An oblivious fragile watermarking scheme for images utilizing edge transitions in BTC bitmaps As one of the famous block-based image coding schemes, block truncation coding (BTC) has been also applied in digital watermarking. Previous BTC-based watermarking or hiding schemes usually embed secret data by modifying the BTC encoding stage or BTC-compressed data, obtaining the watermarked image with poorer quality than the BTC-compressed version. This paper presents a new oblivious image watermarking scheme by exploiting BTC bitmaps. Unlike the traditional schemes, our approach does not really perform the BTC compression on images during the embedding process but utilizes the parity of the number of horizontal edge transitions in each BTC bitmap to guide the watermark embedding and extraction processes. The embedding process starts by partitioning the original cover image into non-overlapping 4x4 blocks and performing BTC on each block to obtain its BTC bitmap. One watermark bit is embedded in each block by modifying at most three pixel values in the block to make sure that the parity of the number of horizontal edge transitions in the bitmap of the modified block is equal to the embedded watermark bit. In the extraction stage, the suspicious image is first partitioned into non-overlapping 4x4 blocks and BTC is performed on each block to obtain its bitmap. Then, by checking the parity of the number of horizontal edge transitions in the bitmap, we can extract one watermark bit in each block. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed watermarking scheme is fragile to various image processing operations while keeping the transparency very well.

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

fragile image watermarking
oblivious watermarking
data hiding
image authentication


Convergence of the Complex Envelope of Bandlimited OFDM Signals Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems have been used extensively in wireless communications in recent years; thus, there is significant interest in analyzing the properties of the transmitted signal in such systems. In particular, a large amount of work has focused on analyzing the variation of the complex envelope of the transmitted signal and on designing methods to minimize this variation. In this paper, it is established that the complex envelope of a bandlimited uncoded OFDM signal converges weakly to a Gaussian random process as the number of subcarriers goes to infinity. This shows that the properties of the OFDM signal will asymptotically approach those of a Gaussian random process over any finite time interval. The convergence proof is then extended to two important cases, namely, coded OFDM systems and systems with an unequal power allocation across subcarriers.

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

orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ofdm)


Generation of high-repetition-rate pulses utilizing cascaded single mode fiber and semiconductor optical amplifier To generate high-repetition-rate optical pulses, a novel and simple device is demonstrated, in which the cascaded single mode fiber (SMF) with negative third order dispersion and semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) are adopted. Numerical research results show that let an optical pulse with center wavelength in Zero dispersion wavelength of optical fiber transit in SMF for generating an oscillation pulse. Subsequently, the followed SOA is provided for amplification. As a consequence, the high-repetition-rate optical pulses can be obtained.

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

single mode fiber
semiconductor optical amplifier

optoelectronics
high-repetition-rate optical pulses


MXQ (MaXimal queuing): A network mechanism for controlling misbehaving flows in best effort networks The problems caused by misbehaving flows are becoming; important issues in high-speed best effort networks. In this paper. we propose the MXQ (MaXimal Queuing) mechanism which correctly identifies and adequately penalizes misbehaving flows. Identification and penalization are the keys to controlling misbehaving flows, which is believed to be crucial for providing best effort services to a large number of residential customers at reasonable cost. The proposed mechanism consists of estimating incoming traffic at network edges and selective packet discard at network nodes. This combination realizes the identification and penalization in a correct, adequate and easy to understand way, thus maintaining the stability and efficiency of best effort networks. A number of experiments are performed on a prototype system to examine the unfairness caused by different TCP implementations, which is one type of misbehavior. The results show that the MXQ mechanism can adequately penalize the misbehaving flows, and can improve Fairness, even when differently implemented TCP flows are present.

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


Thermal and hydrodynamic modelling of active catheters for interventional radiology Interventional radiologists desire to improve their operating tools such as catheters. Active catheters in which the tip is moved using shape memory alloy actuators activated using the Joule effect present a promising approach for easier navigation in the small vessels. However, the increase in temperature caused by this Joule effect must be controlled in order to prevent damage to blood cells and tissues. This paper is devoted to the simulation and experimental validation of a fluid-thermal model of an active catheter prototype. Comparisons between computer-predicted and experimentally measured temperatures are presented for both experiments in air and water at 37 degrees C. Good agreement between the computational and experimental results is found, demonstrating the validity of the developed computer model. These comparisons enable us to highlight some important issues in the modelling process and to determine the optimal current for the activation of the catheter.

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

active catheter
shape memory alloy
modelling


Neuroendocrine Regulation of Frog Adrenocortical Cells by Neurotensin Abstract: We previously characterized the primary structure of neurotensin (NT) from an extract of the intestine of the frog Rana esculenta. In this study, we provide evidence for the involvement of NT in the neurocrine regulation of the secretory activity of frog adrenocortical cells. Immunohistochemical studies revealed that the adrenal gland of R. esculenta is innervated by a dense network of NT-immunoreactive fibers. Graded concentrations of frog NT induced a dose-dependent stimulation of corticosterone and aldosterone secretion by frog adrenocortical explants through activation of two receptors with pEC50 of 9.8 and 6.9. These data support the view that NT, released by nerve fibers within the frog adrenal gland, acts locally to control corticosteroid secretion.

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


efficient topic-based unsupervised name disambiguation Name ambiguity is a special case of identity uncertainty where one person can be referenced by multiple name variations in different situations or even share the same name with other people. In this paper, we focus on the problem of disambiguating person names within web pages and scientific documents. We present an efficient and effective two-stage approach to disambiguate names. In the first stage, two novel topic-based models are proposed by extending two hierarchical Bayesian text models, namely Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Our models explicitly introduce a new variable for persons and learn the distribution of topics with regard to persons and words. After learning an initial model, the topic distributions are treated as feature sets and names are disambiguated by leveraging a hierarchical agglomerative clustering method. Experiments on web data and scientific documents from CiteSeer indicate that our approach consistently outperforms other unsupervised learning methods such as spectral clustering and DBSCAN clustering and could be extended to other research fields. We empirically addressed the issue of scalability by disambiguating authors in over 750,000 papers from the entire CiteSeer dataset.

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

probability analysis
bayesian models
hierarchical clustering methods
unsupervised machine learning


Focus-aided scene segmentation ? Focus has been typically exploited in computer vision as depth cue. A new focus-based perceptual cue is introduced: the focus signal. The focus signal corresponds to the change in focus level as a function of time. The focus signal can be integrated with classical cues for image segmentation. The proposed focus-aided methodology yields improved scene segmentation.

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

image sequences
focus measure
defocus
visual cue integration
focus cue


On maximal QROBDD's of Boolean functions We investigate the structure of "worst-case" quasi reduced ordered decision diagrams and Boolean functions whose truth tables are associated to: we suggest different ways to count and enumerate them. We, then, introduce a notion of complexity which leads to the concept of "hard" Boolean functions as functions whose QROBDD are "worst-case" ones. So we exhibit the relation between hard functions and the Storage Access function ( also known as Multiplexer).

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

boolean complexity
boolean graphs
binary decision diagrams
bdd
obdd


A genetic algorithm application in bankruptcy prediction modeling Prediction of corporate failure using past financial data is a well-documented topic. Early studies of bankruptcy prediction used statistical techniques such as multiple discriminant analysis, logit and probit. Recently, however, numerous studies have demonstrated that artificial intelligence such as neural networks (NNs) can be an alternative methodology for classification problems to which traditional statistical methods have long been applied. Although numerous theoretical and experimental studies reported the usefulness of NNs in classification studies, there exists a major drawback in building and using the model. That is, the user cannot readily comprehend the final rules that the NN models acquire. We propose a genetic algorithms (GAs) approach in this study and illustrate how GAs can be applied to bankruptcy prediction modeling. An advantage of present approach using GAs is that it is capable of extracting rules that are easy to understand for users like expert systems. The preliminary results show that rule extraction approach using GAs for bankruptcy prediction modeling is promising.

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

genetic algorithms
rule extraction
bankruptcy prediction


a layout-aware optimization strategy for collective i/o In this study, we propose an optimization strategy to promote a better integration of the parallel I/O middleware and parallel file systems. We illustrate that a layout-aware optimization strategy can improve the performance of current collective I/O in parallel I/O system. We present the motivation, prototype design and initial verification of the proposed layout-aware optimization strategy. The analytical and initial experimental testing results demonstrate that the proposed strategy has a potential in improving the parallel I/O system performance.

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

collective i/o
parallel file system
data layout
mpi i/o
petascale file system
parallel i/o


Flexible G1 interpolation of quad meshes ? Transforming an arbitrary mesh into a smooth G1 surface has been the subject of intensive research works. To get a visual pleasing shape without any imperfection even in the presence of extraordinary mesh vertices is still a challenging problem in particular when interpolation of the mesh vertices is required. We present a new local method, which produces visually smooth shapes while solving the interpolation problem. It consists of combining low degree biquartic Bzier patches with minimum number of pieces per mesh face, assembled together with G1-continuity. All surface control points are given explicitly. The construction is local and free of zero-twists. We further show that within this economical class of surfaces it is however possible to derive a sufficient number of meaningful degrees of freedom so that standard optimization techniques result in high quality surfaces.

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


featherweight wrap java We present an extension for a Java like language with a mechanism for dynamically extending object behaviors. Our approach consists in moving the addition of new features from class (static) level to object (dynamic) level: the basic features of entities (representing their structure) are separated from the additional ones (wrapper classes whose instances represent run-time added behaviors). At run-time, these entities can be dynamically composed by instantiating wrapper objects which are attached to basic entities. We formalize our extension by adding the new constructs to Featherweight Java; the core language so extended (Featherweight Wrap Java) is type safe.

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


The Author-Topic-Community model for author interest profiling and community discovery In this paper, we propose a generative model named the author-topic-community (ATC) model for representing a corpus of linked documents. The ATC model allows each author to be associated with a topic distribution and a community distribution as its model parameters. A learning algorithm based on variational inference is derived for the model parameter estimation where the two distributions are essentially reinforcing each other during the estimation. We compare the performance of the ATC model with two related generative models using first synthetic data sets and then real data sets, which include a research community data set, a blog data set, a news-sharing data set, and a microblogging data set. The empirical results obtained confirm that the proposed ATC model outperforms the existing models for tasks such as author interest profiling and author community discovery. We also demonstrate how the inferred ATC model can be used to characterize the roles of users/authors in online communities.

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

author community discovery
author interest profiling
variational inference


Cycle graph analysis for 3D roof structure modelling: Concepts and performance The paper presents a cycle graph analysis approach to the automatic reconstruction of 3D roof models from airborne laser scanner data. The nature of convergences of topological relations of plane adjacencies, allowing for the reconstruction of roof corner geometries with preserved topology, can be derived from cycles in roof topology graphs. The topology between roof adjacencies is defined in terms of ridge-lines and step-edges. In the proposed method, the input point cloud is first segmented and roof topology is derived while extracting roof planes from identified non-terrain segments. Orientation and placement regularities are applied on weakly defined edges using a piecewise regularization approach prior to the reconstruction, which assists in preserving symmetries in building geometry. Roof corners are geometrically modelled using the shortest closed cycles and the outermost cycle derived from roof topology graph in which external target graphs are no longer required. Based on test results, we show that the proposed approach can handle complexities with nearly 90% of the detected roof faces reconstructed correctly. The approach allows complex height jumps and various types of building roofs to be firmly reconstructed without prior knowledge of primitive building types.

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

3d roof reconstruction
airborne laser scanning
graph analysis


Logistics learning mechanisms and capabilities: towards an understanding of sustainable competitive advantage This study explores the relationship between logistics capabilities and sustainable competitive advantage by using the notion of learning mechanisms. It is argued that a set of processes of learning mechanisms may serve as a source of dynamic capabilities that create, develop and maintain logistics capabilities in their role as source of a companys sustainable competitive advantage. The learning mechanisms, in the form of experience accumulation, knowledge articulation and codification, are identified in two best-practice companies within logistics. Results imply that the origin of the sustainability of a logistics-based companys competitive advantage may be found in the dynamics of organisational learning, ultimately based on trial and error and experience accumulation. As such, the research elaborates on the connection between logistics capabilities and strategic competitive advantage, with learning as mediating dynamic capability.

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

operational capabilities
knowledge management


Electroencephalographic spectral asymmetry index for detection of depression This study is aimed to compare sensitivity of different electroencephalographic (EEG) indicators for detection of depression. The novel EEG spectral asymmetry index (SASI) was introduced based on balance between the powers of two special EEG frequency bands selected lower and higher of the EEG spectrum maximum and excluding the central frequency from the calculations. The efficiency of the SASI was compared to the traditional EEG inter-hemispheric asymmetry and coherence methods. EEG recordings were carried out on groups of depressive and healthy subjects of 18 female volunteers each. The resting eight-channel EEG was recorded during 30min. The SASI calculated in an arbitrary EEG channel differentiated clearly between the depressive and healthy group (p<0.005). Correlation between SASI and Hamilton Depression Rating Scale score was 0.7. The EEG inter-hemispheric asymmetry and coherence revealed some trends, but no significant differences between the groups of healthy controls and patients with depressive disorder.

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

eeg analysis
inter-hemispheric asymmetry


An experimental ambiguity detection tool Although programs convey an unambiguous meaning, the grammars used in practice to describe their syntax are often ambiguous, and completed with disambiguation rules. Whether these rules achieve the removal of all the ambiguities while preserving the original intended language can be difficult to ensure. We present an experimental ambiguity detection tool for GNU Bison, and illustrate how it can assist a grammatical development for a subset of Standard ML. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


web-based acquisition of japanese katakana variants This paper describes a method of detecting Japanese Katakana variants from a large corpus. Katakana words, which are mainly used as loanwords, cause problems with information retrieval and so on, because transliteration creates several variations in spelling and all of these can be orthographic. Previous works manually defined Katakana rewrite rules such as \%Y ( be ) and \%t\%' ( ve ) being replaceable with each other, for generating variants and also defined the weight of each operation to edit one string into another to detect these variants. However, these previous researches have not been able to keep up with the ever-increasing number of loanwords and their variants. With our method proposed in this paper, the weight of each edit operation is mechanically assigned based on Web data. In experiments, it performed almost as well as one with manually determined weights. Thus, the advantages of our method are: 1) need no expertise in linguistics to determine weight of each operation, and 2) able to keep up with new Katakana loanwords only by collecting text data from Web and acquiring new weights of edit operations automatically. It also achieved 98.6\% recall and 86.3\% precision in the task of extracting Katakana variant pairs from 38 year's worth of corpora of Japanese newspaper articles.

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

spelling variation
thesaurus
contextual similarity
edit distance


a task-based information retrieval interface to support bioinformatics analysis In this research-in-progress paper, we present the design and pilot testing of an interface created to support the integration of bioinformatics analysis with biological laboratory research. The interface presents a task-based bioinformatics analysis protocol detailing the functional analysis of a gene sequence, a complex information task that is problematic for many biologists. The interface guides the user through a series of 14 analytical steps, providing details on why to follow the step, what data is input/output, what tool(s) to use and how to interpret the results. It provides the framework and support within which the user can accomplish the information task. Our pilot testing has demonstrated initial evidence of the effectiveness of the interface, but also highlighted areas for clarification and enhancement.

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


Adaptive speaker identification with audiovisual cues for movie content analysis An adaptive speaker identification system which employs both audio and visual cues is proposed in this work for movie content analysis. Specifically, a likelihood-based approach is first applied for speaker identification using pure speech data, and techniques such as face detection/recognition and mouth tracking are applied for talking face recognition using pure visual data. These two information cues are then effectively integrated under a probabilistic framework for achieving more robust results. Moreover, to account for speakers' voice variations along time, we propose to update their acoustic models on the fly by adapting to their incoming speech data. An improved system performance (80% identification accuracy) has been observed on two test movies.

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

movie content analysis
adaptive speaker identification

speech segmentation and clustering
mouth detection and tracking
unsupervised speaker model adaptation


Performance comparison of Bug navigation algorithms The Bug algorithm family are well-known robot navigation algorithms with proven termination conditions for unknown environments. Eleven variations of Bug algorithm have been implemented and compared against each other on the EyeSim simulation platform. This paper discusses their relative performance for a number of different environment types as well as practical implementation issues.

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


Twin binary sequences: A nonredundant representation for general nonslicing floorplan The efficiency and effectiveness of many floor-planning methods depend very much on the representation of the geometrical relationship between the modules. A good representation can shorten the searching process so that more accurate estimations on area and interconnect costs can be performed. Nonslicing floorplan is the most general kind of floorplan that is commonly used. Unfortunately, there is not yet any complete and non-redundant topological representation for nonslicing structure. In this paper, we propose the first representation of this kind. Like some previous work (Zhou et al. 2001), we have also made use of mosaic floorplan as an intermediate step. However, instead of including a more than sufficient number of extra dummy blocks in the set of modules (that will increase the size of the solution space significantly), our representation allows us to insert an exact number of irreducible empty rooms to a mosaic floorplan such that every nonslicing floorplan can be obtained uniquely from one and only one mosaic floorplan. The size of the solution space is only O(n!2(3n)/n(1.5)), which is the size without empty room insertion, but every nonslicing floorplan can be generated uniquely and efficiently in linear time without any redundant representation.

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

computer-aided design
very large scale integration


Effect of annealing conditions on formation of SrRuO3 films by interfacial reaction of SrO/RuO2 bi-layer films Effect of annealing conditions on formation of SrRuO3 film was investigated. Conformal SrRuO3 film was formed by interfacial reaction of SrO/RuO2 bi-layer. SrRuO3 film effectively acted as a functional electrode for perovskite high-k dielectric.

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

capacitor electrode
strontium ruthenate
rapid thermal annealing
atomic layer deposition


Formalized entity extraction methodology for changeable business requirements Without a formal methodology extracting entities from business descriptions, a business requirement in the real world cannot be abstracted correctly into an entity-relationship schema. Once core entities arc discovered, we can obtain an Entity-Relationship) Diagram (ERD) by inserting relationships between/among the relevant entities and by aggregating some attributes into one of the entities or relationships. There have been so many Studies on formal guidelines for extracting entities from business descriptions. Most of them adopt a knowledge-based approach which consults a knowledge base to recommend entity candidates. However, the knowledge-based approach usually fails to construct the most appropriate ERD for a given business domain. The approach performs the entity extraction on the stiff premise that an object would be classified as an entity if it happen to be classified as an entity once or more in past applications. The previous studies did not consider the flexibility in the object classification that even the same object Could be regarded as either an entity or an attribute according to the various concerns of field workers. In this paper, we discuss some limitations of the previous researches on object classification and propose a new methodology for flexible entity extraction. To evaluate the practicality of the devised methodology, we developed a tool for the methodology and performed a case study on option trading applications with the tool.

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

database design methodology
enterprise data modeling
entity-relationship model
requirements analysis
database design automation


The ethylene/metal(0) and ethylene/metal(I) redox system: model ab initio calculations Ab initio calculations ( coupled cluster with single and double excitations; CCSD) have been used to investigate the model redox systems ethylene: M( 0) ( M = Li, Na, K, Rb, Cs) and ethylene: M( I) ( M = Be, Mg, Ca, Sr, Ba, Zn, Cd, Hg). Within C-2v symmetry, the ground ((2)A(1)) states correspond to the charge distribution given in the title. The lowest (B-2(2)) excited states correspond, somewhat counter intuitively, to the ethylene (center dot-)/M(II) ion pair: These trends can be rationalized on the basis of simple electrostatic and configuration-mixing arguments that lead to two simple equations for predicting the electron-transfer energies for oxidation or reduction of the ethylene. The electron-transfer energies to the B-2(2) ion pairs are dominated by the electrostatic ion-pairing energies.

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


Unsupervised learning of image manifolds by semidefinite programming Can we detect low dimensional structure in high dimensional data sets of images? In this paper, we propose an algorithm for unsupervised learning of image manifolds by semidefinite programming. Given a data set of images, our algorithm computes a low dimensional representation of each image with the property that distances between nearby images are preserved. More generally, it can be used to analyze high dimensional data that lies on or near a low dimensional manifold. We illustrate the algorithm on easily visualized examples of curves and surfaces, as well as on actual images of faces, handwritten digits, and solid objects.

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

semidefinite programming
image manifolds

manifold learning
dimensionality reduction
kernel methods
data analysis
semidefinite embedding


Artificial neural network-based model for predicting VO(2)max from a submaximal exercise test The goal of this study is to develop an accurate artificial neural network (ANN)-based model to predict maximal oxygen uptake (VO(2)max) of fit adults from a single stage submaximal treadmill jogging test. Participants (81 males and 45 females), aged from 17 to 40 years, successfully completed a maximal graded exercise test (GXT) to determine VO(2)max. The variables; gender, age, body mass, steady-state heart rate and jogging speed are used to build the ANN prediction model. Using 10-fold cross validation on the dataset, the average values of standard error of estimate (SEE). Pearson's correlation coefficient (r) and multiple correlation coefficient (R) of the model are calculated as 1.80 ml kg(-1) min(-1), 0.95 and 0.93, respectively. Compared with the results of the other prediction models in literature that were developed using Multiple Linear Regression Analysis, the reported values of SEE, r and R in this study are considerably more accurate. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

maximal oxygen uptake
submaximal exercise test


Predictive power of LDA to discriminate abnormal wine fermentations Wine fermentation is a critical step of winemaking. Unfavorable conditions can seriously affect the quality of the final product; however, it is difficult to anticipate these abnormal behaviors. In this study, the predictive power of stepwise linear discriminant analysis (SLDA) was evaluated to discriminate the behavior of wine fermentation. Information on different chemical concentrations from 18 industrial wine fermentations of Cabernet Sauvignon was used in this study. The statistical procedure consisted of curve fitting with exponential curve, and Stepwise LDA applied to the parameters of the curve. This methodology was applied to different times between the beginning and the end of fermentation (72, 95, 100, 150, 200 and 400 h). The results revealed that between seven and eight, of the 28 variables studied, minimized the Standard Error of Cross-Validation (SECV) for the different times. In almost all times studied, correlation coefficient of alcoholic degree, initial concentration of glucose, initial density and correlation coefficient of tartaric acid were the variables more discriminant, and they indicated some differences between a normal and an abnormal fermentation, which need to be corroborated with more information. In this work, before 95 h, it was not possible to minimize the prediction error and find the most discriminant variables. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

lda
wine fermentation
stepwise
prediction


conditional random fields for activity recognition in smart environments One of the most common functions of smart environments is to monitor and assist older adults with their activities of daily living. Activity recognition is a key component in this application. It is essentially a temporal classification problem which has been modeled in the past by nave Bayes classifiers and hidden Markov models (HMMs). In this paper, we describe the use of another probabilistic model: Conditional Random Fields (CRFs), which is currently gaining popularity for its remarkable performance for activity recognition. Our focus is on using CRFs to recognize activities performed by an inhabitant in a smart home environment and our goal is to validate the claim of its higher or similar performance by comparing CRFs with HMMs using data collected in a real smart home.

B I I O B I 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 random fields
smart environments
activity recognition


Web-Traveler Policies for Images on Social Networks Images are one of the most popular type of contents shared on these sites. One of the most popular types of contents shared on these sites is image. Most of these networks offer some rudimentary forms of access controls such as allowing the users to choose who can view their profiles or the images uploaded by them. These controls however apply only in the perimeter of the users' direct control such as desktops, profiles etc. Users have no control over their content once it is downloaded by others. In order to enable a user to truly maintain control over his content, new access control mechanisms must be designed so as to enable users to control their content even when managed by others. Towards fulfilling this gap, in this paper we propose the concept of "web-traveler policies". Web-traveler policies allow the user to specify who can view, upload or download a given image within a social network. The unique, innovative feature of web-traveler policies is that they travel with the image, as long as it is hosted on the given social networking site. Additionally, we explore the possibility of extending these controls across different sites, by using the concept of mashups. In the paper we prove the feasibility of this approach, by implementing a working prototype of our approach on a real open source social network platform. We test the performance and scalability of such architecture under heavy user loads and also its resilience towards na < ve attacks. This work is a first innovative step toward scalable systems for providing each user with a centralized system for his/her own content's protection all over the web.

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


correctness criteria for replicated database systems with snapshot isolation replicas In this work, we present the correctness criteria that ensures a replicated database behaves like a single copy where trans-actions see a weaker form of SI, called Generalized-SI, with deferred update protocols in a crash failure scenario.

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

replica control
formal proofs
i/o automaton model
database replication


On answering the question "Where do I start in order to solve a new problem involving interval type-2 fuzzy sets?" This paper, which is tutorial in nature, demonstrates how the Embedded Sets Representation Theorem (RT) for a general type-2 fuzzy set (T2 FS), when specialized to an interval (I)T-2 FS, can be used as the starting point to solve many diverse problems that involve IT2 FSs. The problems considered are: set theoretic operations, centroid, uncertainty measures, similarity, inference engine computations for Mamdani IT2 fuzzy logic systems, linguistic weighted average, person membership function approach to type-2 fuzzistics, and Interval Approach to type-2 fuzzistics. Each solution obtained from the RT is a structural solution but is not a practical computational solution, however, the latter are always found from the former. It is this author's recommendation that one should use the RT as a starting point whenever solving a new problem involving IT2 FSs because it has had such great success in solving so many such problems in the past, and it answers the question "Where do I start in order to solve a new problem involving IT2 FSs?" (C) 2009 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 B I B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B B I B O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O B O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

representation theorem
embedded sets
centroid
uncertainty measures
similarity
linguistic weighted average
fuzzistics

interval type-2 fuzzy sets
fuzzy logic system


Testing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Missions in a Scaled Environment UAV research generally follows a path from computer simulation and lab tests of individual components to full integrated testing in the field. Since realistic environments are difficult to simulate, its hard to predict how control algorithms will react to real world conditions such as varied lighting, weather, and obstacles like trees and wires. This paper introduces a methodic approach to developing UAV missions. A scaled down urban environment provides a facility to perform testing and evaluation (T&E) on control algorithms before flight. A UAV platform and test site allow the tuned control algorithms to be verified and validated (V&V) in real world flights. The resulting design methodology reduces risk in the development of UAV missions.

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

unmanned aerial vehicles
verification and validation


Memory characteristics of MOSFET with silicon nanoclusters formed using a pulse-type gas-feeding technique in the LPCVD system The digital gas-feeding method was used in this study, with Si2H6 as the source gas, in a low-pressure chemical-vapor deposition system, to grow Si nanoclusters with high densities and uniform sizes. The densities of the Si nanoclusters rose to 71011cm?2, and their sizes slightly changed at about 7nm based on the frequency of gas-pulse feeding in the digital process. MOSFETs containing Si nanoclusters as a floating gate in the gate stack were fabricated, and the various nonvolatile-memory characteristics of MOSFET were investigated. The total threshold voltage shift of 3.7V was achieved, and the program/erase times were found to be 5?s/50ms when the program/erase voltages were +18/?20V, respectively. The charge-storage memory window was extrapolated over 1year to be 1.5V in the retention measurements of the fabricated Si nanocluster floating-gate memory device.

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

flash memory
nanocrystal floating-gate memory
nonvolatile memory
digital gas-feeding


Accurate tracking of legged robots on natural terrain Statically stable walking locomotion research has focused mainly on robot design and gait generation. However, there is a need to expand robots' capabilities so that walking machines can accomplish the kinds of real tasks for which they are eminently suited. Many such tasks demand trajectory tracking, but researchers have traditionally ignored this subject. This article focuses on the tracking of predefined trajectories with hexapod robots walking on natural terrain with forbidden zones. The method presented herein, which relies on gait algorithms defined elsewhere, describes certain localization strategies and control techniques that have been employed to follow trajectories accurately and have been implemented in a real walking hexapod. Several experimental examples are included to assess the proposed algorithms.

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


Applying domain knowledge and social information to product analysis and recommendations: an agent-based decision support system The advance of Internet and Web technologies has boosted the development of electronic commerce. More and more people have changed their traditional trading behaviors and started to conduct Internet shopping. However, the exponentially increasing product information provided by Internet enterprises causes the problem of information overload, and this inevitably reduces the customer's satisfaction and loyalty. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose a multi-agent system that is capable of eliciting expert knowledge and of recommending optimal products for individual consumers. The recommendations are based on both product knowledge from domain experts and the customer's preferences from system-consumer interactions. In addition, the system also uses behavior patterns collected from previous consumers to predict what the current consumer may expect. Experiments have been conducted and the results show that our system can give sensible recommendations, and it is able to adapt to the most up-to-date preferences for the customers.

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

multi-attribute decision making
software agent
knowledge acquisition
recommendation
collaboration
behavior modeling


The MindGame: A P300-based braincomputer interface game We present a BrainComputer Interface (BCI) game, the MindGame, based on the P300 event-related potential. In the MindGame interface P300 events are translated into movements of a character on a three-dimensional game board. A linear feature selection and classification scheme is applied to identify P300 events and calculate gradual feedback features from a scalp electrode array. The classification during the online run of the game is computed on a single-trial basis without averaging over subtrials. We achieve classification rates of 0.65 on single-trials during the online operation of the system while providing gradual feedback to the player.

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


Dynamically adaptive register file architecture for energy reduction in embedded processors Energy reduction in embedded processors is a must since most embedded systems run on batteries and processor energy reduction helps increase usage time before needing a recharge. Register files are among the most power consuming parts of a processor core. Register file power consumption mainly depends on its size (height as well as width), especially in newer technologies where leakage power is increasing. We provide a register file architecture that, depending on the application behavior, dynamically (i) adapts the width of individual registers, and (ii) puts partitions of temporarily unused registers into low-power mode, so as to save both static and dynamic power. We show that our scheme increases register file area by 3.6% and imposes 2.85% performance overhead on average. Our experimental results on OpenRISC 1200 processor and with selected MiBench benchmark suite show up to 29%, and 54% (24% and 49% on average) reduction in dynamic and static energy consumption of the register file, respectively.

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

low-power
energy efficiency
processor architectures


Linear Surface Reconstruction from Discrete Fundamental Forms on Triangle Meshes We present a linear algorithm to reconstruct the vertex coordinates for a surface mesh given its edge lengths and dihedral angles, unique up to rotation and translation. A local integrability condition for the existence of an immersion of the mesh in 3D Euclidean space is provided, mirroring the fundamental theorem of surfaces in the continuous setting (i.e. Gauss's equation and the MainardiCodazzi equations) if we regard edge lengths as the discrete first fundamental form and dihedral angles as the discrete second fundamental form. The resulting sparse linear system to solve for the immersion is derived from the convex optimization of a quadratic energy based on a lift from the immersion in the 3D Euclidean space to the 6D rigid motion space. This discrete representation and linear reconstruction can benefit a wide range of geometry processing tasks such as surface deformation and shape analysis. A rotation-invariant surface deformation through point and orientation constraints is demonstrated as well.

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

differential coordinates
first fundamental forms
second fundamental forms


IPTV over EPON: Synthetic traffic generation and performance evaluation In an increasingly content-centric world where users consume large amounts of multimedia content, video delivery platforms over packet networks, such as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV), are gaining rapid popularity. At the same time, to serve the ever-increasing bandwidth demand from users, access networks, traditionally the bottleneck for high-bandwidth applications, are also undergoing rapid evolution. Forecasting how streaming IPTV over a network will perform is challenging as the data rate of a video stream varies with scene, time, framerate, and encoding. Nevertheless, it is important to evaluate the performance of an access network for IPTV traffic to ensure good Quality of Service (QoS) for users. Using video traces for such evaluation requires multiple video traces to represent different scenarios and generally involves slow I/O-based operations, such as file reading. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we explore several aspects of modeling IPTV streaming, and present a synthetic video trace generator that closely resembles the empirical IPTV traces. Our analysis confirms that our synthetic video trace follows the statistical properties of empirical videos, and its resultant data rate is representative of the IPTV video streaming. Next we study the performance of Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) in streaming IPTV by using the generated synthetic trace. Parameters of interest are the number of parallel video streams supported, the effects of the degree of video compression, average and maximum packet delays, and packet delay variances (jitter). It is shown that 10G-EPON can support a large number of parallel IPTV channels at moderate rates of video compression.

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


Robust multi-objective and multi-level optimization of complex mechanical structures This paper presents a new approach to robust multi-objective and multi-level optimization of the design of complex mechanical structures. The optimization is at two levels: system and elements. At system-level, the robust multi-objective problem has four cost functions: on the one hand the minimization of the global mass and displacement at a fixed point of the mechanical structure, and on the other hand the maximization of both the robustness and the displacement of the mass. At element-level the robust multi-objective problem has two cost functions: minimization of the element mass and maximization of its robustness. A robust condensation technique, based on an enriched KarhunenLove condensation, is used for complex structures which require a large finite element model. In contrast to existing formulations, this new approach takes into account uncertainties in the design parameters at system-level and element-level. It also allows for the task sharing which is commonly used in structural engineering.

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

multi-objective optimization
multi-level optimization
genetic algorithm
karhunenlove transformation


Anticipatory drivers in the Nagel-Schreckenberg-model The Nagel-Schreckenberg-model (NaSch-model) describes macroscopic features of real traffic very well. However, the characterization of a single car driver's behavior in some details is not realistic, e.g., the NaSch-driver calculates his/her distance to the car in front from the position this car has just in the very moment and ignores that it could move further in the next time step. This behavior is rarely found in real traffic. Normally, a driver estimates the speed of the car in front, takes as well a certain braking distance into consideration and keeps distance accordingly. As an answer to this demand, the second rule of the NaSch-model is modified in the following.

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


supporting human creative story authoring with asynthetic audience Human creativity plays an important role in the production of many of the media products that permeate our society. However, non-expert creators are often limited by a lack of technical ability, as opposed to creative ability. This is especially true for story authoring. We present an approach to supporting creativity using synthetic audience - an intelligent agent that acts as (a) a surrogate story recipient and (b) critic capable of providing constructive feedback. We describe initial efforts based on computational modeling of cognitive processes and creativity.

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


Center and distinguisher for strings with unbounded alphabet Consider two sets B and G of strings of length L with characters from an unbounded alphabet Sigma, i.e., the size of Sigma is not bounded by a constant and has to be taken into consideration as a parameter for input size. A closest string s* of B is a string that minimizes the maximum of Hamming(1) distance(s, s*) over all string s : s is an element of B. In contrast, a farthest string t* from G maximizes the minimum of Hamming distance(t*,t) over all elements t: t is an element of G. A distinguisher of B from G is a string that is close to every string in B and far away from any string in G. We obtain polynomial time approximation schemes to settle the above problems.

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

approximation algorithm
computational molecular biology
center string selection
distinguishing string selection
unbounded alphabet size


An adaptive method for anomaly detection in symmetric network traffic Symmetry is an obvious phenomenon in two-way communications. In this paper, we present an adaptive nonparametric method that can be used for anomaly detection in symmetric network traffic. Two important features are emphasized in this method: (i) automatic adjustment of the detection threshold according to the traffic conditions; and (ii) timely detection of the end of an anomalous event. Source-end defense against SYN flooding attacks is used to illustrate the efficacy of this method. Experiments on real traffic traces show that this method has high detection accuracy and low detection delays, and excels at detecting low intensity attacks.

O O O O B I O O O 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

inside security
algorithm design
network security
sequential analysis


FBSF: A new fast packet switching fabric based on multistage interconnection network with multiple outlets In this paper, we propose a new switching network architecture with output queueing, The proposed switch, FBSF (FAB Banyan Switching Fabrics) can deliver up to 2r packets simultaneously destined for the same outlet in a single time slot. The switch fabrics consist of Batcher sorter, a radix-r double shuffle network, r-packet distributors, two FAB networks, and output buffer modules. The performance of the switch fabric is evaluated by measures of throughput, average queue length, average waiting lime, and packet loss rate. Numerical and simulation results indicate that the switch exhibits very good delay-throughput performance over a wide range of input traffic.

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 I O O O O O O O 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

switching network
output queueing
batcher sorter

banyan network
packet distributor
fab network


A qualitative comparison of Artificial Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines in ECG arrhythmias classification In this paper, a novel use of KernelAdatron (KA) learning algorithm to aid SVM (Support Vector Machine) for ECG arrhythmias classification is proposed. The proposed pattern classifier is compared with MLP (multi-layered perceptron) using back propagation (BP) learning algorithm. The ECG signals taken from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database are used in training to classify 6 different arrhythmia, plus normal ECG. The MLP and SVM training and testing stages were carried out twice. They were first trained only with one ECG lead signal and then a second ECG lead signal was added to the training and testing datasets. The aim was to investigate its influence on training and testing performance (generalization ability) plus time of training for both classifiers. Implementation of these three criteria for evaluation of ECG signals classification will ease the problem of structural comparisons, which has not been given attention in previous research works. The results indicate that SVM in comparison to MLP is much faster in training stage and nearly seven times higher in performance, but MLP generalization ability in terms of mean square error is more than three times less. The proposed SVM method shows considerable improvement in comparison to recently reported results obtained by Osowski et al. (2008).

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


Seeking multi-thresholds directly from support vectors for image segmentation Threshold selection is an important topic and also a critical preprocessing step for image analysis, pattern recognition and computer vision. In this letter, a novel automatic image thresholding approach only from the support vectors is proposed. It first fits the 1D histogram of a given image by support vector regression (SVR) to obtain all boundary support vectors and then sifts automatically so-needed (multi-) threshold values directly from the support vectors rather than the optimized extrema of the fitted histogram in which finding the extrema is, in general, difficult. The proposed approach is not only computationally efficient but also does not require prior assumptions whatsoever to be made about the image (type, features, contents, stochastic model, etc.). Such an algorithm is most useful for applications that are supposed to work with different (and possibly initially unknown) types of images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can select the thresholds automatically and effectively, and the resulting images can preserve the main features of the components of the original images very well.

O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 segmentation
support vector regression

automatic thresholding
histograms
image processing


Deficiencies in traditional measures of in vitro hippocampal rhythms An in vitro thick slice mouse hippocampus preparation exhibits spontaneous rhythmic local field potentials in the 34Hz range due to synchronous discharges in the inhibitory interneuron population. Intracellular rhythms are recorded concurrently with field rhythms from this preparation in data sets of approximately 3min durations. Cross-correlation, phase and frequency distribution are used to compare intracellular and field rhythms and generate groups of activity in the timefrequency domain. We find that patterns of activity present in timefrequency are obscured using other techniques and we characterize the activity that is omitted.

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


An immersed interface method for solving incompressible viscous flows with piecewise constant viscosity across a moving elastic membrane This paper presents an implementation of the second-order accurate immersed interface method to simulate the motion of the flexible elastic membrane immersed in two viscous incompressible fluids with different viscosities, which further develops the work reported in Tan et al. [Z.-J. Tan, D.V. Le, K.M. Lim, B.C. Khoo, An Immersed Interface Method for the Incompressible NavierStokes Equations with Discontinuous Viscosity Across the Interface, submitted for publication] focussing mainly on the fixed interface problems. In this work, we introduce the velocity components at the membrane as two augmented unknown interface variables to decouple the originally coupled jump conditions for the velocity and pressure. Three forms of augmented equation are derived to determine the augmented variables to satisfy the continuous condition of the velocity. The velocity at the membrane, which determine the motion of the membrane, is then solved by the GMRES iterative method. The forces calculated from the configuration of the flexible elastic membrane and the augmented variables are interpolated using cubic splines and applied to the fluid through the jump conditions. The position of the flexible elastic membrane is updated implicitly using a quasi-Newton method (BFGS) within each time step. The NavierStokes equations are solved on a staggered Cartesian grid using a second order accurate projection method with the incorporation of spatial and temporal jump conditions. In addition, we also show that the inclusion of the temporal jump contributions has non-negligible effect on the simulation results when the grids are crossed by the membrane. Using the above method, we assess the effect of different viscosities on the flow solution and membrane motion.

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

incompressible viscous flows
piecewise constant viscosity
immersed interface method
projection method


Acoustic emission source location on large plate-like structures using a local triangular sensor array A new acoustic emission (AE) source location method was developed for large plate-like structures, which evaluates the location of the source using a combined time of flight and modal source location algorithm. Three sensors are installed in a triangular array with a sensor to sensor distance of just a few centimeters. The direction from the sensor array to the AE source can be established by analysing the arrival times of the A0 component of the signal to the three sensors whilst the distance can be evaluated using the separation of S0 and A0 mode at each sensor respectively. The close positioning of the sensors allows the array to be installed in a single housing. This simplifies mounting, wiring and calibration procedures for non-destructive testing (NDT) and structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. Furthermore, this array could reduce the number of sensors needed to monitor large structures compared to other methods. An automatic wave mode identification method is also presented.

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

source location
local triangular sensor array

acoustic emission (ae)
modal analysis
wave mode arrival time


A Distributed Mincut/Maxflow Algorithm Combining Path Augmentation and Push-Relabel We propose a novel distributed algorithm for the minimum cut problem. Motivated by applications like volumetric segmentation in computer vision, we aim at solving large sparse problems. When the problem does not fully fit in the memory, we need to either process it by parts, looking at one part at a time, or distribute across several computers. Many mincut/maxflow algorithms are designed for the shared memory architecture and do not scale to this setting. We consider algorithms that work on disjoint regions of the problem and exchange messages between the regions. We show that the region push-relabel algorithm ofDelong and Boykov (A scalable graph-cut algorithm for N-D grids, in CVPR, 2008) uses ?(n 2) rounds of message exchange, where n is the number of vertices. Our new algorithm performs path augmentations inside the regions and push-relabel style updates between the regions. It uses asymptotically less message exchanges, \(O(\mathcal{B}^{2})\), where \(\mathcal{B}\) is the set of boundary vertices. The sequential and parallel versions of our algorithm are competitive with the state-of-the-art in the shared memory model. By achieving a lower amount of message exchanges (even asymptotically lower in our synthetic experiments), they suit better for solving large problems using a disk storage or a distributed system.

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

maximum flow
push-relable
augmenting path
large scale


Linear Types for Computational Effects I shall present an extension of Moggi's computational metalanguage with primitives from linear logic, the enriched effect-calculus. Illustrative applications to side effects, continuations, nondeterminism and polymorphism will be considered. The talk is based on joint work with Jeff Egger and Rasmus Mogelberg.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 performance of active spectral reflectance sensors as influenced by measuring distance, device temperature and light intensity Ambient conditions and sensorplant distances may affect active sensors performance. Effects of changes in light and temperature on three active sensors were investigated. Active sensors performance is hardly affected by changes in light intensity. Distance between the sensor and the target surface needs to be considered. Varying device temperature should be taken into account.

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

precision farming
precision phenotyping
phenomics
fertilisation
site specific management


Microgrid dynamic response during the pre-planned and forced islanding processes involving DFIG and synchronous generators Dynamic response of a microgrid system when it faces different operative conditions. Load shedding response when an unforeseen load is connected. Load shedding response due to the loss of one generator. Some other byproducts related to the developed study are also shown in the article.

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

dfig generator
microgrid systems
pre-planned islanding


On exploiting static and dynamically mined metadata for exploratory web searching Most Web Search Engines (WSEs) are appropriate for focalized search, i.e., they make the assumption that users can accurately describe their information need using a small sequence of terms. However, as several user studies have shown, a high percentage of search tasks are exploratory, and focalized search very commonly leads to inadequate interactions and poor results. This paper proposes exploiting static and dynamically mined metadata for enriching web searching with exploration services. Online results clustering, which is a mining task of dynamic nature since it is based on query-dependent snippets, is useful for providing users with overviews of the top results and thus allowing them to restrict their focus to the desired parts. On the other hand, the various static metadata that are available to a search engine (e.g., domain, language, date, and filetype) are commonly exploited only through the advanced (form-based) search facilities that some WSEs offer (and users rarely use). We propose an approach that combines both kinds of metadata by adopting the interaction paradigm of dynamic taxonomies and faceted exploration, which allows the users to restrict their focus gradually using both static and dynamically derived metadata. Special focus is given on the design and analysis of incremental algorithms for speeding up the exploration process. The experimental evaluation over a real WSE shows that this combination results to an effective, flexible, and efficient exploration experience. Finally, we report the results of a user study indicating that this direction is promising in terms of user preference, satisfaction, and effort.

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

interactive information retrieval
faceted and dynamic taxonomies


Parametric representation of a surface pencil with a common line of curvature Line of curvature on a surface plays an important role in practical applications. A curve on a surface is a line of curvature if its tangents are always in the direction of the principal curvature. By utilizing the Frenet frame, the surface pencil can be expressed as a linear combination of the components of the local frame. With this parametric representation, we derive the necessary and sufficient condition for the given curve to be the line of curvature on the surface. Moreover, the necessary and sufficient condition for the given curve to satisfy the line of curvature and the geodesic requirements is also analyzed.

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

line of curvature
frenet frame
parametric representation


Bounded model checking of infinite state systems Bounded model checking (BMC) is an attractive alternative to symbolic model checking, since it often allows a more efficient verification. The idea of BMC is to reduce the model checking problem to a satisfiability problem of the underlying base logic, so that sophisticated decision procedures can be utilized to check the resulting formula. We present a new approach to BMC that extends current methods in three ways: First, instead of a reduction to propositional logic which restricts BMC to finite state systems, we focus on infinite state systems and therefore consider more powerful, yet decidable base logics. Second, instead of directly unwinding temporal logic formulas, we use special translations to ?-automata that take into account the temporal logic hierarchy and maintain safety and liveness properties. Third, we employ both global and local model checking procedures to take advantage of the different types of specifications that can be handled by these techniques. Based on three-valued logic, our bounded model checking procedures may either prove or disprove a specification, or they may explicitly state that no information has been obtained due to insufficient bounds.

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

bounded model checking
infinite state systems
temporal logic hierarchy
local model checking


access control and management in b2c model of electronic commerce The paper discusses main characteristics and functionality of "Business-to-Consumer" model of electronic comerce (e-commerce). All participants in this model are devided into separate groups according to their participation in the business processes. As a result a hierarchical structure with four levels is proposed, which is intended to realize access control of the users and transactions management. It is a part of the Business Mnangement System in B2C model and could be implemented for customizing, analysis of Web sites, planning and development of data security according to the new tendencies in e-business and contemporary computer technologies.

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

model "business-to-consumer" (b2c)
e-commerce


Structure from silhouettes: a new paradigm for fast sketch-based design of trees Modeling natural elements such as trees in a plausible way, while offering simple and rapid user control, is a challenge. This paper presents a method based on a new structure from silhouettes paradigm. We claim that sketching the silhouettes of foliage at multiple scales is quicker and more intuitive for a user than having to sketch each branch of a tree. This choice allows us to incorporate botanical knowledge, enabling us to infer branches that connect in a plausible way to their parent branch and have a correct distribution in 3D. We illustrate these ideas by presenting a seamless sketch-based interface, used for sketching foliage silhouettes from the scale of an entire tree to the scale of a leaf. Each sketch serves for inferring both the branches at that level and construction lines to serve as support for sub-silhouette refinement. When the user finally zooms out, the style inferred for the branching systems he has refined (in terms of branch density, angle, length distribution and shape) is duplicated to the unspecified branching systems at the same level. Meanwhile, knowledge from botany is again used for extending the branch distribution to 3D, resulting in a full, plausible 3D tree that fits the user-sketched contours. As our results show, this system can be of interest to both experts and novice users. While experts can fully specify all parts of a tree and over-sketch specific branches if required, any user can design a basic 3D tree in one or two minutes, as easily as sketching it with paper and pen.

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

computer graphics [i.3.3]: methodology and techniques


Service personalization for assistive living in a mobile ambient healthcare-networked environment For more than a decade, it has been observed that due to the continuously increasing elderly population, medical expenditures for home health-care have rapidly increased every year. Health-care organizations are being encouraged to find more efficient methods of providing high-quality care with cost savings. Elderly people who live alone may fear being unable to obtain help if they are injured or ill. For many families, the fear of such an event can dominate decisions about living arrangements. During the last decades, this fear has generated an industry, marketing house automations, alarm-and-notification systems as well as assistive technologies and interventions that aim at easier and more efficient control of their living environment, as well as the provision of specialized home-care services. In this study, the most important aspects of the INHOME platform architecture, the home-care services provided together with the home-care applications developed such as health monitoring and household appliances monitoring and control, are discussed. The goal of the INHOME project is to provide ambient assistive living services to improve the quality of life of elderly people at home and is mainly targeted at ameliorating the ways of providing intelligent services for assisting independent living of elderly people at home.

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

home-care
networked home
health-care services
aal
assisted living at home


Handwritten digit recognition: investigation of normalization and feature extraction techniques The performance evaluation of various techniques is important to select the correct options in developing character recognition systems. In our previous works, we have proposed aspect ratio adaptive normalization (ARAN) and have evaluated the performance of state-of-the-art feature extraction and classification techniques. For this time, we will propose some improved normalization functions and direction feature extraction strategies and will compare their performance with existing techniques. We compare ten normalization functions (seven based on dimensions and three based on moments) and eight feature vectors on three distinct data sources. The normalization functions and feature vectors are combined to produce eighty classification accuracies to each dataset. The comparison of normalization functions shows that moment-based functions outperform the dimension-based ones and the aspect ratio mapping is influential. The comparison of feature vectors shows that the improved feature extraction strategies outperform their baseline counterparts. The gradient feature from gray-scale image mostly yields the best performance and the improved NCFE (normalization-cooperated feature extraction) features also perform well. The combined effects of normalization, feature extraction, and classification have yielded very high accuracies on well-known datasets.

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

handwritten digit recognition
normalization
aspect ratio mapping
direction feature
ncfe
gradient feature


Stochastic finite-state systems in control theory ? This paper is concerned, in the main, with a problem of pursuitevasion in the context of a stochastic finite-state system. Two cases are considered: (a) non-competitive pursuit in which the target does not try to evade the pursuer; and (b) a competitive case in which the aim of the target is to maximize the time of interception, and that of the pursuer is to minimize it. Employing dynamic programming, it is shown that determination of optimal policies for the target and pursuer reduce to solution of a functional equation involving the expected time of interception vector. Furthermore, it is shown that the functional equation is a contraction mapping. Optimal solution is obtained through iterated contraction. Convergence of iteration is established through the use of the Banach fixed-point theorem.

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

adversarial control theory
stochastic automata


multiple haptic targets for motion-impaired computer users Although a number of studies have reported that force feedback gravity wells can improve performance in "point-and-click" tasks, there have been few studies addressing issues surrounding the use of gravity wells for multiple on-screen targets. This paper investigates the performance of users, both with and without motion-impairments, in a "point-and-click" task when an undesired haptic distractor is present. The importance of distractor location is studied explicitly. Results showed that gravity wells can still improve times and error rates, even on occasions when the cursor is pulled into a distractor. The greatest improvement is seen for the most impaired users. In addition to traditional measures such as time and errors, performance is studied in terms of measures of cursor movement along a path. Two cursor measures, angular distribution and temporal components, are proposed and their ability to explain performance differences is explored.

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


Sufficient conditions of the discrete maximumminimum principle for parabolic problems on rectangular meshes New numerical models for simulation of physical and chemical phenomena have to meet certain qualitative requirements, such as nonnegativity preservation, maximumminimum principle, and maximum norm contractivity. For parabolic initial boundary value problems, these properties are generally guaranteed by certain geometrical conditions on the meshes used and by choosing the time-step according to some lower and upper bounds. The necessary and sufficient conditions of the qualitative properties and their relations have been already given. In this paper sufficient conditions are derived for the Galerkin finite element solution of a linear parabolic initial boundary value problem. We solve the problem on a 2D rectangular domain using bilinear basis function.

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

nonnegativity preservation
maximum norm contractivity

parabolic problem
finite element method
discrete maximum principle


Invariant Signatures of Closed Planar Curves We prove that any subset of a"e(2) parametrized by a C (1) periodic function and its derivative is the Euclidean invariant signature of a closed planar curve. This solves a problem posed by Calabi et al. (Int. J. Comput. Vis. 26:107-135, 1998). Based on the proof of this result, we then develop some cautionary examples concerning the application of signature curves for object recognition and symmetry detection as proposed by Calabi et al.

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

closed curves
phase portrait
symmetry detection


extending the implementation scheme of functional programming system fp for supporting the formal software development methodology An extension to the implementation scheme of functional programming system FP is proposed for handling multiple order operations at function level. The concepts of Functional Form Operator (FFO), Nth order applications, and invariant semantics of functional forms are introduced. An FFO can be taken as either an operator at function level, or a variable of other operations for building new FFO's. Thus variable-free operators can be defined for mappings from a list of functions to a new function denoted by a functional form, or from a list of FFO's to a new one. Together with the notion of multi-order applications, a hierarchy of operations at function level can be handled. This approach is useful for supporting the formal software development methodology characterized by top-down functional specification, bottom-up function mapping construction and stepwise validation.

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 B 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 O O O 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 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

functional form
functional programming
applications

algebra of programs
correctness verification
functional form operator
abstract data type


Symmetric RBAC model that takes the separation of duty and role hierarchies into consideration RBAC is a family of reference models in which permissions are assigned to roles, and users are also assigned to appropriate roles. Studies on the permissionrole part of RBAC model are relatively insufficient compared with those on the userrole part, and researches on symmetric RBAC models to overcome this is also in an incipient stage. Therefore there is difficulty in assigning permissions suitable for roles. This paper proposes a symmetric RBAC model that supplements the constraints on permission assignment set forth by previous studies. The proposed symmetric RBAC model reflects the conflicts of interests between roles and the sharing and integration of permissions on the assignment of permissions by presenting the constraints on permission assignment that take the separation of duties and role hierarchies into consideration. In addition, by expressing constraints prescribing prerequisite relations between permissions through AND/OR graphs, it is possible to effectively limit the complicated prerequisite relations of permissions. The constraints on permission assignment for the proposed symmetric RBAC model reduce errors in permission assignment by properly detailing rules to observe at the time of permission assignment.

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


notification for shared annotation of digital documents Notification and shared annotations go hand-in-hand. Notification of activity in a shared document system is known to support awareness and improve asynchronous collaboration, but few studies have examined user needs and explored design tradeoffs. We examined large-scale use of notifications in a commercial system and found it lacking. We designed and deployed enhancements to the system, then conducted a field study to gauge their effect. We found that providing more information in notification messages, supporting multiple communication channels through which notifications can be received, and allowing customization of notification messages are particularly important. Overall awareness of annotation activity on software specifications increased with our enhancements

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


BEM solution of Poisson's equation with source function satisfying ?2?=constant In this paper Poisson's equation in two dimensions is studied and different solutions with a BEM are outlined depending on whether the source function is harmonic or not. When the Laplacian of the source function is zero or a constant, the Galerkin vector and the multiple-reciprocity method are applied. When the Laplacian of the source function is no longer zero, the source function is approximated by Lagrange polynomials. This method is then improved by subtracting a parabola from the source function.

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

poisson's equation
lagrange interpolation
boundary element method


Sheet resistance measurement on AlGaN/GaN wafers and dispersion study We study the dispersion in the Rsheet measurement. We study the light influence on the Rsheet measurement. We deduce a trapping mechanism in the AlGaN/GaN stack. We simulate the trapping phenomenon.

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


Designing Best Effort Networks-on-Chip to Meet Hard Latency Constraints Many classes of applications require Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees from the system interconnect. In Networks-on-Chip (NoC) QoS guarantees usually translate into bandwidth and latency constraints for the traffic flows and require hardware support in the NoC fabric and its interfaces. In this article we present a novel NoC synthesis framework to automatically build networks that meet hard latency constraints of end-to-end traffic streams without requiring specialized hardware for the network components. The hard latency constraints are met by carefully designing the NoC topology and selecting the appropriate routes for flow using lean best-effort network components. We perform experiments on several System on Chip (SoC) benchmarks. We compared against a topology synthesis method with no support for real-time constraints and we show that the proposed method can produce topologies that can meet significantly tighter worst case latency constraints (on average 44%). We also show that the tightest worst case latency can be provided with little overhead on power consumption (on average 8.5%).

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


Synchronization of complex dynamical networks with discrete time delays on time scales This paper investigates the global exponential synchronization problem in arrays of complex networks with time delays based on the theory of calculus on time scales, Lyapunov functional and linear matrix inequality technique, and derives several sufficient criteria to ensure the global exponential synchronization for the considered networks. It is shown that the synchronization conditions of complex dynamical networks on time scales are different from those derived for conventional continuous or discrete complex networks. Moreover, the presented results of this paper indicate that the globally synchronization problems with both discrete time case and continuous time case can be addressed in a unified framework.

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

exponential synchronization
lyapunov functional

complex network
time scale
delta derivative