Story Tracker: Incremental visual text analytics of news story development Online news sources produce thousands of news articles every day, reporting on local and global real-world events. New information quickly replaces the old, making it difficult for readers to put current events in the context of the past. The stories about these events have complex relationships and characteristics that are difficult to model: they can be weakly or strongly related or they can merge or split over time. In this article, we present a visual analytics system for temporal analysis of news stories in dynamic information streams, which combines interactive visualization and text mining techniques to facilitate the analysis of similar topics that split and merge over time. Text clustering algorithms extract stories from online news streams in consecutive time windows and identify similar stories from the past. The stories are displayed in a visualization, which (1) sorts the stories by minimizing clutter and overlap from edge crossings, (2) shows their temporal characteristics in different time frames with different levels of detail, and (3) allows incremental updates of the display without recalculating the past data. Stories can be interactively filtered by their duration and connectivity in order to be explored in full detail. To demonstrate the system's capabilities for detailed dynamic text stream exploration, we present a use case with real news data about the Arabic Uprising in 2011.

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

news stream analysis
topic evolution
dynamic visualization


an efficient incremental algorithm for min-area retiming As one of the most effective sequential optimization techniques, retiming is a structural transformation that relocates flip-flops in a circuit without changing its functionality. The min-area retiming problem seeks a solution with the minimum flip-flop area (or number) under a given clock period. Even though having polynomial runtime, the best existing algorithms for this problem still need to first construct a dense path graph and then find a min-cost network flow on it, thus incur huge storage and time expenses for large circuits. Recently, provable incremental algorithms have been discovered for min-period retiming, and heuristic incremental algorithms have been proposed for min-area retiming. However, given the complexity of the problem, min-area retiming is still resisting an efficient provable incremental algorithm. In this paper, we fill the gap by presenting an efficient algorithm to solve the min-area retiming problem incrementally and optimally. Contrary to existing approaches, no dense path graph is constructed; only the active timing constraints are dynamically generated in the algorithm. Experimental results show that the total runtime of our algorithm for all the benchmarks is at least 60 x faster than the best existing approach.

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


Non-rigid stereo factorization In this paper we address the problem of recovering 3D non-rigid structure from a sequence of images taken with a stereo pair. We have extended existing non-rigid factorization algorithms to the stereo camera case and presented an algorithm to decompose the measurement matrix into the motion of the left and right cameras and the 3D shape, represented as a linear combination of basis-shapes. The added constraints in the stereo camera case are that both cameras are viewing the same structure and that the relative orientation between both cameras is fixed. Our focus in this paper is on the recovery of flexible 3D shape rather than on the correspondence problem. We propose a method to compute reliable 3D models of deformable structure from stereo images. Our experiments with real data show that improved reconstructions can be achieved using this method. The algorithm includes a non-linear optimization step that minimizes image reprojection error and imposes the correct structure to the motion matrix by choosing an appropriate parameterization. We show that 3D shape and motion estimates can be successfully disambiguated after bundle adjustment and demonstrate this on synthetic and real image sequences. While this optimization step is proposed for the stereo camera case, it can be readily applied to the case of non-rigid structure recovery using a monocular video sequence.

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

non-rigid structure from motion
non-linear optimization
deformable model


Simulation of a ridge-type semiconductor laser with selective double-sided anti-guiding and partially undoped cladding layers A ridge-type semiconductor laser with selective double-sided anti-guiding and partially undoped cladding layers is proposed, and lasing characteristics are simulated. With increases in the height and width of the selective double-sided anti-guiding layers, both kink-level and threshold current increase. With an increase in the thickness of the partially undoped cladding layers, the kink-level increases. There is an optimum value for the thickness of the partially undoped cladding layers to minimize the threshold current with maintaining kink-free operation. The lowest threshold current for kink-free operation is 46.1 mA, which is much lower than the previous lowest value of 57.0 mA.

O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 statistical framework for picture reconstruction using 2D AR models This paper presents a framework for Filling In missing gaps in images and particularly patches with texture. The algorithm can also be used as a fallback mode in treating missing data for video sequence reconstruction. The underlying idea is to construct a parametric model of the p.d.f. of the texture to be re-synthesised and then draw samples from that p.d.f. to create the resulting reconstruction. A Bayesian approach is used to articulate 2D Autoregressive Models as generative models for texture (using the Gibbs sampler) given surrounding boundary conditions. A fast implementation is presented that iterates between pixelwise updates and blockwise parametric model estimation. The novel ideas in this paper are joint parameter estimation and fast, efficient texture reconstruction using linear models.

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

video reconstruction
statistical interpolation
texture synthesis
image reconstruction
image restoration
gibbs sampling
bayesian inference


application design within the system for business automation (sba) The system for business automation provides a new design methodology with which business applications can be automated by non-professional programmers onto a computer. This methodology retains the users manual perception of his application, it allows a gradual automation of the application, each application within a business system can be designed with only local knowledge of the business, and frames of reference are provided within which the application is designed.

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

applications methodology users design perception knowledge automation business

systems
computation
design methodologies
locality
programmer


Constructing a New-Style Conceptual Model of Brain Data for Systematic Brain Informatics The development of brain science has led to a vast increase of brain data. To meet requirements of a systematic methodology of Brain Informatics (BI), this paper proposes a new conceptual model of brain data, namely Data-Brain, which explicitly represents various relationships among multiple human brain data sources, with respect to all major aspects and capabilities of human information processing systems (HIPS). A multidimension framework and a BI methodology-based ontological modeling approach have been developed to implement a Data-Brain. The Data-Brain, Data-Brain-based BI provenances, and heterogeneous brain data can be used to construct a Data-Brain-based brain data center which provides a global framework to integrate data, information, and knowledge coming from the whole research process for systematic BI study. Such a Data-Brain modeling approach represents a radically new way for domain-driven conceptual modeling of brain data, which models a whole process of systematically investigating human information processing mechanisms.

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

data-brain
domain-driven conceptual modeling
ontologies
provenance


designing clustering-based web crawling policies for search engine crawlers The World Wide Web is growing and changing at an astonishing rate. Web information systems such as search engines have to keep up with the growth and change of the Web. Due to resource constraints, search engines usually have difficulties keeping the local database completely synchronized with the Web. In this paper, we study how tomake good use of the limited system resource and detect as many changes as possible. Towards this goal, a crawler for the Web search engine should be able to predict the change behavior of the webpages. We propose applying clustering-based sampling approach. Specifically, we first group all the local webpages into different clusters such that each cluster contains webpages with similar change pattern. We then sample webpages from each cluster to estimate the change frequency of all the webpages in that cluster. Finally, we let the crawler re-visit the cluster containing webpages with higher change frequency with a higher probability. To evaluate the performance of an incremental crawler for a Web search engine, we measure both the freshness and the quality of the query results provided by the search engine. We run extensive experiments on a real Web data set of about 300,000 distinct URLs distributed among 210 websites. The results demonstrate that our clustering algorithm effectively clusters the pages with similar change patterns, and our solution significantly outperforms the existing methods in that it can detect more changed webpages and improve the quality of the user experience for those who query the search engine.

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

web search engine
sampling
incremental crawler
clustering


Characterizing minimal semantics-preserving slices of predicate-linear, free, liberal program schemas A program schema defines a class of programs, all of which have identical statement structure, but whose functions and predicates may differ. A schema thus defines an entire class of programs according to how its symbols are interpreted. A subschema of a schema is obtained from a schema by deleting some of its statements. We prove that given a schema S which is predicate-linear, free and liberal, such that the true and false parts of every if predicate satisfy a simple additional condition, and a slicing criterion defined by the final value of a given variable after execution cif any program defined by S, the minimal subschema of S which respects this slicing criterion contains all the function and predicate symbols 'needed' by the variable according to the data dependence and control dependence relations used in program slicing, which is the symbol set given by Weiser's static slicing algorithm. Thus this algorithm gives predicate-minimal slices for classes of programs represented by schemas satisfying our set of conditions. We also give an example to show that the corresponding result with respect to the slicing criterion defined by termination behaviour is incorrect. This complements a result by the authors in which S was required to be function-linear, instead of predicate-linear. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

herbrand domain
weiser's algorithm
free and liberal schemas
linear schemas


Decoupled control of thrust and normal force in a double-layer single-sided linear induction motor In this paper, a modified force decoupling method for improved servo control of a magnetically suspended double-layer single-sided linear induction motor (LIM) is presented. In this study, the primary is magnetically suspended under and moved along the double-layer secondary which consists of an aluminum plate with a back-iron. In order to decoupled the normal and thrust force, analytical expressions for the forces as function of the slip frequency and the primary current are obtained by curve fitting on steady-state FEM results. From these steady-state force models, the required current amplitude and slip frequency are solved for given force setpoints. The setpoints are generated by a position controller which is designed based on a dynamical model of the LIM. The dynamical model is estimated by injecting noise into a transient FE-model and measurements. Transient FEM simulations and measurements show the effectiveness of the proposed controller and decoupling method when they are used to magnetically suspend and position the LIM. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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 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


Damage detection using successive parameter subset selections and multiple modal residuals Successive use of the homogeneous modal residuals in damage detection. Symmetries, large changes in residuals and multiple damage levels are considered. 3D frame structure with a loose joint is used to demonstrate the concept. Frequency residuals and symmetries determine the candidate damage regions. Mode shape residuals assist selection of one location from the candidate regions.

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

subspace angles
parameter subset selection
symmetry


Generalized Tractability for Multivariate Problems Part II: Linear Tensor Product Problems, Linear Information, and Unrestricted Tractability We continue the study of generalized tractability initiated in our previous paper "Generalized tractability for multivariate problems, Part I: Linear tensor product problems and linear information", J. Complex. 23:262-295, 2007. We study linear tensor product problems for which we can compute linear information which is given by arbitrary continuous linear functionals. We want to approximate an operator S-d given as the d-fold tensor product of a compact linear operator S-1 for d = 1, 2,..., with parallel to S-1 parallel to = 1 and S-1 having at least two positive singular values. Let n(epsilon, S-d) be the minimal number of information evaluations needed to approximate Sd to within epsilon is an element of [0, 1]. We study generalized tractability by verifying when n(epsilon, S-d) can be bounded by a multiple of a power of T(epsilon(-1), d) for all (epsilon(-1), d). Omega subset of [1, infinity) x N. Here, T is a tractability function which is non-decreasing in both variables and grows slower than exponentially to infinity. We study the exponent of tractability which is the smallest power of T(epsilon(-1), d) whose multiple bounds n(epsilon, S-d). We also study weak tractability, i.e., when lim(epsilon-1+d ->infinity), ((epsilon-1, d)is an element of Omega) ln n(epsilon, S-d)/(epsilon(-1) + d) = 0. In our previous paper, we studied generalized tractability for proper subsets Omega of [1, infinity) x N, whereas in this paper we take the unrestricted domain Omega(unr) = [1, infinity) x N. We consider the three cases for which we have only finitely many positive singular values of S-1, or they decay exponentially or polynomially fast. Weak tractability holds for these three cases, and for all linear tensor product problems for which the singular values of S-1 decay slightly faster than logarithmically. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the function T such that generalized tractability holds. These conditions are obtained in terms of the singular values of S-1 and mostly asymptotic properties of T. The tractability conditions tell us how fast T must go to infinity. It is known that T must go to infinity faster than polynomially. We show that generalized tractability is obtained for T(x, y) = x(1+ln y). We also study tractability functions T of product form, T(x, y) = f(1)(x)f(2)(x). Assume that a(i) = lim inf(x -> 8)(ln ln f(i)(x))/(ln ln x) is finite for i = 1, 2. Then generalized tractability takes place iff a(i) > 1 and (a(1) - 1)(a(2) - 1) >= 1, and if (a(1) - 1)(a(2) - 1) = 1 then we need to assume one more condition given in the paper. If (a(1) - 1)(a(2) - 1) > 1 then the exponent of tractability is zero, and if (a(1) - 1)(a(2) - 1) = 1 then the exponent of tractability is finite. It is interesting to add that for T being of the product form, the tractability conditions as well as the exponent of tractability depend only on the second singular eigenvalue of S-1 and they do not depend on the rate of their decay. Finally, we compare the results obtained in this paper for the unrestricted domain Omega(unr) with the results from our previous paper obtained for the restricted domain Omega(res) = [1, infinity) x {1, 2, ..., d*}boolean OR[1, epsilon(-1)(0)) x N with d* >= 1 and epsilon(0) is an element of (0, 1). In general, the tractability results are quite different. We may have generalized tractability for the restricted domain and no generalized tractability for the unrestricted domain which is the case, for instance, for polynomial tractability T(x, y) = xy. We may also have generalized tractability for both domains with different or with the same exponents of tractability.

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

multivariate problem
tensor product problem
information-based complexity


Numerical aspects in modeling high Deborah number flow and elastic instability Investigating highly nonlinear viscoelastic flow in 2D domain, we explore problem as well as property possibly inherent in the streamline upwinding technique (SUPG) and then present various results of elastic instability. The mathematically stable Leonov model written in tensor-logarithmic formulation is employed in the framework of finite element method for spatial discretization of several representative problem domains. For enhancement of computation speed, decoupled integration scheme is applied for shear thinning and Boger-type fluids. From the analysis of 4:1 contraction flow at low and moderate values of the Deborah number (De) the solution with SUPG method does not show noticeable difference from the one by the computation without upwinding. On the other hand, in the flow regime of high De, especially in the state of elastic instability the SUPG significantly distorts the flow field and the result differs considerably from the solution acquired straightforwardly. When the strength of elastic flow and thus the nonlinearity further increase, the computational scheme with upwinding fails to converge and evolutionary solution does not become available any more. All this result suggests that extreme care has to be taken on occasions where upwinding is applied, and one has to first of all prove validity of this algorithm in the case of high nonlinearity. On the contrary, the straightforward computation with no upwinding can efficiently model representative phenomena of elastic instability in such benchmark problems as 4:1 contraction flow, flow over a circular cylinder and flow over asymmetric array of cylinders. Asymmetry of the flow field occurring in the symmetric domain, enhanced spatial and temporal fluctuation of dynamic variables and flow effects caused by extension hardening are properly described in this study.

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

viscoelastic flow
leonov model
high deborah number
elastic instability
streamline upwinding


Convergence of program transformers in the metric space of trees In recent years increasing consensus has emerged that program transformers, e.g. partial evaluation and unfold/fold transformations, should terminate; a compiler should stop even if it performs fancy optimizations! A number of techniques to ensure termination of program transformers have been invented, but their correctness proofs are sometimes long and involved. We present a framework for proving termination of program transformers, cast in the metric space of trees. We first introduce the notion of an abstract program transformer; a number of well-known program transformers can be viewed as instances of this notion. We then formalize what it means that an abstract program transformer terminates and give a general sufficient condition for an abstract program transformer to terminate. We also consider some specific techniques for satisfying the condition. As applications we show that termination of some well-known program transformers either follows directly from the specific techniques or is easy to establish using the general condition. Our framework facilitates simple termination proofs for program transformers. Also, since our framework is independent of the language being transformed, a single correctness proof can be given in our framework for program transformers that use essentially the same technique in the context of different languages. Moreover, it is easy to extend termination proofs for program transformers to accommodate changes to these transformers. Finally, the framework may prove useful for designing new termination techniques for program transformers. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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

program transformers
termination
metric space of trees


Incremental learning for ? ? -Support Vector Regression The ? ? -Support Vector Regression (? ? -SVR) is an effective regression learning algorithm, which has the advantage of using a parameter ? ? on controlling the number of support vectors and adjusting the width of the tube automatically. However, compared to ? ? -Support Vector Classification (? ? -SVC) (Schlkopf etal., 2000), ? ? -SVR introduces an additional linear term into its objective function. Thus, directly applying the accurate on-line ? ? -SVC algorithm (AONSVM) to ? ? -SVR will not generate an effective initial solution. It is the main challenge to design an incremental ? ? -SVR learning algorithm. To overcome this challenge, we propose a special procedure called initial adjustments in this paper. This procedure adjusts the weights of ? ? -SVC based on the KarushKuhnTucker (KKT) conditions to prepare an initial solution for the incremental learning. Combining the initial adjustments with the two steps of AONSVM produces an exact and effective incremental ? ? -SVR learning algorithm (INSVR). Theoretical analysis has proven the existence of the three key inverse matrices, which are the cornerstones of the three steps of INSVR (including the initial adjustments ), respectively. The experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that INSVR can avoid the infeasible updating paths as far as possible, and successfully converges to the optimal solution. The results also show that INSVR is faster than batch ? ? -SVR algorithms with both cold and warm starts.

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

? ? -support vector regression ? ? ? ? ?


Improved approximation algorithms for the MinMax Selecting Items problem We give a simple deterministic O ( log K / log log K ) approximation algorithm for the MinMax Selecting Items problem with K scenarios. It improves over the previous best approximation ratio of O ( log K ) due to Kasperski, Kurpisz, and Zielinski (2013) [4]. It has a polynomial runtime also in the RAM model of computation. We also show that the standard LP formulation for this problem has an integrality gap of order log K / log log K . Dependent randomized rounding is the main tool.

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 B I O O O O

approximation algorithm
randomized rounding


Joint maps for orientation, eye, and direction preference in a self-organizing model of V1 Primary visual cortex (V1) contains overlaid feature maps for orientation (OR), motion direction selectivity (DR), and ocular dominance (OD). Neurons in these maps are connected laterally in patchy, long-range patterns that follow the feature preferences. Using the LISSOM model, we show for the first time how realistic laterally connected joint OR/OD/DR maps can self-organize from Hebbian learning of moving natural images. The model predicts that lateral connections will link neurons of either eye preference and with similar DR and OR preferences. These results suggest that a single self-organizing system may underlie the development of spatiotemporal feature preferences and lateral connectivity.

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 B O O O O O O O

ocular dominance map
orientation map
direction map


Pirana and PCluster: A modeling environment and cluster infrastructure for NONMEM Pharmacokinetic-pharmacodynamic modeling using non-linear mixed effects modeling (NONMEM) is a powerful yet challenging technique, as the software is generally accessed from the command line. A graphical user interface, Pirana, was developed that offers a complete modeling environment for NONMEM, enabling both novice and advanced users to increase efficiency of their workflow. Pirana provides features for the management and creation of model files, the overview of modeling results, creation of run reports and handling of datasets and output tables, and the running of custom R scripts on model output. Through the secure shell (SSH) protocol, Pirana can also be used to connect to Linux clusters (SGE, MOSIX) for distribution of workload. Modeling with NONMEM is computationally burdensome, which may be alleviated by distributing runs to computer clusters. A solution to this problem is offered here, called PCluster. This platform is easy to set up, runs in standard network environments, and can be extended with additional nodes if needed. The cluster supports the modeling toolkit Perl speaks NONMEM (PsN), and can include dedicated or non-dedicated PCs. A daemon script, written in Perl, was designed to run in the background on each node in the cluster, and to manage job distribution. The PCluster can be accessed from Pirana, and both software products have extensively been tested on a large academic network. The software is available under an open-source license. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


Mining affective needs of automotive industry customers for building a mass-customization recommender system Mass customization systems aim to receive customer preferences in order to facilitate personalization of products and services. Current online configuration systems are unable to efficiently identify real customer affective needs because they offer an excess variety of products that usually confuse customers. On the other hand, mining affective customer needs may result in recommender systems, which can enhance existing configuration systems by recommending initial configurations according to customer affective needs. This paper introduces a mass customization recommender system that exploits data mining techniques on automotive industry customer data aiming at revealing associations between user affective needs and the design parameters of automotive products. One key novelty of the presented approach is that it deploys the Citarasa engineering, a methodology that focuses on the provision of the appropriate characterizations on customer data in order to associate them with customer affective needs. Based on the application of classification techniques we build a recommendation engine, which is evaluated in terms of user satisfaction, tool's effectiveness, usefulness and reliability among other parameters.

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

mass customization
affective needs
data mining
recommender systems


Multiple Scaling Extrinsic Soft Information for Improved Min-Sum Iterative Decoding of LDPC Codes This paper presents an improved min-sum iterative decoding scheme for regular and irregular LDPC codes. The proposed decoding scheme scales the extrinsic soft information from variable nodes to check. Different scaling factors are applied for iterations and the scaling factors are obtained by a simplified vector optimization method.

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


Assistive Tagging: A Survey of Multimedia Tagging with Human-Computer Joint Exploration Along with the explosive growth of multimedia data, automatic multimedia tagging has attracted great interest of various research communities, such as computer vision, multimedia, and information retrieval. However, despite the great progress achieved in the past two decades, automatic tagging technologies still can hardly achieve satisfactory performance on real-world multimedia data that vary widely in genre, quality, and content. Meanwhile, the power of human intelligence has been fully demonstrated in the Web 2.0 era. If well motivated, Internet users are able to tag a large amount of multimedia data. Therefore, a set of new techniques has been developed by combining humans and computers for more accurate and efficient multimedia tagging, such as batch tagging, active tagging, tag recommendation, and tag refinement. These techniques are able to accomplish multimedia tagging by jointly exploring humans and computers in different ways. This article refers to them collectively as assistive tagging and conducts a comprehensive survey of existing research efforts on this theme. We first introduce the status of automatic tagging and manual tagging and then state why assistive tagging can be a good solution. We categorize existing assistive tagging techniques into three paradigms: (1) tagging with data selection & organization; (2) tag recommendation; and (3) tag processing. We introduce the research efforts on each paradigm and summarize the methodologies. We also provide a discussion on several future trends in this research direction.

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

tagging
tag recommendation
tag refinement

algorithms
experimentation
human factors
annotation
interactive tagging
tag location


Generic integration of environmental decision support systems state-of-the-art Environmental Information Systems (EIS) and Environmental Decision Support Systems (EDSS) are major building blocks in environmental management and science today. They are used at all levels of public bodies (community, state, national and international level), in science, in management and as information platforms towards the public. EIS and EDSS are usually said to have certain characteristics, which distinguish them from standard information systems, e.g. information complexity in time and space or uncompleteness or fuzzyness of data items. By the very nature of the complex tasks involved, different methodologies can be an option while developing new system, for instance modelling, decision theoretic approaches, artificial intelligence, geographical analysis, statistics and many more. As software developers, we face the situation where we have to recompose these different methodologies in different application scenarios over and over again. This paper discusses the question, how different EIS and EDSS tools can be integrated in a generic way. For this purpose, we discuss a number of integration strategies and give two examples of current EU-funded projects.

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

environmental decision support systems (edss)


Deriving similarity for Semantic Web using similarity graph One important research challenge of current Semantic Web is resolving the interoperability issue across ontologies. The issue is directly related to identifying semantics of resources residing in different domain ontologies. That is, the semantics of a concept in an ontology differs from others according to the modeling style and intuition of the knowledge expert even though they are the same forms of a concept in each respective ontology. In this paper, we propose a similarity measure to resolve the interoperability issue by using a similarity graph. The strong point of this paper is that we provide a precise mapping technique and similarity properties to derive the similarity. The novel contribution of this paper is that we provide a core technique of computing similarity across ontologies of Semantic Web.

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


polymorphic regular tree types and patterns We propose a type system based on regular tree grammars, where algebraic datatypes are interpreted in a structural way. Thus, the same constructors can be reused for different types and a flexible subtyping relation can be defined between types, corresponding to the inclusion of their semantics. For instance, one can define a type for lists and a subtype of this type corresponding to lists of even length. Patterns are simply types annotated with binders. This provides a generalization of algebraic patterns with the ability of matching arbitrarily deep in a value. Our main contribution, compared to languages such as XDuce and CDuce, is that we are able to deal with both polymorphism and function types.

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

type system
value
tree
subtyping
inclusion
polymorphism
types
matching
relation

structure
semantic
language
functional
tree automata
flexibility
general
grammar
pattern


Approximate convex skyline: A partitioned layer-based index for efficient processing top-k queries A top-k query returns k tuples with the highest (or the lowest) scores from a relation. Layer-based methods are the representative ones for processing top-k queries efficiently. These methods construct a list of layers, where the ith layer contains the tuples that can potentially be the top-i answer. Thus, the layer-based methods can answer top-k queries by reading at most k layers. To construct layers, the existing layer-based methods use convex skyline, convex hull or skyline methods. Among them, the convex skyline is constructed by computing the convex hull over the skyline. Accordingly, the layer size of the convex skyline is relatively smaller than those of the convex hull, and the index building time is relatively shorter than those of the skyline. However, for large and high-dimensional databases, the convex skyline suffers from long index building time and large memory usage, because most objects can become the skyline points. This paper focuses on how to build an index, which contains a smaller number of objects comparing to the skyline and uses less time to construct an index comparing to the convex skyline. Specifically, we propose a method, called the Approximate Convex Skyline Enhanced (simply, AppCSE), which reduces the index building time and memory usage of the convex skyline. In the proposed method, we first construct the skyline, and then, partition the region of the skyline into multiple subregions, and compute the convex hull in each subregion with virtual objects. After that, AppCSE combines the objects obtained by computing the convex hull. Through various experiments with synthetic and real datasets, we demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the index building time and memory usage comparing to the existing methods. In addition, we show that the degradation of query performance is negligible when using AppCSE as the layering scheme.

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


Towards formal analysis of wireless LAN security with MIS protocol In 2004, the MIS and MISAUTH protocols (shortly MISP) were proposed for secure and fast connection in Wireless LAN (WLAN). Since then, several studies were conducted to evaluate MISP. However, because of the lack of formal security analysis, the security measures provided by them cannot be trusted to be precise and reasonable. Motivated by this, we formally analyse MISP based on both BAN-logic and the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPAS) tool. This analysis clearly shows that MISP suffers from weak Session Key (SK) while being vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attack. We discuss these weaknesses and related attacks in detail, and also provide considerable comments for implementation of MISP.

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


A visible watermarking algorithm based on the content and contrast aware (COCOA) technique A novel visible watermarking algorithm based on the content and contrast aware (COCOA) technique with the consideration of Human Visual System (HVS) model is presented in this study. In order to determine the optimal watermark locations and strength at the watermark embedding stage, the COCOA visible watermarking utilizes the global and local characteristics of the host and watermark images in the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) domain. To achieve the best tradeoff between the embedding energy of watermark and the perceptual translucence, the utilization of contrastsensitive function, noise visible function of perceptual model, and the basis function amplitudes of DWT coefficients are fine tuned, for the best quality of perceptual translucence and noise reduction of the COCOA algorithm. The experimental results demonstrate that COCOA technique not only provides high PSNR values for the watermarked images, but also preserves the watermark visibility under various signal processing operations, especially the watermark removal attack.

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

csf
human vision system
nvf
copyright protection
image inpainting
image recovery


Integrating data envelopment analysis and analytic hierarchy for the facility layout design in manufacturing systems Facility layout design (FLD) has a very important effect on the performance of a manufacturing system. The concept of FLD is usually considered as a multiobjective problem. For this reason, a layout generation and its evaluation are often challenging and time consuming due to their inherent multiple objectives in nature and their data collection process. In addition, an effective facility layout evaluation procedure necessitates the consideration of qualitative criteria, e.g., flexibility in volume and variety and quality related to the product and production, as well as quantitative criteria such as material handling cost, adjacency score, shape ratio, and material handling vehicle utilization in the decision process. This paper presents a decision-making methodology based on data envelopment analysis (DEA), which uses both quantitative and qualitative criteria, for evaluating FLD. The criteria that are to be minimized are viewed as inputs whereas the criteria to be maximized are considered as outputs. A computer-aided layout-planning tool, VisFactory, is adopted to facilitate the layout alternative design process as well as to collect quantitative data by using exact and vague data by means of fuzzy set theory. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is then applied to collect qualitative data related to quality and flexibility. The DEA methodology is used to solve the layout design problem by simultaneously considering both the quantitative and qualitative data. The purposed integrated procedure is applied to a real data set of a case study, which consists of 19 FLDs provided of the plastic profile production system.

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


Chemometric analysis of the multidrug resistance in strains of Penicillium digitatum Multidrug resistance activities pECr(50) of diverse strains of pathogenic fungus Penicillium digitatum against seven toxicants were studied by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA). Fungal growth data (radii, circumferences, surface areas of fungal colonies, radius differences and ratios) in absence and presence of toxicants were used to derive eight new descriptors for 35 fungal strains. This data set was studied by PCA and HCA, and was correlated with the genome descriptor PCR for expression of gene CYP51 by Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression. Both analyses of pECr(50) data and of fungal growth data have identified baseline resistance character, origin and target fruits of the fungal strains. In addition, the analysis of fungal growth data shows that fungal growth morphology is multivariate by nature, meaning that experimental data can be explored more intensely than in usual practice. Fungal growth is directly related to the production of enzyme P450(14DM) as the main resistance mechanism of P. digitatum against demethylation inhibitors. This is visible from a parsimonious PLS model (two principal components, Q(2) = 0.985, R-2 = 0.991, SEV = 0.028), validated with eight strains in the external validation set (Q(ev)(2) = 0.982, R-ev(2) = 0.990, SECev = 0.025). Chemometric methods in exploring bioassay data are promising approaches to obtain useful information on fungal resistance and to apply these findings in practice.

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

demethylation inhibitors
multidrug resistance
partial least squares

chemometrics
exploratory analysis
green mould


identifying the addressee in human-human-robot interactions based on head pose and speech In this work we investigate the power of acoustic and visual cues, and their combination, to identify the addressee in a human-human-robot interaction. Based on eighteen audio-visual recordings of two human beings and a (simulated) robot we discriminate the interaction of the two humans from the interaction of one human with the robot. The paper compares the result of three approaches. The first approach uses purely acoustic cues to find the addressees. Low level, feature based cues as well as higher-level cues are examined. In the second approach we test whether the human's head pose is a suitable cue. Our results show that visually estimated head pose is a more reliable cue for the identification of the addressee in the human-human-robot interaction. In the third approach we combine the acoustic and visual cues which results in significant improvements.

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

speech recognition
head pose estimation
multimodal interfaces
attentive interfaces
human-robot interaction
focus of attention


An immersed-boundary method for flowstructure interaction in biological systems with application to phonation A new numerical approach for modeling a class of flowstructure interaction problems typically encountered in biological systems is presented. In this approach, a previously developed, sharp-interface, immersed-boundary method for incompressible flows is used to model the fluid flow and a new, sharp-interface Cartesian grid, immersed-boundary method is devised to solve the equations of linear viscoelasticity that governs the solid. The two solvers are coupled to model flowstructure interaction. This coupled solver has the advantage of simple grid generation and efficient computation on simple, single-block structured grids. The accuracy of the solid-mechanics solver is examined by applying it to a canonical problem. The solution methodology is then applied to the problem of laryngeal aerodynamics and vocal fold vibration during human phonation. This includes a three-dimensional eigen analysis for a multi-layered vocal fold prototype as well as two-dimensional, flow-induced vocal fold vibration in a modeled larynx. Several salient features of the aerodynamics as well as vocal fold dynamics are presented.

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

immersed-boundary method
elasticity
bio-flow mechanics
laryngeal flow
flow-induced vibration


a research agenda for data curation cyberinfrastructure In 2008, the National Science Foundation released the DataNet solicitation, which presents an ambitious vision for a comprehensive data curation cyberinfrastructure in support of fourth paradigm science. The program subsequently funded two projects, DataONE and the Data Conservancy. The authors put forth an uncertainty framework for understanding the larger socio-cultural issues that influence the progress of DataNet projects and cyberinfrastructure projects in general. This framework highlights the key technical, organizational, scientific, and institutional contexts that the projects must consider as they mature.

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


Formalizing and Verifying Protocol Refinements A (business) protocol describes, in high-level terms, a pattern of communication between two or more participants, specifically via the creation and manipulation of the commitments between them. In this manner, a protocol offers both flexibility and rigor: a participant may communicate in anyway it chooses as long as it discharges all of its activated commitments. Protocols thus promise benefits in engineering cross-organizational business processes. However, software engineering using protocols presupposes a formalization of protocols and a notion of the refinement of one protocol by another. Refinement for protocols is both intuitively obvious (e.g., PayViaCheck is clearly a kind of Pay) and technically nontrivial (e.g., compared to Pay, PayViaCheck involves different participants exchanging different messages). This article formalizes protocols and their refinement. It develops Proton, an analysis tool for protocol specifications that overlays a model checker to compute whether one protocol refines another with respect to a stated mapping. Proton and its underlying theory are evaluated by formalizing several protocols from the literature and verifying all and only the expected refinements.

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

algorithms
languages
verification
agent communication
verification of multiagent systems


Sampling of heterogeneous bottom ash from municipal waste-incineration plants Bottom ash from waste-incineration plants is a very heterogeneous material and sampling requires special attention. The objective of the sampling should be carefully defined before a sampling protocol can be made. In Denmark, 500,000 tonnes of bottom ash is produced annually from a number of municipal and privately owned incineration plants. For legal reasons, the bottom ash has to be sampled and evaluated since reuse options of the bottom ash depends on comparing fixed thresholds with these analytical results. Legally, a sample of 5 kg has to be taken from every batch of 5000 tonnes of bottom ash. The amount of trace elements leaking into the environment (leachates) play the key role in deciding if and where bottom ash can be reused. Test for systematic error (bias) and estimation of the sampling and preparation errors were the main objectives of this study. Three alternative methods of sampling, comprising mechanical sampling, "stopped belt sampling" and manual sampling from a stockpile have been evaluated and compared here. The primary and secondary sampling uncertainty is shown to be the dominant factor in the overall uncertainty of the analytical results. Stopped belt sampling of four different types of bottom ashes has been carried out in a baseline study to estimate the primary increment variance, enabling estimation of the different uncertainties associated with the final analytical result. Based on this study, the owners and operators of incinerating plants in Denmark now recommend to the Danish Environmental Agency to revise the current governmental protocol for sampling of bottom ash in order to minimize the risk for biased samples and to significantly reduce the uncertainty of the final result. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Regularized least squares support vector regression for the simultaneous learning of a function and its derivatives In this paper, we propose a regularized least squares approach based support vector machine for simultaneously approximating a function and its derivatives. The proposed algorithm is simple and fast as no quadratic programming solver needs to be employed. Effectively, only the solution of a structured system of linear equations is needed.

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

support vector machines
machine learning
function approximation


A Review of Mutual Transmission of Important Infectious Diseases between Livestock and Wildlife in Europe Oral vaccination of red foxes against rabies has been practiced in Europe since 1978 and has succeeded in greatly reducing the occurrence of this disease in foxes

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

wildlife
livestock
infectious diseases
europe


An effective hybrid learning system for telecommunication churn prediction A hybrid model learning system for telecom customer churn prediction is proposed. The hybrid model integrates weighted k-means clustering and a rule induction method. The effectiveness of the proposed system is estimated using ROC, AUC and accuracy. The proposed system achieves superior prediction performance against other models. The proposed system can be widely applied in applications of different realms.

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

telecommunication
churn prediction
hybrid model
clustering
rule induction


A fuzzy random forest When individual classifiers are combined appropriately, a statistically significant increase in classification accuracy is usually obtained. Multiple classifier systems are the result of combining several individual classifiers. Following Breiman's methodology, in this paper a multiple classifier system based on a "forest" of fuzzy decision trees, i.e., a fuzzy random forest, is proposed. This approach combines the robustness of multiple classifier systems, the power of the randomness to increase the diversity of the trees, and the flexibility of fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets for imperfect data management. Various combination methods to obtain the final decision of the multiple classifier system are proposed and compared. Some of them are weighted combination methods which make a weighting of the decisions of the different elements of the multiple classifier system (leaves or trees). A comparative study with several datasets is made to show the efficiency of the proposed multiple classifier system and the various combination methods. The proposed multiple classifier system exhibits a good accuracy classification, comparable to that of the best classifiers when tested with conventional data sets. However, unlike other classifiers, the proposed classifier provides a similar accuracy when tested with imperfect datasets (with missing and fuzzy values) and with datasets with noise. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

random forest
combination methods
fuzzy sets


Genetic algorithm to maximize a lower-bound for system time-to-failure with uncertain component Weibull parameters A genetic algorithm (GA) is used to solve the redundancy allocation problem when the objective is to maximize a lower percentile of the system time-to-failure distribution and the available components have random Weibull scale parameters. The GA searches the prospective solution space using an adaptive penalty to consider both feasible and infeasible solutions until converging to a feasible recommended system design. The objective function is intractable and a bi-section search is required as a function evaluator. Previously, this problem has most often been formulated to maximize system reliability instead of a lower-bound on system time-to-failure. Most system designers and users are risk-averse, and maximization of a lower percentile of the system time-to-failure distribution is a more conservative strategy (i.e. less risky) compared to maximization of the mean or median of the time-to-failure distribution. The only previous research to consider a lower percentile of system time-to-failure, also required that all component Weibull parameters are known. Those findings have been extended to address problems where the Weibull shape parameter is known, or can be accurately estimated, but the scale parameter is a random variable. Results from over 90 examples indicate that the preferred system design is sensitive to the user's perceived risk. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

genetic algorithm
redundancy allocation problem
weibull parameters


TCHR: a framework for tabled CLP Tabled Constraint Logic Programming is a powerful execution mechanism for dealing with Constraint Logic Programming without worrying about fixpoint computation. Various applications, e.g. in the fields of program analysis and model checking, have been proposed. Unfortunately, a high-level system for developing new applications is lacking, and programmers are forced to resort to complicated ad hoc solutions. This papers presents TCHR, a high-level framework for tabled Constraint Logic Programming. It integrates in a light-weight manner Constraint Handling Rules (CHR), a high-level language for constraint solvers, with tabled Logic Programming. The framework is easily instantiated with new application-specific constraint domains. Various high-level operations can be instantiated to control performance. In particular, we propose a novel, generalized technique for compacting answer sets.

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

constraint logic programming
constraint handling rules


Inference of edge replacement graph grammars We describe an algorithm and experiments for inference of edge replacement graph grammars. This method generates candidate recursive graph grammar productions based on isomorphic subgraphs which overlap by two nodes. If there is no edge between the two overlapping nodes, the method generates a recursive graph grammar production with a virtual edge. We guide the search for the graph grammar based on the size of the grammar and the portion of the graph described by the grammar. We show experiments where we generate graphs from known graph grammars, use our method to infer the grammar from the generated graphs, and then measure the error between the original and inferred grammars. Experiments show that the method performs well on several types of grammars, and specifically that error decreases with increased numbers of unique labels in the graph.

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


ROBUSTNESS INSTEAD OF ACCURACY SHOULD BE THE PRIMARY OBJECTIVE FOR SUBJECTIVE PATTERN RECOGNITION RESEARCH: STABILITY ANALYSIS ON MULTICANDIDATE ELECTORAL COLLEGE VERSUS DIRECT POPULAR VOTE Subjective pattern recognition is a class of pattern recognition problems, where we not only merely know a few, if any, the strategies our brains employ in making decisions in daily life but also have only limited ideas on the standards our brains use in determining the equality/inequality among the objects. Face recognition is a typical example of such problems.

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

computer vision
decision support
machine learning
perceptual reasoning
representations
knowledge retrieval
national voting
regional voting
image processing
vision and scene understanding
similarity measures


In-place sorting with fewer moves It is shown that an array of n elements can be sorted using O(1) extra space, O(n log n/log log n) element moves, and a log(2)n + O(n log log n) comparisons. This is the first in-place sorting algorithm requiring o(n log n) moves in the worst case while guaranteeing O(n log n) comparisons, but due to the constant factors involved the algorithm is predominantly of theoretical interest. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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

in-place algorithms
merging
mergesort
multiway merge


Self testing quantum apparatus We study, in the context of quantum information and quantum communication, a configuration of devices that includes (1) a source of some unknown bipartite quantum state that is claimed to be the Bell state Phi(+) and (2) two spatially separated but otherwise unknown measurement apparatus, one on each side, that are each claimed to execute an orthogonal measurement at an angle theta is an element of {-pi/8,0, pi/8} that is chosen by the user. We show that, if the nine distinct probability distributions that are generated by the self checking configuration, one for each pair of angles, are consistent with the specifications, the source and the two measurement apparatus are guaranteed to be identical to the claimed specifications up to a local change of basis on each side. We discuss the connection with quantum cryptography.

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

quantum information
self testing
quantum cryptography


Reference properties of uniform quantizers - comparison of Widrow's and direct approaches We present an analysis of the quantization error or generalized (nonuniform and/or nonmonotonic) quantizers. The mean value and mean-squared value of the quantization error and the quantized output are derived in terms of the observed signals. The results can be used to identify basic parameters of ADC converters. The results can be utilized in the reference models used in the ADC test methods recommended by the IEEE. (C) 2003 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 B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

analog-digital conversion
error analysis
identification
ieee standards
statistical analysis


Optimal wire ordering and spacing in low power semiconductor design A key issue for high integration circuit design in the semiconductor industry are power constraints that stem from the need for heat removal and reliability or battery lifetime limitations. As the power consumption depends heavily on the capacitances between adjacent wires, determining the optimal ordering and spacing of parallel wires is an important issue in the design of low power chips. As it turns out, optimal wire spacing is a convex optimization problem, whereas the optimal wire ordering is combinatorial in nature, containing (a special class of) the Minimum Hamilton Path problem. While the latter is NP-hard in general, the present paper provides an O(N log N) algorithm that solves the coupled ordering and spacing problem for N parallel wires to optimality.

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

optimal wire placement
convex programming
combinatorial optimization


Computer

program

for

simulation

of

neutrons

from

an

AmBe

source

and

calculation

of

proton

track

profiles

A

computer

program

called

for

neutron

simulation

through

a

PADC

detector

and

its

detection

was

described

and

developed.

In

this

work

the

neutron

AmBe

source

was

considered

for

simulation.

It

was

shown

that

the

most

intensive

secondary

particles,

created

in

neutron

interactions

with

the

detector,

are

protons.

The

programming

steps

are

outlined

with

detailed

description

of

neutron

simulation,

determination

of

latent

tracks

of

created

protons,

as

well

as,

their

development

after

detector

etching

in

the

same

and

opposite

direction

of

particle

motion.

The

outputs

of

the

code

are

parameters

of

created

protons

(coordinates

of

starting

and

stopping

points,

direction

angles

of

particles,

initial

and

deposited

energies)

and

number

of

visible

tracks

per

incident

neutron.

Program

title:

Catalogue

identifier:

Program

summary

Program

obtainable

from:

CPC

Program

Library,

Queen?s

University,

Belfast,

N.

Ireland

Licensing

provisions:

Standard

CPC

licence,

No.

of

lines

in

distributed

program,

including

test

data,

etc.:

No.

of

bytes

in

distributed

program,

including

test

data,

etc.:

Distribution

format:

tar.gz

Programming

language:

Fortran

Computer:

PCs

and

workstations

Operating

system:

Unix,

Linux,

Windows

RAM:

MB

Classification:

External

routines:

For

the

Windows

installation

the

entire

code

must

be

linked

with

the

PORTLIB

library.

Nature

of

problem:

The

neutrons

do

not

cause

ionizations

in

the

detector,

and

consequently

no

tracks

are

produced

directly

by

them

in

the

PADC.

Due

to

the

elastic

and

nonelastic

interaction

of

neutrons

with

the

atoms

of

PADC,

recoil

nuclei

and

secondary

particles

are

created

producing

latent

intrinsic

tracks.

After

chemical

etching

in

aqueous

NaOH

solution

these

tracks

become

visible

under

optical

microscope

and

usually

density

of

visible

tracks

is

measured.

Optical

microscopes

are

often

used

for

this

purpose

but

the

process

is

relatively

tedious

and

time

consuming.

The

present

computer

program

has

been

written

for

neutron

simulation

through

PADC

detector;

determination

of

parameters

of

secondary

particles;

calculation

track

profiles

of

secondary

particles

emitted

in

the

same

and

opposite

direction

as

etchant

progression.

The

outputs

of

the

code

are

parameters

of

secondary

particles

(coordinates

of

starting

and

stopping

points,

direction

angles

of

particles,

initial

and

deposited

energies)

and

number

of

visible

tracks

per

incident

neutron.

Solution

method:

A

computer

program

is

prepared

to

simulate

neutron?s

interactions

in

a

PADC

by

the

Monte

Carlo

method

using

the

Neutron

data

library

ENDF/B-VII

[B.

Milenkovic,

D.

Nikezic,

N.

Stevanovic,

Radiat.

Meas.

The

parameters

of

the

emitted

secondary

particles

(emission

angle,

initial

energy,

deposited

energy

and

starting

and

stopping

coordinates)

were

stored

in

an

enclosed

file.

The

subroutine

for

calculation

of

track

profiles

by

a

finite

difference

method

for

particles

emitted

in

the

same

direction

was

developed

[D.

Nikezic,

N.

Stevanovic,

D.

Kostic,

S.

Savovic,

K.C.C.

Tse,

K.N.

Yu,

Radiat.

Meas.

It

was

shown

that

there

are

many

tracks

formed

in

the

opposite

direction

than

the

etchant

progression.

The

method

for

calculation

of

track

profiles

for

these

particles

is

developed

in

[B.

Milenkovic,

N.

Stevanovic,

D.

Krstic,

D.

Nikezic,

Radiat.

Meas.

It

is

very

different

than

the

method

for

track

in

the

same

direction.

The

separate

subroutine

for

this

purpose

was

developed

here.

Additional

comments:

The

program

distribution

file

contains

an

executable

which

enables

the

program

to

be

run

on

a

Windows

machine.

The

source

code

is

also

provided,

but

in

order

to

build

an

executable

the

PORTLIB

must

be

available.

Running

time:

Running

time

depends

mainly

on

the

neutron

number

for

simulation,

source

and

detector

geometry

and

removed

layer

required

by

the

user.

Running

time

is

several

minutes.

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

neutron
padc detector
simulation
chemical etching


Gamer, a General Game Playing Agent This work is concerned with our general game playing agent Gamer. In contrast to many other players, we do not only use a Prolog-like mechanism to infer knowledge about the current state and the available moves but instantiate the games to reduce the inference time in parallel UCT game tree search. Furthermore, we use the generated output to try to solve the games using symbolic search methods and thus play optimally.

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

general game playing
symbolic search
uct


Nominal System T This paper introduces a new recursion principle for inductive data modulo alpha-equivalence of bound names. It makes use of Odersky-style local names when recursing over bound names. It is formulated in an extension of Godel's System T with names that can be tested for equality, explicitly swapped in expressions and restricted to a lexical scope. The new recursion principle is motivated by the nominal sets notion of "alpha-structural recursion", whose use of names and associated freshness side-conditions in recursive definitions formalizes common practice with binders. The new Nominal System T presented here provides a calculus of total functions that is shown to adequately represent alpha-structural recursion while avoiding the need to verify freshness side-conditions in definitions and computations. Adequacy is proved via a normalization-by-evaluation argument that makes use of a new semantics of local names in Gabbay-Pitts nominal sets.

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

languages theory verification alpha-equivalence types


Bit rate of HSDPA in tunnels cigar-shaped microcells This paper presents the bit rate of High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) mode for cigar-shaped microcells deployed at tunnels. The hybrid propagation loss model with log-normal shadowing is used to calculate the signal to interference plus noise ratio taking into account the expected value and the variance of the interference. Amodel of ten cigar-shaped microcells is used in the analysis. The effect of the propagation parameters on the HSDPA performance (coverage and bit rate) is studied. It is found that, with a sector transmitted power of 1 W, a sector with a range of 1km can be deployed with the worst case propagation parameters values. It is shown that it is impossible to support more than 6 HSDPA codes for full coverage within the sector what ever the power assigned to the HSDPA service.

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

umts
wcdma
cigar-shaped microcell in tunnels


security architectures revisited The knowledge in technologies needed to build secure platforms, or Security Architectures , has significantly matured over the recent years. These include small interface technologies, access-control contracts, tunneling, secure booting, effective resource control, and virtual machines. Putting together these ingredients into a small secure platform seems straightforward, yet still remains to be done, and has the potential of making operating systems more dependable.

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

platform technologies secure knowledge control resource

dependencies
architecture
operating system
access control
interfaces
virtual machine
effect
contract


Effective Transfer Tagging from Image to Video Recent years have witnessed a great explosion of user-generated videos on the Web. In order to achieve an effective and efficient video search, it is critical for modern video search engines to associate videos with semantic keywords automatically. Most of the existing video tagging methods can hardly achieve reliable performance due to deficiency of training data. It is noticed that abundant well-tagged data are available in other relevant types of media (e. g., images). In this article, we propose a novel video tagging framework, termed as Cross-Media Tag Transfer (CMTT), which utilizes the abundance of well-tagged images to facilitate video tagging. Specifically, we build a "cross-media tunnel" to transfer knowledge from images to videos. To this end, an optimal kernel space, in which distribution distance between images and video is minimized, is found to tackle the domain-shift problem. A novel cross-media video tagging model is proposed to infer tags by exploring the intrinsic local structures of both labeled and unlabeled data, and learn reliable video classifiers. An efficient algorithm is designed to optimize the proposed model in an iterative and alternative way. Extensive experiments illustrate the superiority of our proposal compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

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

design
experimentation
cross media
transfer learning
semi-supervised learning


BEES: BioinspirEd backbonE Selection in Wireless Sensor Networks Sensor networks have their own distinguishing characteristics that set them apart from other types of networks. Several techniques have been proposed in the literature to address some of the fundamental problems faced by a sensor network design. Most of the proposed techniques attempt to solve one problem in isolation from the others; hence, protocol designers have to face the same common challenges again and again. This, in turn, has a direct impact on the complexity of the protocols and on energy consumption. Instead of using this approach, we propose BEES, a lightweight bioinspired backbone construction protocol, that can help mitigate many of the typical challenges in sensor networks by allowing the development of simpler network protocols. We show how BEES can help mitigate many of the typical challenges inherent to sensor networks including sensor localization, clustering, and data aggregation among others.

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

wsn
backbone sensors
hexagons
voids
infrastructure


Failure replacement and preventive maintenance spare parts ordering policy This paper addresses inventory policy for spare parts, when demand for the spare parts arises due to regularly scheduled preventive maintenance, as well as random failure of units in service. A stochastic dynamic programming model is used to characterize an ordering policy which addresses both sources of demand in a unified manner. The optimal policy has the form (s(k),S(k)), where k is the number of periods until the next scheduled preventive maintenance operation. The nature of the (s(k),S(k)) policy is characterized through numeric evaluation. The efficiency of the optimal policy is evaluated, relative to a simpler policy which addresses the failure replacement and preventive maintenance demands with separate ordering policies.

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

inventory
failure replacement
preventive maintenance
dynamic programming


Time-varied pitch gain predictor for low bit rate speech coders The long-term predictor (LTP) can effectively reduce the redundancy of the quasi-periodicity of speech signals. Traditional pitch predictors in linear predictive coding systems are developed by assuming that pitch gains are constant in ea(h processing subframe. In this paper, we introduce a time-varied prediction gain to achieve a better representation of speech periodicity than the traditional approach, Due to the non-stationary. variation of speech. the proposed LTP method can trace the detailed fluctuation of speech amplitude in both transient and stationary periods, Simulation results show that the proposed first-order varied-gain pitch predictor obtains a near speech quality as the fifth-order pitch predictor of the G.723.1 coder does: however. the former requires much lower computation than the latter.

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

speech coding
time-varied pitch gain predictor


A backward elimination discrete optimization algorithm for model selection in spatio-temporal regression models Regression models are used in geosciences to extrapolate data and identify significant predictors of a response variable. Criterion approaches based on the residual sum of squares (RSS), such as the Akaike Information Criterion, Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC), Deviance Information Criterion, or Mallows' Cp can be used to compare non-nested models to identify an optimal subset of covariates. Computational limitations arise when the number of observations or candidate covariates is large in comparing all possible combinations of the available covariates, and in characterizing the covariance of the residuals for each examined model when the residuals are autocorrelated, as is often the case in spatial and temporal regression analysis. This paper presents computationally efficient algorithms for identifying the optimal model as defined using any RSS-based model selection criterion. The proposed dual criterion optimal branch and bound (DCO B&B) algorithm is guaranteed to identify the optimal model, while a single criterion heuristic (SCH) B&B algorithm provides further computational savings and approximates the optimal solution. These algorithms are applicable both to multiple linear regression (MLR) and to response variables with correlated residuals. We also propose an approach for iterative model selection, where a single set of covariance parameters is used in each iteration rather than a different set of parameters being used for each examined model. Simulation experiments are performed to evaluate the performance of the algorithms for regression models, using MLR and geostatistical regression as prototypical regression tools and BIC as a prototypical model selection approach. Results show massive computational savings using the DCO B&B algorithm relative to performing an exhaustive search. The SCH B&B is shown to provide a good approximation of the optimal model in most cases, while the DCO B&B with iterative covariance parameter optimization yields the closest approximation to the DCO B&B algorithm while also providing additional computational savings.

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

model selection
algorithm
branch and bound
discrete optimization


geometrically aware communication in random wireless networks Some of the first routing algorithms for position-aware wireless networks used the Delaunay triangulation of the point-locations of the network's nodes as the underlying connectivity graph. Later on these solutions were considered impractical because the Delaunay triangulation may in general contain arbitrarily long edges and because calculating the Delaunay triangulation may require a global view of the network. Many other algorithms were then suggested for geometric routing, often assuming random placement of network nodes for analysis or simulation [27, 5, 28, 15]. But as we show, when the nodes are uniformly placed in the unit disk the Delaunay triangulation does not contain long edges, it is easy to compute locally and it is in many ways optimal for geometric routing and flooding.In particular, we prove that with high probability the maximal length of an edge in Del ( P ), the Delaunay triangulation of a set P of n nodes uniformly placed in the unit disk, is O (3?3log n over n ), and that the expected sum of squares of all the edges in Del ( P ) is O (1). These geometric results imply that for wireless networks, randomly distributed in a unit disk (1) computing the Delaunay triangulation locally is asymptotically easy; (2) simple "face routing" through the Delaunay triangulation optimizes, up to poly-logarithmic factors, the energy load on the nodes, and (3) flooding the network, an operation quite common in sensor nets, is with high probability optimal up to a constant factor. The last property is particularly important for geocasting because the Delaunay triangulation is known to be a spanner.

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

geometric routing
delaunay triangulation


A Framework for Multiple Kernel Support Vector Regression and Its Applications to siRNA Efficacy Prediction The cell defense mechanism of RNA interference has applications in gene function analysis and promising potentials in human disease therapy. To effectively silence a target gene, it is desirable to select appropriate initiator siRNA molecules having satisfactory silencing capabilities. Computational prediction for silencing efficacy of siRNAs can assist this screening process before using them in biological experiments. String kernel functions, which operate directly on the string objects representing siRNAs and target mRNAs, have been applied to support vector regression for the prediction and improved accuracy over numerical kernels in multidimensional vector spaces constructed from descriptors of siRNA design rules. To fully utilize information provided by string and numerical data, we propose to unify the two in a kernel feature space by devising a multiple kernel regression framework where a linear combination of the kernels is used. We formulate the multiple kernel learning into a quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) problem, which although yields global optimal solution, is computationally demanding and requires a commercial solver package. We further propose three heuristics based on the principle of kernel-target alignment and predictive accuracy. Empirical results demonstrate that multiple kernel regression can improve accuracy, decrease model complexity by reducing the number of support vectors, and speed up computational performance dramatically. In addition, multiple kernel regression evaluates the importance of constituent kernels, which for the siRNA efficacy prediction problem, compares the relative significance of the design rules. Finally, we give insights into the multiple kernel regression mechanism and point out possible extensions.

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

multiple kernel learning
support vector regression
rna interference
sirna efficacy

multiple kernel heuristics
qcqp optimization


An ANN based approach to recognize initial phonemes of spoken words of Assamese language Initial phoneme is used in spoken word recognition models. These are used to activate words starting with that phoneme in spoken word recognition models. Such investigations are critical for classification of initial phoneme into a phonetic group. A work is described in this paper using an artificial neural network (ANN) based approach to recognize initial consonant phonemes of Assamese words. A self organizing map (SOM) based algorithm is developed to segment the initial phonemes from its word counterpart. Using a combination of three types of ANN structures, namely recurrent neural network (RNN), SOM and probabilistic neural network (PNN), the proposed algorithm proves its superiority over the conventional discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based phoneme segmentation. The algorithm is exclusively designed on the basis of Assamese phonemical structure which consists of certain unique features and are grouped into six distinct phoneme families. Before applying the segmentation approach using SOM, an RNN is used to take some localized decision to classify the words into six phoneme families. Next the SOM segmented phonemes are classified into individual phonemes. A two-class PNN classification is performed with clean Assamese phonemes, to recognize the segmented phonemes. The validation of recognized phonemes is checked by matching the first formant frequency of the phoneme. Formant frequency of Assamese phonemes, estimated using the pole or formant location determination from the linear prediction model of vocal tract, is used effectively as a priori knowledge in the proposed algorithm.

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


SUPPORT TO MPI APPLICATIONS ON THE GRID The current middleware stacks provide varying support for the Message Passing Interface (MPI) programming paradigm. Users face a complex and heterogeneous environment where too many low level details have to be specified to execute even the simplest parallel jobs. MPI-Start is a tool that provides an interoperable MPI execution framework across the different middleware implementations to abstract the user interfaces from the underlying middleware and to allow users to execute parallel applications in a uniform way, thus bridging the gap between HPC and HTC. In this work we present the latest developments in MPI-Start and how it can be integrated in the different middleware stacks available as part of EMI, providing a unified user experience for MPI jobs.

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