals and/or strain signals. Recently, a few attempts have been reported using acceleration signals as they contain rich information and are relatively inexpensive. However, it is known that acceleration signals are vulnerable to the noise disturbances, and hence are less robust. This paper presents a study that uses bispectrum to analyze the acceleration signals. It is shown that the bispectrum can suppress Gaussian color noise to boost the signal-to-noise ratio. It also extracts the features of the signal that are related to the defective parts (such as material too thick or slug). The experimental results demonstrate that the method presented is effective and has a good potential for applications in shop floor. We also present new method for reducing the computation load in the process.

B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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
stamping process
higher order statistics


Simulating nanoindentation and predicting dislocation nucleation using interatomic potential finite element method Dislocation nucleation is central to our understanding of the onset of plasticity during nanoindentation. The shear stress in small volumes beneath the nanoindenter can achieve the theoretical limit of a perfect crystal. The ensuing nonlinear elastic instability can trigger homogenous dislocation nucleation inside the crystal. Here we employ the interatomic potential finite element method to simulate nanoindentation and predict dislocation nucleation. Simulations are performed for indentation on the (111), (110) and (100) surfaces of Al, Cu, Ni single crystals. We quantify the critical conditions of dislocation nucleation, including the indentation load of nucleation, location of nucleation site, nucleation stress and activated slip system. We find these conditions sensitively depend on indentation orientation, but are consistent for different crystals. The results highlight the critical role of hyperelasticity (the nonlinear elasticity caused by elastic softening at large strain) and crystallography in dislocation nucleation in small material volumes. Our study also reveals the deficiency of commonly used nucleation criterion such as the critical resolved shear stress.

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


Medium access control for ATM-to-CDMA interface An integrated medium access control framework for a direct sequence code-division multiple access (CDMA) radio access to an asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) network is considered. The system accommodates multimedia services such as voice and data. The inherently high error rate associated with the multipath fading channel is partly overcome by the introduction of a data link control layer employing one- and two-dimensional CRC codes for error detection/correction in voice and data packets, respectively. Analysis and simulations show promising average delay and error probability performance, as well as low coding redundancy. Two-dimensional CRC, particularly in conjunction with automatic repeat request (ARQ), outperforms convolutional coding with much less overhead and processing requirement at the ATM-CDMA interface.

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


ranking model adaptation for domain-specific search Recently, various domain-specific search engines emerge, which are restricted to specific topicalities or document formats, and vertical to the broad-based search. Simply applying the ranking model trained for the broad-based search to the verticals cannot achieve a sound performance due to the domain differences, while building different ranking models for each domain is both laborious for labeling sufficient training samples and time-consuming or the training process. In this paper, to address the above difficulties, we investigate two problems: (1) whether we can adapt the ranking model learned for existing Web page search or verticals, to the new domain, so that the amount of labeled data and the training cost is reduced, while the performance requirement is still satisfied; and (2) how to adapt the ranking model from auxiliary domains to a new target domain. We address the second problem from the regularization framework and an algorithm called ranking adaptation SVM is proposed. Our algorithm is flexible enough, which needs only the prediction from the existing ranking model, rather than the internal representation of the model or the data from auxiliary domains. The first problem is addressed by the proposed ranking adaptability measurement, which quantitatively estimates if an existing ranking model can be adapted to the new domain. Extensive experiments are performed over Letor benchmark dataset and two large scale datasets crawled from different domains through a commercial internet search engine, where the ranking model learned for one domain will be adapted to the other. The results demonstrate the applicabilities of the proposed ranking model adaptation algorithm and the ranking adaptability measurement.

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

learning to rank
information retrieval
domain adaptation
support vector machines


Nonlinear Fourier analysis for discontinuous conductivities: Computational results Two reconstruction methods of Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) are numerically compared for nonsmooth conductivities in the plane based on the use of complex geometrical optics (CGO) solutions to D-bar equations involving the global uniqueness proofs for Caldern problem exposed in Nachman (1996) [43] and Astala and Pivrinta (2006) [6]: the AstalaPivrinta theory-based low-pass transport matrix method implemented in Astala et al. (2011) [3] and the shortcut method which considers ingredients of both theories. The latter method is formally similar to the Nachman theory-based regularized EIT reconstruction algorithm studied in Knudsen et al. (2009) [34] and several references from there. New numerical results are presented using parallel computation with size parameters larger than ever, leading mainly to two conclusions as follows. First, both methods can approximate piecewise constant conductivities better and better as the cutoff frequency increases, and there seems to be a Gibbs-like phenomenon producing ringing artifacts. Second, the transport matrix method loses accuracy away from a (freely chosen) pivot point located outside of the object to be studied, whereas the shortcut method produces reconstructions with more uniform quality.

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

inverse problem
beltrami equation
conductivity equation
inverse conductivity problem
complex geometrical optics solution
nonlinear fourier transform
scattering transform


Optimizing filter banks for supervised texture recognition Two criteria for invariant supervised texture segmentation based on multi-channel approaches are introduced. The texture segmentation is carried out by feature extraction using multi-channel Gabor filtering and classification with symmetric phase-only matched filtering. For the feature extraction highly efficient filter banks are required that enable clear distinction between feature vectors representing different textures in order to achieve a high classification rate. For the design of the filter banks, the variances of the frequency components must be maximized. The spar hyper volume spanned by the normalized feature vectors representing different textures must be maximized as well. These two criteria provide guidelines for filter bank design.

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

filter banks
texture recognition
spar hyper volume


Imprecise navigation Conventional models of navigation commonly assume a navigation agent's location can be precisely determined. This paper examines the more general case, where an agent's actual location cannot be precisely determined. This paper develops a formal model of navigation under imprecision using a graph. Two key strategies for dealing with imprecision are identified and defined: contingency and refinement. A contingency strategy aims to find an instruction sequence that maximizes an agent's chances of reaching its destination. A refinement strategy aims to use knowledge gained as an agent moves through the network to disambiguate location. Examples of both strategies are empirically tested using a simulation with computerized navigation agents moving through a road network at different levels of locational imprecision. The results of the simulation indicate that both the strategies, contingency and refinement, applied individually can produce significant improvements in navigation performance under imprecision, at least at relatively fine granularities. Using both strategies in concert produced significant improvements in performance across all granularities.

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

granularity
wayfinding
navigation agent
graph theory
indiscernibility


Algorithms for computing Abelian periods of words ? Constantinescu and Ilie [S. Constantinescu, L. Ilie. Fine and Wilfs theorem for abelian periods, Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science 89 (2006) 167170] introduced the notion of an Abelian period of a word. A word of length n n over an alphabet of size ? ? can have ?(n2) ? ( n 2 ) distinct Abelian periods. The Brute-Force algorithm computes all the Abelian periods of a word in time O(n2?) O ( n 2 ? ) using O(n?) O ( n ? ) space. We present an offline algorithm based on a select function having the same worst-case theoretical complexity as the Brute-Force one, but outperforming it in practice. We then present online algorithms that also enable us to compute all the Abelian periods of all the prefixes of w w .

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

abelian repetition
weak repetition
design of algorithms
text algorithms
combinatorics on words


High order asymptotic preserving nodal discontinuous Galerkin IMEX schemes for the BGK equation In this paper, we develop high-order asymptotic preserving (AP) schemes for the BGK equation in a hyperbolic scaling, which leads to the macroscopic models such as the Euler and compressible NavierStokes equations in the asymptotic limit. Our approaches are based on the so-called micromacro formulation of the kinetic equation which involves a natural decomposition of the problem to the equilibrium and the non-equilibrium parts. The proposed methods are formulated for the BGK equation with constant or spatially variant Knudsen number. The new ingredients for the proposed methods to achieve high order accuracy are the following: we introduce discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretization of arbitrary order of accuracy with nodal Lagrangian basis functions in space; we employ a high order globally stiffly accurate implicitexplicit (IMEX) RungeKutta (RK) scheme as time discretization. Two versions of the schemes are proposed: Scheme I is a direct formulation based on the micromacro decomposition of the BGK equation, while Scheme II, motivated by the asymptotic analysis for the continuous problem, utilizes certain properties of the projection operator. Compared with Scheme I, Scheme II not only has better computational efficiency (the computational cost is reduced by half roughly), but also allows the establishment of a formal asymptotic analysis. Specifically, it is demonstrated that when 0<??1 0 < ? ? 1 , Scheme II, up to O(?2) O ( ? 2 ) , becomes a local DG discretization with an explicit RK method for the macroscopic compressible NavierStokes equations, a method in a similar spirit to the ones in Bassi and Rebay (1997) [3], Cockburn and Shu (1998) [16]. Numerical results are presented for a wide range of Knudsen number to illustrate the effectiveness and high order accuracy of the methods.

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

implicitexplicit
asymptotic preserving
discontinuous galerkin
micromacro decomposition


Ant colony optimization approach to a fuzzy goal programming model for a machine tool selection and operation allocation problem in an FMS Due to the global competition in manufacturing environment, firms are forced to consider increasing the quality and responsiveness to customization, while decreasing costs. The evolution of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) offers great potential for increasing flexibility and changing the basis of competition by ensuring both cost effective and customized manufacturing at the same time. Some of the important planning problems that need realistic modelling and quicker solution especially in automated manufacturing systems have assumed greater significance in the recent past. The language used by the industrial workers is fuzzy in nature, which results in failure of the models considering deterministic situations. The situation in the real life shop floor demands to adopt fuzzy-based multi-objective goals to express the target set by the management. This paper presents a fuzzy goal programming approach to model the machine tool selection and operation allocation problem of FMS. An ant colony optimization (ACO)-based approach is applied to optimize the model and the results of the computational experiments are reported.

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

ant colony optimization
fuzzy goal programming
machine tool selection
operation allocation
flexible manufacturing systems


An object-oriented framework for the development of computer-based guideline implementations Clinical practice guidelines provide a means of directing medical care towards clinically appropriate and cost-effective interventions. A direct relationship exists between the integration of a guideline into clinical workflow and the effectiveness of the guideline in influencing clinicians' behavior. Computer-based guideline implementations, used at the point-of-care, accomplish this integration. Employing object-oriented technologies, we propose a framework of reusable components for the development of guideline implementation systems. We have identified eight information management services that are common to such systems. Our framework integrates these services and their respective reusable components into clinical workflow to promote the development of comprehensive guideline implementation systems, which should ultimately enhance guideline compliance and the overall quality of care.

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

object-oriented framework
software engineering


Talking Wearables Exploit Context This paper addresses the issue of how natural language generation technology can contribute to less intrusive wearable devices. Based on the investigation of how humans adapt the form of their utterances to the context of their hearer, we propose a strategy to relate (physical) context to the automated generation of natural language utterances. First we emphasise that different dimensions of context need to be taken into account and illustrate this with examples of lexical choice. Then we elaborate a strategy for determining sentence structure and prosody annotation based on the context relating to focus of attention. Our approach sets up an experimental basis in the context of an advice-giving wearable device (parrot).

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


On cyclic self-dual codes We investigate cyclic self-dual codes over F(2)(r). We give a decomposition of a repeated-root cyclic codes over F(p)(r). The decomposition is used to analyze cyclic self-dual codes over F(2)(r). We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of nontrivial cyclic self-dual codes over F(2)(r), and prove that all cyclic self-dual codes over F(2)(r) are Type I. Finally we classify cyclic self-dual codes of some lengths over F(4), F(8), and F(16).

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


software prefetching and caching for translation lookaside buffers A number of interacting trends in operating system structure, processor architecture, and memory systems are increasing both the rate of translation lookaside buffer (TLB) misses and the cost of servicing amiss. This paper presents two novel software schemes, implemented under Mach 3.0, to decrease both the number and the cost of kernel TLB misses (i.e., misses on kernel data structures, including user page tables). The first scheme is a new use of prefetching for TLB entries on the IPC path, and the second scheme is a new use of software caching of TLB entries for hierarchical page table organizations. For a range of applications, prefetching decreases the number of kernel TLB misses by 40\% to 50\%, and caching decreases TLB penalties by providing a fast path for over 90\% of the misses. Our caching scheme also decreases the number of nested TLB traps due to the page table hierarchy, reducing the number of kernel TLB miss traps for applications by 20\% to 40\%. Prefetching and caching, when used alone, each improve application performance by up to 3.5\%; when used together, they improve application performance by up to 3\%. On synthetic benchmarks that involve frequent communication among several different address spaces (and thus put more pressure on the TLB), prefetching improves overall performance by about 6\%, caching improves overall performance by about 10\%, and the two used together improve overall performance by about 12\%. Our techniques are very effective in reducing kernel TLB penalties, which currently range from 1\% to 5\% of application runtime for the benchmarks studied. Since processor speeds continue to increase relative to memory speeds, our schemes should be even more effective in improving application performance in future architectures.

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

communication
prefetching
applications
use
performance
data structures
tables
paper
buffers
runtime
user
processor
translation
software
structure
architecture
operating system
future
cost
scheme

paging
benchmark
memory system
addressing
hierarchies
hierarchic
organization
space
memorialized
relation
caches
effect


Loss probabilities of hand-in traffic under various protocols II. Model comparisons Mobile telephone traffic business demands that a given base station be able to handle both newly originating traffic and hand-off traffic from neighboring base stations, with priority to be given to the latter, existing traffic. This paper examines three access control protocols that give such traffic priority by specifying a reserve capacity R amongst the N-tot channels, where R need not be an integer. Assuming a Poisson arrival process and independent exponential service times, it is shown via birth-death processes, sample path constructions and stochastic monotonicity results for Markov processes that pairwise comparison of the protocols considered is possible, and, in particular, that one of them is 'best' in terms of the smallest loss probability of one type of traffic for a given rate of loss for the other type. Results proved via sample path constructions hold under weaker conditions of stationary ergodic arrival processes and exponential service times. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Coupling of Boundary Element and Wave Based Methods for the efficient solution of complex multiple scattering problems A novel hybrid method for the efficient solution of complex acoustic multiple scattering problems is proposed in this paper. The Wave Based Method and the Boundary Element Method are coupled to benefit from the strengths of both. The former is an indirect Trefftz approach, which has a faster convergence rate and lower computational load compared to element based methods when applied on geometries of moderate complexity. The latter is the state-of-the-art technique for unbounded acoustic problems and can handle very complex geometries. The idea behind the hybrid method is to take advantage of the fast WBM solution for scatterers of moderate complexity and take advantage of the BEM?s capability for handling scatterers of high complexity. For the BEM part, the indirect variational formulation is used which allows modeling of open boundary problems (zero thickness walls). In addition, the WBM makes it possible to easily add heterogeneities (domain inclusions) to the problem. Therefore, the hybrid method does not only aim for better efficiency but also for extending the variety of configurations that can be tackled by both methods with ease. The accuracy and the performance of the method are demonstrated with three examples, both in 2D and 3D. It is shown that when complex and simple scatterers coexist, the hybrid method is more efficient than the WBM, the BEM and the Fast-Multipole BEM while it is able to provide accuracy of similar level.

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

indirect variational boundary element method

hybrid boundary element wave based method


An evolutionary constraint satisfaction solution for over the cell channel routing A novel evolutionary assignment-ordering approach for combinatorial optimization using constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) modeling is presented. In the assignment of values to variables, the order of assignment is determined by an ordering function combined with problem-specific features. No a priori information is available on the assignment-ordering function and it is completely determined by evolutionary optimization to produce the best assignment results. Indeed, experimental evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms very well-known approaches for the solution of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems from VLSI layout design, namely, channel routing and multi-layer over the cell channel routing.

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

combinatorial optimization
channel routing

genetic algorithms
constraint satisfaction problems
over-the-cell channel routing


a network model for manet nodes and actors collaboration to optimize processing in event areas In this paper, we design a new network model for mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) nodes and actors in wireless sensor networks collaboration to optimize the processing in event areas. Distributed algorithms have been developed, consisting of two phases: set-up phase and negotiation phase. The former is based on the weighted proportional max-min fairness to initially distribute the MANET nodes over the event areas, while the latter based on the market-based technique is used to re-distribute the number of MANET nodes depending on the current and new events. We have implemented the negotiation phase of this network model in ns-2, piggybacking over optimized link-state routing (OLSR) protocol. Simulation results show that the resources of MANET nodes spending on processing events (utility) and their resources for moving to event areas (cost) converge to the Pareto optimal set (theoretical optimal solutions found by the micro-genetic algorithm).

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


compile-time execution structure of object-oriented programs with practical ownership domain annotations Ownership domain annotations express and enforce design intent related to object encapsulation and communication directly in real object-oriented code. First, this work will make the ownership domains type system more expressive. Second, ownership domain annotations enable obtaining, at compile time, the execution structure of an annotated program. The execution structure is sound, hierarchical and scales to large programs. It also conveys more design intent that existing compile-time approaches that do not rely on ownership annotations. Finally, tools will infer these annotations semi-automatically at compile time, once a developer provides the design intent.

O B I O O O O O O O O O O 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 structure
ownership types
runtime structure


Reasoning on temporal class diagrams: Undecidability results This paper introduces a temporal class diagram language useful to model temporal varying data. The atemporal portion of the language contains the core constructors available in both EER diagrams and UML class diagrams. The temporal part of the language is able to distinguish between temporal and atemporal constructs, and it has the ability to represent dynamic constraints between classes. The language is characterized by a model-theoretic (temporal) semantics. Reasoning services as logical implication and satisfiability are also defined. We show that reasoning on finite models is different from reasoning on unrestricted ones. Then, we prove that reasoning on temporal class diagrams is an undecidable problem on both unrestricted models and on finite ones.

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

description logics
temporal data models
temporal logics


A hybrid biased random key genetic algorithm approach for the unit commitment problem This work proposes a hybrid genetic algorithm (GA) to address the unit commitment (UC) problem. In the UC problem, the goal is to schedule a subset of a given group of electrical power generating units and also to determine their production output in order to meet energy demands at minimum cost. In addition, the solution must satisfy a set of technological and operational constraints. The algorithm developed is a hybrid biased random key genetic algorithm (HBRKGA). It uses random keys to encode the solutions and introduces bias both in the parent selection procedure and in the crossover strategy. To intensify the search close to good solutions, the GA is hybridized with local search. Tests have been performed on benchmark large-scale power systems. The computational results demonstrate that the HBRKGA is effective and efficient. In addition, it is also shown that it improves the solutions obtained by current state-of-the-art methodologies.

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

genetic algorithms
hybrid metaheuristics
electrical power generation


High-resolution 3D surface strain magnitude using 2D camera and low-resolution depth sensor ? Measures the 3-D surface strain impacted on the face during facial expressions. Describes an automatic approach for calibrating Kinect with external camera. Method shows high correlation between 3-D strain maps calculated from two views. Method robust to multiple depth resolutions. Over 100 subjects and 600 expressions used for testing.

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


CONTINUOUS TIME QUANTUM WALKS AND QUOTIENT GRAPHS Continuous-time quantum walks (CTQW) over finite group schemes is investigated, where it is shown that some properties of a CTQW over a group scheme defined on a finite group G induces a CTQW over group scheme defined on G/H, where H is a normal subgroup of G with prime index. This reduction can be helpful in analyzing CTQW on underlying graphs of group schemes. Even though this claim is proved for normal subgroups with prime index (using the Clifford's theorem from representation theory), it is checked in some examples that for other normal subgroups or even non-normal subgroups, the result is also true! It means that CTQW over the graph on G, starting from any arbitrary vertex, is isomorphic to the CTQW over the quotient graph on G/H if we take the sum of the amplitudes corresponding to the vertices belonging to the same cosets.

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


MACHINE LEARNING ON CONGESTION ANALYSIS BASED REAL-TIME NAVIGATION SYSTEM In the metropolitan region, most congestion or traffic jams are caused by the uneven distribution of traffic flow that creates bottleneck points where the traffic volume exceeds the road capacity. Additionally, unexpected incidents are the next most probable cause of these bottleneck regions. Moreover, most drivers are driving based on their empirical experience without awareness of real-time traffic situations. This unintelligent traffic behavior can make the congestion problem worse. Prediction based route guidance systems show great improvements in solving the inefficient diversion strategy problem by estimating future travel time when calculating accurate travel time is difficult. However, performances of machine learning based prediction models that are based on the historical data set degrade sharply during a congestion situation. This paper develops a new navigation system for reducing travel time of an individual driver and distributing the flow of urban traffic efficiently in order to reduce the occurrence of congestion. Compared with previous route guidance systems, the results reveal that our system, applying the advanced multi-lane prediction based real-time fastest path (AMPRFP) algorithm, can significantly reduce the travel time especially when drivers travel in a complex route environment and face frequent congestion problems. Unlike the previous system,(1) it can be applied either for single lane or multi-lane urban traffic networks where the reason for congestion is significantly complex. We also demonstrate the advantages of this system and verify the results using real highway traffic data and a synthetic experiment.

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

congestion
fastest path
machine learning
urban traffic networks

traffic jam
real-time traffic
support vector regression (svr)
travel time prediction
multi-lane


Robust fuzzy control for uncertain discrete-time nonlinear Markovian jump systems without mode observations This paper studies the robust fuzzy control problem of uncertain discrete-time nonlinear Markovian jump systems without mode observations. The Takagi and Sugeno (TS) fuzzy model is employed to represent a discrete-time nonlinear system with norm-bounded parameter uncertainties and Markovian jump parameters. As a result, an uncertain Markovian jump fuzzy system (MJFS) is obtained. A stochastic fuzzy Lyapunov function (FLF) is employed to analyze the robust stability of the uncertain MJFS, which not only is dependent on the operation modes of the system, but also directly includes the membership functions. Then, based on this stochastic FLF and a non-parallel distributed compensation (non-PDC) scheme, a mode-independent state-feedback control design is developed to guarantee that the closed-loop MJFS is stochastically stable for all admissible parameter uncertainties. The proposed sufficient conditions for the robust stability and mode-independent robust stabilization are formulated as a set of coupled linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be solved efficiently by using existing LMI optimization techniques. Finally, it is also demonstrated, via a simulation example, that the proposed design method is effective.

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

uncertain nonlinear systems
robust control
linear matrix inequality (lmi)
stochastic stability


a musical instrument for facilitating musical expressions In this paper, we propose a new musical instrument that allows people to concentrate on controlling indiscrete elements so that they can directly create their musical expressions. We describe a prototype musical instrument and demonstrate two applications of the prototype to show its effectiveness.

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


dynamic recognition of synchronization operations for improved data race detection Debugging multithreaded programs, which involves detection and identification of the cause of data races, has proved to be a hard problem. Although there has been significant amount of research on this topic, prior works rely on one important assumption - the debuggers must be aware of all the synchronization operations that take place during a program run. This assumption is a significant limitation as multithreaded programs, including the popular SPLASH-2 benchmark, have barriers and flag synchronizations implemented in the user code. We show that the lack of knowledge of these synchronization operations leads to unnecessary reporting of numerous races. Our experiments with SPLASH-2 benchmark suite show that 12-131 distinct segments in source code, on an average, give rise to well over 4 million dynamic instances of falsely reported races for these programs. We propose a dynamic software technique that identifies the user defined synchronizations exercised during a program run. This information not only helps avoids reporting of unnecessary races, but also helps a record/replay system to speedup the replay. Our evaluation confirms that our synchronization detector is highly accurate with no false negatives and very few false positives. Thus, reporting of nearly all unnecessary races is avoided. Finally, we show that the knowledge of synchronization operations resulted in about 23\% reduction in replay time.

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

synchronization and infeasible races
record and replay


A pharmacophore model for NK2 antagonist comprising compounds from several structurally diverse classes A neurokinin 2 (NK2) antagonist pharmacophore model has been developed on the basis of five non-peptide antagonists from several structurally diverse classes. To evaluate the pharmacophore model, another 20 antagonists were fitted to the model. By use of exhaustive conformational analysis (MMFFs force field and the GB/SA hydration model) and least-squares molecular superimposition studies, 23 of the 25 antagonists were fitted to the model in a low energy conformation with a low RMS value. The pharmacophore model is described by four pharmacophore elements: Three hydrophobic groups and a hydrogen bond donor represented as a vector. The hydrophobic groups are generally aromatic rings, but this is not a requirement. The antagonists bind in an extended conformation with two aromatic rings in a parallel displaced and tilted conformation. The model was able to explain the enantioselectivity of SR48968 and GR159897.

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

conformational analysis
enantioselectivity
pharmacophore model

bioactive conformation
mmff force field
neurokinin a
nk1 receptor
nk2 receptor
substance p
tachykinin


micropayment schemes with ability to return changes Many secure micropayment schemes have been proposed as the desire to support the low-value and the high-volume purchases of some e-commerce applications such as mobile commerce services or web-based interactive video services. However it seems that no one studies how to add the ability of returning changes in micropayment schemes. In this paper, we take the lead in studying the micropayment schemes with ability to return changes (MSRC), which reduce the hash operations in transaction phase. When compared with the previous micropayment schemes, the proposed MSRC have the low computation costs and thus is more suitable and practical for mobile commerce environments, where have the limited computation capability and the limited bandwidth.

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

macropayment
payword
hash chain
e-commerce


Diffusion tensor imaging the medial longitudinal fasciculus in INO: opportunities and challenges The medial longitudinal fasciculus (MLF) is a white matter pathway in the brainstem that plays a key role in coordinating eye movements. Injury to the MLF leads to abnormalities in eye movements that can be measured with high precision by oculography, making it an ideal eloquent pathway to study imaging/function correlates. Tractography is an emerging method for identifying white matter pathways and offers the tantalizing promise of noninvasive, quantitative characterization of tissue integrity underlying functional deficits. However, the small caliber of the MLF and partial volume averaging with signal from nearby cerebrospinal fluid pose severe technical challenges to tractography-based delineation of the MLF. We discuss progress toward the goal of imaging the MLF and potential benefits of achieving this goal. Initial work suggests that ultra-high field (7 tesla) may complement tractography for characterizing the MLF.

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

tractography
medial longitudinal fasciculus
diffusion tensor imaging
brainstem

ultra high field
internuclear ophthalmoparesis


ethics education in the microchip millennium In today's fast-paced, technology-dependent society, individuals are often confronted with a wide variety of ethical dilemmas and moral issues when living, learning and working in an Information Technology (IT) environment. In many instances, IT users find themselves at a loss, because it is often not clear which, if any, moral rule applies. In addition, if two or more moral rules are relevant this can also lead to problems and confusion, particularly if those rules clash. Furthermore, ethical ignorance concerning IT security and IT-related crimes, not withstanding overt disregard, can cause many individuals to make inappropriate decisions, such as virus creation, the invasion of privacy and the proliferation of e-mail hoaxes. In this paper, which is designed to guide and assist both educators and administrators in their efforts to improve, expand and/or create an ethics workshop or credit course, the authors will discuss the unethical actions associated with IT and the motivations that are often promulgated by lack of awareness. The authors also point out the increasing and critical need for universities and colleges to take a more active role--including, but not limited to, compulsory ethics education--in preparing students, faculty and staff for the ethical IT dilemmas they may encounter both academically and professionally in the "Microchip Millennium.

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

ethical dilemmas
compulsory
information technology
education
ethics