Securing skeletal systems with limited performance penalty: The muskel experience Algorithmic skeletons have been exploited to implement several parallel programming environments, targeting workstation clusters as well as workstation networks and computational grids. When targeting non-dedicated clusters, workstation networks and grids, security has to be taken adequately into account in order to guarantee both code and data confidentiality and integrity. However, introducing security is usually an expensive activity, both in terms of the effort required to managed security mechanisms and in terms of the time spent performing security related activities at run time. We discuss the cost of security introduction as well as how some features typical of skeleton technology can be exploited to improve the efficiency code and data securing in a typical skeleton based parallel programming environment and we evaluate the performance cost of security mechanisms implemented exploiting state of the art tools. In particular, we take into account the cost of security introduction in muskel, a Java based skeletal system exploiting macro data now implementation technology. We consider the adoption of mechanisms that allow securing all the Communications involving remote, unreliable nodes and we evaluate the cost of such mechanisms. Also, we consider the implications on the computational grains needed to scale secure and insecure skeletal computations. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Necessary Conditions for the Global Rigidity of Direction-Length Frameworks It is an intriguing open problem to give a combinatorial characterisation or polynomial algorithm for determining when a graph is globally rigid in a"e (d) . This means that any generic realisation is uniquely determined up to congruence when each edge represents a fixed length constraint. Hendrickson gave two natural necessary conditions, one involving connectivity and the other redundant rigidity. In general, these are not sufficient, but they do suffice in two dimensions, as shown by Jackson and Jordan. Our main result is an analogue of the redundant rigidity condition for frameworks that have both direction and length constraints. For any generic globally rigid direction-length framework in a"e (d) with at least 2 length edges, we show that deleting any length edge results in a rigid framework. It seems harder to obtain a corresponding result when a direction edge is deleted: we can do this in two dimensions, under an additional hypothesis that we believe to be unnecessary. Our proofs use a lemma of independent interest, stating that a certain space parameterising equivalent frameworks is a smooth manifold. We prove this lemma using arguments from differential topology and the Tarski-Seidenberg theorem on semi-algebraic sets.

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

global rigidity
direction-length frameworks


the abcd's of paxos We explain how consensus is used to implement replicated state machines, the general mechanism for fault-tolerance. We describe an abstract version of Lamport's Paxos algorithm for asynchronous consensus. Then we derive the Byzantine, classic, and disk versions of Paxos from the abstract one, show how they are related to each other, and discuss the safety, liveness, and performance of each one.

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

version general algorithm performance consensus

abstraction
fault tolerance
state machine
asynchronicity


An Effective Solution to Task Scheduling and Memory Partitioning for Multiprocessor System-on-Chip The growing trend in current complex embedded systems is to deploy a multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC). A MPSoC consists of multiple heterogeneous processing elements, a memory hierarchy, and input/output components which are linked together by an on-chip interconnect structure. Such an architecture provides the flexibility to meet the performance requirements of multimedia applications while respecting the constraints on memory, cost, size, time, and power. Many embedded systems employ software-managed memories known as scratch-pad memories (SPM). Unlike caches, SPMs are software-controlled and hence the execution time of applications on such systems can be accurately predicted. Scheduling the tasks of an embedded application on the processors and partitioning the available SPM budget among these processors are two critical issues in such systems. Often, these are considered separately; such a decoupled approach may miss better quality schedules. In this paper, we present an integrated approach to task scheduling and SPM partitioning to further reduce the execution time of embedded applications. Results on several real-life benchmarks show the significant improvement from our proposed technique.

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

memory partitioning
scratchpad
task scheduling


A polynomial algorithm for finding T-span of generalized cacti It has been known for years that the problem of computing the T-span is NP-hard in general. Recently, Giaro et al. (Discrete Appl. Math., to appear) showed that the problem remains NP-hard even for graphs of degree ??3 and it is polynomially solvable for graphs with degree ??2. Herein, we extend the latter result. We introduce a new class of graphs which is large enough to contain paths, cycles, trees, cacti, polygon trees and connected outerplanar graphs. Next, we study the properties of graphs from this class and prove that the problem of computing the T-span for these graphs is polynomially solvable.

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

t-coloring
t-span
cactus
outerplanar graph


Delay-dependent robust asymptotic state estimation of Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy Hopfield neural networks with mixed interval time-varying delays This paper investigates delay-dependent robust asymptotic state estimation of fuzzy neural networks with mixed interval time-varying delay. In this paper, the Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy model representation is extended to the robust state estimation of Hopfield neural networks with mixed interval time-varying delays. The main purpose is to estimate the neuron states, through available output measurements such that for all admissible time delays, the dynamics of the estimation error is globally asymptotically stable. Based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional which contains a triple-integral term, delay-dependent robust state estimation for such T-S fuzzy Hopfield neural networks can be achieved by solving a linear matrix inequality (LMI), which can be easily facilitated by using some standard numerical packages. The unknown gain matrix is determined by solving a delay-dependent LMI. Finally two numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

linear matrix inequality
hopfield neural networks
state estimation

t-s fuzzy model
lyapunov-krasovskii functional


Approximation reduction in inconsistent incomplete decision tables This article deals with approaches to attribute reductions in inconsistent incomplete decision table. The main objective of this study is to extend a kind of attribute reductions called a lower approximation reduct and an upper approximation reduct, which preserve the lower/upper approximation distribution of a target decision. Several judgement theorems of a lower/upper approximation consistent set in inconsistent incomplete decision table are educed. Then, the discernibility matrices associated with the two approximation reductions are examined as well, from which we can obtain approaches to attribute reduction of an incomplete decision table in rough set theory.

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

rough set theory
inconsistent incomplete decision table
approximation reduction

maximal consistent block
discernibility function


An endoscopic force-position sensor grasper with minimum sensors This study reports on the design, fabrication, testing, and mathematical modelling of a semiconductor microstrain-gauge endoscopic tactile sensor. The sensor can measure, with reasonable accuracy, the magnitude and the position of an applied load on a grasper. The designed assembly consists of two semiconductor microstrain-gauge sensors, which are positioned at the back face of a prototype endoscopic grasper. The intensity of the applied force can be seen on a light emitting diode (LED) device. Altogether, 20 different force magnitudes for seven different locations on the endoscopic grasper are tested experimentally. The magnitudes of force vary from 0.5 to 10 N with an increment of 0.5 N. The in-house electrical amplification system for the microstrain gauges is also designed, fabricated, and tested. The sensor is insulated and can operate safely in wet environments. It exhibits high force sensitivity, good linearity, and large dynamic range. To predict the behaviour of the designed system under various loading conditions, three-dimensional finite element modelling (FEW is used. There is a good correlation between the computed theoretical results for the force magnitudes together with their points of application and the experimental results. The miniaturized electronic device could be integrated with an endoscopic grasper.

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

endoscopy
fem
minimally invasive surgery


Long range dependence in network traffic and the closed loop behaviour of buffers under adaptive window control We consider an Internet link carrying http-like traffic, i.e., transfers of finite volume files arriving at random time instants. These file transfers are controlled by an adaptive window protocol (AWP); an example of such a protocol is TCP. We provide analysis for the auto-covariance function of the AWP-controlled traffic into the links buffer; this traffic, in general, cannot be represented by an onoff process. The analysis establishes that, for TCP-controlled transfer of Pareto-distributed file sizes with infinite second moment, the traffic into the link buffer is long range-dependent (LRD). We also develop an analysis for obtaining the stationary distribution of the link buffer occupancy under an AWP-controlled transfer of files sampled from some distribution. For any AWP, the analysis provides us with the LaplaceStieltjes transform (LST) of the distribution of the link buffer occupancy process in terms of the functions defining the AWP and the file size distribution. The analysis also provides a necessary and a sufficient condition for the finiteness of the mean link buffer content; these conditions again have explicit dependence on the AWP used and the file size distribution. This establishes the sensitivity of the buffer occupancy process to the file size distribution. Combining the results from the above analyses, we provide various examples in which the closed loop control of an AWP results in finite mean link buffer occupancy even though the file sizes are Pareto-distributed (with infinite second moment), and the traffic into the link buffer is long range-dependent (with Hurst parameters which would suggest an infinite mean queue occupancy under open loop analysis). We also study the effect of window reductions due to active queue management and find that window reductions lead to further lightening of the tail of buffer occupancy distribution. The significance of this work is three-fold: (i) by looking at the window evolution as a function of the amount of data served and not as a function of time, this work provides a new framework for analysing various processes related to the link buffer under AWP-controlled transfer of files with a general file size distribution; (ii) it indicates that the buffer behaviour in the Internet may not be as poor as predicted from an open loop analysis of a queue fed with LRD traffic; and (iii) it shows that the buffer behaviour (and hence the throughput performance for finite buffers) is sensitive to the distribution of file sizes.

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

tcp
closed loop control
long range dependence


Arts and Leisure Participation Among IT Users: Further Evidence of Time Enhancement Over Time Displacement A major concern about new technologies like IT is how much they might displace time on media and other daily activities. Three highly-publicized early studies of the initial impact of IT indicated it was reducing time on both social life and mass media use. However, data from a number of high-quality national surveys since then-from the Pew Center, the General Social Survey (GSS), the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS)-have not replicated these results, in some cases finding increased social life and media use (especially reading) among IT users. The present article examines data from two separate national surveys (the GSS 2002 and the SPPA 2008), Even though the two studies asked different IT questions and examined different arts activities over different periods of Internet diffusion, progressively higher arts participation was found among Internet users, before and after education and other predictors of arts activity were controlled. The SPPA data also show that users and heavier IT users were also more active in a variety of other free time activities like attending movies, volunteering and sports. IT use here then becomes a away of extending or enhancing live attendance rather than displacing it. However, the results also raise questions about whether these correlations result from a "response set'' of respondents overestimating their activity participation.

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


A vision-based collision avoidance technique for micro air vehicles using local-level frame mapping and path planning This paper presents a vision-based collision avoidance technique for small and miniature air vehicles (MAVs) using local-level frame mapping and path planning. Using computer vision algorithms, a depth map that represents the range and bearing to obstacles is obtained. Based on the depth map, we estimate the range, azimuth to, and height of obstacles using an extended Kalman filter that takes into account the correlations between obstacles. We then construct maps in the local-level frame using cylindrical coordinates for three dimensional path planning and plan Dubins paths using the rapidly-exploring random tree algorithm. The behavior of our approach is analyzed and the characteristics of the environments where the local path planning technique guarantees collision-free paths and maneuvers the MAV to a specific goal region are described. Numerical results show the proposed technique is successful in solving path planning and multiple obstacle avoidance problems for fixed wing MAVs.

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

path planning
collision avoidance
computer vision


Testing real-time systems using genetic algorithms The development of real-time systems is an essential industrial activity whose importance is increasing. The most important analytical method to assure the quality of real-time systems is dynamic testing. Testing is the only method which examines the actual run-time behaviour of real-time software, based on an execution in the real application environment. Dynamic aspects like the duration of computations, the memory actually needed, or the synchronization of parallel processes are of major importance for the correct function of real-time systems and have to be tested. A comprehensive investigation of existing software test methods shows that they mostly concentrate on testing for functional correctness. They are not suited for an examination of temporal correctness which is essential to real-time systems. Very small systems show a wide range of different execution times. Therefore, existing test procedures must be supplemented by new methods, which concentrate on determining whether the system violates its specified timing constraints. In general, this means that outputs are produced too early or their computation takes too long. The task of the tester is to find the inputs with the longest or shortest execution times to check whether they produce a temporal error. If the search for such inputs is interpreted as a problem of optimization, genetic algorithms can be used to find the inputs with the longest or shortest execution times automatically. The fitness function is the execution time measured in processor cycles. Experiments using genetic algorithms on a number of programs with up to 1511 LOC and 843 integer input parameters have successfully identified new longer and shorter paths than had been found using random testing or systematic testing. Genetic algorithms are able therefore to check large programs and they show considerable promise in establishing the validity of the temporal behaviour of real-time software.

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

testing
genetic algorithms
temporal behaviour


Approaching the time lower bound on cloned-tag identification for large RFID systems ? Tag cloning attacks threaten a variety of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications but are hard to prevent. To secure RFID applications that confine tagged objects in the same RFID system, this paper studies the cloned-tag identification problem. Although limited existing work has shed some light on the problem, designing fast cloned-tag identification protocols for applications in large-scale RFID systems is yet not thoroughly investigated. To this end, we propose leveraging broadcast and collisions to identify cloned tags. This approach relieves us from resorting to complex cryptography techniques and time-consuming transmission of tag IDs. Based on this approach, we derive a time lower bound on cloned-tag identification and propose a suite of time-efficient protocols toward approaching the time lower bound. The execution time of our protocol is only 1.4 times the value of the time lower bound, being over 91% less than that of the existing protocol. Even better, we further dig up an adaptive protocol that can yield higher time efficiency under some scenarios. The proposed protocols may benefit also RFID applications that distribute tagged objects across multiple places.

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

cloning attack
cloned-tag identification
time-efficient


Structural topology design with multiple thermal criteria This paper shows how the evolutionary structural optimization (ESO) algorithm can be used to achieve a multiple criterion design for a structure in a thermal environment. The proposed thermal ESO procedure couples an evolutionary iterative process of a finite element heat conduction solution and a finite element thermoelastic solution. The overall efficiency of material usage is measured in terms of the combination of thermal stress levels and heat flux densities by wing a combination strategy with weighting factors. The ESO method then works by eliminating from the structural domain under-utilized material. In this paper a practical design example of a printed circuit board substrate is presented to illustrate the capabilities of the ESO algorithm for thermal design optimization in multiple load environments.

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 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

structural optimization
heat conduction
thermal stress

finite element analysis
optimality criteria


Secondary instability of a swept-wing boundary layer disturbed by controlled roughness elements Wind-tunnel data on velocity perturbations evolving in a laminar swept-wing flow under low subsonic conditions are reported. The focus of the present experiments are secondary disturbances of the boundary layer which is modulated by stationary streamwise vortices. Both the stationary vortices and the secondary oscillations of interest are generated in a controlled manner. The experimental data are obtained through hot-wire measurements. Thus, evolution of the vortices, either isolated or interacting with each other, is reconstructed in detail. As is found, the secondary disturbances, initiating the laminar-flow breakdown, are strongly affected by configuration of the stationary boundary-layer perturbation that may have an implication to laminarturbulent transition control.

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


efficient character-level taint tracking for java Over 80\% of web services are vulnerable to attack, and much of the danger arises from command injection vulnerabilities. We present an efficient character-level taint tracking system for Java web applications and argue that it can be used to defend against command injection vulnerabilities. Our approach involves modification only to Java library classes and the implementation of the Java servlets framework, so it requires only a one-time modification to the server without any subsequent modifications to a web application's bytecode or access to the web application's source code. This makes it easy to deploy our technique and easy to secure legacy web software. Our preliminary experiments with the JForum web application suggest that character-level taint tracking adds 0-15\% runtime overhead.

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


Structureactivity relationships of modified C-terminal endomorphin-2 analogues by molecular dynamics simulations Motivated by recent experimental works on the modifications of endomorphin-2 (EM2, H-Tyr-Pro-Phe-Phe-NH2) to develop better painkiller, we performed structureactivity-relationship (SAR) studies to investigate modified C-terminal ligands by using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Specifically, instead of the CONH2 for the unmodified EM2s C-terminus, the analogue 2 with its C-terminus being CONHNH2 and analogue 3 with its C-terminus being COOMe are studied. First, a systematic conformer search was performed via the quantum chemical AM1 calculations. The cis/trans isomers of the lowest energy were hence selected as MD initial structures. We further showed that EM2s in water exhibited similar dihedral angles to those in DMSO, obtained from the NMR experiment. This similarity indicates the reliability of our MD simulations, and enables us to discuss related bioactivity. Our results showed that the interactions of the Tyr1-Phe3 pair for cis-/trans-EM2s played a considerable role for structural stability. Furthermore, we utilized the ?1 rotamers of individual aromatic side chains to examine the structural bioactivity. It is shown that this criterion to determine the conformational bioactivity toward ?-opioid receptor (MOR) is insufficient. Thus, we have further employed rotamer-combination approaches to examine the characteristics of SAR for cis-/trans-EM2s. Our results suggested that the bioactive ?1 rotamers for Tyr1-Phe3 pair remained to favor the [transtrans] status for MOR selectivity. Therefore, based on the analysis of the ?1 rotamers, it is suggested that the analogue 2 exhibit greater structural bioactivity for MOR than the analogue 3, and both of them be greater than unmodified EM2 for trans isomers.

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

endomorphin-2
structureactivity-relationship
molecular dynamics simulation
rotamer-combination approach


Integrated routing algorithms for provisioning "sub-wavelength" connections in IP-over-WDM networks This work focuses on developing and implementing comprehensive unified constraint-based routing algorithms within the generalized multi-protocol label switching framework (GMPLS) to provision "sub-wavelength" circuits (low-rate traffic streams). Constraint-based routing is further augmented in this work by dynamically routing both an active and another alternate link/node-disjoint backup path at the same time in order to provision a given connection request. This new integrated approach combines both IP routing and optical resource allocation to setup end-to-end connections.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 routing
ip/wdm networks
routing and wavelength assignment
survivable optical networks


fMRI analysis on the GPUPossibilities and challenges Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) makes it possible to non-invasively measure brain activity with high spatial resolution. There are however a number of issues that have to be addressed. One is the large amount of spatio-temporal data that needs to be processed. In addition to the statistical analysis itself, several preprocessing steps, such as slice timing correction and motion compensation, are normally applied. The high computational power of modern graphic cards has already successfully been used for MRI and fMRI. Going beyond the first published demonstration of GPU-based analysis of fMRI data, all the preprocessing steps and two statistical approaches, the general linear model (GLM) and canonical correlation analysis (CCA), have been implemented on a GPU. For an fMRI dataset of typical size (80 volumes with 646422voxels), all the preprocessing takes about 0.5s on the GPU, compared to 5s with an optimized CPU implementation and 120s with the commonly used statistical parametric mapping (SPM) software. A random permutation test with 10,000 permutations, with smoothing in each permutation, takes about 50s if three GPUs are used, compared to 0.52.5h with an optimized CPU implementation. The presented work will save time for researchers and clinicians in their daily work and enables the use of more advanced analysis, such as non-parametric statistics, both for conventional fMRI and for real-time fMRI.

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

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri)


ESTIMATION OF THE FRACTIONALLY DIFFERENCING PARAMETER WITH THE R/S METHOD Extensive computer experiments are performed to examine the finite sample behavior of the R/S analysis in case of long-term dependence. Our simulation study differs from former studies both in its design and in its size. In addition, we used a method for obtaining finite sequences of a long-term dependent process, which exactly reproduces the correlation structure of the underlying process. The results obtained show that the R/S analysis does not allow reliable estimation of the fractionally differencing parameter.

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

long-term dependence
adjusted rescaled range
arfima


addressing the cognitive difficulties of expressing n-ary relations in semantic web data We present results from an empirical study in which everyday users attempted to generate formal knowledge representations for use in the Semantic Web. In particular, we focus on one especially difficult aspect of knowledge creation: statements that embody n-ary relations and therefore require reification of the verb in order to be expressible in standard RDF. In a cognitive experiment performed on over 80 novices, participants were asked to author statements containing n-ary relations corresponding to textual passages they were given. Our study compares the results between visual and text-based representations, illustrates the extent of the problem, and offers an alternative syntax for such relations that relieves several difficulties users face in properly formulating these statements. Our results soundly demonstrate that by allowing the use of this alternate syntax in place of traditional approaches, non-initiates can achieve much greater accuracy and coverage in the knowledge they generate. Further, knowledge modeled with the syntax can be trivially converted to standard RDF triples "behind" the user interface, so that the knowledge a user generates constitutes valid Linked Data.

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


modeling and simulation of storage space allocation at tpl systems Allocating storage space at TPL systems differs significantly from traditional private logistics systems. The resources are commodities sold directly to customers of different characteristics. Total revenue suffers when allocating too much to lower-rate (i.e. price sensitive) customers; and the resources allocated to full-rate (i.e. time sensitive) customers become "spoiled" when the orders do not arrive as expected. The random nature of order characteristics (including arrival pattern) makes allocation decisions very hard. This paper proposed a simulation approach that focuses on the development of a robust conceptual framework for simulation modeling and analysis of this important class of problems. Computer models are being developed with ARENA and used to verify and validate the concepts and mechanisms developed. Limited simulation experiments were conducted to compare allocation strategies in terms of defined performance measures, and produced the results consistent with intuition and practice.

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


Pedestrian detection and tracking at crossroads This paper presents a system that can perform pedestrian detection and tracking using vision-based techniques. A very important issue in the field of intelligent transportation system is to prevent pedestrians from being hit by vehicles. Recently, a great number of vision-based techniques have been proposed for this purpose. In this paper, we propose a vision-based method, which combines the use of a pedestrian model as well as the walking rhythm of pedestrians to detect and track walking pedestrians. Through integrating some spatial and temporal information grabbed by a vision system, we are able to develop a reliable system that can be used to prevent traffic accidents happened at crossroads. In addition, the proposed system can deal with the occlusion problem. Experimental results obtained by executing some real world cases have demonstrated that the proposed system is indeed superb.

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

pedestrian detection and tracking
intelligent transportation system
pedestrian model
walking rhythm


A CAD/CAE integrated framework for structural design optimization using sequential approximation optimization An improved sequential approximation optimization algorithm is developed. An estimate of width of Gaussian kernel functions for surrogate models is proposed. An adaptive sampling strategy is developed based on the improved surrogate model. A framework that integrates CAD, CAE and SAO tools is developed.

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

sequential approximation optimization
integrated framework
surrogate model
adaptive sampling strategy
structural design


Full Discretisations for Nonlinear Evolutionary Inequalities Based on Stiffly Accurate RungeKutta and hp-Finite Element Methods The convergence of full discretisations by implicit RungeKutta and nonconforming Galerkin methods applied to nonlinear evolutionary inequalities is studied. The scope of applications includes differential inclusions governed by a nonlinear operator that is monotone and fulfills a certain growth condition. A basic assumption on the considered class of stiffly accurate RungeKutta time discretisations is a stability criterion which is in particular satisfied by the RadauIIA and LobattoIIIC methods. In order to allow nonconforming hp-finite element approximations of unilateral constraints, set convergence of convex subsets in the sense of GlowinskiMoscoStummel is utilised. An appropriate formulation of the fully discrete variational inequality is deduced on the basis of a characteristic example of use, a Signorini-type initial-boundary value problem. Under hypotheses close to the existence theory of nonlinear first-order evolutionary equations and inequalities involving a monotone main part, a convergence result for the piecewise constant in time interpolant is established.

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

nonlinear evolutionary inequalities
nonconforming galerkin methods
stability
convergence


Training RBF network to tolerate single node fault In this paper, an objective function for training a radial basis function (RBF) network to handle single node open fault is presented. Based on the definition of this objective function, we propose a training method in which the computational complexity is the same as that of the least mean squares (LMS) method. Simulation results indicate that our method could greatly improve the fault tolerance of RBF networks, as compared with the one trained by LMS method. Moreover, even if the tuning parameter is misspecified, the performance deviation is not significant.

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


LinKernighan heuristic adaptations for the generalized traveling salesman problem The LinKernighan heuristic is known to be one of the most successful heuristics for the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). It has also proven its efficiency in application to some other problems. In this paper, we discuss possible adaptations of TSP heuristics for the generalized traveling salesman problem (GTSP) and focus on the case of the LinKernighan algorithm. At first, we provide an easy-to-understand description of the original LinKernighan heuristic. Then we propose several adaptations, both trivial and complicated. Finally, we conduct a fair competition between all the variations of the LinKernighan adaptation and some other GTSP heuristics. It appears that our adaptation of the LinKernighan algorithm for the GTSP reproduces the success of the original heuristic. Different variations of our adaptation outperform all other heuristics in a wide range of trade-offs between solution quality and running time, making LinKernighan the state-of-the-art GTSP local search.

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

heuristics
linkernighan
generalized traveling salesman problem


Modeling and control compensation of nonlinear friction using adaptive fuzzy systems System performance in terms of control accuracy and stability is usually negatively affected by friction occurrences in mechanical systems. Thus, it is important to model the friction properly so that it can be used in controller design. This paper employs adaptive fuzzy systems to approximate unknown nonlinear friction functions, and applies the estimation of friction in proportional-derivative (PD) control law to enhance the control performance. On the basis of Lyapunov stability theory, a bound of tracking errors of the closed-loop control system is derived. Techniques proposed in this paper have been applied to a typical motion control system for simulation studies. The results obtained demonstrate that our proposed method in this paper has good potential in controlling many mechanical systems with unknown nonlinear friction.

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

adaptive fuzzy system
stability analysis
feed-forward control compensation


A decidable two-sorted quantified fragment of set theory with ordered pairs and some undecidable extensions In this paper we address the decision problem for a two-sorted fragment of set theory with restricted quantification which extends the language studied in [4] with pair-related quantifiers and constructs. We also show that the decision problem for our language has a nondeterministic exponential-time complexity. However, in the restricted case of formulae whose quantifier prefixes have length bounded by a constant, the decision problem becomes NP-complete. In spite of such restriction, several useful set-theoretic constructs, mostly related to maps, are still expressible. We also argue that our restricted language has applications to knowledge representation, with particular reference to metamodeling issues. Finally, we compare our proposed language with two similar languages in terms of their expressivity and present some undecidable extensions of it, involving any of the domain, range, image, and map composition operators.

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


All-IP wireless sensor networks for real-time patient monitoring The all-IP WSN architecture based on gateway trees is proposed. The proposed routing algorithm is achieved in the link layer without route discovery. A mobile node does not need to be configured with a care-of address. A physician can monitor the vital signs of a patient at any time and at any places.

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 B I O O 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

all-ip wireless sensor network
real time


Web designers and web users: Influence of the ergonomic quality of the web site on the information search Despite rapid growth in the number of web sites, there is still a significant number of ergonomic problems which hinder web users. Many studies focus on analysing cognitive processes and difficulties experienced by web users, but very few are interested in web designers difficulties or in comparing their respective activities. Towards this end, the two experimental studies presented in this article compare the strategies developed both by professional web designers and (novice vs. experienced) web users while searching for information on web sites of varying ergonomic quality. More precisely, we investigated whether web designers can effectively use their own strategies as web users when designing web sites. We presented a comparison of novice web users, experienced web users and professional web designers searching behavior and cognitive load when using ergonomic and non-ergonomic web sites. In addition, we asked web designers to predict the strategy used by novice web users. Based on the results obtained in the two experiments, we conclude that web designers are not able to predict strategies of novice users and do not behave like novice users. Consequently, ways for supporting web designers in developing a user-centered activity are necessary, and certain ways are suggested at the end of this article.

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

web designers
web users
information search
cognitive load


3D solid fin model construction from 2D shapes using non-uniform rational B-spline surfaces A computer aided design (CAD) tool has been specifically developed for rapid and easy design of solid models for surfboard and sailboard fins. This tool simplifies the lofting of advanced fin cross-sectional foils, in this instance based upon the family of standard airfoil series set by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), whilst retaining a basic parametric description at each cross-section. This paper describes the way in which non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) surfaces are created from 2D profile splines, and are then used to generate 3D geometrical surfaces of the fins, which can be imported directly into commercial software packages for finite element stress analysis (FEA) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Pressure distributions, lift and drag forces are determined from a CFD flow analysis for various fins designed with this tool, and the results suggest that the incorporation of advanced foils into surfboard fins could indeed lead to increased performance over fins foiled using current standard techniques.

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

computer aided design (cad)
naca airfoils
computational fluid dynamics (cfd)


Using interspike intervals to quantify noise effects on spike trains in temperature encoding neurons This paper examines how noise interacts with the non-linear dynamical mechanisms of neuronal stimulus. We study the spike trains generated by a minimal Hodgkin-Huxley type model of a cold receptor neuron. The distributions of interspike intervals(ISIs) of purely deterministic simulations exhibit considerable differences compared to the noisy ones. We quantify the effect of noise using ISI return plots and the ISI-distance recently proposed by Kreuz etal. (J Neurosci Meth, 165:151161, 2007). It is shown that the spike trains of a cold receptor neuron are more strongly affected by noise for low temperatures than for high temperatures. This trend is also observed in both regimes of cold receptors: tonic firing(which occurs for low and high temperatures) and bursting (which occurs for intermediate temperatures).

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

neural spike train
isi-distance
cold receptor model


ON THE MONADIC SECOND-ORDER TRANSDUCTION HIERARCHY We compare classes of finite relational structures via monadic second-order transductions. More precisely, we study the preorder where we set C subset of K if, and only if, there exists a transduction tau such that C subset of tau(K). If we only consider classes of incidence structures we can completely describe the resulting hierarchy. It is linear of order type omega+3. Each level can be characterised in terms of a suitable variant of tree-width. Canonical representatives of the various levels are: the class of all trees of height n, for each n is an element of N, of all paths, of all trees, and of all grids.

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

monadic second-order logic
guarded second-order logic
hypergraphs


Oscillation of first-order impulsive differential equations with advanced argument For first-order linear impulsive differential equations with an advanced argument, various criteria for oscillation and nonoscillation of solutions of these equations are found, Some results of which improve the known theorems. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

impulsive advanced equation
positive solution


Flood control of urban stormwater conduit systems using the finite element method This paper presents a method of controlling the water levels in a conduit system by employing optimal control theory and the finite element method. A shallow-water equation is employed for the analysis of flow behaviour. Optimal control theory is utilized to obtain a control value for the target state value. The Sakawa-Shindo method is employed as a minimization technique. For the computational storage requirements, the time domain decomposition method is applied. The Crank-Nicolson method is used for temporal discretization. In addition to a method for optimally controlling water level, a method is presented for determining transversality conditions, the terminal condition of the Lagrange multiplier. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

optimal control theory
finite element method
time domain decomposition method

terminal condition for lagrange multiplier


Interactive HDR lighting of dynamic participating media In this paper, we present two optimization techniques to light and render volumetric data of inhomogeneous participating media. Both are independent of the lighting model selected. We use an implementation of the ray marching algorithm to approximate the Radiance Transfer Equation. The system can calculate single scattering in time-varying isotropic participating media with the incident field being modeled as a high dynamic range (HDR) environment map. We can use dynamic lighting (with certain restrictions) and free camera movement without using any precomputations while achieving interactive frame rates.

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

high dynamic range
participating media
lighting


On computing all abductive explanations from a propositional horn theory Abduction is a fundamental mode of reasoning with applications in many areas of AI and Computer Science. The computation of abductive explanations is an important computational problem, which is at the core of early systems such as the ATMS and Clause Management Systems and is intimately related to prime implicate generation in propositional logic. Many algorithms have been devised for computing some abductive explanation, and the complexity of the problem has been well studied. However, little attention has been paid to the problem of computing multiple explanations, and in particular all explanations for an abductive query. We fill this gap and consider the computation of all explanations of an abductive query from a propositional Horn theory, or of a polynomial subset of them. Our study pays particular attention to the form of the query, ranging from a literal to a compound formula, to whether explanations are based on a set of abducible literals and to the representation of the Horn theory, either by a Horn conjunctive normal form (CNF) or model-based in terms of its characteristic models. For these combinations, we present either tractability results in terms of polynomial total-time algorithms, intractability results in terms of nonexistence of such algorithms (unless P = NP), or semi-tractability results in terms of solvability in quasi-polynomial time, established by polynomial-time equivalence to the problem of dualizing a monotone CNF expression. Our results complement previous results in the literature, and refute a longstanding conjecture by Selman and Levesque. They elucidate the complexity of generating all abductive explanations and shed light on related problems such as generating sets of restricted prime implicates of a Horn theory. The algorithms for tractable cases can be readily applied for generating a polynomial subset of explanations in polynomial time.

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

algorithms
theory
abduction
propositional logic
polynomial totaltime
computation
prime implicates
tractability

horn theories
enumeration algorithms
dualization problem
model-based reasoning
characteristic set
np-hardness


Fuzzy methods for case-based recommendation and decision support The paper proposes two case-based methods for recommending decisions to users on the basis of information stored in a database. In both approaches, fuzzy sets and related (approximate) reasoning techniques are used for modeling user preferences and decision principles in a flexible manner. The first approach, case-based decision making, can principally be seen as a case-based counterpart to classical decision principles well-known from statistical decision theory. The second approach, called case-based elicitation, combines aspects from flexible querying of databases and case-based prediction. Roughly, imagine a user who aims at choosing an optimal alternative among a given set of options. The preferences with respect to these alternatives are formalized in terms of flexible constraints, the expression of which refers to cases stored in a database. As both types of decision support might provide useful tools for recommender systems, we also place the methods in a broader context and discuss the role of fuzzy set theory in some related fields.

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

recommender systems
fuzzy sets
approximate reasoning
decision making

case-based reasoning
nearest neighbor estimation


Design and implementation of decentralised supervisory control for manufacturing system automation Supervisory control theory, which was first proposed by Ramadge and Wonahm, is a well-suited control theory for the control of complex systems such as semiconductor manufacturing systems, automobile manufacturing systems, and chemical processes because these are better modelled by discrete event models than by differential or difference equation models at higher levels of abstraction. Moreover, decentralised supervisory control is an efficient method for large complex systems according to the divide-and-conquer principle. This article presents a solution and a design procedure of supervisory control problem for the case of decentralised control. We apply the proposed design procedure to an experimental miniature computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) system. This article presents the design of fourteen modular supervisors and one high-level supervisor to control the experimental miniature CIM system. These supervisors are controllable, non-blocking, and non-conflicting. After the verification of the supervisors by simulation, the collision avoidance supervisors for automated guided vehicle system have been implemented to demonstrate their efficacy.

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

decentralised control
supervisory control theory

discrete event systems
manufacturing automation


Weighted bootstrap for neural model selection This article proposes a weighted bootstrap procedure, which is an efficient bootstrap technique for neural model selection. Our primary interest in reducing computer effort is to not resample (in the original bootstrap procedure) uniformly from the original sample, but to modify this distribution in order to obtain variance reduction. The performance of the weighted bootstrap is demonstrated on two artificial data sets and one real dataset. Experimental results show that the weighted bootstrap procedure permits an approximately 2 to 1 reduction in replication size.

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

bayesian bootstrap
bayesian bootstrap clones
weighted bootstrap


Are test cases needed? Replicated comparison between exploratory and test-case-based software testing Manual software testing is a widely practiced verification and validation method that is unlikely to fade away despite the advances in test automation. In the domain of manual testing, many practitioners advocate exploratory testing (ET), i.e., creative, experience-based testing without predesigned test cases, and they claim that it is more efficient than testing with detailed test cases. This paper reports a replicated experiment comparing effectiveness, efficiency, and perceived differences between ET and test-case-based testing (TCT) using 51 students as subjects, who performed manual functional testing on the jEdit text editor. Our results confirm the findings of the original study: 1) there is no difference in the defect detection effectiveness between ET and TCT, 2) ET is more efficient by requiring less design effort, and 3) TCT produces more false-positive defect reports than ET. Based on the small differences in the experimental design, we also put forward a hypothesis that the effectiveness of the TCT approach would suffer more than ET from time pressure. We also found that both approaches had distinctive issues: in TCT, the problems were related to correct abstraction levels of test cases, and the problems in ET were related to test design and logging of the test execution and results. Finally, we recognize that TCT has other benefits over ET in managing and controlling testing in large organizations.

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

software testing
manual testing
test cases
exploratory testing
experiment
effectiveness
efficiency


Reducing false positives in intrusion detection systems A post-processing filter is proposed to reduce false positives in network-based intrusion detection systems. The filter comprises three components, each one of which is based upon statistical properties of the input alert set. Special characteristics of alerts corresponding to true attacks are exploited. These alerts may be observed in batches, which contain similarities in the source or destination IPs, or they may produce abnormalities in the distribution of alerts of the same signature. False alerts can be recognized by the frequency with which their signature triggers false positives. The filter architecture and design are discussed. Evaluation results performed using the DARPA 1999 dataset indicate that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the number and percentage of false positives produced by Snort (Roesch, 1999). Our filter limited false positives by a percentage up to 75%.

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

intrusion detection systems
filter
snort


slotted stream tapping Video on Demand VOD is a multimedia service which allows a remote user to select and then view video at his convenience at any time he wants. Required bandwidth and latency time, defined as a user maximum waiting time, are usually among the most critical issues in VoD systems. Previous works in the field may be classified within two categories of protocols; namely reactive and proactive. Proactive protocols broadcast video regardless of the number of participating viewers. Reactive protocols, however, broadcast any given video upon the request by at least one client. While the former save bandwidth at high workloads, the later save bandwidth at low workloads. In this paper, we propose a rather hybrid solution, termed Slotted Stream Tapping SST broadcasting protocol, which operates as a reactive protocol at low workloads and as a proactive one at high workloads. We start with a description of our proposed protocol and then provide an exact analytical study of its keys parameters and performance measures. We show that under all different workloads, our SST protocols requires indeed less bandwidth than even the optimal Stream Tapping reactive protocol, performs much better than many well known proactive protocols and assures at high workloads a very reasonable performance with respect to the optimal proactive protocol; namely the Harmonic Broadcasting protocol, yet very easy to implement.

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

reactive protocol
proactive protocol
broadcasting
stream tapping


Variable lighting face recognition using discrete wavelet transform This paper presents a new discrete wavelet transform (DWT) based illumination normalization approach for face recognition under varying lighting conditions. Our method consists of three steps. Firstly, DWT-based denoising technique is employed to detect the illumination discontinuities in the detail subbands. And the detail coefficients are updated with using the obtained discontinuity information. Secondly, a smooth version of the input image is obtained by applying the inverse DWT on the updated wavelet coefficients. Finally, multi-scale reflectance model is presented to extract the illumination invariant features. The merit of the proposed method is it can preserve the illumination discontinuities when smoothing image. Thus it can reduce the halo artifacts in the normalized images. Moreover, only one parameter involved and the parameter selection process is simple and computationally fast. Experiments are carried out upon the Yale B and CMU PIE face databases, and the results demonstrate the proposed method can achieve satisfactory recognition rates under varying illumination conditions.

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

discrete wavelet transform
face recognition

illumination invariant extraction
illumination compensation


Quantitative analysis of the Italian National Scientific Qualification We analyze the results of the first Italian National Scientific Qualification. Overall, less than half of the applications were successful. We study the correlation between qualification and bibliometric indicators of applicants. Significant differences exist among scientific disciplines.

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

asn
research evaluation
bibliometrics
italy


a mas decision support tool for water-right markets We present a MAS decision support tool, as an open and regulated virtual organization, that uses intelligent agents to manage a flexible water-right market. The application goal of this tool is to be used as a simulator to assist in decision-taking processes for policy makers. The simulator focuses on demands and, in particular, on the type of regulatory (in terms of norms selection and agents behaviour), and market mechanisms that foster an efficient use of water while also trying to prevent conflicts among parties. Technically, it contributes with a testbed to explore policy-simulation alternatives under an agreement-technology perspective, thus promoting agreements fulfillment.

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

decision support systems
mas simulation
mas applications
e-market
e-institutions


A cost effective fault-tolerant scheme for RAIDs The rapid progress in mass storage technology has made it possible for designers to implement large data storage systems for a variety of applications. One of the efficient ways to build large storage systems is to use RAIDs as basic storage modules. In general,,the data can be recovered in RAIDs only when one error occurs. But in large RAIDs systems, the,fault probability will increase when the number of disks increases, and the use of disks with big storage capacity will cause the recovering time to prolong, thus the probability of the second disk's fault will increase. Therefore, it is necessary to develop methods to recover data when two or more errors have occurred. In this paper, a fault tolerant scheme is proposed based on extended Reed-Solomon code, a. recovery procedure is designed to correct up to two. errors which is implemented by software and hardware together, and the scheme is verified by computer simulation. In this scheme, only two redundant disks are used to recover up to two disks' fault. The encoding and decoding methods, and the implementation based on software and hardware, are described. The application of the scheme in software RAIDs that are built in cluster computers are also described. Compared with the existing methods such as EVENODD and DH, the proposed scheme has distinct improvement in implementation and redundancy.

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

raid
fault-toletant technology
data availability


On the structure of continuous uninorms Uninorms were introduced by Yager and Rybalov [13] as a generalization of triangular norms and conorms. We ask about properties of increasing, associative, continuous binary operation U in the unit interval with the neutral element e is an element of (0, 1). If operation U is continuous, then e = 0 or e = 1. So, we consider operations which are continuous in the open unit square. As a result every associative, increasing binary operation with the neutral element e is an element of (0, 1), which is continuous in the open unit square may be given in (0, 1)(2) or (0,1)(2) as an ordinal sum of a semigroup and a group. This group is isomorphic to the positive real numbers with multiplication. As a corollary we obtain the results of Hu, Li [7].

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

continuity
t-norms
t-conorms
ordinal sum of semigroups


Evaluation of the degenerate scale for BIE in plane elasticity and antiplane elasticity by using conformal mapping For a better understanding for the formulation of the degenerate scale problem by using the complex variable, preliminary knowledge is introduced. Formulation for the degenerate scale problem is based on the direct usage of the complex variable and the conformal mapping. After using the conformal mapping, the vanishing displacement condition is assumed on the boundary of unit circle. The complex potentials on the mapping plane are sought in a form of superposition of the principal part and the complementary part. The principal part of the complex potentials is given beforehand, and the complementary part plays a role for compensating the displacement along the boundary from the principal part. After using the appropriate complex potentials, the boundary displacement becomes one term with the form of g(R)?c (g(R) a function of R), where R denotes a length parameter. By letting the vanishing displacement on the boundary, or g(R)?c=0, the degenerate scale R is obtained. For four cases, the elliptic contour, the triangle contour, the square contour and the ellipse-like contour, the degenerate scales are evaluated in a closed form. For the case of antiplane elasticity, similar degenerate scale problems are solved.

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

boundary integral equation
conformal mapping technique
closed form solution
plane elasticity: antiplane elasticity


opportunities for private and secure machine learning While the interplay of Artificial Intelligence and Security covers a wide variety of topics, the 2008 AISec program largely focuses on use of artificial intelligence techniques to aid with traditional security concerns: intrusion detection, security policy management, malware detection, etc. This talk will address the flip side of the issue: Using machine learning on sensitive data. The privacy-preserving data mining literature provides numerous solutions to machine learning on sensitive data, while protecting the data from disclosure. Unfortunately, privacy has yet to provide the economic incentives for commercial development of this technology. This talk will survey this work (and open challenges) in light of problems that may have greater incentives for development: collaborative machine learning by parties that do not fully trust each other. Opportunities include job brokerage (assigning jobs in ways that most efficiently utilize resources of competing companies), supply chain optimization, inter-agency data sharing, etc. Techniques similar to those in privacy-preserving data mining can enable such applications without the degree of information disclosure and trust currently required, providing a business model for development of the technology (and as a by-product, reducing the number of trusted systems that need to be secured.)

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

artificial intelligence
security
privacy


On a transfer theorem for the P not equal NP conjecture A model of computation is defined over the algebraic numbers and over number fields. This model is non-uniform, and the cost of operations depends on the height of the operands and on the degree of the extension of the rational defined by those operands. A transfer theorem for the P not equal NP Conjecture is proved, namely: P not equal NP in this model over the real algebraic numbers if and only if P not equal NP in the classical setting. (C) 2001 Academic Press.

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

np-completeness
computability over a ring


Strategies for the adaptation of ERP systems Given the significant impact of implementing enterprise resources planning (ERP), managerial adaptation of ERP offers a useful method of further maximizing the benefits of this system. This study employs a technology adaptation perspective and case research methodology to examine three dimensions of alignment between organization and ERP system. Four medium size electronic component manufacturers are selected, which are typical of domestic companies that could afford and implement ERP. From the findings of the case study, this research attempts to build a theoretical model of prescribing management strategies for implementing ERP. The findings indicated that the requirement for successful alignment between the system and organization falls into two categories. The alignment issues in the two categories help explain the working of process integration in the organization and also how to reduce the alignment gap. To summarize, this study proposes an adaptation framework containing a set of propositions and hypotheses to delineate the relevant research issues.

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

manufacturing resource planning
manufacturing systems
product technology


Genetic algorithm to estimate interaction parameters of multicomponent systems for liquid-liquid equilibria Genetic algorithm (GA) has been utilized to estimate the binary interaction parameters from multicomponent liquid-liquid equilibria data; and its applicability for NRTL and UNIQUAC thermodynamic models has been demonstrated. These models being highly non-convex can have several local extrema. GA leads to globally optimum values; it does not require any initial guess but only the upper and lower bounds of the interaction parameters. It has also been shown to perform better than inside variance estimation method (IVEM) and the techniques used in ASPEN, DECHEMA. The objective function and the root-mean-square deviation for these four techniques have been compared for methanol-diphenylamine-cyclohexane system using UNIQUAC. The applicability of GA to six ternary, two quaternary and two quinary systems has also been undertaken. Invariably the rmsd values for GA are better than reported in the literature. (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

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

liquid-liquid equilibria
activity coefficient
parameter estimation


a procedure of adaptive kernel combination with kernel-target alignment for object classification In order to achieve good performance in object classification problems, it is necessary to combine information from various image features. Because the large margin classifiers are constructed based on similarity measures between samples called kernels, finding appropriate feature combinations boils down to designing good kernels among a set of candidates, for example, positive mixtures of predetermined base kernels. There are a couple of ways to determine the mixing weights of multiple kernels: (a) uniform weights, (b) a brute force search over a validation set and (c) multiple kernel learning (MKL). MKL is theoretically and technically very attractive, because it learns the kernel weights and the classifier simultaneously based on the margin criterion. However, we often observe that the support vector machine (SVM) with the average kernel works at least as good as MKL. In this paper, we propose as an alternative, a two-step approach: at first, the kernel weights are determined by optimizing the kernel-target alignment score and then the combined kernel is used by the standard SVM with a single kernel. The experimental results with the VOC 2008 data set [8] show that our simple procedure outperforms the average kernel and MKL.

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

multiple kernel learning
object classification


Redefining thalassemia as a hypercoagulable state As the life expectancy of ?-thalassemia patients has markedly improved over the last decade, several new complications are being recognized. The presence of a high incidence of thromboembolic events, mainly in thalassemia intermedia patients, has led to the identification of a hypercoagulable state in thalassemia. In this review, the molecular and cellular mechanisms leading to hypercoagulability in thalassemia are highlighted, and the current clinical experience is summarized. Recommendations for thrombosis prophylaxis are also discussed.

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 B 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


mobile learning for just-in-time applications This document will attempt to evaluate the potential of a mobile learning and training system for use in a Just-In-Time (JIT) environment. The literature review covers existing mobile communications technology and learning systems, an overview of JIT training, and the characteristics of a JIT environment are covered before investigating a framework for implementing a JIT mobile learning system (JITML) using existing mobile learning and educational theories. Finally, the design challenges and further research and design of JITML are discussed.

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

mobile-learning (m-learning)
just-in-time training
education
socio-technical system


Sox8 and Sertoli-cell Function OX8 is a transcription factor that belongs to the SoxE group of high mobility group (HMG) superfamily of genes. As Sox8 is widely expressed during development, and has male-specific expression at the critical period for sex determination, it was initially hypothesized that its inactivation would result in abnormal sex determination. Though knockout males showed normal sexual development, they did however display a progressive seminiferous tubule failure and infertility. Young males could occasionally sire litters, though fecundity decreased with age in parallel with an increase in the degeneration and disorganization of the seminiferous epithelium. SOX8 is a product of the adult Sertoli cells. Sox8 knockout males showed a progressive dysregulation of the spermatogenic cycle, including sloughing of spermatocytes and round spermatids into the epididymis and spermiation failure. Sperm that did reach the epididymis showed an age-dependent decrease in both total and progressive motility in addition to overall number. We conclude that SOX8 transactivated genes have key roles in adult Sertoli-cell function and its elimination results in progressive male infertility

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


Maximal repetitions in strings The cornerstone of any algorithm computing all repetitions in strings of length n in O(n) time is the fact that the number of maximal repetitions (runs) is linear. Therefore, the most important part of the analysis of the running time of such algorithms is counting the number of runs. Kolpakov and Kucherov [R. Kolpakov, G. Kucherov, Finding maximal repetitions in a word in linear time, in: Proc. of FOCS'99, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1999, pp. 596-604] proved it to be cn but could not provide any value for c. Recently, Rytter [W. Rytter, The number of runs in a string: Improved analysis of the linear upper bound, in: B. Durand, W. Thomas (Eds.), Proc. of STACS'06, in: Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci., vol. 3884, Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2006, pp. 184195] proved that c <= 5. His analysis has been improved by Puglisi et al. to obtain 3.48 and by Rytter to 3.44 (both submitted). The conjecture of Kolpakov and Kucherov, supported by computations, is that c = 1. Here we improve dramatically the previous results by proving that c <= 1.6 and show how it could be improved by computer verification down to 1. 18 or less. While the conjecture may be very difficult to prove, we believe that our work provides a good approximation for all practical purposes. For the stronger result concerning the linearity of the sum of exponents, we give the first explicit bound: 5.6n. Kolpakov and Kucherov did not have any and Rytter considered "unsatisfactory" the bound that could be deduced from his proof. Our bound could be as well improved by computer verification down to 2.9n. or less. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

repetitions in strings
runs
maximal repetitions
sum of exponents

combinatorics on words
maximal periodicities


Children construct novel word meaning ad-hoc based on known words: Computational model of shape and material biases Taking the stance that two well-known word learning biases (shape and material bias) are formed through learning (learned bias account, LBA), we illustrated a concrete computational mechanism with ad-hoc meaning substitution (AMS) hypothesis, and verified it by two computer simulations. AMS represents that when given a novel word and a corresponding instance, children create novel word meaning by using the known word meaning and the instance as an ad-hoc template. The AMS function enables fast mapping and vocabulary spurt. To describe the AMS process computationally, we introduced word distributional prototype (WDP), which is the explicit representation of word meaning with an inductive learning function. Simulation 1 revealed that when a network with WDP and AMS was given a biased vocabulary reflecting young children, it demonstrated shape, material, and overgeneralized shape biases. This result suggested that a triad of word meaning induction, ad-hoc meaning substitution, and early biased vocabulary is essential for the emergence of biases. Simulation 2 introduced the notion of maturity that denoted a degree of learning convergence for each word meaning, and then the network showed neither shape nor material bias during an early small vocabulary. This result indicated that the period at which each bias emerges is decided by maturity. Though AMS consists of simpler and valider mechanisms than those proposed in previous studies, it could reproduce behavior of shape and material biases and explain their emergence process clearly. These results suggest that phenomena concerning shape and material biases are explicable with a simple ad-hoc learning instead of meta-learning among LBA or innate language-specific ones.

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

connectionist model
prototype model
cognitive process
shape bias
overgeneralized shape bias


Fuzzy segmentation of video shots using hybrid color spaces and motion information Video segmentation can be defined as the process of partitioning video into spatio-temporal objects that are homogeneous in some feature space, with the choice of features being very important to the success of the segmentation process. Fuzzy segmentation is a semi-automatic region-growing segmentation algorithm that assigns to each element in an image a grade of membership in an object. In this paper, we propose an extension of the multi-object fuzzy segmentation algorithm to segment pre-acquired color video shots. The color features are selected from channels belonging to different color models using two different heuristics: one that uses the correlations between the color channels to maximize the amount of information used in the segmentation process, and one that chooses the color channels based on the separation of the clusters formed by the seed spels for all possible color spaces. Motion information is also incorporated into the segmentation process by making use of dense optical flow maps. We performed experiments on synthetic videos, with and without noise, as well as on some real videos. The experiments show promising results, with the segmentations of real videos produced using hybrid color spaces being more accurate than the ones produced using three other color models. We also show that our method compares favorably to a state-of-the art video segmentation algorithm.

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

fuzzy segmentation
video segmentation
hybrid color spaces
optical flow


Recursive identification of induction motor parameters The use of linear parameter estimation techniques to determine the rotor resistance, self-inductance of the rotor winding, as well as the stator leakage inductance of a three-phase induction machine is investigated in this paper. In order to obtain results with maximum accuracy, some specific procedures to reduce the effect of the operating conditions on the quality of the estimates are investigated. For analytical identification, a model is developed from the steady-state equations of induction motor dynamics. The identification procedure, based on a simple algorithm derived from least squares techniques, uses only the information of stator currents and voltages and rotor angular speed as inputoutput data. The computer simulation as well as the experimental results are used to anchor the main conclusions issued from this study and to demonstrate the practical use of the identification method.

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

linear parameter estimation
induction motor
least squares techniques


Application of artificial bee colony algorithm on surface wave data Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is applied to invert surface wave data. The ABC algorithm is benchmarked on noise-free, noisy and observed data. The performance of ABC is compared to those of the standard GA and the basic PSO. Results show ABC can be effectively used to invert surface wave dispersion data.

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

genetic algorithm
particle swarm optimization
surface waves
dispersion curves


Plasma etching of copper films at low temperature Experimental verification of a low temperature (<20C), reactive plasma etch process for copper films is presented. The plasma etch process, proposed previously from a thermochemical analysis of the CuClH system, is executed in two steps. In the first step, copper films are exposed to a Cl2 plasma to preferentially form CuCl2, which is volatilized as Cu3Cl3 by exposure to a H2 plasma in the second step. Plasma etching of thin films (9nm) and thicker films (400nm) of copper has been performed; chemical composition of sample surfaces before and after etching has been determined by X-ray photoelectron and flame atomic absorption spectroscopies.

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Fuzzy Real Options for Risky Project Evaluation Using Least Squares Monte-Carlo Simulation A numerical technique for evaluating risky projects with fuzzy real options is developed. Fuzzy real options are based on hybrid variables that represent the market risk of a project, which is derived from data, and the private risk, which is usually estimated by experts. These hybrid variables can be evaluated using an extension of Least Squares Monte-Carlo simulation that produces numerical evaluations of fuzzy real options based on the generation and backward induction of sample paths. A major advantage of this methodology is its ability to determine values regardless of whether or not an analytic solution exists. To illustrate, two fuzzy real options models are evaluated using the proposed algorithm: one, on brownfields, for comparison with analytic outputs for fuzzy real options; the other, on oil development, for comparison to the results of the Integrated Valuation Procedure (IVP), another algorithm to assess private risk. The results indicate that the generalized Least Squares Monte-Carlo simulation produces similar results to the analytic valuation of fuzzy real options, when this is possible. Moreover, the use of fuzzy real options can overcome the private risk problem without invoking IVP, which is preferable because expert linguistic estimates are easier to use in a fuzzy environment.

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

fuzzy real options
private risk
project evaluation

least squares monte carlo simulation (lsm)


Low Complexity Logarithmic and Anti-Logarithmic Converters for Hybrid Number System Processors and DSP Applications This paper presents an efficient approach for logarithmic and anti-logarithmic converters which can be used in the arithmetic unit of hybrid number system processors and logarithm/exponent function generators in DSP applications. By employing the novel quasi-symmetrical difference method with only the simple shift-add logic and the look-up table, the proposed approach can reduce the hardware area and improve the conversion speed significantly while achieve similar accuracy compared with the previous methods. The implementation results in both FPGA and 0.18-mu m CMOS technology are also presented and discussed.

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

logarithmic converter
anti-logarithmic converter
look-up table (lut)-based computation
digital signal processing (dsp)


A heuristic index for selecting similar categories in multiple correspondence analysis applied to living donor kidney transplantation This work introduces a heuristic index (the tolerance distance) to define the closeness of two variable categories in multiple correspondence analysis (MCA). This index is a weighted Euclidean distance where weightings are based on the importance of each MCA axis, and variable categories were considered to be associated when their distances were below the tolerance distance. This approach was applied to a renal transplantation data. The analysed variables were allograft survival and 13 of its putative predictors. A bootstrap-based stability analysis was employed for assessing result reliability. The method identified previously detected associations within the database, such as that between race of donors and recipients, and that between HLA match and Cyclosporine use. A hierarchical clustering algorithm was also applied to the same data, allowing for interpretations similar to those based on MCA. The defined tolerance distance could thus be used as an index of closeness in MCA, hence decreasing the subjectivity of interpreting MCA results.

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

cn immunosuppression protocolwithout cyclosporine a

cy immunosuppression protocolwith cyclosporine a


Stability of parallel algorithms to evaluate Chebyshev series In this paper: we present rounding error bounds of recent parallel versions of Forsythe's and Clenshaw's algorithms for the evaluation of finite series uf Chebyshev polynomials of the first and second kind. The backward errors are studied by using the matrix formulation of the algorithm, whereas the forward error is also Studied by means of a more direct approach that permits us to obtain sharper bounds. The bounds show all almost stable behavior as ill the sequential algorithms. This fact is: illustrated with several numerical tests. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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