Targeted Intra-operative RadiotherapyTARGIT for Early Breast Cancer Breast conservation by wide local excision for early breast cancer is now considered safe and should be considered default therapy wherever possible. Unfortunately, this requires access to costly radiotherapy centers. Many women in the developing world or for that matter in wealthy countries with large land masses and small populations do not have access to radiotherapy and are therefore denied the option of breast-conserving surgery. Whole-breast radiation by external beam after tumorectomy is predicated on the belief that latent foci of subclinical cancer outside the index quadrant are responsible for local recurrence. We do not think this is the case, as over 90% of these recurrences occur in the index quadrant. In this paper we describe a novel system for intra-operative radiotherapy using a mobile unit that should, in theory, be able to replace 6 weeks of external beam from a linear accelerator. The technique, TARGIT, is currently undergoing a multinational clinical trial in comparison with conventional external beam. If we can prove at least equivalence in outcome, then breast-conserving surgery might become available to all women in the developing world and to those living long distances from the nearest radiotherapy center.

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

intra-operative radiotherapy
technology for developing world


Performance analysis of cellular automata Monte Carlo Simulation for estimating network reliability Network reliability is very important for the decision support information. Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) is one of the optimal algorithms to estimate the network reliability for different kinds of network configuration. The traditional reliability estimation requires the information of all Minimal Paths (MPs) or Minimal Cuts (MCs). However, finding all MPs/MCs is extremely computationally expensive. This paper has compared and analyzed three Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) methods for estimating the two-terminal network reliability of a binary-state network: (1) MCS1 simulates the network reliability in terms of known MPs, (2) MCS2 estimates the network reliability in terms of known MCs; and (3) CAMCS (based on cellular automata, CA) estimates the network reliability directly without knowing any information of MPs or MCs. Our simulation results show that the direct estimation without knowing any information of MPs or MCs can speedup about 185 times when compared with other traditional approaches which require MPs or MCs information.

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

cellular automata (ca)
monte carlo simulation (mcs)
minimal path (mp)
minimal cut (mc)


Iterative-improvement-based heuristics for adaptive scheduling of tasks sharing files on heterogeneous master-slave environments The scheduling of independent but file-sharing tasks on heterogeneous master-slave platforms has recently found important applications in Grid environments. The scheduling heuristics recently proposed for this problem are all constructive in nature and based on a common greedy criterion which depends on the momentary completion time values of the tasks. We show that this greedy decision criterion has shortcomings in exploiting the file-sharing interaction among tasks since completion time values are inadequate to extract the global view of this interaction. We propose a three-phase scheduling approach which involves initial task assignment, refinement, and execution ordering phases. For the refinement phase, we model the target application as a hypergraph and, with an elegant hypergraph-partitioning-like formulation, we propose using iterative-improvement-based heuristics for refining the task assignments according to two novel objective functions. Unlike the turnaround time, which is the actual schedule cost, the smoothness of proposed objective functions enables the use of iterative-improvement-based heuristics successfully since their effectiveness and efficiency depend on the smoothness of the objective function. Experimental results on a wide range of synthetically generated heterogeneous master-slave frameworks show that the proposed three-phase scheduling approach performs much better than the greedy constructive approach.

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

file-sharing tasks
heterogeneous master-slave platform
grid computing
iterative improvement


Power quality time series data mining using S-transform and fuzzy expert system This paper presents a new approach for power quality time series data mining using S-transform based fuzzy expert system (FES). Initially the power signal time series disturbance data are pre-processed through an advanced signal processing tool such as S-transform and various statistical features are extracted, which are used as inputs to the fuzzy expert system for power quality event detection. The proposed expert system uses a data mining approach for assigning a certainty factor for each classification rule, thereby providing robustness to the rule in the presence of noise. Further to provide a very high degree of accuracy in pattern classification, both the Gaussian and trapezoidal membership functions of the concerned fuzzy sets are optimized using a fuzzy logic based adaptive particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique. The proposed hybrid PSO-fuzzy expert system (PSOFES) provides accurate classification rates even under noisy conditions compared to the existing techniques, which show the efficacy and robustness of the proposed algorithm for power quality time series data mining.

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

power quality
fuzzy expert system
particle swarm optimization


DIA: A Complexity-Effective Decoding Architecture Fast instruction decoding is a true challenge for the design of CISC microprocessors implementing variable-length instructions. A well-known solution to overcome this problem is caching decoded instructions in a hardware buffer. Fetching already decoded instructions avoids the need for decoding them again, improving processor performance. However, introducing such special-purpose storage in the processor design involves an important increase in the fetch architecture complexity. In this paper, we propose a novel decoding architecture that reduces the fetch engine implementation cost. Instead of using a special-purpose hardware buffer, our proposal stores frequently decoded instructions in the memory hierarchy. The address where the decoded instructions are stored is kept in the branch prediction mechanism, enabling it to guide our decoding architecture. This makes it possible for the processor front end to fetch already decoded instructions from the memory instead of the original nondecoded instructions. Our results show that using our decoding architecture, a state-of-the-art superscalar processor achieves competitive performance improvements, while requiring less chip area and energy consumption in the fetch architecture than a hardware code caching mechanism.

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

superscalar processor design
cisc instruction decoding
variable-length isa
branch predictor


Static Analysis of Multi-Staged Programs via Unstaging Translation Static analysis of multi-staged programs is challenging because the basic assumption of conventional static analysis no longer holds: the program text itself is no longer a fixed static entity, but rather a dynamically constructed value. This article presents a semantic-preserving translation of multi-staged call-by-value programs into unstaged programs and a static analysis framework based on this translation. The translation is semantic-preserving in that every small-step reduction of a multi-staged program is simulated by the evaluation of its unstaged version. Thanks to this translation we can analyze multi-staged programs with existing static analysis techniques that have been developed for conventional unstaged programs: we first apply the unstaging translation, then we apply conventional static analysis to the unstaged version, and finally we cast the analysis results back in terms of the original staged program. Our translation handles staging constructs that have been evolved to be useful in practice (typified in Lisp's quasi-quotation): open code as values, unrestricted operations on references and intentional variable-capturing substitutions. This article omits references for which we refer the reader to our companion technical report.

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

languages
theory
multi-staged languages
semantics preservation
abstract interpretation
projection


Performance Comparison of Uncoded OFDM Systems with Trellis Shaping over Nonlinear Channels Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) can achieve remarkable performance in terms of spectral efficiency, but its power amplifier efficiency becomes poor because of its high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) nature of transmitted signals. Trellis shaping is an effective method to reduce peak and average power without signal distortion at the cost of transmitter complexity and its performance depends on the metric used for the trellis decoder. Several metrics, defined in either time or frequency domain, have been proposed in the literature. In many practical OFDM systems, however, slight nonlinearity is tolerable as long as the resulting distortion meets the system requirements such as bit error rate (BER) and spurious level of transmitted signals. In this paper, we make a thorough performance comparison of trellis-shaped uncoded OFDM systems with different metrics in terms of complexity, achievable PAPR, and resulting BER as well as power spectrum in a practical channel where the signal envelope is distorted by a power amplifier (PA). Our study shows that the metric designed in frequency domain is mostly favorable in such a scenario.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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)


Reengineering windows software applications into reusable CORBA objects CORBA is becoming one of the most important middleware for supporting object-oriented and client/server paradigms in distributed computing systems. However, application systems based on CORBA are still scarce to date. One reason is that only few CORBA object services have been developed. To have a new CORBA application, a programmer must make the effort to design a program with a CORBA interface. In our previous work [Proceedings of the Sixth IEEE Computer Society Workshop on Future Trends of Distributed Computing Systems (1997) 2], a re-engineering approach was proposed to convert RPC-based programs into CORBA objects. This has successfully increased the development of CORBA applications. However, the source code is required in this approach. In many cases, software designers cannot acquire the source code. This prevents adapting existing PC software applications, particularly for Windows applications. Our study addresses this problem. A graphic factory temperature monitor system, which integrates MS-Excel under MS-Windows, was implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.

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

software reuse
software integration
functional integration model


family storytelling for grandparents and grandchildren living apart Grandparents may feel revitalized when a grandchild joins the family, but the physical separation that often exists between grandparents and grandchildren can make it difficult to develop a close relationship. Current communication technologies, such as the phone, are inadequate for developing close relationships with children. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a technology probe exploring how technology can be designed to alleviate this problem. Based on the evaluation, four important themes for designing technology for distributed intergenerational bonding are elicited and discussed. The four themes are Conversational Context (to have something to talk about), Facilitation (to be given the opportunity to talk), Diversified Interaction Forms (to maintain attention of the child) and Supporting Grandparent caring for grandchild (to adapt activity to the mood of the child).

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

bonding
conversational context
technology probe
grandchildren
grandparents


Automatic 3D model reconstruction based on novel pose estimation and integration techniques An automatic three-dimensional (3D) model reconstruction technique is presented to acquire complete and closed 3D models of real objects. The technique is based on novel approaches to pose estimation and integration. Two different poses of an object are used because a single pose often hides some surfaces from a range sensor. A second pose is used to expose such surfaces to the sensor. Two partial 3D models are reconstructed for two different poses of the object using a multi-view 3D modeling technique. The two 3D models are then registered in two stepscoarse registration, and its refinement. Coarse registration is facilitated by a novel pose estimation technique, which estimates a rigid transformation between two models. The pose is estimated by matching a stable tangent plane (STP) of each pose-model with the base tangent plane, which is invariant for a vision system. We employ geometric constraints to find the STP. After registration refinement, two models are integrated to a complete 3D model based on voxel classification defined in multi-view integration. Texture mapping is done to obtain a photo-realistic reconstruction of the object. Reconstruction results and error analysis are presented for several real objects.

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

3d reconstruction
range image
pose integration


Triple helix in the agricultural sector of Northeast Asian countries: a comparative study between Korea and China In this paper, the agricultural innovation systems of two Northeast Asian countriesKorea and Chinaare investigated and compared from the perspective of triple helix innovation. Specifically, the current study examines the nature of agricultural innovation of the two countries and considers agricultural R&D investments and activities as well as the roles of university, industry, and government (UIG), which are the three units comprising the triple helix. As an empirical extension of the qualitative analysis, we collected bibliometric information of agricultural scientific publications from 1990 to 2010 and patent information from 1980 to 2010. By calculating transmission of uncertainty, which indicates collaboration among UIG, this paper tracks the relationship dynamics of the units comprising the triple helix. In addition, we analyze topics in scientific publications and patents in order to observe and compare the subareas that are the focus in the two countries. The findings reveal both commonalities and differences between the two countries, thus providing knowledge of and insights into the agricultural sector.

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

triple helix
agricultural sector
korea
china


Motion control of an electrostrictive actuator Electrostrictive actuator is a relatively new category of smartmaterial transducers. However, a major deficiency of electrostrictive actuator is the limitation of motion accuracy caused by inherent non-linearity and hysteresis. This paper presents a new iterative learning control algorithm to improve the positioning/tracking accuracy of an electrostrictive actuator. In this algorithm, the iterative gain is not fixed but variable according to both the previous trial result and the nominal input/output relationship of the electrostrictive actuator. The convergence to the objective position/motion is theoretically proved. The effectiveness of this algorithm is experimentally verified through actual positioning and tracking control of a stacked electrostrictive actuator. Experimental results showed that using this gain-variable iterative learning control algorithm, not only can the stability of precision positioning be dramatically improved, but also precise and non-delay tracking of motion can be rapidly achieved. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

electrostrictive actuator
motion control
learning control algorithm


Valuation of boundary-linked assets by stochastic boundary value problems solved with a wavelet-collocation algorithm This article studies the valuation of boundary-linked assets and their derivatives in continuous-time markets. Valuing boundary-linked assets requires the solution of a stochastic differential equation with boundary conditions, which, often, is not Markovian. We propose a wavelet-collocation algorithm for solving a Milstein approximation to the stochastic boundary problem. Its convergence properties are studied. Furthermore, we value boundary-linked derivatives using Malliavin calculus and Monte Carlo methods. We apply these ideas to value European call options of boundary-linked assets. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

financial derivatives
wavelets
collocation methods


Personalized recommendation based on a multilevel customer model Personalized recommendation needs powerful Web Intelligence (WI) technologies to manage, analyze and employ various business data on the Web for e-business intelligence. This paper presents a novel recommendation framework on the Web, which is based on a multilevel customer model comprising three submodels, namely, the customer shopping model (CSM), the customer preference model (CPM), and the customer consumption model (CCM). These models capture a customer's information from different aspects. After preprocessing of raw data, we first build the CSM based on Bayesian networks by mining from customer shopping transactions, and then find the CPM by analyzing customer shopping history. Furthermore, the customer purchasing power can be formalized as a linear CCM. By combining the CSM with the present customer shopping action, a recommendation algorithm based on Bayesian probability inference is used to generate an individual recommendation set of commodities. A personalized filter including customization of the CPM and orientation of the CCM is also used to realize a more personalized recommendation. Experimental evaluation on real world data shows that the proposed approach can achieve personalized commodities recommendation efficiently and effectively.

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

web intelligence
personalized recommendation
multilevel customer model
bayesian networks


Real-time view synthesis from a sparse set of views ? It is known that the pure light field approach for view synthesis relies on a large number of image samples to produce anti-aliased renderings. Otherwise, the insufficiency of image sampling needs to be compensated for by geometry sampling. Currently, geometry estimation is done either offline or using dedicated hardware. Our solution to this dilemma is based on three key ideas: a formal analysis of the equivalency between light field rendering and plane-based warping, multi focus imaging in a multi camera system by plane sweeping, and the fusion of the multi focus image using multi view stereo. The essence of our method is to perform necessary depth estimation up to the level required by the minimal joint image-geometry sampling rate using off-the-shelf graphics hardware. As a result, real-time anti-aliased light field rendering is achieved even if the image samples are insufficient.

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

image-based rendering
lumigraph
plenoptic sampling
fragment shading


Temporal data classification using linear classifiers Data classification is usually based on measurements recorded at the same time. This paper considers temporal data classification where the input is a temporal database that describes measurements over a period of time in history while the predicted class is expected to occur in the future. We describe a new temporal classification method that improves the accuracy of standard classification methods. The benefits of the method are tested on weather forecasting using the meteorological database from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and on influenza using the Google Flu Trends database.

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

classification integration
constraint database
datalog
data integration
decision tree
reclassification
svm


Hybrid expert systems: A survey of current approaches and applications This paper is a statistical analysis of hybrid expert system approaches and their applications but more specifically connectionist and neuro-fuzzy system oriented articles are considered. The current survey of hybrid expert systems is based on the classification of articles from 1988 to 2010. Present analysis includes 91 articles from related academic journals, conference proceedings and literature reviews. Our results show an increase in the number of recent publications which is an indication of gaining popularity on the part of hybrid expert systems. This increase in the articles is mainly in neuro-fuzzy and rough neural expert systems areas. We also observe that many new industrial applications are developed using hybrid expert systems recently.

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

connectionist expert systems
hybrid expert systems
neuro-fuzzy expert systems
rough neural expert systems


Multiscale modeling and simulation of dynamic wetting In this paper, we present a multiscale analysis on dynamic wetting and liquid droplet spreading on solid substrates. In the proposed multiscale dynamic wetting model, we couple molecular scale adhesive interaction (the van der Waals type force) and the macroscale flow that is: we combine a coarse-grain adhesive contact model with a modified GurtinMurdoch surface elasto-dynamics theory to formulate a multiscale moving contact line theory to simulate dynamic wetting. The advantage of adopting the coarse grain adhesive contact model in the moving contact line theory is that it can levitate and separate the liquid droplet with the solid substrate, so that the proposed multiscale moving contact line theory avoids imposing the non-slip condition, and then it removes the subsequent singularity problem, which allows the surface energy difference and surface stress propelling droplet spreading naturally. By employing the proposed method, we have successfully simulated droplet spreading over various elastic substrates. The obtained numerical simulation results compare well with the experimental and molecular dynamics results reported in the literature.

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

droplet spreading
moving contact line theory

finite element analysis
surface tension
wettability
youngs equation


Boundedness of the nominal coefficients in Gaussian RBF neural networks The paper analyzes the boundedness of the coefficients involved in Gaussian expansion series. These series arise from the reconstruction of bandlimited functions, applying the sampling theorem with Gaussians as reconstruction filters. The boundedness of the ideal coefficients is a previous requirement that should be imposed to the approximation function. This is due to the fact that the coefficient sequence should be absolutely summable. With this sort of requirements, the targeted function is guaranteed to exhibit finite energy so that it will be manageable from the viewpoint of the approximation theory. On the other hand, the bounds of the coefficients affect considerably to the approximation errors and consequently to the accuracy of the estimation. The major result of this work is formalized in a series of propositions where it is stated how the coefficients are upper bounded by a signal sinus cardinalis (sinc). Finally, an energy measure of the approximation error is determined as a mean square error. In this line, a number of results are presented in both the univariate and the multivariate case showing how these errors strongly depend on the coefficients in the Gaussian expansion.

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

best approximation
truncation errors
sampling theory
radial basis functions
existence and uniqueness
curse of dimensionality


A parallel log-barrier method for mesh quality improvement and untangling The development of parallel algorithms for mesh generation, untangling, and quality improvement is of high importance due to the need for large meshes with millions to billions of elements and the availability of supercomputers with hundreds to thousands of cores. There have been prior efforts in the development of parallel algorithms for mesh generation and local mesh quality improvement in which only one vertex is moved at a time. But for global mesh untangling and for global mesh quality improvement, where all vertices are simultaneously moved, parallel algorithms have not yet been developed. In our earlier work, we developed a serial global mesh optimization algorithm and used it to perform mesh untangling and mesh quality improvement. Our algorithm moved the vertices simultaneously to optimize a log-barrier objective function that was designed to untangle meshes as well as to improve the quality of the worst quality mesh elements. In this paper, we extend our work and develop a parallel log-barrier mesh untangling and mesh quality improvement algorithm for distributed-memory machines. We have used the algorithm with an edge coloring-based algorithm for synchronizing unstructured communication among the processes executing the log-barrier mesh optimization algorithm. The main contribution of this paper is a generic scheme for global mesh optimization, whereby the gradient of the objective function with respect to the position of some of the vertices is communicated among all processes in every iteration. The algorithm was implemented using the OpenMPI 2.0 parallel programming constructs and shows greater strong scaling efficiency compared to an existing parallel mesh quality improvement technique.

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

mesh quality improvement
mesh untangling

parallel mesh quality improvement and untangling


learning to rank with a novel kernel perceptron method While conventional ranking algorithms, such as the PageRank, rely on the web structure to decide the relevancy of a web page, learning to rank seeks a function capable of ordering a set of instances using a supervised learning approach. Learning to rank has gained increasing popularity in information retrieval and machine learning communities. In this paper, we propose a novel nonlinear perceptron method for rank learning. The proposed method is an online algorithm and simple to implement. It introduces a kernel function to map the original feature space into a nonlinear space and employs a perceptron method to minimize the ranking error by avoiding converging to a solution near the decision boundary and alleviating the effect of outliers in the training dataset. Furthermore, unlike existing approaches such as RankSVM and RankBoost, the proposed method is scalable to large datasets for online learning. Experimental results on benchmark corpora show that our approach is more efficient and achieves higher or comparable accuracies in instance ranking than state of the art methods such as FRank, RankSVM and RankBoost.

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


origin of bursts The phenomenon of particle bursts, a well-known feature of PSO is investigated. Their origin is concluded to lie in multiplicative stochasticity, previously encountered in the study of first order stochastic difference equations. The work here demonstrates that bursts contribute to fattening of the tail of the particle position distribution and that these tails are well described by power laws. It is argued that recombinant PSO, a competitive PSO variant without multiplicative randomness, is burst-free.

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


Analysis of an evolutionary RBFN design algorithm, CO2RBFN, for imbalanced data sets In the classification problem field, we often encounter many real application areas in which the data do not have an equitable distribution among the different classes of the problem. In such cases, we are dealing with the so-called imbalanced data sets. This scenario has significant interest since standard classifiers are often biased towards the majority classes, whereas the minority ones tend to have a higher reward as they usually define the concepts of interest from the learning point of view. The aim of this paper is to analyse the performance of CO2RBFN, a evolutionary cooperativecompetitive model for the design of radial-basis function networks applied to classification problems on imbalanced domains, and to study its cooperation with a well-known pre-processing method, the synthetic minority over-sampling technique. The good performance of CO2RBFN is shown through an experimental study carried out on a large collection of imbalanced data sets where we compare, by means of a proper statistical study, the behaviour of our model with many representative neural networks algorithms, the C4.5 decision tree and a hierarchical fuzzy rule-based classification system.

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

radial-basis function networks
genetic algorithm
smote pre-processing method


Dual-homing based scalable partial multicast protection In this paper, we propose a scalable multicast protection scheme based on a dual-homing architecture where each destination host is connected to two edge routers. Under such an architecture, there are two paths from the source of a multicast session to each destination host, which provides a certain level of protection for the data traffic from the source to the destination host. The protection level varies from 0 percent to 100 percent against a single link failure, depending on the number of shared links between these two paths. The major advantage of the proposed scheme lies in its scalability due to the fact that the protection is provided by constructing a dual-homing architecture at the access network while keeping the routing protocols in the core network unchanged. The selection of dual edge routers plays an important role in enhancing the protection level. Two problems arise for the proposed dual-homing partial multicast protection scheme. One is to calculate the survivability from the source to any pair of edge routers. The other is to assign a pair of edge routers for each destination host such that the total survivability is maximized for the multicast session subject to the port number constraint of each edge router. We propose an optimal algorithm to solve the first problem. We prove the decision version of the second problem is NP-complete and propose two heuristic algorithms to solve it. Simulation results show that the proposed heuristic algorithms achieve performance close to the calculated lower bound.

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


Error-correcting output codes based ensemble feature extraction This paper proposes a novel feature extraction method based on ensemble learning. Using the error-correcting output codes (ECOC) to design binary classifiers (dichotomizers) for separating subsets of classes, the outputs of the dichotomizers are linear or nonlinear features that provide powerful separability in a new space. In this space, the vector quantization based meta classifier can be viewed as an ECOC decoder, where each learned prototype of a class can be seen as a codeword of the class in the new representation space. We conducted extensive experiments on 16 multi-class data sets from the UCI machine learning repository. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over both existing ECOC approaches and classic feature extraction approaches. In particular, the decoding strategy using a meta classifier is shown to be more computationally efficient than the linear loss-weighted decoding in state-of-the-art ECOC methods.

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

error-correcting output codes (ecoc)
meta learner


System regression test planning with a fuzzy expert system An effective system testing activity for consecutive releases of very large software systems depends considerably on the selection of test cases for execution. From a practical point of view, it is not feasible to run all possible test cases because of the real-world constraints of limited time, human and monetary resources. While existing techniques for test case selection provide methods to limit the growth of the number of test cases with software evolution, many of them are based on the assumption that source code analysis is available. Very few works have explored the problem of test case selection given the constraint that source code analysis is not available. We propose fuzzy expert systems as an effective solution to the problem. Fuzzy expert systems have the ability to emulate fuzzy human reasoning and judgment processes. The proposed fuzzy expert system identifies potentially critical test cases for system test by correlating knowledge represented by one or more of the following: customer profile, analysis of past test case results, system failure rate, and change in system architecture. We piloted this fuzzy expert system in a large telecommunications system and the results show that test effectiveness and efficiency is significantly improved.

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

fuzzy expert systems
system regression test


A steganographic method based upon JPEG and particle swarm optimization algorithm In this paper, a novel steganographic method, based on JPEG and Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm (PSO), is proposed. In order to improve the quality of stego-images, an optimal substitution matrix for transforming the secret messages is first derived by means of the PSO algorithm. The standard JPEG quantization table is also modified to contain more secret messages. The transformed messages are then hidden in the DC-to-middle frequency components of the quantized DCT coefficients of the cover-image. Finally, a JPEG file with secret messages is generated through JPEG entropy coding. We compare our algorithm with Chang et al.s JPEG-based steganographic algorithm. The experimental results show that our proposed method has larger message capacity and better image quality than Chang et al.s. In addition, our method also has a high security level.

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

particle swarm optimization (pso) algorithm


The folk solution and Boruvkas algorithm in minimum cost spanning tree problems Boruvkas algorithm, which computes a minimum cost spanning tree, is used to define a rule to share the cost among the nodes (agents). We show that this rule coincides with the folk solution, a very well-known rule of this literature.

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

minimum cost spanning tree
boruvkas algorithm
folk solution


Temporal abstraction and inductive logic programming for arrhythmia recogniton from electrocardiograms This paper proposes a novel approach to cardiac arrhythmia recognition from electrocardiograms (ECGs). ECGs record the electrical activity of the heart and are used to diagnose many heart disorders. The numerical ECG is first temporally abstracted into series of time-stamped events. Temporal abstraction makes use of artificial neural networks to extract interesting waves and their features from the input signals. A temporal reasoner called a chronicle recogniser processes such series in order to discover temporal patterns called chronicles which can be related to cardiac arrhythmias. Generally, it is difficult to elicit an accurate set of chronicles from a doctor. Thus, we propose to learn automatically from symbolic ECG examples the chronicles discriminating the arrhythmias belonging to some specific subset. Since temporal relationships are of major importance, inductive logic programming (ILP) is the tool of choice as it enables first-order relational learning. The approach has been evaluated on real ECGs taken from the MIT-BIH database. The performance of the different modules as well as the efficiency of the whole system is presented. The results are rather good and demonstrate that integrating numerical techniques for low level perception and symbolic techniques for high level classification is very valuable. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

ecg
temporal abstraction
inductive logic programming

medical data analysis
cardiac arrhythmia classification
artificial neural network
chronicle recognition


Using second-hand information in collaborative recommender systems Building recommender systems (RSs) has attracted considerable attention in the recent years. The main problem with these systems lies in those items for which we have little information and which cause incorrect predictions. One accredited solution involves using the items content information to improve these recommendations, but this cannot be applied in situations where the content information is unavailable. In this paper we present a novel idea to deal with this problem, using only the available users ratings. The objective is to use all possible information in the dataset to improve recommendations made with little information. For this purpose we will use what we call second-hand information: in the recommendation process, when a similar user has not rated the target item, we will guess his/her preferences using the information available. This idea is independent from the RS used and, in order to test it, we will employ two different collaborative RS. The results obtained confirm the soundness of our proposal.

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

bayesian networks
neighbourhood
second-hand information


Bisimplicial edges in bipartite graphs Bisimplicial edges in bipartite graphs are closely related to pivots in Gaussian elimination that avoid turning zeroes into non-zeroes. We present a new deterministic algorithm to find such edges in bipartite graphs. Our algorithm is very simple and easy to implement. Its running-time is O(nm) O ( n m ) , where n n is the number of vertices and m m is the number of edges. Furthermore, for any fixed p p and random bipartite graphs in the Gn,n,p G n , n , p model, the expected running-time of our algorithm is O(n2) O ( n 2 ) , which is linear in the input size.

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


Travel time analysis for general item location assignment in a rectangular warehouse A travel time model with general item location assignment in a rectangular warehouse system is presented. We give the exact probability mass functions that characterise the tour of an order picker and derive the first and second moments associated with the tour. We apply the model to analysing order batching and storage allocation strategies in an order picking system. The order picking system is modelled as a queueing system with customer batching. The results are compared and validated via simulation. The effects of batching and batch size on the delay time are discussed with consideration to the picking and sorting times for each batch of orders.

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

travel time model
general item location assignment
order batching


A network reduction axiom for efficient computation of terminal-pair reliability Terminal-pair reliability (TR) in network management determines the probabilistic reliability between two nodes (the source and sink) of a network, given failure probabilities of all links. It has been shown that TR can be effectively computed by means of the network reduction technique. Existing reduction axioms, unfortunately, are limited to trivial rules such as valueless link removal and series-parallel link reduction. In this paper, we propose a novel reduction axiom, referred to as triangle reduction. The triangle reduction axiom transforms a graph containing a triangle subgraph to that excluding the base of the triangle. The computational complexity of the transformation is as low as O(1). With triangle reduction, the number of subproblems generated by partition-based TR algorithms, for simplified grid networks, can be reduced to O(((1 + root 5)/2)(n)). The paper further provides an assessment of the effectiveness of triangle reduction on partition-based TR algorithms with respect to the number of subproblems and computation time through experimenting on published benchmarks and random networks. Experimental results demonstrate that, incorporating triangle reduction, the path-based (cut-based) partition TR algorithm yields a substantially reduced number of subproblems and computation time for all (most of the) benchmarks and random networks. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

terminal-pair reliability (tr)
path-based partition
cut-based partition


Predictive link trigger mechanism for seamless handovers in heterogeneous wireless networks Effective and timely link-layer trigger mechanisms can significantly influence the handover performance. The handover process will not perform the correct decision and execution unless adequate and timely link-layer trigger information is delivered. In this paper, a predictive link trigger mechanism for seamless horizontal and vertical handovers in heterogeneous wireless networks is proposed. Unlike previous link trigger algorithms based on pre-defined signal level thresholds, the link layer triggers in this study are adaptively and timely fired in accordance with the network conditions. Firstly, the time required to perform a handover is estimated based on the neighboring network conditions. Secondly, the time to trigger a Link-Going-Down to initiate a handover is determined using a least mean square linear prediction in which the prediction interval (k(h)) is dynamically determined based oil the estimated handover time. An upper bound for the packet loss rate during a handover is derived for a Gaussian shadowing channel. A manner in which this approach can be applied to IEEE 802.21 is shown in media independent handover scenarios. Simulation results of the proposed predictive link triggering mechanism show that it provides a timely proactive handover. The packet loss rate observed in a Gaussian shadowing channel remains low during a handover. Copyright (c) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. C,

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

prediction
heterogeneous wireless networks

seamless handover
link triggers
wlan
wimax


A Multilevel Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Pedestrian Classification Notwithstanding many years of progress, pedestrian recognition is still a difficult but important problem. We present a novel multilevel Mixture-of-Experts approach to combine information from multiple features and cues with the objective of improved pedestrian classification. On pose-level, shape cues based on Chamfer shape matching provide sample-dependent priors for a certain pedestrian view. On modality-level, we represent each data sample in terms of image intensity, (dense) depth, and (dense) flow. On feature-level, we consider histograms of oriented gradients (HOG) and local binary patterns (LBP). Multilayer perceptrons (MLP) and linear support vector machines (linSVM) are used as expert classifiers. Experiments are performed on a unique real-world multimodality dataset captured from a moving vehicle in urban traffic. This dataset has been made public for research purposes. Our results show a significant performance boost of up to a factor of 42 in reduction of false positives at constant detection rates of our approach compared to a baseline intensity-only HOG/linSVM approach.

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


A testbed for large mobile social computing experiments We present a testbed for mobile social computing that can be used to perform research in security, privacy and context-awareness policies and mechanisms appropriate for a wide range of applications. We compare several mobile platforms and present the rational for our design choices and reasons we chose Android as the primary smartphone for the testbed. We also discuss some of the experiments that can be conducted using this testbed.

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


Frequency domain QR code based image steganography using Fresnelet transform Image steganography is the art of hiding secret message onto the source image. A good approach to steganography must provide two attributes: high stego image quality and high embedding capacity. In this paper, a frequency domain steganography based information hiding technique using Fresnelet transform (FT), has been proposed. In this method, the Fresnelet coefficients of the Least Significant Bit (LSB) at high frequency subbands are used to embed the QR coded secret message. This approach yields an average PSNR of 45.40dB and an embedding capacity of 352,332 bits. These results validate the practical feasibility of the proposed method for security applications.

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

frequency domain steganography
fresnelet transform


an event-condition-action language for xml XML repositories are now a widespread means for storing and exchanging information on the Web. As these repositories become increasingly used in dynamic applications such as e-commerce, there is a rapidly growing need for a mechanism to incorporate reactive functionality in an XML setting. Event-condition-action (ECA) rules are a technology from active databases and are a natural method for supporting suchfunctionality. ECA rules can be used for activities such as automatically enforcing document constraints, maintaining repository statistics, and facilitating publish/subscribe applications. An important question associated with the use of a ECA rules is how to statically predict their run-time behaviour. In this paper, we define a language for ECA rules on XML repositories. We then investigate methods for analysing the behaviour of a set of ECA rules, a task which has added complexity in this XML setting compared with conventional active databases.

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

xml repositories
reactive functionality
xml

rule analysis
event-condition-action rules


Imaging gap junctions with silica-coated upconversion nanoparticles Upconversion nanoparticles (UCN) that are excited in the near infrared (NIR) region were synthesized and modified to enable their application to biological systems for imaging. The UCN obtained are oleic acid capped and hence hydrophobic in nature. Since the particles were to be used for imaging cells, a surface modification to make them hydrophilic and biocompatible was performed. Silica coating was chosen for the modification due to the possibility to further functionalize the surface and conjugate biomolecules. Cardiac cells which are capable of forming gap junctions were selected to be labeled. Gap junction specific antibodies were conjugated to the silica-coated UCN. The fluorescence emission spectrum of the particles was obtained with a continuous wave 980 nm laser and size of the particles before and after coating was determined to be 30 and 50 nm, respectively, by TEM. A covalent coupling method was used to bind the gap junction specific antibody to the nanoparticles. The fluorescence imaging experiments were carried out on cardiomyoblast cells and co-culture of bone marrow stem cells/cardiomyoblast cells after incubation with the antibody-modified UCN. Images of the particles after incubation with cardiac cells obtained over days demonstrated the potentials of the UCN for fluorescence imaging.

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

upconversion
fluorescence imaging
gap junction


A stress improvement procedure In this paper, we present a novel procedure to improve the stress predictions in static, dynamic and nonlinear analyses of solids. We focus on the use of low-order displacement-based finite elements 3-node and 4-node elements in two-dimensional (2D) solutions, and 4-node and 8-node elements in 3D solutions because these elements are computationally efficient provided good stress convergence is obtained. We give a variational basis of the new procedure and compare the scheme, and its performance, with other effective previously proposed stress improvement techniques. We observe that the stresses of the new procedure converge quadratically in 1D and 2D solutions, i.e. with the same order as the displacements, and conclude that the new procedure shows much promise for the analysis of solids, structures and multiphysics problems, to calculate improved stress predictions and to establish error measures.

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

finite element stress calculation
low-order displacement-based elements
stress recovery
mixed method


Real time regulation of efficient driving of high speed trains based on a genetic algorithm and a fuzzy model of manual driving Nowadays one of the main priorities for railways administrations and operators is the reduction of energy consumption, due to its impact on CO2 emissions and economic costs. This is especially important on high speed lines, in expansion in many countries, given that very high levels of consumption are involved. Energy saving strategies focused on traffic operation can be applied in the short term with low levels of investment, in particular ecodriving, timetable design and the on line regulation of trains. However approaches in the literature to minimize energy do not normally consider specific models for manual driving in high speed lines and the commercial punctuality constraints of this type of services, and do not take into account the uncertainty associated with manual driving. The aim of this paper is the on line regulation of high speed trains recalculating the energy efficient manual driving to be executed by the driver when significant delays arise. The manual driving is modeled by means of fuzzy parameters: the speed regulation and the response time of the driver when a new driving command has to be applied. The punctuality requirement of the railway operator is represented as a necessity fuzzy measure of punctual arrival at stations. The proposed method for the on line recalculation of efficient driving is a Genetic Algorithm with fuzzy parameters based on an accurate simulation of the train motion. This algorithm is applied on a real Spanish high speed line to assess the energy savings provided by the efficient regulation algorithm compared to the typical driving style that is applied when a train has to get back on schedule after a delay.

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

high speed railways
real time traffic operation
fuzzy logic


Measuring orthopedic implant wear on standard radiographs with a precision in the 10?m-range The aim of this study has been to explore and verify whether the use of a previously designed Analysis-by-Synthesis algorithm is capable to precisely measuring implant wear. The abrasion of polyethylene particles is seen as the main reason for the loosening of prosthetic components in the hip. It lies in the sub-millimeter range, and precision is a crucial point in wear measurement. In the Analysis-by-Synthesis algorithm, the synthetic X-ray image of the implant is matched to its original X-ray projection. This intensity based approach and the use of X-ray images with their inherent high resolution allow principally precise measurements. Wear has been defined based on the estimated implant parameters and under minimization of the impact of the main sources of error. The latter was theoretically studied in a sensitivity analysis. The use of the algorithm was tested in vitro as well as in vivo. In experimental data, the accuracy and the impact of the pelvic position and orientation were studied. The precision was assessed using dual radiographs of 20 patients with total hip replacement. A standard deviation of 49?m was found.

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

x-ray image
cad model
analysis-by-synthesis


a system-level methodology for fully compensating process variability impact of memory organizations in periodic applications Process variability is an emerging problem that is becoming worse with each new technology node. Its impact on the performance and energy of memory organizations is severe and degrades the system-level parametric yield. In this paper we propose a broadly applicable system-level technique that can guarantee parametric yield on the memory organization and which minimizes the energy overhead associated to variability in the conventional design process. It is based on offering configuration capabilities at the memory-level and exploiting them at the system-level. This technique can decrease by up to a factor of 5 the energy overhead that is introduced by state-of-the-art process variability compensation techniques, including statistical timing analysis. In this way we obtain results close to the ideal nominal design again.

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


Determination of a time-dependent diffusivity from nonlocal conditions The inverse problem of determining the temperature and the time-dependent thermal diffusivity from various additional nonlocal information is investigated. These nonlocal conditions can come in the form of an internal or boundary energy, or, in the one-dimensional case, as a difference boundary temperature or heat flux so as to ensure the uniqueness of solution for the heat conduction equation with unknown thermal diffusivity coefficient. The Ritz-Galerkin method with satisfier function is employed to solve the inverse problems numerically. Numerical results are presented and discussed.

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

inverse problem
thermal diffusivity
nonlocal conditions


Quality through managed improvement and measurement (QMIM): Towards a phased development and implementation of a quality management system for a software company The paper describes results of a longitudinal study of developments in the area of software product and process quality improvement within a Hungarian software company, IQSOFT Ltd. This company has been active in this area since 1993, trying to build, introduce and maintain an efficiently working quality management system which, e.g., fulfils the ISO 9001 requirements, allows steady software process improvement and, at the same time, conforms to company's own needs. Over the last eight years five phases could be distinguished. Each phase is described shortly, following the same structure, namely: basic starting points, key problem areas, literature consulted, activities and design executed, reflections on what happened and why. The lessons resulting from the analysis of this case have been formulated in terms of guidelines. We feel that these are applicable to any low maturity software development organisation embarking on a product or process quality improvement endeavour. These guidelines are developed around a framework containing the basic issues of software production (project management, technical processes and products). The guidelines advocate a careful step-by-step development of definitions, quality characteristics, and metrics related to these objects while at the same time developing and introducing the associated process.

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

product and process quality
quality management system
improvement
measurement


Human-Computer input and output techniques: an analysis of current research and promising applications Personal computing applications are constantly increasing their potential power, thanks to steadily growing hardware capabilities and large diffusion of high-quality multimedia output devices. At the same time, mobile communication tools are becoming an integral part of our everyday life, with new advanced functionalities offered at an unrestrainable pace. Although the way we interact with information machines is substantially the same since 20 years-based on keyboard, mouse and window metaphor-other communication modalities are possible, and shortly may become popular as additional interaction methods. Given the paramount importance of the "interface" in present computer applications, no alternative should be ignored, as it could greatly improve the quality of both interaction processes and user cognitive performance. Without pretending to foresee the future, in this paper we provide an overview of the main current technologies which can enable potential novel interfaces, discussing their features, strengths, weaknesses and promising applications.

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

future interfaces
human-computer interaction
input/output techniques
multimodal interaction
perceptive interfaces


Delivering high-quality cancer care: The critical role of quality measurement In 1999, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) published Ensuring Quality Cancer Care, an influential report that described an ideal cancer care system and issued ten recommendations to address pervasive gaps in the understanding and delivery of quality cancer care. Despite generating much fervor, the report's recommendationsincluding two recommendations related to quality measurementremain largely unfulfilled. Amidst continuing concerns regarding increasing costs and questionable quality of care, the IOM charged a new committee with revisiting the 1999 report and with reassessing national cancer care, with a focus on the aging US population. The committee identified high-quality patientclinician relationships and interactions as central drivers of quality and attributed existing quality gaps, in part, to the nation's inability to measure and improve cancer care delivery in a systematic way. In 2013, the committee published its findings in Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care: Charting a New Course for a System in Crisis, which included two recommendations that emphasize coordinated, patient-centered quality measurement and information technology enhancements: Develop a national quality reporting program for cancer care as part of a learning health care system; and Develop an ethically sound learning health care information technology system for cancer that enables real-time analysis of data from cancer patients in a variety of care settings. These recommendations underscore the need for independent national oversight, publicprivate collaboration, and substantial funding to create robust, patient-centered quality measurement and learning enterprises to improve the quality, accessibility, and affordability of cancer care in America.

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

cancer care
quality measurement
learning health care system

patient-centeredness
public reporting
health care delivery


Computing the Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff series and the Zassenhaus product The Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff (BCH) series and the Zassenhaus product are of fundamental importance for the theory of Lie groups and their applications in physics and physical chemistry. Standard methods for the explicit construction of the BCH and Zassenhaus terms yield polynomial representations, which must be translated into the usually required commutator representation. We prove that a new translation proposed recently yields a correct representation of the BCH and Zassenhaus terms. This representation entails fewer terms than the well-known Dynkin-Specht-Wever representation, which is of relevance for practical applications. Furthermore, various methods for the computation of the BCH and Zassenhaus terms are compared, and a new efficient approach for the calculation of the Zassenhaus terms is proposed. Mathematica implementations for the most efficient algorithms are provided together with comparisons of efficiency. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

baker-campbell-hausdorff series
lie algebras


A Sufficient Condition for the Existence of a Universal Slepian-Wolf Code Universal Slepian-Wolf coding for parametric general sources is considered. Our main result shows that under mild conditions on the family of sources, there exists a universal decoder that attains asymptotically the same random-coding error exponent as the maximum-likelihood decoder.

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

random coding
slepian-wolf coding
universal coding


Efficient volume rendering on the body centered cubic lattice using box splines We demonstrate that non-separable box splines deployed on body centered cubic lattices (BCC) are suitable for fast evaluation on present graphics hardware. Therefore, we develop the linear and quintic box splines using a piecewise polynomial (pp)-form as opposed to their currently known basis (B)-form. The pp-form lends itself to efficient evaluation methods such as de Boor's algorithm for splines in box splines basis. Further on, we offer a comparison of quintic box splines with the only other interactive rendering available on BCC lattices that is based on separable kernels for interleaved Cartesian cubic (CC) lattices. While quintic box splines result in superior quality, interleaved CC lattices are still faster, since they can take advantage of the highly optimized circuitry for CC lattices, as it is the case in graphics hardware nowadays. This result is valid with and without prefiltering. Experimental results are shown for both a synthetic phantom and data from optical projection tomography. We provide shader code to ease the adaptation of box splines for the practitioner.

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

volume rendering
box splines
body centered cubic lattice


Optimal setting of reactive compensation devices with an improved voltage stability index for voltage stability enhancement Voltage stability improvement is an important issue in power system planning and operation. Voltage stability of a system depends on the network topology and settings of reactive compensation devices. This research first proposes an improved voltage stability index (IVSI) for network systems, and then presents an optimization method for reactive compensation devices settings. To solve the optimization problem, this work introduces the hybrid differential evolution (HDE) to determine tap settings of on-load tap changing (OLTC) transformers, excitation settings of generators or synchronous condensers (SCs), and locations with sizes of static var compensators (SVCs). The performance of this technique is verified using the IEEE 30-bus power flow test system. The results show that the proposed method using the improved voltage stability index and the optimization method is able to effectively enhance voltage stability of a system and reduce line losses.

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

on-load tap changing (oltc) transformers


Running unstructured grid-based CFD solvers on modern graphics hardware Techniques used to implement an unstructured grid solver on modern graphics hardware are described. The three-dimensional Euler equations for inviscid, compressible flow are considered. Effective memory bandwidth is improved by reducing total global memory access and overlapping redundant computation, as well as using an appropriate numbering scheme and data layout. The applicability of per-block shared memory is also considered. The performance of the solver is demonstrated on two benchmark cases: a NACA0012 wing and a missile. For a variety of mesh sizes, an average speed-up factor of roughly 9.5x is observed over the equivalent parallelized OpenMP code running on a quad-core CPU, and roughly 33x over the equivalent code running in serial. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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


A low-complexity LUT-based squaring algorithm The computation of large modular multi-exponentiation is a time-consuming arithmetic operation used in cryptography. The standard squaring algorithm is well-known and the GuajardoPaar algorithm fixes the improper carry handling bug produced by the standard squaring algorithm, but produces error-indexing bug. In this paper, a novel squaring algorithm is proposed, which stores base products in the Look-Up Table before the squaring computation and base size comparison method. The proposed algorithm can not only evaluate squaring efficiently but also avoid bugs produced in other proposed algorithms (the GuajardoPaar algorithm and the YangHeihLaih algorithm). The performance of the proposed algorithm is 1.615 times faster than the standard squaring algorithm and much faster than other algorithms.

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

information security
fast algorithm design
modular multiplication
public-key cryptosystem


Assessment of productivity and duration of highway construction activities subject to impact of rain Rainfall is regarded as a major uncertainty factor that has adverse impacts on productivity and duration of highway construction activities. In practice, given the location, type, start date, and original duration of the activities, a common approach for construction schedulers to assess the effect of rain is by adding a certain percentage of time to tasks. However, this method depends mainly on the experience and subjective judgment of the schedulers, who may be unfamiliar with the rainfall pattern and its impact on productivity of the operations, and thus, oftentimes produces inaccurate results. This paper presents a model that utilizes historical daily rainfall data and experts' knowledge, and employs fuzzy set concept for assessing the impact of rain on project completion. Based on the model, a fuzzy reasoning knowledge-based scheduling system (FRESS) is proposed. A case study involving a highway construction project implemented in two geographic areas with different rainfall environments is presented to illustrate the salient features of the system that allows users to simulate experts' judgment and to demonstrate the capability and effectiveness of the system that can assist contractors to better estimate activity durations for projects in geographical locations having rainfall data.

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

rain impact
activity duration
knowledge base
fuzzy logic


Dielectric

in

Situ

Monitoring

of

Microgravity

Polymerizations

The

objective

of

the

research

described

here

is

to

develop

dielectric

spectroscopy

to

monitor

polymerization

reactions

and

processes

in

microgravity.

Ground

based

measurements

have

been

made

on

both

neat

thermoset

resins

and

solution

polymerization

reactions.

Polymerization

of

diglycidyl

ether

of

bisphenol

A

(DGEBA)

using

two

curing

agents,

m-phenylenediamine

(m-PDA),

and

(DDM)

were

investigated

to

determine

the

relationship

between

the

dielectric

spectra

and

the

thermoset

polymer

network

and

morphology.

The

results

for

the

epoxy

thermosets

indicate

that

this

technique

can

be

used

to

monitor

the

extent

of

polymerization

and

the

qualitative

nature

of

polymer

network.

The

photopolymerization

of

6-(2-methyl-4-nitroanilino)-2,4-hexadiyn-1-ol

(DAMNA)

in

solution

was

also

investigated

to

determine

if

gravitational

effects

could

be

observed

using

dielectric

spectroscopy.

The

technique

is

able

to

distinguish

between

surface

and

solution

polymerizations

during

formation

of

the

polydiacetylene

thin

films.

In

addition,

it

is

capable

of

monitoring

convective

effects

during

solution

polymerization.

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

dielectric monitoring
microgravity polymerization


High-order linear and non-linear residual distribution schemes for turbulent compressible flows A high-order Residual Distribution scheme for the solution of the compressible RANS equations is developed. The one-equation SpalartAllmaras turbulence model is solved together with the RANS equations as a fully coupled system, in which both the mean flow equations and the turbulence equation are solved with high-order of accuracy. A continuous approximation of the solution is adopted and standard Lagrangian basis functions are used to construct the discrete space. Since viscous terms involve the gradient of the numerical solution which has a discontinuous normal component across the faces of the elements, a continuous approximation of the gradient of the numerical solution is recovered at each degree of freedom of the grid and then interpolated with the same basis functions used for the solution. The non-linear system of equations resulting from the numerical discretization is solved with the non-linear LU-SGS method. Several numerical experiments are performed to verify the accuracy of the numerical method, these are based on both subsonic and transonic flows in two and three spatial dimensions.

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

high order schemes
gradient reconstruction
implicit method


Transductive multi-distance learning for video search Graph-based semi-supervised learning approaches have been proven effective and efficient in solving the problem of the inefficiency of labeled training data in many real-world application areas, such as video annotation. As a significant factor of these algorithms, however, pair-wise similarity metric of samples has not been fully investigated. Specifically, for existing approaches, the estimation of pair-wise similarity between two samples relies on the spatial property of video data. On the other hand, temporal property, an essential characteristic of video data, is not embedded into the pair-wise similarity measure. Accordingly, in this paper, a novel framework for video annotation, called Joint Spatio-Temporal Correlation Learning (JSTCL) is proposed. This framework is characterized by simultaneously taking into account both the spatial and temporal property of video data to improve the estimation of pair-wise similarity. We apply the proposed framework to video annotation and report superior performance compared to key existing approaches over the benchmark TRECVID data set.

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

graph-based semi-supervised learning
pair-wise similarity measure
spatio-temporal correlation


Scalar and vector potentials' coupling on nonmatching grids for the simulation of an electromagnetic brake Purpose - We present a method for the simulation of the dynamical behavior of a coupled magneto-mechanical system given in terms of a conductor moving through an electromagnetic field. Design/methodology/approach - For the magnetic part, we consider a model based on an electric vector and a magnetic scalar potential, whereas the mechanical part is modelled by the equation of a rigid body motion. A weak coupling is employed: at each time step the resulting forces are calculated yielding the new displacement of the conductor. Findings - Numerical results are given for the simulation of an electromagnetic brake with axisymmetric geometry. They indicate that the proposed method is especially well suited for eddy current problems involving moving conductors. Research limitations/implications - Further research should be undertaken toward the application of the proposed method to real 3D problems. Originality/value - The spatial discretization of the problem relies on the use of two independent triangulations to approximate the two involved potentials. Whereas the scalar magnetic potential is discretized by means of nodal H-1-conforming finite elements on a grid covering the global computational domain, the vector electric potential is approximated by H-curl-conforming edge elements on another grid only covering the conductor. The coupling between the two grids is accomplished via the mortar finite element method. At each time step, only the coupling matrix has to be reassembled, all other involved matrices remain the same. Moreover, no remeshing is necessary when the conductor changes its position. The paper should be valuable for any researcher interested in the numerical simulation of eddy current 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 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

electromagnetism
eddy currents
mathematical modelling


Multivariate reduced rank regression in non-Gaussian contexts, using copulas A new procedure is proposed that performs reduced rank regression (RRR) in non-Gaussian contexts based on multivariate dispersion models. Reduced-rank multivariate dispersion models (RR-MDM) generalize RRR to a very large class of distributions, which include continuous distributions like the normal, Gamma, inverse Gaussian, and discrete distributions like the Poisson, the binomial and the negative binomial. A multivariate distribution is created with the help of the Gaussian copula and estimation is performed using maximum likelihood. It is shown how this method can be amended to deal with the case of discrete data. A Monte Carlo simulation shows that the new estimator is more efficient than the traditional Gaussian RRR. In the framework of MDM's a procedure analogous to canonical correlations is introduced, which takes into account the distribution of the data. Finally, the method is applied to the number of trades of five US department stores on the New York Stock Exchange during the year 1999 and determine the existence of a common factor which represents sector specific news. This analysis is helpful in microstructure analysis to identify leaders from the point of view of dissemination of sectorial information.

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

multivariate dispersion model
multivariate statistical analysis
principal component analysis


learning to deduplicate Identifying record replicas in Digital Libraries and other types of digital repositories is fundamental to improve the quality of their content and services as well as to yield eventual sharing efforts. Several deduplication strategies are available, but most of them rely on manually chosen settings to combine evidence used to identify records as being replicas. In this paper, we present the results of experiments we have carried out with a novel Machine Learning approach we have proposed for the deduplication problem. This approach, based on Genetic Programming (GP), is able to automatically generate similarity functions to identify record replicas in a given repository. The generated similarity functions properly combine and weight the best evidence available among the record fields in order to tell when two distinct records represent the same real-world entity. The results of the experiments show that our approach outperforms the baseline method by Fellegi and Sunter by more than 12\% when identifying replicas in a data set containing researcher's personal data, and by more than 7\%, in a data set with article citation data.

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

digital libraries
deduplication
genetic programming


Correlated shadow-fading in wireless networks and its effect on call dropping We discuss a statistical model to generate correlated shadow-fading patterns for wireless systems in the absence of detailed propagation and landscape information. The currently available autocorrelation models result in anomalous effects that depend on traffic density and mobility, as they propose independent random processes for each mobile. Our approach involves generating a pre-computed fading map with the right marginal distributions and spatial correlations, which avoids inconsistencies such as providing widely differing values for mobiles close to each other. The correlations are introduced via a Gaussian random field, which has a covariance structure that depends on a set of parameters which can be computed from local measurements. The model is efficiently implemented using standard linear-algebra methods. We conclude by describing a simulation experiment to study the effect of correlations on call dropping. The experiment reveals a strong relationship between call dropping and the correlation length of the fading pattern, and indicates circumstances under which dropping may be relatively high.

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

shadow-fading
propagation model
statistical physics


Comparison of stoop versus prone postures for a simulated agricultural harvesting task Physical and psychophysical differences between working in the stooped and prone postures were compared while performing a simulated agricultural harvesting task for 30min. Fifteen male subjects participated. The measures used to compare the two postures included perceived discomfort, electromyography (EMG), and heart rate (HR). Average hamstrings localized discomfort (010 scale) was 6.17 (SD=2.9) for the stoop posture and 0.67 (SD=1.29) for the prone posture. Erector spinae and hamstring EMG RMS increased 68% and 18%, respectively, while mean power frequency for the hamstrings decreased 13% for the stoop task. Mean power frequency for the middle trapezius muscle decreased in both postures (stoop 4.13%, prone 3.79%). Average heart rate during the last work cycle was 35% greater than the resting heart rate for the stoop posture while average heart rate was 17% greater for the prone posture. Subjects worked on the prone workstation without rest during the 15min work simulations with less discomfort, no localized fatigue in the back or leg muscles tested, and lower working heart rates than subjects working in the stoop posture.

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


Trend to equilibrium in the dynamics of a gas interacting with a radiation field We consider the moment equations for a kinetic model describing the interaction of monochromatic photons with gas-particles endowed with two internal energy levels, In the space-homogeneous case the stability of the equilibrium solution is analytically proven and numerically tested, In the space-dependent case numerical results show the trend to a space-homogeneous equilibrium solution. (C) 2000 IMACS. Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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

kinetic and transport theory
fluidodynamics equations
numerical solutions


Reporting and counting maximal points in a query orthogonal rectangle ? In this work we show that given a set S of n points with coordinates on an nn n n grid, we can construct data structures for (i) reporting and (ii) counting the maximal points in an axes-parallel query rectangle in sub-logarithmic time. We assume our model of computation to be the word RAM with size of each word being log?n log ? n bits.

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 B I O O O O O O 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 visual dialog In this paper we propose a paradigm called the interactive visual dialog (IVD) as a means of facilitating a system's ability to recognize objects presented to it by a human. The presentation centers around a supermarket checkout scenario in which an operator presents an item to be tallied to a stationary television camera. An active vision approach is used to provide feedback to the operator in the form of an image (or images) depicting what the system thinks the operator is most likely holding, shown in a viewpoint that suggests how the object should next be presented to improve the certainty of interpretation. Interaction proceeds iteratively until the system converges on the correct interpretation. We show how the IVD can be implemented using an entropy-based gaze planning strategy and a sequential Bayes recognition system using optical flow as input. Experimental results show that the system does, in practice, improve recognition accuracy, leading to convergence to a correct solution in a minimal number of iterations.

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


Linear cofactor relationships in Boolean functions This paper describes linear cofactor relationships (LCRs), which are defined as the exclusive sums of cofactors with respect to a pair of variables in Boolean functions. These relationships subsume classical symmetries and single-variable symmetries. The paper proposes an efficient algorithm to detect LCRs and discusses their potential applications in Boolean matching, minimization of decision diagrams, synthesis of regular layout-friendly logic circuits, and detection of support-reducing bound sets.

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

linear cofactor relationship (lcr)
logic synthesis
symmetry