The Heavy Luggage Metric In this paper we consider a new time metric called the Heavy Luggage Metric. This metric models the behavior of a traveller in a city wishing to walk as little as possible, may be carrying some very heavy luggage. A transportation network allows the traveller to move between any pair of stations at cost zero, while walking has a cost proportional to the length of the walked path. We propose efficient algorithms for computing the closest and farthest Voronoi Diagrams for a set of points with respect to this metric.

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


Decentralized control design for switched fuzzy large-scale systems with H? H ? performance This paper investigates the H? H ? control design problem for a class of switched discrete-time TakagiSugeno (TS) fuzzy large-scale systems. The considered fuzzy large-scale systems consist of several interconnected subsystems with different switching modes and each switching mode is described by TS fuzzy models. In addition, there exists the asynchronous switching between the system switching modes and the controller switching modes. By using parallel distributed compensation design method, a state feedback decentralized controller with H? H ? performance is developed. The sufficient conditions of ensuring the switched control system stability are proposed based on the theory of Lyapunov function and average-dwell time methods, which are formulated in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). An illustrated numerical example is provided to show the effectiveness of the obtained theoretical 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

switched fuzzy large-scale systems
fuzzy decentralized control design
average dwell time method


On f-wise arc forwarding index and wavelength allocations in faulty all-optical hypercubes Motivated by the wavelength division multiplexing in all-optical networks, we consider the problem of finding an optimal (with respect to the least possible number of wavelengths) set of f+1 internally node disjoint dipaths connecting all pairs of distinct nodes in the binary r-dimensional hypercube, where 0less than or equal tof<r. This system of dipaths constitutes a routing protocol that remains functional in the presence of up to f faults (of nodes and/or links). The problem of constructing such protocols for general networks was mentioned in [1]. We compute precise values of f-wise arc forwarding indexes and give (describe dipaths and color them) nearly optimal all-to-all f-fault tolerant protocols for the hypercube network. Our results generalize corresponding results from [1,4,14].

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

all-optical networks
fault tolerant system
optical index


Routing based on delivery distributions in predictable disruption tolerant networks ? This article studies disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) where each node knows the probabilistic distribution of contacts with other nodes. It proposes a framework that allows one to formalize the behaviour of such a network. It generalizes extreme cases that have been studied before where (a) either nodes only know their contact frequency with each other or (b) they have a perfect knowledge of who meets who and when. This paper then gives an example of how this framework can be used; it shows how one can find a packet forwarding algorithm optimized to meet the delay/bandwidth consumption tradeoff: packets are duplicated so as to (statistically) guarantee a given delay or delivery probability, but not too much so as to reduce the bandwidth, energy, and memory consumption.

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

delivery guarantees
disruption tolerant networks (dtns)
bellmanford algorithm
mobility prediction


HERO: High-speed enhanced routing operation in Ethernet NICs for software routers Software/open routers, PCs (personal computers) running open-source OSs (operating systems) and equipped with Ethernet network interface cards (NICs), are receiving increasing attention in the research community, because they can offer multi-gigabit-per-second packet forwarding speed, performance comparable to those of low-to-medium end commercial routers. However, commercially available NICs lack programmability. Furthermore, the use of standard NICs implies that each packet crosses the bus twice, and is processed and routed in software by the OS, thus reducing forwarding performance. In this paper, we discuss the design and the implementation of an FPGA-based NIC that permits overcoming the performance bottleneck and the lack of flexibility of commercial NICs. Performance and limitations of the proposed approach are thoroughly discussed. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 routers
network interface cards


Novel architecture of feedforward second-order multibit Delta Sigma AD modulator This paper proposes novel feedforward architecture of the second-order multibit Delta Sigma AD modulator with single DAC-feedback topology. The Delta Sigma AD modulator realizes high resolution by oversampling and noise shaping techniques. However, its SNDR (Signal to Noise and Distortion Ratio) is limited by the dynamic range of the input signal and non-idealities of circuit building blocks, particularly by the harmonic distortion in amplifier circuits. A full feedforward Delta Sigma AD modulator structure has the signal transfer function of unity under ideal circumstances, which means that the signal swings through the loop filter become smaller compared with a feedbacked Delta Sigma AD modulator. Therefore, the harmonic distortion generated inside the loop filter can be significantly reduced in the feedforward structure because the effect of non-idealities in amplifiers can be suppressed when signal swing is small. Moreover, the reduction of the internal signal swings also relaxes output swing requirements for amplifiers with low supply voltage. However, in conventional feedforward Delta Sigma AD modulator, an analog adder is needed before quantizer, and especially in a multibit modulator, an additional amplifier is necessary to realize the summation of feedforward signals, which leads to extra chip area and power dissipation. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture of a feedforward Delta Sigma AD modulator which realizes the summation of feedforward signals without additional amplifier. The proposed architecture is functionally equivalent to the conventional one but with smaller chip area and lower power dissipation. We conducted MATLAB and SPICE simulations to validate the proposed architecture and modulator circuits.

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


Parallel and systolic solution of normalized explicit approximate inverse preconditioning A new class of normalized approximate inverse matrix techniques, based on the concept of sparse normalized approximate factorization procedures are introduced for solving sparse linear systems derived from the finite difference discretization of partial differential equations. Normalized explicit preconditioned conjugate gradient type methods in conjunction with normalized approximate inverse matrix techniques are presented for the efficient solution of sparse linear systems. Theoretical results on the rate of convergence of the normalized explicit preconditioned conjugate gradient scheme and estimates of the required computational work are presented. Application of the new proposed methods on two dimensional initial/boundary value problems is discussed and numerical results are given. The parallel and systolic implementation of the dominant computational part is also investigated.

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

normalized approximate factorization
preconditioning

finite difference systems
normalized approximate inverses
rate of convergence and complexity
parallel iterative methods
parallel computations


Evolving A-type artificial neural networks We investigate Turings notion of an A-type artificial neural network. We study a refinement of Turings original idea, motivated by work of Teuscher, Bull, Preen and Copeland. Our A-types can process binary data by accepting and outputting sequences of binary vectors; hence we can associate a function to an A-type, and we say the A-type represents the function. There are two modes of data processing: clamped and sequential. We describe an evolutionary algorithm, involving graph-theoretic manipulations of A-types, which searches for A-types representing a given function. The algorithm uses both mutation and crossover operators. We implemented the algorithm and applied it to three benchmark tasks. We found that the algorithm performed much better than a random search. For two out of the three tasks, the algorithm with crossover performed better than a mutation-only version.

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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 neural network
evolutionary algorithm


Distributed estimation in diffusion networks using affine least-squares combiners ? We propose a diffusion scheme for adaptive networks, where each node obtains an estimate of a common unknown parameter vector by combining a local estimate with the combined estimates received from neighboring nodes. The combination weights are adapted in order to minimize the mean-square error of the network employing a local least-squares (LS) cost function. This adaptive diffusion network with LS combiners (ADN-LS) is analyzed, deriving expressions for its network mean-square deviation that characterize the convergence and steady-state performance of the algorithm. Experiments carried out in stationary and tracking scenarios show that our proposal outperforms a state-of-art scheme for adapting the weights of diffusion networks (ACW algorithm from [10]), both during convergence and in tracking situations. Despite its good convergence behavior, our proposal may present a slightly worse steady-state performance in stationary or slowly-changing scenarios with respect to ACW due to the error inherent to the least-squares adaptation with sliding window. Therefore, to take advantage of these different behaviors, we also propose a hybrid scheme based on a convex combination of the ADN-LS and ACW algorithms.

B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 filters
adaptive diffusion networks
combination of filters
least-squares
statistical analysis


Assessing web services of emerging economies in an Eastern country Taiwan's e-government Taiwans e-governments are well developed in the northern and southern regions. Physical location and population size hinder regional e-governments development. The emerging economies should focus on the website design of their e-governments.

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

e-government
non-profit organization
internet
web content analysis
dea


Complexity of Gaussian-radial-basis networks approximating smooth functions Complexity of Gaussian-radial-basis-function networks, with varying widths, is investigated. Upper bounds on rates of decrease of approximation errors with increasing number of hidden units are derived. Bounds are in terms of norms IneaStiring smoothness (Bessel and Sobolev norms) multiplied by explicitly given functions a(r, d) of the number of variables d and degree of smoothness r. Estimates are proven using suitable integral representations in the form of networks with continua of hidden units computing scaled Gaussians and translated Bessel potentials. Consequences on tractability of approximation by Gaussian-radial-basis function networks are discussed. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

bessel and sobolev norms
tractability of approximation

gaussian-radial-basis-function networks
rates of approximation
model complexity
variation norms


Elicitation synergy of extracting conceptual tags and hierarchies in textual document This study develops an ontology building process for extracting conceptual tags and hierarchies in textual corpus. Though humans have been creating ontologies for many years, efficient ontology building processes in textual corpus are extremely ad hoc. Several issues have identified including how to recognize terminology in textual document, name concept tags in terminologies, and derive conceptual hierarchies among concepts. The proposed approach is extraction technique combinations to produce ontology prototype for editors. The empirical feedback indicates that elicitation synergy is productive during the early stages of building. Additionally, this elicitation synergy is especially useful for ontology editors who lack reference models of a working domain and who encounter textual corpus as major knowledge sources.

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

ontology engineering
concept extraction
cognition extraction


OpenMP task scheduling strategies for multicore NUMA systems The recent addition of task parallelism to the OpenMP shared memory API allows programmers to express concurrency at a high level of abstraction and places the burden of scheduling parallel execution on the OpenMP run-time system. Efficient scheduling of tasks on modern multi-socket multicore shared memory systems requires careful consideration of an increasingly complex memory hierarchy, including shared caches and non-uniform memory access (NUMA) characteristics. In order to evaluate scheduling strategies, we extended the open source Qthreads threading library to implement different scheduler designs, accepting OpenMP programs through the ROSE compiler. Our comprehensive performance study of diverse OpenMP task-parallel benchmarks compares seven different task-parallel run-time scheduler implementations on an Intel Nehalem multi-socket multicore system: our proposed hierarchical work-stealing scheduler, a per-core work-stealing scheduler, a centralized scheduler, and LIFO and FIFO versions of the Qthreads round-robin scheduler. In addition, we compare our results against the Intel and GNU OpenMP implementations. Our hierarchical scheduling strategy leverages different scheduling methods at different levels of the hierarchy. By allowing one thread to steal work on behalf of all of the threads within a single chip that share a cache, the scheduler limits the number of costly remote steals. For cores on the same chip, a shared LIFO queue allows exploitation of cache locality between sibling tasks as well as between a parent task and its newly created child tasks. In the performance evaluation, our Qthreads hierarchical scheduler is competitive on all benchmarks tested. On five of the seven benchmarks, it demonstrates speedup and absolute performance superior to both the Intel and GNU OpenMP run-time systems. Our run-time also demonstrates similar performance benefits on AMD Magny Cours and SGI Altix systems, enabling several benchmarks to successfully scale to 192 CPUs of an SGI Altix.

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

task parallelism
scheduling
multicore
openmp


Graphical lasso quadratic discriminant function and its application to character recognition Multivariate Gaussian distribution is a popular assumption in many pattern recognition tasks. The quadratic discriminant function (QDF) is an effective classification approach based on this assumption. An improved algorithm, called modified QDF (or MQDF in short) has achieved great success and is widely recognized as the state-of-the-art method in character recognition. However, because both of the two approaches estimate the mean and covariance by the maximum-likelihood estimation (MLE), they often lead to the loss of the classification accuracy when the number of the training samples is small. To attack this problem, in this paper, we engage the graphical lasso method to estimate the covariance and propose a new classification method called the graphical lasso quadratic discriminant function (GLQDF). By exploiting a coordinate descent procedure for the lasso, GLQDF can estimate the covariance matrix (and its inverse) more precisely. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can perform better than the competitive methods on two artificial and nine real datasets (including both benchmark digit and Chinese character data).

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

graphical lasso
quadratic discriminant function
character recognition


Social-Based Algorithm (SBA) This paper proposes a new approach by combining the Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) and socio-political process based Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA). This approach tries to capture several people involved in community development characteristic. People live in different type of communities: Monarchy, Republic, Autocracy and Multinational. Leadership styles are different in each community. Research work has been undertaken to deal with curse of dimensionality and to improve the convergence speed and accuracy of the basic ICA and EA algorithms. The proposed algorithm has been compared with some well-known heuristic search algorithms. The obtained results confirm the high performance of the proposed algorithm in solving various benchmark functions specially in high dimensional problem. Simulation results were reported and the SBA indeed has established superiority over the basic algorithms with respect to set of functions considered and it can be employed to solve other global optimization problems, easily. The results show the efficiency and capabilities of the new hybrid algorithm in finding the optimum. Amazingly, its performance is about 85% better than other algorithms such as EA and ICA. The performance achieved is quite satisfactory and promising for all test functions.

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

evolutionary algorithm
imperialist competitive algorithm


Code-coupling strategy for efficient development of computer software in multiscale and multiphysics nonlinear evolution problems in computational mechanics In this work we seek to provide an efficient approach to development of software computational platform for the currently very active research domain of multiphysics and multiscale analysis in fully nonlinear setting. The typical problem to be solved is nonlinear evolution problem, with different scales in space and time. We show here that a successful solution to such a problem requires gathering the sound theoretical formulation, the most appropriate discrete approximation and the efficient numerical implementation. We show in particular that the most efficient numerical implementation is obtained by reusing the existing codes, in order to accelerate the code development and validation. The key element that makes such an approach possible is the Component Template Library (CTL), presented in this work. We show that the CTL allows to seamlessly merge the existing software products into a single code at compilation time, regardless of their heterogeneities in terms of programming language or redundancy in use of local variables. A couple of illustrative problems of fluidstructure interaction and multiscale nonlinear analysis are presented in order to confirm the advantage of the proposed approach.

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

multiscale
multiphysics
nonlinear evolution problem

software development
code coupling
monolithic code at linkage time


Spectral efficiency comparison between OFDM/OQAM- and OFDM-based CR networks The future wireless communication is expected to be able to improve the efficiency of spectrum usage. To solve the challenge of spectrum shortage, an innovative opportunistic spectrum access strategy, called cognitive radio (CR) has been proposed. In the concept of CR, secondary users or CR users, are allowed to transmit and receive date by detecting the portions of spectra where/when primary users are inactive provided that secondary transmissions cause no harmful interference to the licensed systems. Conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has also been suggested as a physical layer candidate for CR system. In this paper, another potential candidate for CR, OFDM/offset quadrature amplitude modulation (OQAM) is introduced and compared with cyclic prefix based-OFDM (CP-OFDM) and raised cosine windowed-OFDM (RC-OFDM) in CR context, in which including spectral efficiency comparison (SEC) for uncoded transmission and coded transmission. SEC is investigated by balancing the tradeoff between the interference level caused by CR user to licensed user (LU) and the throughput of CR user. Simulated results of SEC for different multicarrier systems are interpreted by theoretically analyzing the out-of-band radiation of their prototype pulses shaping. Both theoretic analysis and experimental results can show that OFDM/OQAM is a more natural candidate than CP-OFDM and RC-OFDM for CR networks application. Copyright (C) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

cognitive radio
ofdm
spectral efficiency


Modification of junction flows by altering the section shapes of the cylinders Through visualization and measurement on the cylinder-plate junction flow, we show the horseshoe vortices can be significantly modified by altering the section shape of the cylinder. Both smoke-wire and Laser-Induced-Fluorescence (LIF) are employed to visualize the vortex structures. Laser Doppler velocimeter is used to measure the velocity field in the symmetry plane upstream of the cylinder. Electrical pressure-scanning valve is applied to acquire the pressure on the plate. It is found that, the sharper the frontal shape of the cylinder, the closer the vortex shedding position and the primary horseshoe vortex location to the cylinder. We quantitatively show the variation of the scale and strength of the primary horseshoe vortex, as well as the maximum wall shear stress, when the section shape of the cylinder is varied. The reduced streamwise adverse pressure gradient explains why the horseshoe vortices are significantly suppressed when the frontal shape of the cylinder becomes sharper. At last, we present a swept thin cylinder installed in front of the primary cylinder can be used to suppress the horseshoe vortices, which is greatly effective and easy to implement.

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


Global decision-making system with dynamically generated clusters New approach to the organization of dispersed decision system structure was proposed. The local knowledge bases, which are in a friendship relation, are grouped. The groups of local knowledge bases will be generated in a dynamic way. Process of elimination inconsistencies in knowledge are implemented in groups. Global decisions are made by using one of the methods for analysis of conflicts.

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

decision-making system
global decision
relation of friendship
relation of conflict
coalition


Video games from the perspective of adults with autism spectrum disorder Video game preferences of 58 adults with autism spectrum disorder were examined. Game play motives included stress relief, immersion, time use, and social connection. Participants reported enjoying achievement, creativity, story, and game graphics. Addiction and negative social interactions were identified as negative game aspects. Many participants disliked game violence, sexual content, and game design problems.

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

asd autism spectrum disorder
td typically developing
m mean
sd standard deviation


Asymptotic stability of linear difference equations of advanced type Necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained for the asymptotic stability of difference equations of advanced type of the form x(n)-ax(n+1)+bx(n+k)=0, n=0, 1,.. where a and b are arbitrary real numbers and k>1. For a=1, we establish an analogue of a result by Levin and May.

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

asymptotic stability
advanced type
difference equations


Reliable heterogeneous applications This paper explores the notion of computational resiliency to provide reliability in heterogeneous distributed applications. This notion provides both software fault-tolerance and the ability to tolerate information-warfare attacks. This technology seeks to strengthen a military mission, rather than to protect its network infrastructure using static defense measures such as network security, intrusion sensors, and firewalls. Even if a failure or attack is successful and never detected, it should be possible to continue information operations and achieve mission objectives. Computational resiliency involves the dynamic use of replicated software structures, guided by mission policy, to achieve reliable operation. However, it goes further to regenerate, automatically, replication in response to a failure or attack, allowing the level of system reliability to be restored and maintained. This paper examines a prototype concurrent programming technology to support computational resiliency in a heterogeneous distributed computing environment. The performance. of the technology is explored through two example applications.

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

computational resiliency
network security

distributed system
fault tolerance
information warfare
load balancing


A statistical approach for selecting discriminative features of spatial regions of interest We propose a statistical approach based on a supervised framework for reducing the dimensionality of the feature space when characterizing and classifying spatial Regions of Interest (ROIs). Our approach employs the statistical techniques of Bootstrapping simulation, Bayesian Inference and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), to select the most informative features according to their discriminative power across distinct classes of data. This reduces the dimensionality of the initial feature space and also improves the classification of the ROIs, since features providing irrelevant information with respect to class membership are discarded. We also introduce a weighted Euclidean Distance designed to effectively classify the ROIs. We evaluate the proposed technique using experiments that involve synthetic spatial regions and real ROIs extracted from medical images. We demonstrate its effectiveness in classification experiments (using established classifiers) and in similarity searches. We also test its scalability on large datasets. Our approach is comparable with or better than other major competitors. We achieve an accuracy of 87% on classifying ROIs in brain images. These results are an improvement of previously reported classification experiments, and show the effect of reducing the dimensionality of the initial feature space.

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

region data
discriminative feature selection
dimensionality reduction
medical image analysis


TCP flow control technique for an interworking interface: hardware implementation Current TCP flow control depends on packet losses to find the workload that a network can support. A variety of situations, including lossy wireless networks, asymmetric networks and web traffic workload, violates many of the assumptions made by TCP, causing degraded end-to-end performances. To improve the performance of TCP over heterogeneous networks (Ethernet and ATM interconnection), we propose a new technique, which we call VegasSnoop+, based on Vegas and Snoop protocols. Two modified service elements take part on the VegasSnoop+ technique. First, Vegas service element manages the connection parameters to achieve better throughput. Second, Snoop service element isolates the Ethernet senders from the characteristics of the ATM link. The objective in this paper is to win from advantages of Vegas and Snoop protocols, as well as to search an interconnection interface for networks interoperability. Actually, the development of two new integrated circuits (the BCM5680 (switch) and the BCM5401 (PHY)) orientate researchers to implement, at higher layer of the OSI model, flow control mechanisms to ensure reliability. VegasSnoop+ is an implementation of TCP, which gives in this way a solution for traffic management and congestion control improving good throughput with more reliability.

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

congestion control
tcp
interconnection interface
hardware implementation


Programs for kriging and sequential Gaussian simulation with locally varying anisotropy using non-Euclidean distances ? Geological deposits display nonlinear features such as veins, channels or folds that result in complex spatial anisotropies that are difficult to model with currently available geostatistical techniques. The methodology presented in this paper for incorporating locally varying anisotropy in kriging or sequential Gaussian simulation is based on modifying how locations in space are related. Normally, the straight line path is used; however, when nonlinear features exist the appropriate path between locations follows along the features. The Dijkstra algorithm is used to determine the shortest path/distance between locations and a conventional covariance or variogram function is used. This nonlinear path is a non-Euclidean distance metric and positive definiteness of the resulting kriging system of equations is not guaranteed. Multidimensional scaling (landmark isometric mapping) is used to ensure positive definiteness. In addition to the variogram, the only parameters required for the implementation of kriging or sequential Gaussian simulation with locally varying anisotropy are (1) the local orientation and magnitude of anisotropy and (2) the number of dimensions required for multidimensional scaling. This paper presents a suite of programs that can be used to krige or simulate practically sized geostatistical models with locally varying anisotropy. The programs kt3d_LVA, SGS_LVA and gamv_LVA are provided.

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

geostatistics resource estimation stationarity isomap


Robust H-infinity output feedback control for uncertain complex delayed dynamical networks In this paper, the robust H-infinity control problem of uncertain complex delayed dynamical networks with non-identical nodes is investigated. The dynamic output feedback controllers are designed to ensure robustly global stability and a smaller prescribed H-infinity disturbance attenuation level for the resulting closed-loop systems. The controller design problem can be solved by a cone complementary linearization algorithm involving linear matrix inequality (LMI) conditions. A numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

dynamic output feedback
cone complementary linearization

complex networks
h-infinity control
linear matrix inequalities


Analytical array polynomial method for linear antenna arrays with phase-only control A new analytical synthesis technique is developed for the phase-only control of linear antenna arrays and is based on the Schelkunoff's unit circle. The array factor is formulated as an array polynomial in the complex z-plane and as a product of corresponding subpolynomials such that their roots are located on the unit circle. A constraint is derived such that the expansion of the subpolynomials yields current excitations with unity magnitudes. In general, the constraint of phase-only control forces some element excitations to be zero for an arbitrary number of array elements. The subpolynomial with the largest degree is used to synthesize the main beam characteristics. The null steering for interference suppression is obtained by using only one subpolynomial to steer only one null. The results verify the developed analytical solution to synthesize the prescribed patterns using the phase shifters of the linear antenna arrays.

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


space-division repetition-based broadcasting protocol for reliable beaconing in vanets In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), beaconing (i.e. periodic transmissions of beacons) is one of the most challenging issues, which is mainly used to advertise the presence of a car to its neighbor cars. Based on the proximity awareness achieved through the beaconing, safety applications can quickly detect dangerous road situations and help drivers avoid them. Recently, repetition-based protocols have been proposed to meet the requirements of timeliness and reliability for the beaconing. However, since most of existing protocols employ CSMA as their underlying medium access control strategy, they are vulnerable to interference from hidden nodes. In this paper, we propose a new broadcasting protocol called Space-Division Repetition-based Broadcasting protocol (SDRB) in order to reduce interference caused by hidden nodes. In SDRB, the geographical area where vehicles are located is divided into smaller space divisions. Vehicles within difference space divisions are allowed to transmit their beacons at different points of time in order to cope with interference from hidden nodes. From the ns-2 simulation results, we verified that SDRB provides more reliable broadcasting service due to its capability of removing such interference as compared to CSMA.

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


an empirical study on the usability of an information navigation aid The Computer Aided Information Navigation (CAIN) project provides a method of adaptive navigation support that aims to increase the World Wide Web's value as a pedagogical tool. To examine whether the system's approach improves comprehension under specific conditions, an experiment compared CAIN with conventional web tools on three measures of performance: comprehension scores, task completion times and user satisfaction. Results revealed that comprehension scores were 30\% greater with CAIN than with the conventional tools and indicated that task completion times can also be reduced without compromising user satisfaction.

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


Fusion-based register allocation The register allocation phase of a compiler maps live ranges of a program to registers. If there are more candidates than there are physical registers, the register allocator must spill a live range (the home location is in memory) or split a live range (the live range occupies multiple locations). One of the challenges for a register allocator is to deal with spilling and splitting together. Fusion-based register allocation uses the structure of the program to make splitting and spilling decisions, with the goal to move overhead operations to infrequently executed parts of a program. The basic idea of fusion-based register allocation is to build up the interference graph. Starting with some base region (e.g., a basic block, a loop), the register allocator adds basic blocks to the region and incrementally builds the interference graph. When there are more live ranges than registers, the register allocator selects live ranges to spit; these live ranges are split along the edge that was most recently added to the region. This article describes fusion-based register allocation in detail and compares it with other approaches to register allocation. For programs from the SPEC92 suite, fusion-based register allocation can improve the execution time (of optimized programs, for the MIPS architecture) by up to 8.4% over Chaitin-style register allocation.

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

languages
measurement
performance evaluation


Learning in a higher-order simple perceptron We find a sufficient condition for the convergence of the learning process of the higher order simple perceptron. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


A secure broadcasting scheme to provide availability, reliability and authentication for wireless sensor networks Reliability and security of broadcasting is critical in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Since reliability and security compete for the same resources, we are interested in jointly solving for error control coding (to achieve reliability) and integrity for a broadcast scenario. We assume Byzantine attacks in which the adversary can compromise nodes and then drop (or modify) the legitimate packets or inject its own packets. For reliable and efficient multihop broadcasting, it is critical to reduce the energy consumption and latency. To prevent the adversary from consuming the scarce network resources by injecting bogus packets, each receiver node should make sure that packets it receives are authentic and it filters out malicious packets immediately. We build our authentication scheme, on top of a reliable and energy efficient broadcasting protocol called Collaborative Rateless Broadcast (CRBcast) to improve efficiency and reliability. On contrary to the previous schemes, our scheme is resilient with respect to Byzantine adversary as well as routing and flooding attacks and protocol exploits. Moreover, we compared our scheme with the previously proposed broadcast authentication schemes and showed that our scheme outperforms them in terms of efficiency and data availability. This is a crucial improvement over the previous schemes that ensure availability by flooding, introducing very large communication overhead and latency.

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

broadcast authentication
security
reliability
sensor networks


Compressive analysis applied to radiation symmetry evaluation and optimization for laser-driven inertial confinement fusion Having as symmetric a radiation drive as possible is very important for uniformly imploding the centrally located capsule in laser-driven Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF). Usually, intensive computation is required to analyze and optimize the radiation symmetry in ICF. In this paper, a novel compressive analysis approach is presented to efficiently evaluate and optimize the radiation symmetry. The core idea includes (1) the radiation flux on the capsule for symmetry evaluation is transformed into frequency domain and weighted to obtain a sparse and orthogonal representation, (2) the sparse coefficients reflecting the radiation flux distribution are accurately and efficiently recovered from far less samples on the frequency domain, i.e. [0,2?)[0,?] [ 0 , 2 ? ) [ 0 , ? ] through ? ? 1-norm optimization, which greatly improves the efficiency of radiation symmetry evaluation and optimization for the design of physics experiments in the laser-driven ICF, and (3) the sparsity level to recover the sparse coefficients is adaptively determined with a one-dimensional optimization procedure for accurate and efficient compressive analysis. Finally, two examples on current laser facilities are utilized to demonstrate the evaluation accuracy, robustness and computation efficiency of compressive analysis approach.

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

compressive analysis
radiation symmetry
optimization
inertial confinement fusion


managing mobility and adaptation in upcoming 802.21 enabled devices One emerging characteristic of electronic devices is the increasing number of connectivity interfaces (aka NICs1) towards the outside world. That obviously translates in a set of technical issues related to their management in order to provide seamless connectivity when the connections move from one interface to another. The IEEE 802.21 is a recent effort of IEEE that aims at providing a general interface for the management of NICs. In this paper we discuss how the upcoming standard may be effectively exploited in a mobile context in order to hide network heterogeneity to end users. To accomplish this task, we propose a centralized element called Mobility Manager interfacing with the 802.21 sublayer and responsible for the application of connectivity policies. Based on a real testbed, we showed that the new standard and the MM can be used to improve network performance experienced by the end user. Moreover we showed how the MM can interact with adaptive applications in order to improve further the range of usability of real-time applications.

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

media independent handover
seamless communications
mobility management


Adaptive evolving strategy for dextrous robotic manipulation A robot task can be represented as a set of trajectories conformed by a sequence of poses. In this way it is possible to teach a mobile robot to accomplish a manipulation task, and also to reproduce it. Nevertheless robot navigation may normally introduce inaccuracies in localization due to natural events as wheel-slides, causing a mismatch between the end-effector and the objects or tools the robot is supposed to interact with. We propose an algorithm for adapting manipulation trajectories for different locations. The adaptation is achieved by optimizing in position, orientation and energy consumption. The approach is built over the basis of Evolution Strategies, and only uses forward kinematics permitting to avoid all the inconveniences that inverse kinematics imply, as well as convergence problems in singular kinematic configurations. Manipulation paths generated with this algorithm can achieve optimal performance, sometimes even improving original path smoothness. Experimental results are presented to verify the algorithm.

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


Efficiency of boundary evaluation for a cellular model Feature modeling systems usually employ a boundary representation (b-rep) to store the shape information on a product. It has, however, been shown that a b-rep has a number of shortcomings, and that a cellular representation can be a valuable alternative. A cellular model stores additional shape information on features, including the feature faces that are not on the boundary of the product. Such information can be profitably used for several purposes. A major operation in every feature modeling system is boundary evaluation, which computes the geometric model of a product, i.e. either the b-rep or the cellular model, from the features that have been specified by the user. Since boundary evaluation has to be executed each time a feature is added, removed or modified, its efficiency is of paramount importance. In this paper, boundary evaluation for a cellular model is described in some detail. Its efficiency is compared to the efficiency of boundary evaluation for a b-rep, on the basis of both complexity analysis and performance measurements for the two types of evaluation. It turns out that boundary evaluation for a cellular model is, in fact, more efficient than for a b-rep, which makes cellular models even more attractive as an alternative to b-reps.

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

feature modeling
boundary representation
cellular model
boundary evaluation
efficiency
complexity analysis
performance measurements


Empirical analysis of factors affecting confirmation bias levels of software engineers Confirmation bias is defined as the tendency of people to seek evidence that verifies a hypothesis rather than seeking evidence to falsify it. Due to the confirmation bias, defects may be introduced in a software product during requirements analysis, design, implementation and/or testing phases. For instance, testers may exhibit confirmatory behavior in the form of a tendency to make the code run rather than employing a strategic approach to make it fail. As a result, most of the defects that have been introduced in the earlier phases of software development may be overlooked leading to an increase in software defect density. In this paper, we quantify confirmation bias levels in terms of a single derived metric. However, the main focus of this paper is the analysis of factors affecting confirmation bias levels of software engineers. Identification of these factors can guide project managers to circumvent negative effects of confirmation bias, as well as providing guidance for the recruitment and effective allocation of software engineers. In this empirical study, we observed low confirmation bias levels among participants with logical reasoning and hypothesis testing skills.

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


CFD studio: An educational software package for CFD analysis and design This paper presents the general characteristics of the educational user-friendly "CFD Studio" package designed for teaching fluid mechanics and heat transfer process, including conduction, coupled conduction/convection, natural and forced convection, external and internal flows. Therefore, general aspects of the three main modules-preprocessor, solver, and post-processor-are discussed aiming to show the generality of the tool. These modules are integrated in the application by a so-called ''numerical problem project" to guide the student through the steps to obtain the solution. (C) 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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


Allocative efficiency of technically inefficient production units We discuss how to measure allocative efficiency without presuming technical efficiency. This is relevant when it is easier to introduce reallocations than improvements of technical efficiency. We compare the approach to the traditional one of assuming technical efficiency before measuring allocative efficiency. In particular, we develop necessary and sufficient conditions in the technology to ensure consistent measures, we suggest alternative interpretations of the approaches, and we relate them to motivational and organizational change perspectives.

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

technical efficiency
allocative efficiency

homothetic technologies
organizational slack
organizational change strategies


Blind

Image

Quality

Assessment:

From

Natural

Scene

Statistics

to

Perceptual

Quality

Our

approach

to

blind

image

quality

assessment

(IQA)

is

based

on

the

hypothesis

that

natural

scenes

possess

certain

statistical

properties

which

are

altered

in

the

presence

of

distortion,

rendering

them

un-natural;

and

that

by

characterizing

this

un-naturalness

using

scene

statistics,

one

can

identify

the

distortion

afflicting

the

image

and

perform

no-reference

(NR)

IQA.

Based

on

this

theory,

we

propose

an

(NR)/blind

algorithm-the

Distortion

Identification-based

Image

Verity

and

INtegrity

Evaluation

(DIIVINE)

index-that

assesses

the

quality

of

a

distorted

image

without

need

for

a

reference

image.

DIIVINE

is

based

on

a

framework

involving

distortion

identification

followed

by

distortion-specific

quality

assessment.

DIIVINE

is

capable

of

assessing

the

quality

of

a

distorted

image

across

multiple

distortion

categories,

as

against

most

NR

IQA

algorithms

that

are

distortion-specific

in

nature.

DIIVINE

is

based

on

natural

scene

statistics

which

govern

the

behavior

of

natural

images.

In

this

paper,

we

detail

the

principles

underlying

DIIVINE,

the

statistical

features

extracted

and

their

relevance

to

perception

and

thoroughly

evaluate

the

algorithm

on

the

popular

LIVE

IQA

database.

Further,

we

compare

the

performance

of

DIIVINE

against

leading

full-reference

(FR)

IQA

algorithms

and

demonstrate

that

DIIVINE

is

statistically

superior

to

the

often

used

measure

of

peak

signal-to-noise

ratio

(PSNR)

and

statistically

equivalent

to

the

popular

structural

similarity

index

(SSIM).

A

software

release

of

DIIVINE

has

been

made

available

online:

for

public

use

and

evaluation.

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


Generalized T-splines and VMCR T-meshes The paper considers the extension of the T-spline approach to the Generalized B-splines (GB-splines), a relevant class of non-polynomial splines. The Generalized T-splines (GT-splines) are based both on the framework of classical polynomial T-splines and on the Trigonometric GT-splines (TGT-splines), a particular case of GT-splines. Our study of GT-splines introduces a class of T-meshes (named VMCR T-meshes) for which both the corresponding GT-splines and the corresponding polynomial T-splines are linearly independent. A practical characterization can be given for a sub-class of VMCR T-meshes, which we refer to as weakly dual-compatible T-meshes, which properly includes the class of dual-compatible (equivalently, analysis-suitable) T-meshes for an arbitrary (polynomial) order.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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-spline
t-mesh
gb-spline
analysis-suitable
dual-compatible
linear independence


the merl motion detector dataset Looking into the future of residential and office building Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) has been collecting motion sensor data from a network of over 200 sensors for a year. The data is the residual traces of year in the life of a research laboratory. It contains interesting spatio-temporal structure ranging all the way from the seconds of individuals walking down hallways, the minutes in lobbies chatting with colleagues, the hours of dozens of people attending talks and meetings, the days and weeks that drive the patterns of life, to the months and seasons with their ebb and flow of visiting employees. This document describes that dataset, which contains well over 30 million raw motion records, spanning a calendar year and two floors of our research laboratory, as well as calender, weather, and some intermediate analytic results. The dataset was originally released as part of the 2007 Workshop on Massive Datasets. The dataset can be obtained from http://www.merl.com/wmd.

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

sensor networks
tracking
visualization
architecture
data mining


Fusion of possibly biased location estimates using Gaussian mixture models A probabilistic framework for fusing location estimates, which may be biased and inconsistent, is presented. The proposed method, involving Gaussian mixture models (GMMs), utilizes prior information regarding the sensor bias, firstly, to reduce errors in the fused location estimate, and secondly, to produce a fused covariance matrix that better reflects the expected location error. Simulations are used to evaluate performance, relative to other techniques, such as the covariance union (CU) method. A passive geolocation application involving an airborne electronic support (ES) system is considered. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

bias
passive geolocation
electronic support

data fusion
multisensor systems
gaussian mixture model


On amplification in inchworm (TM) precision Mechanical amplification in inchworm(TM) piezoelectric linear motors is investigated. The motivation behind mechanical amplification is to increase the precision positioner's potential for speed through augmented step size. The inchworm(TM) motor traversing speed can be roughly the product of step size and operating frequency. The simultaneous maximization of both step size and operating frequency would be ideal. It is shown through the development of a set of design equations and finite element modeling and analysis that the simultaneous maximization of both step size and operating frequency cannot be accomplished for a lever amplifying frame. A trade-off exists between step size and operating frequency. While amplification increases a motor's step size, it introduces much uncertainty and complexity, reduces the stiffness of the motor and limits the potential for high frequency operation. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

inchworm (tm) motors
piezoelectric motors


Longest cycles in sparse random digraphs Long paths and cycles in sparse random graphs and digraphs were studied intensively in the 1980's. It was finally shown by Frieze in 1986 that the random graph with p = c/n has a cycle on at all but at most (1 + ?)ce?cn vertices with high probability, where ? = ? (c) 0 as c ?. This estimate on the number of uncovered vertices is essentially tight due to vertices of degree 1. However, for the random digraph no tight result was known and the best estimate was a factor of c/2 away from the corresponding lower bound. In this work we close this gap and show that the random digraph with p = c/n has a cycle containing all but (2 + ?)e?cn vertices w.h.p., where ? = ? (c) 0 as c ?. This is essentially tight since w.h.p. such a random digraph contains (2e?c ? o(1))n vertices with zero in-degree or out-degree. 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2013

O B O O O O O O O B O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 framework for GPU accelerated deformable object modeling We have developed a framework that uses multicore CPUs and GPUs found on personal computers to accelerate the computations needed for a class of deformable object modeling algorithms. In recent years there has been a growing interest in using deformable objects in computer applications such as animation, video games, garment CAD, and surgical simulation. Deformable object modeling is quite expensive computationally. However, since most of the related calculations can be parallelized, we have developed a framework that utilizes NVIDIA's CUDA technology to accelerate a set of deformable object modeling algorithms by transferring their core computations to the GPU. Our results show that frame rates can be improved more than 20 times using GPU compared with using a multicore CPU. In addition, we have developed a method called Local Shape Matching which is an extension to the Shape Matching method. Using this new method we have achieved fast and robust simulations whose implementations have good numerical stability.

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 I O O O O 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 B 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


changing characters' point of view in interactive storytelling Virtual characters are at the epicentre of Interactive Storytelling systems and in recent years multiple AI planning approaches have been described to specify their autonomous behaviour. This demonstrator provides an overview of our novel approach to the definition of virtual characters aimed at achieving a balance between character autonomy and global plot structure which proposes the notion of a character's Point of View. Additionally, the demonstrator offers the active spectator the ability to discover the story described from the perspective of a number of different characters. We present our fully-implemented Interactive Narrative based on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The system, which features a novel AI planning approach to story generation, can generate very different stories depending on the Point of View adopted and support dynamic modification of the story world which results in different story consequences.

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

virtual actors
narrative modelling
virtual reality


Video Watermarking Algorithm for H.264 Scalable Video Coding Because H. 264/SVC can meet the needs of different networks and user terminals, it has become more and more popular. In this paper, we focus on the spatial resolution scalability of H. 264/SVC and propose a blind video watermarking algorithm for the copyright protection of H. 264/SVC coded video. The watermark embedding occurs before the H. 264/SVC encoding, and only the original enhancement layer sequence is watermarked. However, because the watermark is embedded into the average matrix of each macro block, it can be detected in both the enhancement layer and base layer after downsampling, video encoding, and video decoding. The proposed algorithm is examined using JSVM, and experiment results show that is robust to H. 264/SVC coding and has little influence on video quality.

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


mapping regulations to industry-specific taxonomies For each industry, there exist many taxonomies that are intended for various applications. There are also multiple sources of regulations from different government agencies. Industry practitioners, unlike legal practitioners, are familiar with one or more industry-specific taxonomies but not necessarily regulatory organization systems. To help browsing of regulations by industry practitioners, we propose to map regulations to existing industry-specific taxonomies. A mapping from a single taxonomy to a single regulation is a trivial keyword matching task. From there, we examine techniques to map a single taxonomy to multiple regulations, as well as to map multiple taxonomies to a single regulation. Cosine similarity, Jaccard coefficient and market-basket analysis are tested to model the similarity metric between concepts from different taxonomies. Preliminary evaluations of the three metrics are performed. Examples from the building industry are drawn to illustrate the betterment of regulatory usage from the mapping between various taxonomies and regulations.

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

relatedness analysis
taxonomy interoperability
heterogeneous ontologies
regulation retrieval


Proteomics in Tumor Progression and Metastasis Abstract: With the ultimate goal of systematically identifying and characterizing proteins within an organism, the field of proteomics has generated much excitement in the past few years. Coupled with mass spectrometry, various quantitative and functional techniques are now available that allow for large-scale analyses of proteins implicated in cancer. New techniques are just now being applied to identifying the temporal changes in protein levels associated with tumor development. This review will focus on the use and promise of proteomic technologies as they apply to the study of tumor progression and metastasis.

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

tumor progression and metastasis
mass spectrometry

quantitative proteomics
functional proteomics
silac
icat
electrophoresis
abpp


On the checking of G-coherence of conditional probability bounds We illustrate an approach to uncertain knowledge based on lower conditional probability bounds. We exploit the coherence principle of de Finetti and a related notion of generalized coherence (g-coherence), which is equivalent to the "avoiding uniform loss" property introduced by Walley for lower and upper probabilities. Based on the additive structure of random gains, we define suitable notions of non relevant gains and of basic sets of variables. Exploiting them, the linear systems in our algorithms can work with reduced sets of variables and/or constraints. In this paper, we illustrate the notions of non relevant gain and of basic set by examining several cases of. imprecise assessments defined on families with three conditional events. We adopt 4 geometrical approach, obtaining some necessary and sufficient conditions for g-coherence. We also propose two algorithms which provide new strategies for reducing the number of constraints and for deciding g-coherence. In this way, we try to overcome the computational difficulties which arise when linear systems become intractable. Finally, we illustrate our methods by giving some examples.

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

lower conditional probability bounds
generalized coherence
algorithms
linear systems

reduced sets of variables and constraints


Evolutionary intelligent agents for e-commerce: Generic preference detection with feature analysis Product recommendation and preference tracking systems have been adopted extensively in e-commerce businesses. However, the heterogeneity of product attributes results in undesired impediment for an efficient yet personalized e-commerce product brokering. Amid the assortment of product attributes, there are some intrinsic generic attributes having significant relation to a customer's generic preference. This paper proposes a novel approach in the detection of generic product attributes through feature analysis. The objective is to provide an insight to the understanding of customers' generic preference. Furthermore, a genetic algorithm is used to find the suitable feature weight set, hence reducing the rate of misclassification. A prototype has been implemented and the experimental results are promising. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

generic preference
generic attributes
feature analysis
genetic algorithm


Substructure based approach to finite element model updating A substructure-based finite element model updating technique is proposed in this paper. A few eigenmodes of the independent substructures and their associated derivative matrices are assembled into a reduced eigenequation to recover the eigensolutions and eigensensitivities of the global structure. Consequently, only the concerned substructures and the reduced eigenequation are re-analyzed in the optimization process, thus reducing the computational load of the traditional model updating methods which perform on the global structure. Applications of the proposed substructure-based model updating to a frame structure and a practical bridge demonstrate that the present method is computationally effective and efficient.

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


Ultra-wideband (UWB) power divider with filtering response using shorted-end coupled lines and open/short-circuit slotlines A novel ultra-wideband (UWB) power divider with bandpass-filtering frequency response has been presented. The shorted-end coupled lines and the open/short-circuit slotlines are introduced to this presented power divider. An isolation resistor R is located across the slotline for improving the isolation between the output ports of the power divider. Based on even and odd mode analysis, an analytical model of the presented power divider structure has also been proposed. An UWB power divider with passband response has been designed, fabricated, and measured. The measured results verify the predicted attractive features. It can be seen that the presented UWB power divider can not only divide/combine the power of microwave signals, but also reject unwanted frequency signals to better regulate the UWB performance.

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

power divider
filtering response
slotline

ultra-wideband (uwb)
shorted-end coupled line


TAP-Binding Peptides Prediction by QSAR Modeling Based on Amino Acid Structural Information The transporter associated with antigen processing (TAP) is essential for peptide delivery from the cytosol into the lumen of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), where these peptides are loaded on a major histocompatibility complex (MHC) I molecules and form peptide-MHC complex. The peptide-MHC leaves the ER and displays their antigenic cargo on the cell surface to cytotoxic T cells. In this study, 89 physicochemical properties of amino acid were collected from AAIndex database, and used to characterize the peptides which were binding to TAP. Then, the stepwise regression (STR) was used to optimize the parameters which characterized the TAP binding peptides, and the multiple linear regression (MLR) was used to construct the quantitative structural activity relationship (QSAR) model based on optimized parameters. The quantitative models had good reliability and predictive ability: the Q(2) of "leave one out" validation is 0.676 and R-2 of test dataset is 0.722 respectively. Additionally, the standardized coefficients of the models could demonstrate the attributions for each position of epitope and determine which special amino acid is suitable at any position of the peptide. Therefore, the QSAR model constructed by STR-MLR has many advantages, such as, easier calculation and explanation, good performance, and definite physiochemical indication, which could be used to guide the design and modification of the TAP binding peptide.

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

transporter associated with antigen processing (tap)

quantitative structural activity relationship (qsar)


Giga-bit CMOS equalizers for high-speed data links Consumer electronics are experiencing an explosive growth in bandwidth requirements. This growth is driven by demand for fiber-to-the-home Internet connections, the increasing capabilities of in-home consumer devices as well as the demands of multimedia recording and playback in mobile devices. However, traditional copper channels and previous generations of optical fiber experience dispersive effects at data rates above 1 Gbps, leading to inter-symbol interference (ISI). This paper presents a finite impulse response filter-based feed forward equalizer (FFE) to reduce the effect of ISI on these channels. The efficacy is of the FFE is demonstrated by measuring the eye diagrams of a 10 Gbps signal transmitted through an optical fiber as well as a copper backplane with and without FFE compensation. The proposed FFEs successfully compensate ISI for both the optical and copper backplane links. All circuits are fabricated using a 0.18 mu m CMOS process.

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

backplane
cmos
feed forward equalizer
optical fiber


An efficient optimization scheme for WDM/TDM PON network planning With the growing popularity of bandwidth demanding services such as HDTV, VoD, and video conferencing applications, there is an increasing demand on broadband access. To meet this demand, the access networks are evolving from the traditional DSL (xDSL more recently) and cable techniques to a new generation of fiber-based access techniques. While EPONs and GPONs have been the most studied passive optical access networks (PONs), WDM-PON is now clearly seen as the next generation trend with an hybrid set of switching equipment. We propose here an original optimization scheme for the deployment of greenfield PON networks where we minimize the overall deployment cost. Given the geographical location of ONUs and their incoming/outgoing traffic demands, the newly proposed scheme optimizes the placement of splitters/AWGs in a PON and the link dimensioning in order to provision the overall demand. The optimization scheme proceeds in three phases. In the first phase, we generate several potential equipment hierarchies, where each equipment hierarchy is associated with an ONU partition such that a switching equipment is associated with each cluster, each ONU belongs to a single cluster, and the splitting ratio of the equipment corresponds to the number of ONUs in the cluster. In the second phase, for each equipment hierarchy, we make use of a column generation (CG) mathematical model to select the type and location of the switching equipment that leads to the minimum cost multi-stage equipment topology which accommodates all the traffic demand. The third phase selects the best hierarchy among all the generated and dimensioned hierarchies. The optimization model encompasses the particular cases where all switching equipment are either splitters and AWGs, and outputs the location of the switching equipment together with the dimensioning of the PON network. We performed numerical experiments on various data sets in order to evaluate the performance of the optimization model, and to analyze the type of equipment hierarchies which are generated depending on the traffic and the location of the ONUs. Crown Copyright (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

equipment location
network provisioning
equipment selection


Mining text and visual links to browse TV programs in a web-like way As the amount of recorded TV content is increasing rapidly, people need active and interactive browsing methods. In this paper, we use both text information from closed captions and visual information from video frames to generate links to enable users to easily explore not only the original video content but also augmented information from the Web. This solution especially shows its superiority when the video content cannot be fully represented by closed captions. A prototype system was implemented and some experiments were carried out to prove its effectiveness and efficiency.

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


self-adaptive multimodal-interruption interfaces This work explores the use of ambient displays in the context of interruption. A multimodal interface was created to communicate with users by using two ambient channels for interruption: heat and light. These ambient displays acted as external interruption generators designed to get users attention away from their current task; playing a game on a desktop computer. It was verified that the disruptiveness and effectiveness of interruptions varies with the interruption modality used to interrupt. The thermal modality produced a larger decrease in performance and disruptiveness on a task being interrupted than the visual modality. Our results set the initial point in providing the theory behind future self-adaptive multimodal-interruption interfaces that will employ users individual physiological responses to each interruption modality and dynamically select the modality based on effectiveness and performance metrics

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

physiological feedback
thermal displays
modalities of interruption
modalities of interruptions
multimodal-interruption interfaces
output modalities
multimodal interfaces
adaptive interfaces


Blind quantum computation We investigate the possibility of having someone carry out the work of executing a function for you, but without letting him learn anything about your input. Say Alice wants Bob to compute some known function f upon her input x, but wants to prevent Bob from learning anything about x. The situation arises for instance if client Alice has limited computational resources in comparison with mistrusted server Bob, or if x is an inherently mobile piece of data. Could there be a protocol whereby Bob is forced to compute f (x) blindly, i.e. without observing x? We provide such a blind computation protocol for the class of functions which admit an efficient procedure to generate random input-output pairs, e.g. factorization. The cheat-sensitive security achieved relies only upon quantum theory being true. The security analysis carried out assumes the eavesdropper performs individual attacks.

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

secure circuit evaluation
secure two-party computation
information hiding
information gain versus disturbance
quantum cryptography


a hybrid finite automaton for practical deep packet inspection Deterministic finite automata (DFAs) are widely used to perform regular expression matching in linear time. Several techniques have been proposed to compress DFAs in order to reduce memory requirements. Unfortunately, many real-world IDS regular expressions include complex terms that result in an exponential increase in number of DFA states. Since all recent proposals use an initial DFA as a starting-point, they cannot be used as comprehensive regular expression representations in an IDS. In this work we propose a hybrid automaton which addresses this issue by combining the benefits of deterministic and non-deterministic finite automata. We test our proposal on Snort rule-sets and we validate it on real traffic traces. Finally, we address and analyze the worst case behavior of our scheme and compare it to traditional ones.

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

deep packet inspection
dfa
regular expressions


Managing misspelled queries in IR applications Our work concerns the design of robust information retrieval environments that can successfully handle queries containing misspelled words. Our aim is to perform a comparative analysis of the efficacy of two possible strategies that can be adopted. A first strategy involves those approaches based on correcting the misspelled query, thus requiring the integration of linguistic information in the system. This solution has been studied from complementary standpoints, according to whether contextual information of a linguistic nature is integrated in the process or not, the former implying a higher degree of complexity. A second strategy involves the use of character n-grams as the basic indexing unit, which guarantees the robustness of the information retrieval process whilst at the same time eliminating the need for a specific query correction stage. This is a knowledge-light and language-independent solution which requires no linguistic information for its application. Both strategies have been subjected to experimental testing, with Spanish being used as the case in point. This is a language which, unlike English, has a great variety of morphological processes, making it particularly sensitive to spelling errors. The results obtained demonstrate that stemming-based approaches are highly sensitive to misspelled queries, particularly with short queries. However, such a negative impact can be effectively reduced by the use of correction mechanisms during querying, particularly in the case of context-based correction, since more classical approaches introduce too much noise when query length is increased. On the other hand, our n-gram based strategy shows a remarkable robustness, with average performance losses appreciably smaller than those for stemming.

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

misspelled queries
information retrieval

spelling correction
character n-grams
evaluation methodology


reflection, self-awareness and self-healing in openorb There is a growing interest in the area of self-healing systems. Self-healing does however impose considerable demands on system infrastructures---especially in terms of openness and support for reconfigurability. This paper proposes that the self-awareness inherent in reflective technologies lends itself well to the construction of self-healing systems. In particular, the paper examines the support provided by the Open ORB reflective middleware technology for the construction of this increasingly important class of system.

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

reflection support technologies paper systems middleware class reconfigurability

awareness infrastructure self-awareness self-healing


Nonlinear blind source separation by variational Bayesian learning Blind separation of sources from their linear mixtures is a well understood problem. However, if the mixtures are nonlinear, this problem becomes generally very difficult. This is because both the nonlinear mapping and the underlying sources must be learned from the data in a blind manner, and the problem is highly ill-posed without a suitable regularization. In our approach, multilayer perceptrons are used as nonlinear generative models for the data, and variational Bayesian (ensemble) learning is applied for finding the sources. The variational Bayesian technique automatically provides a reasonable regularization of the nonlinear blind separation problem. In this paper, we first consider a static nonlinear mixing model, with a successful application to real-world speech data compression. Then we discuss extraction of sources from nonlinear dynamic processes, and detection of abrupt changes in the process dynamics. In a difficult test problem with chaotic data, our approach clearly outperforms currently available nonlinear prediction and change detection techniques. The proposed methods are computationally demanding, but they can be applied to blind nonlinear problems of higher dimensions than other existing approaches.

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

independent component analysis
nonlinear dynamics


International Aerospace Information Network: international cooperation and resource sharing The identification, acquisition, and utilisation of scientific and technical information is of paramount importance to the efficiency of the research and development (R&D) process. With the advances in information technology and information management, increased international participation in the aerospace field, and the realities of scarce resources for every nation, the strategies and benefits for international cooperation and resource sharing are readily apparent. With this in mind, a Working Group was established in 1994 to examine the issues, strategies, and actions required to develop a mechanism for improving the access to, and use of aerospace and aerospace-related information by developing a self-sustaining, worldwide network of partner organisations committed to sharing their data and information resources. The Working Group decided that the Internet would be the most suitable Vehicle to provide such a mechanism and developed a prototype International Aerospace Information Network (IAIN) Web site, providing a catalogue of aerospace information sources from which information searches can be launched.

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

aerospace industry
information resources management
information retrieval
information systems


Analysis of keyword networks in MIS research and implications for predicting knowledge evolution New concepts and ideas build on older ones. This path dependence in knowledge evolution has promoted research to identify important knowledge elements, research trends, and opportunities by analyzing publication data. In our study, keyword networks formed from published academic articles were analyzed to examine how keywords are associated with each other and to identify important keywords and their change over time. Based on MIS publication data from 1999 to 2008, our analysis provided several notable findings. First, while the MIS field has changed rapidly, resulting in many new keywords, the connectivity among them is highly clustered. Second, the keyword networks show clear power-law distribution, which implies that the more popular a keyword, the more likely it is selected by new researchers and used in follow-on studies. In addition, a strong hierarchical structure is identified in the network. Third, the network-based perspective reveals interdisciplinary keywords which are different from popular ones and have the potential to lead research in the MIS field.

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

keyword network
scale-free network
network analysis
centrality
trend analysis


Improving Java performance and energy dissipation through efficient code caching Traditional Java code generation and instruction fetch path is not efficient, as Java binary code is typically written into the data cache first, and then is loaded into the instruction cache through the shared L2 cache or memory, which takes both time and energy. In this paper, we study three hardware-based code caching strategies, which attempt to write and read the dynamically generated Java code faster and more energy-efficiently. Our experimental results indicate that with proper architectural support, writing code directly into the instruction cache can improve the performance for a variety of Java applications by 9.6% on average, with up to 42.9%. Also, the average energy dissipation of these Java programs can be reduced by 6% with efficient code caching.

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


Sentimental equilibria with optimal control The ubiquitous phenomenon of marital dissolution in the West poses a major theoretical problem that is not well understood. The fact that most couples declare that they are committed to an enduring and happy relationship allows us to model their sentimental relationship as a simple optimal control problem. A state variable monitors the wellness of the relationship whose natural decay in time must be counteracted with effort - the control variable - according to a widely accepted principle in marital psychology. Equilibria are basic desirable solutions of this control problem. In this note key properties of equilibria - in particular, existence, dynamical instability and sensitivity analysis - are obtained for a class of decaying sentimental dynamics. An underlying mechanism combining the existence of an effort stress with the instability of the model may be identified as a main cause of distress for the couple relationship. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

marriage
divorce
couple disruption
equilibrium