Transaction-based online debug for NoC-based multiprocessor SoCs ? As complexity and size of Systems-on-Chip (SoC) grow, debugging becomes a bottleneck for designing IC products. In this paper, we present an approach for online debug of NoC-based multiprocessor SoCs. Our approach utilizes monitors and filters implemented in hardware. Monitors and filters observe and filter transactions at run-time. They are connected to a Debug Unit (DU). Transaction-based programmable Finite State Machines (FSMs) in the DU check assertions online to validate the correct relation of transactions at run-time. The experimental results show efficiency and performance of our approach.

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

transaction-based online debug
system-on-chip (soc)
network-on-chip (noc)


Area minimization of power distribution network using efficient nonlinear programming techniques This paper deals with area minimization of power network for very large-scale integration designs. A new algorithm based on efficient nonlinear programming techniques is presented to solve this problem. During the optimization, a penalty method, conjugate gradient method, circuit sensitivity analysis, and merging adjoint networks are applied, which enable the algorithm to optimize large circuits. The experiment results prove that this algorithm is robust and can achieve the objective of minimizing the area of power network in a short runtime.

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

adjoint network
very large scale integration (vlsi)


Analyzing reconfigurable algorithms for managing replicated data We analyze reconfigurable algorithms for managing replicated data to determine how often one should detect and react to failure conditions so that reorganization operations can be performed at the appropriate time to improve the availability of replicated data. We use dynamic voting as a case study to reveal design trade-offs for designing such reconfigurable algorithms and illustrate how often failure detection and reconfiguration activities should be performed so as to maximize data availability. Stochastic Petri nets are used as a tool to facilitate our analysis.

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

availability
dynamic voting
stochastic petri nets

reconfigurable systems
data replication
data contention
distributed systems


Fusing color and shape descriptors in the recognition of degraded iris images acquired at visible wavelengths Despite the substantial research into the development of covert iris recognition technologies, no machine to date has been able to reliably perform recognition of human beings in real-world data. This limitation is especially evident in the application of such technology to large-scale identification scenarios, which demand extremely low error rates to avoid frequent false alarms. Most previously published works have used intensity data and performed multi-scale analysis to achieve recognition, obtaining encouraging performance values that are nevertheless far from desirable. This paper presents two key innovations. (1) A recognition scheme is proposed based on techniques that are substantially different from those traditionally used, starting with the dynamic partition of the noise-free iris into disjoint regions from which MPEG-7 color and shape descriptors are extracted. (2) The minimal levels of linear correlation between the outputs produced by the proposed strategy and other state-of-the-art techniques suggest that the fusion of both recognition techniques significantly improve performance, which is regarded as a positive step towards the development of extremely ambitious types of biometric recognition.

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

biometrics
security and surveillance
forensics
visible-light data


impact of prefix-match changes on ip reachability Although most studies of Internet routing treat each IP address block (or prefix) independently, the relationship between prefixes is important because routers ultimately forward packets based on the "longest-matching prefix." In fact, the most-specific prefix for a given destination address may change over time, as BGP routes are announced and withdrawn. Even if the most-specific route is withdrawn, routers may still be able to deliver packets to the destination using a less-specific route. In this paper, we analyze BGP update messages and Netflow traffic traces from a large ISP to characterize both the changes to the longest-matching prefix over time and the resulting effects on end-to-end reachability of the destination hosts. To drive our analysis, we design and implement an efficient online algorithm for tracking changes in the longest-matching prefix for each IP address. We analyze the BGP message traces to identify the reasons for prefix-match changes, including failures, route flapping, sub-prefix hijacking, and load-balancing policies. Our preliminary analysis of the Netflow data suggests that the relationship between BGP updates and IP reachability is sometimes counterintuitive.

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


Some properties of neural networks in designing fuzzy systems Fuzzy systems have gained more and more attention from researchers and practitioners of various fields. In such systems, the output represented by a fuzzy set sometimes needs to be transformed into a scalar value, and this task is known as the defuzzification process. Several analytic methods have been proposed for this problem, but lately, the neural network approach has been used for this purpose. When employed as defuzzifiers, a neural network is called a defuzzification neural network. In this paper, some preliminary results on properties of such defuzzification networks will be reported.

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


Quantification and handling of sampling errors in instrumental measurements: a case study Instrumental measurements are often used to represent a whole object even though only a small part of the object is actually measured. This can introduce an error due to the inhomogeneity of the product. Together with other errors resulting from the measuring process, such errors may have a serious impact on the results when the instrumental measurements are used for multivariate regression and prediction. This paper gives examples of how errors influencing the predictions obtained by a multivariate regression model can be quantified and handled. Only random errors are considered here, while in certain situations, the effect of systematic errors is also considerable. The relevant errors contributing to the prediction error are: error in instrumental measurements (x-error), error in reference measurements (y-error), error in the estimated calibration model (regression coefficient error) and model error (due to non-linearities, lack of x-information, etc.). The size of the four error contributions are estimated by an errors-in-variables approach, and the importance of the different errors is evaluated. An approach based on the theory of the measurement error models is used to show how the influence of errors in the instrumental measurements can be partly adjusted for. The approach can be used when the number of replicates used for calibration and prediction differs. With few replicates during prediction and when the error in the instrumental measurements has significant impact on the predictions, the approach seems to provide more accurate predictions than the naive approach. Predictions of water content of fish fillets from low-field NMR relaxations are used as examples to show the applicability of the methods. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Application of classification trees to determine biological and chemical indicators for river assessment: case study in the Chaguana watershed (Ecuador) Benthic macroinvertebrates were sampled in the Chaguana river basin in SW Ecuador in March (wet season) and September (dry season) of 2005 and 2006. Aquatic insects dominated the macrobenthos, with Trichoptera, Diptera, Ephemeroptera, Hemiptera and Odonata being the orders with the highest diversity and Ephemeroptera and Diptera being most abundant. No systematic differences in richness and abundance were observed between dry and wet seasons, which is in agreement with the literature. It is concluded that, in the neotropics, macroinvertebrates can probably be sampled for water quality assessments during the whole year: however, sampling soon after spates should be avoided. Using multivariate analysis, stations could be clustered into three groups based on their macroinvertebrate community composition: sites with low, intermediate and high human impact. Classification trees indicated that stations with low human impact had low conductivities, while stations with high conductivities were characterised as highly impacted if the dissolved oxygen concentration was low and intermediately impacted if the dissolved oxygen concentration was high. Classification trees also indicated that Leptophlebiidae (Ephemeroptera) were characteristic for sites with low impact; in sites with intermediate impact, this family was absent but Hydropsychidae (Trichoptera) were present; when both families were absent, impact was high.

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

community analysis
water quality assessment


Modeling growth in SiGe gas-source molecular beam epitaxy using Si2H6 and GeH4 We have modeled SiGe growth with gas-source molecular beam epitaxy using Si2H6 and GeH4. The model is described by a combination of Si2H6 and GeH4 adsorptions and hydrogen desorption. The Si2H6 and GeH4 adsorptions are two-site and four-site adsorption processes respectively. The hydrogen desorption is a first order reaction. The model allows predictions of substrate-temperature dependencies of SiGe growth rate and surface-hydrogen coverage in the wide temperature range of 450700C.

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


a dsl to declare aspect execution order Composing aspects is known to be problematic since unpredicted aspect interactions may appear and may lead to erroneous weaved programs. This paper focuses on one of these issues: the advice ordering around a join point. It views aspect composition issues as a crosscutting concern that should be handled by a composition aspect. It proposes a domain-specific declarative aspect composition language for composing aspects, and applies it on a number of examples.

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


SocialBROKER: A collaborative social space for gathering semantically-enhanced financial information Social Networks constitute the key ingredient for the huge success of the so called Social Web or Web 2.0. In social networks, a user has the possibility to interact with other users without the need of meeting them. The value of social applications benefits from the network effect, which states that the value of a service to a user arises from the number of people using the service. However, the associated semantics for this kind of applications, delivered through tagging, is generally scarce, thus narrowing the range of permissible operations for exploiting these data. In this paper, we present a semantic-based social platform that incorporates the benefits of semantic Web technologies into traditional social environments. The value of the proposed framework is twofold. First, the interaction of the users with the system gives rise to semantic content that can populate a knowledge base. Then, the social-side of the platform is improved by taking advantage of the captured semantics. SocialBROKER is a prototype implementation of the proposed platform customized for the eFinance domain. It allows for creating collaborative groups that define financial-related initiatives and proposals. The integration of Semantic Web concepts and Social Networks enables our system to automatically create semantically-empowered relationships between the investors registered within the platform based on their interactions. This further allows the system to analyze the social behavior of the network members and to generate a customized profile for each of them. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

social semantic web
natural language interfaces


The effects of advertising, prices and distribution on market share volatility Although the influence of marketing decision variables on market share has received ample attention in the literature, less is known about their effects on volatility. This study attempts to shed light on this issue by empirically examining the effects of advertising, pricing and distribution, not only on market share but also on its volatility, using an EGARCH model. We argue that establishing a link between management-controlled actions, such as advertising, pricing and distribution, and market share volatility may benefit firms seeking to reduce uncertainty in their market share performance. Application of the proposed model to data on two markets (SUVs and Minivans), suggested that advertising, pricing and distribution significantly influence market share volatility.

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


Electrostatic Monitoring of Gas Path Debris for Aero-engines We present advanced condition monitoring technology based on electrostatic induction for detecting the debris in aero-engines exhaust gas. We also discuss the key technologies related to electrostatic monitoring systems, such as sensing technology, signal processing, feature extraction, and abnormal particle identification. The finite element method and data fitting method are applied to analyze the sensing characteristics of the sensor. We apply empirical mode decomposition and independent component analysis to effectively remove the noise mixed in with the monitoring signal. Certain diagnostic features extracted from the de-noised signal are presented here. A knowledge-acquisition model based on rough sets theory and artificial neural networks is constructed to identify the abnormal particles. The experiment results show the effectiveness of the methods proposed in this paper, and provide some guidelines for future research in this field for the aviation industry.

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

condition monitoring
feature extraction
signal processing

aero-engine
electrostatic sensor
knowledge acquisition


View selection for designing the global data warehouse ? A global data warehouse (DW) integrates data from multiple distributed heterogeneous databases and other information sources. A global DW can be abstractly seen as a set of materialized views. The selection of views for materialization in a DW is an important decision in the design of a DW. Current commercial products do not provide tools for automatic DW design. We provide a general method that, given a set of select-project-join queries to be satisfied by the DW, generates sets of materialized views that satisfy all the input queries. This process is complex since `common subexpressions' between the queries need to be detected and exploited. Our method is then applied to solve the problem of selecting such a materialized view set that fits in the space allocated to the DW for materialization and minimizes the combined overall query evaluation and view maintenance cost. We design algorithms which are implemented and we report on their experimental evaluation.

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


What stakeholders will or will not say: A theoretical and empirical study of topic importance in Requirements Engineering elicitation interviews ? We identify 30 requirements elicitation Topics via interviews with IT experts. We test if stakeholders share elicitation Topics spontaneously during interviews. We draw an Elicitation Topic Map to visualize which Topics are Implicit/Explicit. We replicate the Elicitation Topic Map in the case of Social Network systems. We provide guidelines for interviews based on observations from the Topic Map.

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

requirements engineering
elicitation
topic map
social network


Design, development and assessment of control schemes for IDMS in a standardized RTCP-based solution Currently, several media sharing applications that allow social interactions between distributed users are gaining momentum. In these networked scenarios, synchronized playout between the involved participants must be provided to enable truly interactive and coherent shared media experiences. This research topic is known as Inter-Destination Media Synchronization (IDMS). This paper presents the design and development of an advanced IDMS solution, which is based on extending the capabilities of RTP/RTCP standard protocols. Particularly, novel RTCP extensions, in combination with several control algorithms and adjustment techniques, have been specified to enable an adaptive, highly accurate and standard compliant IDMS solution. Moreover, as different control or architectural schemes for IDMS exist, and each one is best suited for specific use cases, the IDMS solution has been extended to be able to adopt each one of them. Simulation results prove the satisfactory responsiveness of our IDMS solution in a small scale scenario, as well as its consistent behavior, when using each one of the deployed architectural schemes.

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

inter-destination media synchronization
rtp/rtcp
distributed media consumption


Tag SNP selection via a genetic algorithm Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) provide valuable information on human evolutionary history and may lead us to identify genetic variants responsible for human complex diseases. Unfortunately, molecular haplotyping methods are costly, laborious, and time consuming; therefore, algorithms for constructing full haplotype patterns from small available data through computational methods, Tag SNP selection problem, are convenient and attractive. This problem is proved to be an NP-hard problem, so heuristic methods may be useful. In this paper we present a heuristic method based on genetic algorithm to find reasonable solution within acceptable time. The algorithm was tested on a variety of simulated and experimental data. In comparison with the exact algorithm, based on brute force approach, results show that our method can obtain optimal solutions in almost all cases and runs much faster than exact algorithm when the number of SNP sites is large. Our software is available upon request to the corresponding author.

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

single nucleotide polymorphisms
tag snp selection problem
genetic algorithm


Validation and enclosure of solutions of linear complementarity problems An inclusion condition is presented to guarantee the existence of the solution of the linear complementarity problem in a given domain. The condition can be tested numerically with very small computational cost. Based on the condition algorithms are designed to compute an interval to enclose the unknown solution. Numerical results are reported to support the theoretical analysis in the paper.

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

validation of the solution
enclosure of the solution
interval analysis
h-matrix


Client-access protocols for replicated services This paper addresses the problem of replicated service provision in distributed systems. Existing systems that follow the State Machine approach concentrate on the synchronization of the server replicas and do not consider the problem of client interaction with the server group. The paper analyzes client interaction and identifies a number of access protocols to meet a range of client requirements and system models. The paper demonstrates that protocols for the "open" group model-clients external to the group of servers-satisfy the requirements of the State Machine approach, even when replication is transparent to the clients. Experimental performance results indicate that the "open" model is clearly desirable when the service is used by a large, dynamically changing set of clients. The situation which pertains to Internet service provision.

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

availability
client-server
client access


Computation of Floquet Multipliers Using an Iterative Method for Variational Equations This paper proposes a new method to numerically obtain Floquet multipliers which characterize stability of periodic orbits of ordinary differential equations. For sufficiently smooth periodic orbits, we can compute Floquet multipliers using some standard numerical methods with enough accuracy. However, it has been reported that these methods may produce incorrect results under some conditions. In this work, we propose a new iterative method to compute Floquet multipliers using eigenvectors of matrix solutions of the variational equations. Numerical examples show effectiveness of the proposed method.

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

stability
ordinary differential equations
periodic orbits
floquet multipliers


Effective derivation of similarity transformations for implicit Laplacian mesh editing Laplacian coordinates as a local shape descriptor have been employed in mesh editing. As they are encoded in the global coordinate system, they need to be transformed locally to reflect the changed local features of the deformed surface. We present a novel implicit Laplacian editing framework which is linear and effectively captures local rotation information during editing. Directly representing rotation with respect to vertex positions in 3D space leads to a nonlinear system. Instead, we first compute the affine transformations implicitly defined for all the Laplacian coordinates by solving a large sparse linear system, and then extract the rotation and uniform scaling information from each solved affine transformation. Unlike existing differential-based mesh editing techniques, our method produces visually pleasing deformation results under large angle rotations or big-scale translations of handles. Additionally, to demonstrate the advantage of our editing framework, we introduce a new intuitive editing technique, called configuration-independent merging, which produces the same merging result independent of the relative position, orientation, scale of input meshes.

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

mesh deformation
mesh merging
configuration-independent


Health on the Net automated database of health and medical information With the number of World Wide Web sites growing every day, the problem is not just to find information, but to locate the right piece of information. Current World Wide Web search engines have not resolved this problem as they most often return a long list of documents. The search result is then unusable because of the large number of answers from different domains and topics. Only complex queries may, in a given situation, produce a limited number of potentially relevant documents. To make searches more efficient and usable by common users, we now need intelligent and specialised search engines on the Net 1and2. Health On the Net Foundation and the Molecular Imaging and Bioinformatics Laboratory at Geneva University Hospital have developed Multi-Agent Retrieval Vagabond on Information Networks (MARVIN), a robot that searches sites and documents specifically related to a given specialised field. One such robot has already been implemented and used for the medical and the 2D electrophoresis domains. Health On the Net Foundation has implemented the corresponding search engines, MedHunt (http://www.hon.ch/cgi-bin/find) for the medical field and 2DHunt (http://www.hon.ch/cgi-bin/2DHunt/find) for the 2D electrophoresis field.

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

hon
dedicated robot
specialised robot
specialised search engine


Methods to assess youth engagement in a text messaging supplement to an effective teen pregnancy program 221 youth participated in a text message program over two semesters. Four-fifths (82%) responded at least once to text messages. Youth responded more frequently to messages utilizing quizzes and questions. Responses were more frequent among young women and Hispanic participants. Responses declined substantially after four months.

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

sms programs
health behavior
sms response
sms engagement


Deformation twinning during impact of a titanium cylinder numerical calculations using a constitutive theory based on multiple natural configurations It is well-known that polycrystalline metals (especially those with bcc or hcp structures), when subjected to impact, undergo two inelastic processes slip and twinning. Since the work of Taylor [20] the former one has been studied extensively; while more recently, deformation twinning has attracted attention of some researchers, e.g. [3], [1]and[22]. Zerilli and Armstrong [22] suggested that the major effect of twinning is a refinement of the grain size. Based on this assumption, they proposed a model for twinning and showed that much better agreement with experiments can be obtained if, in addition to deformation by slip, deformation twinning is also considered. Similar conclusions were reached by Holt et al. [5] who analyzed the Taylor impact of a titanium specimen. In this work, we concentrate on the processes associated with deformation twinning. We model twinning by using the theory introduced by Rajagopal and Srinivasa [17]and[18], which is based on multiple natural configurations (an outline of the theory is given in Section 2). The theory considers the energetics associated with twinning and it can predict the volume fraction of the twinned material at each point and time. In this study, we model the Taylor impact of a titanium cylinder. We assume that the problem is axisymmetric and solve the full dynamic equations by using the Galerkin finite element method. Our results show that the energy absorbed during twinning and the deformation due to twinning are relatively small, and the material twins more near the center line. We also demonstrate the dependence of the results on the initial grain size of the material. Specifically, by modeling two materials of widely differing grain sizes, we show that the large-grained material twins substantially more than the small-grained material.

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


Dark Matter Caustics The late infall of cold dark matter onto an isolated galaxy such as our own produces flows with definite velocity vectors at any physical point in the galactic halo. It also produces caustics which are places where the dark matter density is very large. The outer caustics are topological spheres whereas the inner caustics are rings. The self-similar model of galactic halo formation predicts that the caustic ring radii an follow the approximate law an? 1/n. In a recent study of 32 extended and well-measured galactic rotation curves, we found evidence for this law.

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


Using a qualitative research method for building a software maintenance methodology This article explains our experience of using Action Research to develop a software maintenance methodology involving two organizations: a group of university researchers and a software services organization. The concept of 'methodology' comprises a wide set of elements whose identification, definition and integration is not a trivial task, due to the magnitude of the project and to the different nature of the organizations. The use of Action Research was a key factor in the progress of the research and has been essential in the adoption of the methodology within the software services organization. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

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

action research
qualitative research
software maintenance


Intelligent manufacturing and environmental sustainability The definition of sustainability which is generally adopted is: meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission on the Environment and Development, 1987. Brundtland report). The EU MDG7 report, describes environmental sustainability as: meeting current human needs without undermining the capacity of the environment to provide for those needs over the long term (UN, 2005a). Over the past decade public concern about sustainable development has profoundly transformed attitudes and to a lesser extent practices in manufacturing industries. A sustainable approach to design and engineering involves evaluating where a product or system has the greatest environmental impact and then prioritising strategies which reduce that impact. There is hardly any industry sector in which the management of environmental sustainability is not of significant relevance. The degradation of pristine ecosystems, global warming, and unprecedented energy usage, has become key issues for all of earths tenants. It is essential that all facets of design and manufacturing take action on environmental sustainability concerns through appropriate strategies, and endeavour to implement standards such as the ISO 14001, and accommodating related legislation as a foundation for sustainable manufacturing. This paper discusses the sustainability challenges of the industrial world, the sustainable management issues they face, and the strategies they might employ, while maintaining corporate responsibility and gaining competitive advantage.

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

energy
sustainability
corporate responsibility


compatible tetrahedralizations We give some special-case tetrahedralization algorithms. We first consider the problem of finding a tetrahedralization compatible with a fixed triangulation of the boundary of a polyhedron. We then adapt our solution to the related problem of compatibly tetrahedralizing the interior and exterior of a polyhedron. We also show how to tetrahedralize the region between nested convex polyhedra with O(n log n) tetrahedra and no Steiner points.

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 B O O O O O O


Adaptive elastic segmentation of brain MRI via shape-model-guided evolutionary programming This paper presents a fully automated segmentation method for medical images. The goal is to localize and parameterize a variety of types of structure in these images for subsequent quantitative analysis. We propose a new hybrid strategy that combines a general elastic template matching approach and an evolutionary heuristic. The evolutionary algorithm uses prior statistical information about the shape of the target structure to control the behavior of a number of deformable templates. Each template, modeled in the form of a B-spline, is warped in a potential field which is itself dynamically adapted. Such a hybrid scheme proves to be promising: by maintaining a population of templates, we cover a large domain of the solution space under the global guidance of the evolutionary heuristic, and thoroughly explore interesting areas. We address key issues of automated image segmentation systems. The potential fields are initially designed based on the spatial features of the edges in the input image, and are subjected to spatially adaptive diffusion to guarantee the deformation of the template. This also improves its global consistency and convergence speed. The deformation algorithm can modify the internal structure of the templates to allow a better match. We investigate in detail the preprocessing phase that the images undergo before they can be used more effectively in the iterative elastic matching procedure: a texture classifier, trained via linear discriminant analysis of a learning set, is used to enhance the contrast of the target structure with respect to surrounding tissues. We show how these techniques interact within a statistically driven evolutionary scheme to achieve a better tradeoff between template flexibility and sensitivity to noise and outliers. We focus on understanding the features of template matching that are most beneficial in terms of the achieved match. Examples from simulated and real image data are discussed, with considerations of algorithmic efficiency.

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

adaptive algorithms
hybrid evolutionary algorithms


Finding a tree structure in a resolution proof is NP-complete The resolution tree problem consists of deciding whether a given sequence-like resolution refutation admits a tree structure. This paper shows the NP-completeness of both the resolution tree problem and a natural generalization of the resolution tree problem that does not involve resolution. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Design and implementation of real time wideband channel simulator This paper describes the design and implementation of a DSP based real time wideband channel simulator. The simulator implementation uses a floating point (TMS320C6713) and a fixed point (TMS320C6416) DSPs.The simulator has 8 taps and baseband bandwidth of 20 MHz. It has flexibility to generate several channel models under varied environmental conditions. To validate the functionality of the simulator, the baseband data is applied to the simulator input and its output is statistically analyzed and the results are compared with those predicted analytically.

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

baseband
channel models
fixed point
floating point
simulator


Soft ideals and soft filters of soft ordered semigroups It is shown that soft ordered semigroups over an ordered semigroup are actually soft ordered subsemigroups of (S,A) ( S , A ) . Soft idealistic semigroups over an ordered semigroup are soft ideals of soft ordered semigroup (S,A) ( S , A ) . The concept of soft filters of a soft ordered semigroup is introduced. It is shown that restricted complement of a soft filter is a soft prime ideal of (S,A) ( S , A ) .

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

ordered semigroups
soft ideals
soft filters


An interior proximal method in vector optimization This paper studies the vector optimization problem of finding weakly efficient points for maps from Rn R n to Rm R m , with respect to the partial order induced by a closed, convex, and pointed cone C?Rm C ? R m , with nonempty interior. We develop for this problem an extension of the proximal point method for scalar-valued convex optimization problem with a modified convergence sensing condition that allows us to construct an interior proximal method for solving VOP on nonpolyhedral set.

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

interior point methods
c-convex
positively lower semicontinuous


Humanized mouse models of Cooley's anemia: correct fetal-to-adult hemoglobin switching, disease onset, and disease pathology ? thalassemia major or Cooley's Anemia (CA) has been difficult to model in mice due to their lack of a fetal hemoglobin gene equivalent. This summary describes novel preclinical humanized mouse models of CA that survive on human fetal hemoglobin at birth and are blood-transfusion dependent for life upon completion of their human fetal-to-adult hemoglobin switch after birth. These CA models are the first to recapitulate the temporal onset of the disease in human patients. These novel humanized CA disease models are useful for the study of the regulation of globin gene expression, synthesis, and switching; examining the onset of disease pathology; development of transfusion and iron chelation therapies; induction of fetal hemoglobin synthesis; and the testing of novel genetic and cell-based therapies for the correction of thalassemia.

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

thalassemia
transfusion
hemoglobin switching


Modeling and numerical treatment of elastic rods with frictionless self-contact In this paper we present a hyperelastic rod model that takes into account self-contact forces. The model is based on Cosserat rod theory that incorporates shear, elongation, flexure and twist deformations. The problem of avoiding self-penetration of parts of the rod is handled by the introduction of a contact distance function and the incorporation of associated contact forces. We present a penalty method for the treatment of the multi-valued and non-differentiable contact law. We also describe an augmented Lagrangian formulation of this problem. We then give the details of the finite-element discretization of the elastic rod self-contact problem as well as some numerical examples.

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


real-time view-dependent rendering of parametric surfaces We propose a view-dependent adaptive subdivision algorithm for rendering parametric surfaces on parallel hardware. Our framework allows us to bound the screen space error of a piecewise linear approximation. We naturally assign more primitives to curved areas while keeping quads large for flatter parts of the model and avoid cracks resulting from the polygonal approximation of non-uniform patch subdivision. The overall algorithm is simple, fits current GPUs extremely well, and is surprisingly fast while producing little to no artifacts.

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

gpgpu
real-time rendering
adaptive surface rendering


A computational strategy exploiting genetic algorithms to recover color surface reflectance functions Information about the spectral reflectance of a color surface is useful in many applications. Assuming that reflectance functions can be adequately approximated by a linear combination of a small number of basis functions, we address here the recovery of a surface reflectance function, given the tristimulus values under one or more illuminants. Basis functions presenting different characteristics and cardinalities are investigated, and genetic algorithms are employed to optimize the estimation. Our analysis of a variety of standard datasets provides information about the ability of each set of basis functions we used to model generic reflectance spectra.

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

genetic algorithms
reflectance function
tristimulus values


Feature normalization based on non-extensive statistics for speech recognition Most compensation methods to improve the robustness of speech recognition systems in noisy environments such as spectral subtraction, CMN, and MVN, rely on the fact that noise and speech spectra are independent. However, the use of limited window in signal processing may introduce a cross-term between them, which deteriorates the speech recognition accuracy. To tackle this problem, we introduce the q-logarithmic (q-log) spectral domain of non-extensive statistics and propose q-log spectral mean normalization (q-LSMN) which is an extension of log spectral mean normalization (LSMN) to this domain. The recognition experiments on a synthesized noisy speech database, the Aurora-2 database, showed that q-LSMN was consistently better than the conventional normalization methods, CMN, LSMN, and MVN. Furthermore, q-LSMN was even more effective when applied to a real noisy environment in the CENSREC-2 database. It significantly outperformed ETSI AFE front-end.

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

robust speech recognition
q-logarithm
non-extensive statistics


Development of the approximate analytical model for the stub-girder system using neural networks This paper presents the methodology to develop a neural-networks-based model for approximate structural analysis. The approach is verified by modeling a stub-girder system to predict its behavior. The development of approximate analytical model by using neural networks is studied in an effort to find a method to efficiently generate credible outputs that are consistent with those by Vierendeel truss girder and finite element models. The criteria and rules for determining the neural network architecture are described using the performance evaluation with eight architecture design aspects and two subject variables to be compared. The criteria of accuracy are mostly focused because one of the objectives of an approximate analysis is to provide results that are within an allowable error.

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

neural networks
approximate structural analysis
vierendeel truss girder
performance evaluation
accuracy


Social debt in software engineering: insights from industry Social debt is analogous to technical debt in many ways: it represents the state of software development organisations as the result of accumulated decisions. In the case of social debt, decisions are about people and their interactions. Our objective was to study the causality around social debt in practice. In so doing, we conducted exploratory qualitative research in a large software company. We found many forces together causing social debt; we represented them in a framework, and captured anti-patterns that led to the debt in the first place. Finally, we elicited best practices that technicians adopted to pay back some of the accumulated debt. We learned that social debt is strongly correlated with technical debt and both forces should be reckoned with together during the software process.

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

software project management
socio-technical decisions
social software engineering
case study


Who drives a crisis? The diffusion of an issue through social networks Investigating a total of 5787 reports from multiple media including Twitter. Tweets and postings in online communities drove diffusion of a corporate crisis. Online personal media took a leading role in setting agendas of the crisis evolution. Four stages of crisis were identified and they had different agendas. Traditional media reported each issue latest as following online media.

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

inter-media agenda-setting
social media
crisis communication
content analysis


Modeling the precedence effect for speech using the gamma filter The ability of the human auditory system to localize the direction of a sound source in a reverberant environment extends from simple clicks to complex speech signals. The perceived location of the auditory event is dominated by the direct sound, for small enough time intervals between the direct sound and reflectiona phenomenon known as the precedence effect. In this paper we present a computer simulation of the precedence effect for speech, implemented using Matlab and tested with speech signals from the TIMIT database. The model is based on the biological assumption that the rate of change of a signal (onset) is critical in triggering the precedence effect. The model demonstrates the precedence effect on speech signals, as opposed to prior models that have only been tested on clicks. In addition, a novel onset enhancement method is described and implemented using the gamma filter, a new class of linear systems for adaptive signal processing. This method can either use fixed coefficients and obtain similar results to prior methods of onset enhancement, or use an adaptive framework. The adaptive framework is promising in its ability to enhance onsets and to reduce the steady state portions of the signal.

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

precedence effect
reverberant
speech
gamma filter
onset enhancement

sound localization
complex signals
auditory modeling


TOPAZO 4.0 - A new version of a computer program for evaluation of deconvoluted and realistic observables atr LEP 1 and LEP 2 The program TOPAZO was developed for computing a variety of physical observables which are related to the e(+)e(-) annihilation into fermion pairs and to the large angle Bhabha scattering around the Z resonance. Among them the Z parameters or pseudo-observables, the deconvoluted cross sections and those dressed with QED radiation, and finally the forward-backward asymmetries; The calculations are performed both for a completely inclusive experimental setup and for a realistic one, i.e. a setup with cuts on the acollinearity angle, on the energy of the outgoing fermions or on their invariant mass and angular acceptance. The new version, 4.0, includes several innovative features; First of all, the most important new capabilities since previous versions are electroweak, QCD and QED correction factors that are relevant at the Z resonance in the light of the present experimental accuracy. Among them, the effect of the next-to-leading O(alpha(2)m(2),) corrections, the radiative corrections to the hadronic decay of the Z, providing complete corrections of O(alpha alpha(s)) to Gamma (Z --> q (q) over bar) with q = u, d, s, c, and b, and leading O(alpha(3)) QED corrections. Secondly, the program has been upgraded to cover two-fermion final states at LEP 2 energies, where some of the assumptions made for earlier versions are no longer valid. In particular, to this aim all the electroweak radiative corrections relevant far from the Z peak have been added for s-channel processes, e.g, purely weak boxes, next-to-leading O(alpha(2)) and leading O(alpha(3)) QED corrections. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

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

bhabha scattering
lep
electroweak
qed corrections
radiative corrections
deconvoluted and realistic observables

extrapolated and realistic experimental setup


the semantics of query modification We present a method that exploits 'linked data' to determine semantic relations between consecutive user queries. Our method maps queries onto concepts in linked data and searches the linked data graph for direct or indirect relations between the concepts. By comparing relations between large numbers of user queries, we identify semantic modification patterns. The application of this method to the logs of an image search engine revealed interesting usage patterns, such as that users often search for two entities sharing a property (e.g., two players from the same team). These patterns can be used to generate query suggestions. Results of preliminary experiments show that the patterns enable us to generate suggestions for more queries than a method purely based on search-log statistics.

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


Active site acidic residues and structural analysis of modelled human aromatase: A potential drug target for breast cancer This study sheds new light on the role of acidic residues present in the active site cavity of human aromatase. Eight acidic residues (E129, D222, E245, E302, D309, E379, D380 and D476) lining the cavity are identified and studied using comparative modeling, docking, molecular dynamics as well as statistical techniques. The structural environment of these acidic residues is studied to assess the stability of the corresponding carboxylate anions. Results indicate that the environment of the residues E245, E302 and D222 is most suitable for carboxylate ion formation in the uncomplexed form. However, the stability of D309, D222 and D476 anions is seen to increase on complexation to steroidal substrates. In particular, the interaction between D309 and T310, which assists proton transfer, is found to be formed following androgen/nor-androgen complexation. The residue D309 is found to be clamped in the presence of substrate which is not observed in the case of the other residues although they exhibit changes in properties following substrate binding. Information entropic analysis indicates that the residues D309, D222 and D476 have more conformational flexibility compared to E302 and E245 prior to substrate binding. Interaction similar to that between D476 and D309, which is expected to assist androgen aromatization, is proposed between E302 and E245. The inhibition of aromatase activity by 4-hydroxy androstenedione (formestane) is attributed to a critical hydrogen bond formation between the hydroxy moiety and T310/D309 as well as the large distance from D476. The results corroborate well with earlier site directed mutagenesis studies.

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

hydrogen bonding
information entropy
polar atoms
solvent accessibility


a parallel algorithm for computing borders The border concept has been introduced by Mannila and Toivonen in their seminal paper [20]. This concept finds many applications, e.g maximal frequent itemsets, minimal functional dependencies, emerging patterns between consecutive database instances and materialized view selection. For large transactions and relational databases defined on n items or attributes, the running time of any border computations are mainly dominated by the time T (for standard sequential algorithms) required to test the interestingness , in general the frequencies, of sets of candidates. In this paper we propose a general parallel algorithm for computing borders whatever the application is. We prove the efficiency of our algorithm by showing that: (i) it generates exactly the same number of candidates as the standard sequential algorithm and, (ii) if the interestingness test time of a candidate is bounded by ? then for a multi-processor shared memory machine with p cores, we prove that the total interestingness time T p

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 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


Evaluation of reference tissue model and tissue ratio method for 5-HTT using [(123)I] ADAM tracer The serotonin (5-hydroxytryptamine, or 5-HT) transporters (5-HTT) are target-sites for commonly used antidepressants. [12311 ADAM is a novel radiotracer that selectively binds the 5-HTT of the central nervous system. The aim for this study was to compare four-parameter model (FPM) with three-parameter model (TPM) from non-invasive reference tissue model (RTM) for 5-HTT quantification using the cerebellum as indirect input function. Furthermore, we compared tracer kinetic model with the tissue ratio (TR) method. The binding potential (BP) values derived from both models were almost the same, but ratio of delivery (RI) in TPM had smaller standard deviation than the FPM. There was also significant correlation between BP and specific uptake ratio (SUR). In conclusion, simplified reference tissue model (SRTM) was the better choice because of its stability and convenient implementation for non-invasive quantification of brain SPECT studies. The correlation found between BP and SUR supports the use of TR method for quantification of 5-HTT to avoid arterial sampling in dynamic SPECT scan. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

reference tissue model
binding potential
specific uptake ratio
spect

serotonin transporters
[(123)i] adam
5-htt


Security for Web Services: Standards and Research Issues This article discusses the main security requirements for Web services and it describes how such security requirements are addressed by standards for Web services security recently developed or under development by various standardizations bodies. Standards are reviewed according to a conceptual framework that groups them by the main functionalities they provide. Covered standards include most of the standards encompassed by the original Web Service Security roadmap proposed by Microsoft and IBM in 2002 (Microsoft and IBM 2002). They range from the ones geared toward message and conversation security and reliability to those developed for providing interoperable Single Sign On and Identity Management functions in federated organizations. The latter include Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), WS-Policy, XACML, that is related to access control and has been recently extended with a profile for Web services access control; XKMS and WS-Trust; WS-Federation, LibertyAlliance and Shibboleth, that address the important problem of identity management in federated organizations. The article also discusses the issues related to the use of the standards and open research issues in the area of access control for Web services and innovative digital identity management techniques are outlined.

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

access control
identity management
reliability
security


Learning Ground CP-Logic Theories by Leveraging Bayesian Network Learning Techniques Causal relations are present in many application domains. Causal Probabilistic Logic (CP-logic) is a probabilistic modeling language that is especially designed to express such relations. This paper investigates the learning of CP-logic theories (CP-theories) from training data. Its first contribution is SEM-CP-logic, an algorithm that learns CP-theories by leveraging Bayesian network (BN) learning techniques. SEM-CP-logic is based on a transformation between CP-theories and BNs. That is, the method applies BN learning techniques to learn a CP-theory in the form of an equivalent BN. To this end, certain modifications are required to the BN parameter learning and structure search, the most important one being that the refinement operator used by the search must guarantee that the constructed BNs represent valid CP-theories. The paper's second contribution is a theoretical and experimental comparison between CP-theory and BN learning. We show that the most simple CP-theories can be represented with BNs consisting of noisy-OR nodes, while more complex theories require close to fully connected networks (unless additional unobserved nodes are introduced in the network). Experiments in a controlled artificial domain show that in the latter cases CP-theory learning with SEM-CP-logic requires fewer training data than BN learning. We also apply SEM-CP-logic in a medical application in the context of HIV research, and show that it can compete with state-of-the-art methods in this domain.

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

statistical relational learning
cp-logic


Network MIMO With Linear Zero-Forcing Beamforming: Large System Analysis, Impact of Channel Estimation, and Reduced-Complexity Scheduling We consider the downlink of a multicell system with multiantenna base stations and single-antenna user terminals, arbitrary base station cooperation clusters, distance-dependent propagation pathloss, and general "fairness" requirements. Base stations in the same cooperation cluster employ joint transmission with linear zero-forcing beamforming, subject to sum or per-base station power constraints. Intercluster interference is treated as noise at the user terminals. Analytic expressions for the system spectral efficiency are found in the large-system limit where both the numbers of users and antennas per base station tend to infinity with a given ratio. In particular, for the per-base station power constraint, we find new results in random matrix theory, yielding the squared Frobenius norm of submatrices of the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse for the structured non-i.i.d. channel matrix resulting from the cooperation cluster, user distribution, and path-loss coefficients. The analysis is extended to the case of nonideal Channel State Information at the Transmitters obtained through explicit downlink channel training and uplink feedback. Specifically, our results illuminate the trade-off between the benefit of a larger number of cooperating antennas and the cost of estimating higher-dimensional channel vectors. Furthermore, our analysis leads to a new simplified downlink scheduling scheme that preselects the users according to probabilities obtained from the large-system results, depending on the desired fairness criterion. The proposed scheme performs close to the optimal (finite-dimensional) opportunistic user selection while requiring significantly less channel state feedback, since only a small fraction of preselected users must feed back their channel state information.

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

channel estimation
downlink scheduling
network mimo

large random matrices
linear zero-forcing beamforming


A verification framework for agent communication In this paper, we introduce a veri. cation method for the correctness of multiagent systems as described in the framework of ACPL (Agent Communication Programming Language). The computational model of ACPL consists of an integration of the two different paradigms of CCP (Concurrent Constraint Programming) and SCP (Communicating Sequential Processes). The constraint programming techniques are used to represent and process information, whereas the communication mechanism of ACPL is described in terms of the synchronous handshaking mechanism of CSP. Consequently, we show how to de. ne a veri. cation method for ACPL in terms of an integration of the veri. cation methods for CCP and CSP. We prove formally the soundness of the method and discuss its completeness.

O O O O 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

semantics
verification methods
specification
agent communication language
multi-agent systems


auction mechanism for optimally trading off revenue and efficiency We study selling one indivisible object to multiple potential buyers. Depending on the objective of the seller, different selling mechanisms are desirable. The Vickrey auction with a truthful reserve price is optimal when the objective is efficiency (i.e., allocating the object to the party who values it the most). The Myerson auction is optimal when the objective is the seller's expected utility. These two objectives are generally in conflict, and cannot be maximized with one mechanism. In many real-world settings---such as privatization and competing electronic marketplaces---it is not clear that the objective should be either efficiency or seller's expected utility. Typically, one of these objectives should weigh more than the other, but both are important. We account for importance of both objectives by designing a new deterministic auction mechanism that maximizes expected social welfare subject to a minimum constraint on the seller's expected utility. This way the seller can expect to do well enough for himself, while maintaining the attractive properties of the mechanism.

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


knowledge acquisition from simplified text The problem of entering and integrating new knowledge into a logic-based knowledge base is substantial. Our solution is to provide a natural language interface, which reads simplified English, enabled by a knowledge-based memory-retrieval driven natural language understander. This paper presents a set of tools and interfaces for interacting with such a system, and a discussion of the underlying Reader system, the reading component of the Learning Reader project. The interfaces presented provide direct feedback about what portions of the text are understood, and what interpretations are being produced from it. In addition tools are presented to, among other things, provide example sentences, to facilitate users producing simplified English text suitable for the Reader.

B I O O O O O O 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 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

knowledge acquisition
simplified english
learning reader


Offline quality monitoring for legal evidence images in video-surveillance applications Video-surveillance attracted an important research effort in the last few years. Many works are dedicated to the design of efficient systems and the development of robust algorithms. video compression is a very important stage in order to ensure the viability of video-surveillance systems. However, it introduces some distortions decreasing significantly the detection, recognition and identification tasks for legal investigators. Fortunately, an important effort is made in terms of standard definition for video-surveillance in order to achieve to a complete interoperability. However, quality issues are still not addressed in an appropriate way. Investigators are often facing the dilemma of selecting the best match (legal evidence) of the targeted object in the video-sequence. In this paper, we propose an offline quality monitoring system for the extraction of most suitable legal evidence images for video-surveillance applications. This system is constructed around three innovative parts: First, a robust tracking algorithm based on foveal wavelet and mean shift. Second, a no-reference quality metric based on sharpness feature. Finally, a super-resolution algorithm allowing to increase the size of the tracked object without using any information outside the image itself. The combination of the proposed algorithms allowed the construction of a quality monitoring system increasing significantly the efficiency of the legal evidence image extraction.

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

video-surveillance
super-resolution
sharpness metric


Missing pattern discovery In this paper, we study the missing patterns problem: Find the shortest pair of patterns that do not occur close to each other in a given text, i.e., the distance between their occurrences is always greater than a given threshold ?. We present various solutions to this problem, as well as to the case where the patterns in the pair are required to be of the same length. This work is motivated by optimizing the sensitivity of PCR. Experiments show that our algorithm is practical enough to handle human genome data.

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

polymerase chain reaction (pcr)
suffix trees


Constructing Two-layered Freight Traffic Network Model from Truck Probe Data The road network in the Keihanshin area (the second most populated urban region in Japan encompassing the metropolitan areas of the cities of Osaka in Osaka prefecture, Kobe in Hy?go Prefecture, and Kyoto in Kyoto prefecture) is modeled as two layers from the viewpoint of the frequency of use of roads by freight vehicles. This model was derived,tested and validated from the probe car data of 300 trucks operated by 21 freight companies in the Keihanshin area. The two layers are called high-frequency-network and low-frequency-network layers. Characteristics, such as the density of probe data, average driving time, and speed of both network layers, were estimated. This analysis revealed that trucks spend a duration about 6 times longer on the high-frequency network even though it is 1/4 the size of the low-frequency network. The instantaneous velocity histograms indicated a significant difference in speeds between the two network layers of 25.03km/h in the high-frequency layer and 16.87km/h in the low-frequency layer. Service-level evaluations, reliability analysis, and route-selection modeling should become easier to deal with in the future by introducing these layered networks.

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

probe car
freight traffic
network model
truck


THE QUANTUM QUERY COMPLEXITY OF AC(0) We show that any quantum algorithm deciding whether an input function f from [n] to [n] is 2-to-1 or almost 2-to-1 requires Theta(n) queries to f. The same lower bound holds for determining whether or not a function f from [2n - 2] to [n] is surjective. These results yield a nearly linear Omega(n/log n) lower bound on the quantum query complexity of AC(0). The best previous lower bound known for any AC(0) function was the Omega(n/log n)(2/3)) bound given by Aaronson and Sin's Omega(n(2/3)) lower bound for the element distinctness problem [1].

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 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

constant-depth circuits
lower bounds
quantum adversary method


How crystals that sense and respond to their environments could evolve An enduring mystery in biology is how a physical entity simple enough to have arisen spontaneously could have evolved into the complex life seen on Earth today. Cairns-Smith has proposed that life might have originated in clays which stored genomes consisting of an arrangement of crystal monomers that was replicated during growth. While a clay genome is simple enough to have conceivably arisen spontaneously, it is not obvious how it might have produced more complex forms as a result of evolution. Here, we examine this possibility in the tile assembly model, a generalized model of crystal growth that has been used to study the self-assembly of DNA tiles. We describe hypothetical crystals for which evolution of complex crystal sequences is driven by the scarceness of resources required for growth. We show how, under certain circumstances, crystal growth that performs computation can predict which resources are abundant. In such cases, crystals executing programs that make these predictions most accurately will grow fastest. Since crystals can perform universal computation, the complexity of computation that can be used to optimize growth is unbounded. To the extent that lessons derived from the tile assembly model might be applicable to mineral crystals, our results suggest that resource scarcity could conceivably have provided the evolutionary pressures necessary to produce complex clay genomes that sense and respond to changes in their environment.

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


Term identification in the biomedical literature Sophisticated information technologies are needed for effective data acquisition and integration from a growing body of the biomedical literature. Successful term identification is key to getting access to the stored literature information, as it is the terms (and their relationships) that convey knowledge across scientific articles. Due to the complexities of a dynamically changing biomedical terminology, term identification has been recognized as the current bottleneck in text mining, andas a consequencehas become an important research topic both in natural language processing and biomedical communities. This article overviews state-of-the-art approaches in term identification. The process of identifying terms is analysed through three steps: term recognition, term classification, and term mapping. For each step, main approaches and general trends, along with the major problems, are discussed. By assessing previous work in context of the overall term identification process, the review also tries to delineate needs for future work in the field.

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

term identification
term recognition
term classification
term mapping
biomedical literature


A new control method in startup progress for power turbine generators as waste heat recovery system using an overall shipboard system model Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present a new control method for a power turbine generator (PTG) as a waste heat recovery system using an overall shipboard system model that ascertains startup characteristics. Design/methodology/approach - The PTG system is a waste heat recovery-type generation system making use of exhaust gas from the main shipboard diesel engines. With the PTG systems, control during startup is not entirely clear. Startup characteristics from power turbine startup through synchronization to the system bus are ascertained using an overall shipboard system model. Findings - A startup sequence control is clarified for a combination of gas valve operation and load bank. A prototype constructed on the basis of the simulation. As a result, in the startup process, so as to limit speed overshooting that is 0.83 p.u. at 100 percent output from main diesel engine as the severest condition. The synchronization to the system bus is attained, and highly satisfactory results are achieved. Originality/value - The PTG is an extremely effective system for fuel cost reduction in the face of rising fuel prices, and systems capable of providing several thousand kilowatts are being considered.

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

electric generators
modelling
ships
systems engineering
energy supply systems


Challenges in sustainable integrated process synthesis and the capabilities of an MINLP process synthesizer MipSyn The use of the mathematical programming approach to the synthesis of chemical processes has many valuable creative principles, i.e. optimality, feasibility and integrality of solutions, which are essential for obtaining "truly" integrated sustainable solutions. However, our tools are still insufficient to perform the sustainable product-process synthesis integrally across the whole chemical supply chain. The ongoing development of concepts, methods and computer applications thus remains the most important role of the PSE community in order to provide engineers with powerful systems tools with which to shape sustainable development. The task, however, is very challenging even at the level of process synthesis since we are dealing with multi-criteria, an enormous amount of complex interactions, uncertainties, discrete and continuous decisions, giving rise to the use of the simultaneous, mixed-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) approach. Although several efficient MINLP solvers have been developed in the last two decades, hardly any academic or professional MINLP synthesizer for solving such nontrivial synthesis problems has been developed so far. The present contribution wishes to shed light on some important issues relating to different challenges that had to and still have to be mastered as well as various capabilities which in turn were rewarded by mastering some of the challenges during the development of the advanced mixed-integer process synthesizer (MipSyn), the successor of the process synthesizer PROSYN-MINLP (Kravanja & Grossmann, 1990, 1994). The primary aim of future research is oriented towards the development of an even more advanced and robust synthesizer shell, capable of solving large-scale sustainable applications in different engineering domains. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

process synthesis
process synthesizer
mipsyn
minlp


Mostly Static Program Partitioning of Binary Executables We have built a runtime compilation system that takes unmodified sequential binaries and improves their performance on off-the-shelf multiprocessors using dynamic vectorization and loop-level parallelization techniques. Our system, Azure, is purely software based and requires no specific hardware support for speculative thread execution, yet it is able to break even in most cases; that is, the achieved speedup exceeds the cost of runtime monitoring and compilation, often by significant amounts. Key to this remarkable performance is an offline preprocessing step that extracts a mostly correct control flow graph (CFG) from the binary program ahead of time. This statically obtained CFG is incomplete in that it may be missing some edges corresponding to computed branches. We describe how such additional control flow edges are discovered and handled at runtime, so that an incomplete static analysis never leads to an incorrect optimization result. The availability of a mostly correct CFG enables us to statically partition a binary executable into single-entry multiple-exit regions and to identify potential parallelization candidates ahead of execution. Program regions that are not candidates for parallelization can thereby be excluded completely from runtime monitoring and dynamic recompilation. Azure's extremely low overhead is a direct consequence of this design.

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

experimentation
continuous compilation and optimization
dynamic parallelization
binary translation


Multiscale simulation method for self-organization of nanoparticles in dense suspension This paper presents a multiscale simulation method for self-organization of nanoparticles in a dense suspension. The method consists of a solid-liquid two-phase model, in which the flow of solvent and the motion of nanoparticles are treated by an Euler-Lagrange hybrid scheme with a dual time stepping. The method also includes various multiscale forces whose characteristic length and time scales are much different with one another. Especially frictional force between nanoparticles is included to describe dynamics of aggregated nanoparticles more precisely. Two-dimensional simulation results indicate that the present multiscale method is effective for modeling of motion of nanoparticles in the dense suspension and provides more rational results for self-organization of nanoparticles than previous simulation methods. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

multiscale forces
frictional force between nanoparticles

nanoparticle
self-organizaion
solid-liquid two-phase flow
euler-lagrange hybrid scheme


A NOTE ON THE LOCALLY LINEAR EMBEDDING ALGORITHM The paper presents mathematical underpinnings of the locally linear embedding technique for data dimensionality reduction. It is shown that a cogent framework for describing the method is that of optimization on a Grassmann manifold. The solution delivered by the algorithm is characterized as a constrained minimizer for a problem in which the cost function and all the constraints are defined on such a manifold. The role of the internal gauge symmetry in solving the underlying optimization problem is illuminated.

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

dimensionality reduction
locally linear embedding
grassmann manifold
optimization

stiefel manifold
gauge freedom
gauge fixing


Evaluating semantic similarity and relatedness over the semantic grouping of clinical term pairs Objective: develop a method to quantify the similarity and relatedness of biomedical and clinical term pairs. Semantic similarity and relatedness measures exploit information extrapolated from the Unified Medical Language System. Evaluates the performance of similarity and relatedness measures over term pairs from various semantic groups. Evaluates combining semantic similarity and relatedness measures.

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

natural language processing
nlp
semantic relatedness


Configurable and reconfigurable computing for digital signal processing Recent DSP applications have many significant issues such as higher system performance, lower power consumption, higher design flexibility, faster time-to-market, and so on. Neither a conventional ASIC nor a conventional DSP can necessarily satisfy all the requirements at once nowadays. Therefore, an alternate for DSP applications will be needed to complement the drawbacks of ASICs and DSPs. This paper introduces a new computing paradigm called configurable computing or reconfigurable computing, which has more potential in terms of performance and flexibility. Conventional silicon platforms will not satisfy the conflicting demands of standard products and customization. However, silicon platforms such as FPGAs for configurable or reconfigurable computing are standardized in manufacturing but customized in application. This paper also presents a brief survey of the existing silicon platforms that support configuration or reconfiguration in the application domain of digital signal processing such as image processing, communication processing, audio and speech processing. Finally, we show some promising reconfigurable architectures for the digital signal processing and discuss the future of reconfigurable computing.

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

configurable computing
reconfigurable computing
digital signal processing


Sensor-driven agenda for intelligent home care of the elderly The exponential increase of home-bound persons who live alone and are in need of continuous monitoring requires new solutions to current problems. Most of these cases present illnesses such as motor or psychological disabilities that deprive of a normal living. Common events such as forgetfulness or falls are quite common and have to be prevented or dealt with. This paper introduces a platform to guide and assist these persons (mostly elderly people) by providing multisensory monitoring and intelligent assistance. The platform operates at three levels. The lower level, denominated Data acquisition and processing performs the usual tasks of a monitoring system, collecting and processing data from the sensors for the purpose of detecting and tracking humans. The aim is to identify their activities in an intermediate level called activity detection. The upper level, Scheduling and decision-making, consists of a scheduler which provides warnings, schedules events in an intelligent manner and serves as an interface to the rest of the platform. The idea is to use mobile and static sensors performing constant monitoring of the user and his/her environment, providing a safe environment and an immediate response to severe problems. A case study on elderly fall detection in a nursery home bedroom demonstrates the usefulness of the proposal.

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


Multicast Capacity of Wireless Ad Hoc Networks Under Gaussian Channel Model We study the multicast capacity of large-scale random extended multihop wireless networks, where a number of wireless nodes are randomly located in a square region with side length a = root n, by use of Poisson distribution with density 1. All nodes transmit at a constant power F, and the power decays with attenuation exponent alpha > 2. The data rate of a transmission is determined by the SINR as B log(1 + SINR), where B is the bandwidth. There are as randomly and independently chosen multicast sessions. Each multicast session has k randomly chosen terminals. We show that when k = theta(2)n(1/2+beta) capacity that each multicast session can achieve, with high probability, is at least c(s) root n/n(s)root k, where theta(1), theta(2), and c(s) are some special constants and beta > 0 is any positive real number. We also show that for k = O(n/log(2) n), the per-flow multicast capacity under Gaussian channel is at most O(root n/n(s)root k) when we have at least n(s) = Omega(log n) random multicast flows. Our result generalizes the unicast capacity for random networks using percolation theory.

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

capacity
gaussian channel
multicast
percolation theory
unicast
wireless ad hoc networks


Dynamics and bifurcations of the adaptive exponential integrate-and-fire model Recently, several two-dimensional spiking neuron models have been introduced, with the aim of reproducing the diversity of electrophysiological features displayed by real neurons while keeping a simple model, for simulation and analysis purposes. Among these models, the adaptive integrate-and-fire model is physiologically relevant in that its parameters can be easily related to physiological quantities. The interaction of the differential equations with the reset results in a rich and complex dynamical structure. We relate the subthreshold features of the model to the dynamical properties of the differential system and the spike patterns to the properties of a Poincare map defined by the sequence of spikes. We find a complex bifurcation structure which has a direct interpretation in terms of spike trains. For some parameter values, spike patterns are chaotic.

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

integrate-and-fire
dynamical systems
chaos


Vehicle routing problem with time windows considering overtime and outsourcing vehicles The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is an important problem in third-party logistics and supply chain management. We extend the VRPTW to the VRPTW with overtime and outsourcing vehicles (VRPTWOV), which allows overtime for drivers and the possibility of using outsourced vehicles. This problem can be applied to third-party logistics companies for managing central distributor-local distributors, local distributor-retailers (or customers), and manufacturers. We developed a mixed integer programming model, a genetic algorithm (GA), and a hybrid algorithm based on simulated annealing. The computational results demonstrate the efficiency of the developed algorithms. We also develop a decision support system for the VRPTWOV that is equipped with a vehicle route rescheduling function for realistic situations based on the GA.

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

vehicle routing
genetic algorithm
simulated annealing
decision support system


A distributed architecture for facilitating the integration of blind musicians in symphonic orchestras The emergence of new technologies is providing opportunities to develop novel solutions that facilitate the integration of visually impaired people in different activities of our daily life. This paper presents a distributed intelligent architecture, called DIAMI, focused on facilitating the integration of blind musicians into orchestras. The DIAMI architecture provides a distributed, ubiquitous system aimed at providing a way for blind musicians to receive instructions from the orchestra conductor in an unobtrusive manner. The structure of the DIAMI architecture and the preliminary results obtained are presented in detail within this paper. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. 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 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

distributed systems
ambient intelligence
motion capture