An organizing framework for nursing Informatics research Because nursing informatics is a young specialty, perhaps it is not surprising that much of the research done to date has been problem-driven, as opposed to model-driven. Continuing to struggle with definitions, nursing informatics lacks a theoretical base on which to build its science. When models or theories have been used to guide research, they typically have been applied to a single, or to very few, studies. In this paper, I describe and evaluate several of the models that have been described in nursing informatics literature and then propose an organizing model that may be used as an overarching framework to guide research.

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


user-perceived quality-aware adaptive delivery of mpeg-4 content Many adaptive delivery mechanisms have been devised for streaming multimedia over best-effort IP networks. Most of these adaptive schemes do not consider the user's perception of quality when making adaptations. We propose that an optimum adaptation trajectory exists which indicates how encoding quality should be adapted (upgraded/downgraded) with respect to user perceived quality in response to network conditions. This optimum adaptation trajectory can be used with any transmission adaptation policy. We describe a system architecture that uses knowledge of user perceived quality to make adaptation decisions and give an example of how this knowledge can be used to complement the sender-based adaptation algorithm, LDA.

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

perception
multimedia
adaptation algorithm
quality


Toll-like Receptors in Multiple Sclerosis Mouse Experimental Models Certain pathogen molecules trigger innate immune responses and drive subsequent adaptive immune responses toward an antigen presented simultaneously. Such bacterial or viral molecules constitute pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) that bind to pattern-recognition receptors such as toll-like receptors (TLRs). Recently, endogenous molecules were identified that ligate the same receptors. The role of these receptors' response to complete Freund's adjuvant during initiation of CD4 T cell responses in EAE, the animal model for multiple sclerosis, is here discussed. Myeloid differentiation primary response gene 88 (MyD88) is necessary for the induction of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE), and it is required for the activation of myeloid dendritic cells and differentiation of T helper 17 cells. The role of individual TLR, in particular TLR3, TLR4, and TLR9, signaling in modulation of EAE inflammation varies with the experimental model employed and the immune cells that drive pathology. The TLR-dependent production of proinflammatory cytokines is regulated by mechanisms that dampen the pathway and prevent excess damage. Development of TLR antagonists to treat autoimmune diseases must acknowledge the possibility of interference with regulatory mechanisms.

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


Compressible flow equations based on moving coordinates determined by the wave speed In this paper, we consider moving coordinates with a speed determined by the wave speed. This allows us to move the coordinates at the speed of contact discontinuities, expansion fans, or other wave structures. While recognizing that the Lagrangian coordinates, which can well resolve the sliplines, behave badly for expansion waves, we demonstrate that a coordinate system moving at the characteristic speed of the expansion fan behaves much better for expansion waves. Moreover, the new coordinate system allows one to well capture the shock wave, the slipline and the expansion waves at the same time. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

generalized characteristic coordinate system


A Bayesian method for comparing and combining binary classifiers in the absence of a gold standard Many problems in bioinformatics involve classification based on features such as sequence, structure or morphology. Given multiple classifiers, two crucial questions arise: how does their performance compare, and how can they best be combined to produce a better classifier? A classifier can be evaluated in terms of sensitivity and specificity using benchmark, or gold standard, data, that is, data for which the true classification is known. However, a gold standard is not always available. Here we demonstrate that a Bayesian model for comparing medical diagnostics without a gold standard can be successfully applied in the bioinformatics domain, to genomic scale data sets. We present a new implementation, which unlike previous implementations is applicable to any number of classifiers. We apply this model, for the first time, to the problem of finding the globally optimal logical combination of classifiers.

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

binary classifier
bayesian methods
protein sub-cellular localisation
diagnostic tests
genome wide association studies.


Removing propagation redundant constraints in redundant modeling A widely adopted approach to solving constraint satisfaction problems combines systematic tree search with various degrees of constraint propagation for pruning the search space. One common technique to improve the execution efficiency is to add redundant constraints, which are constraints logically implied by others in the problem model. However, some redundant constraints are propagation redundant and hence do not contribute additional propagation information to the constraint solver. Redundant constraints arise naturally in the process of redundant modeling where two models of the same problem are connected and combined through channeling constraints. In this paper, we give general theorems for proving propagation redundancy of one constraint with respect to channeling constraints and constraints in the other model. We illustrate, on problems from CSPlib (http: //www. csplib. org), how detecting and removing propagation redundant constraints in redundant modeling can speed up search by several order of magnitudes.

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

constraint propagation
redundant constraints
redundant modeling


Simple Monte Carlo and the metropolis algorithm We study the integration of functions with respect to an unknown density. Information is available as oracle calls to the integrand and to the non-normalized density function. We are interested in analyzing the integration error of optimal algorithms (or the complexity of the problem) with emphasis on the variability of the weight function. For a corresponding large class of problem instances we show that the complexity grows linearly in the variability, and the simple Monte Carlo method provides an almost optimal algorithm. Under additional geometric restrictions (mainly log-concavity) for the density functions, we establish that a suitable adaptive local Metropolis algorithm is almost optimal and outperforms any non-adaptive algorithm. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

metropolis algorithm
optimal algorithms
complexity

monte carlo methods
log-concave density
rapidly mixing markov chains
adaptivity


Interactive live-wire boundary extraction Live-wire segmentation is a new interactive tool for efficient, accurate and reproducible boundary extraction which requires minimal user input with a mouse. Optimal boundaries are computed and selected at interactive rates as the user moves the mouse starting from a manually specified seed point. When the mouse position comes into the proximity of an object edge, a live-wire boundary snaps to, and wraps around the object of interest. The input of a new seed point freezes the selected boundary segment and the process is repeated until the boundary is complete. Two novel enhancements to the basic live-wire methodology include boundary cooling and on-the-fly training. Data-driven boundary cooling generates seed points automatically and further reduces user input. On-the-fly training adapts the dynamic boundary to edges of current interest. Using the live-wire technique, boundaries are extracted in one-fifth of the time required for manual tracing, but with 4.4 times greater accuracy and 4.8 times greater reproducibility. In particular, interobserver reproducibility using the live-wire tool is 3.8 times greater than intraobserver reproducibility using manual tracing.

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

boundary cooling and training
speed
accuracy and reproducibility
graph searching
interactive segmentation
live-wire boundary extraction


3D Shape Regression for Real-time Facial Animation We present a real-time performance-driven facial animation system based on 3D shape regression. In this system, the 3D positions of facial landmark points are inferred by a regressor from 2D video frames of an ordinary web camera. From these 3D points, the pose and expressions of the face are recovered by fitting a user-specific blendshape model to them. The main technical contribution of this work is the 3D regression algorithm that learns an accurate, user-specific face alignment model from an easily acquired set of training data, generated from images of the user performing a sequence of predefined facial poses and expressions. Experiments show that our system can accurately recover 3D face shapes even for fast motions, non-frontal faces, and exaggerated expressions. In addition, some capacity to handle partial occlusions and changing lighting conditions is demonstrated.

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

face tracking
monocular video tracking
3d avatars
facial performance
user-specific blendshapes


Techniques for fast simulation of models of highly dependable systems With the ever-increasing complexity and requirements of highly dependable systems, their evaluation during design and operation is becoming more crucial. Realistic models of such systems are often not amenable to analysis using conventional analytic or numerical methods. Therefore, analysts and designers turn to simulation to evaluate these models. However, accurate estimation of dependability measures of these models requires that the simulation frequently observes system failures, which are rare events in highly dependable systems. This renders ordinary Simulation impractical for evaluating such systems. To overcome this problem, simulation techniques based on importance sampling have been developed, and are very effective in certain settings. When importance sampling works well, simulation run lengths can be reduced by several orders of magnitude when estimating transient as well as steady-state. dependability measures. This paper reviews some of the importance-sampling techniques that have been developed in recent years to estimate dependability measures efficiently in Markov and non-Markov models of highly dependable systems.

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

highly dependable system
markov chain
steady-state dependability measure
transient dependability measure


Perceived job effectiveness in coopetition: A survey of virtual teams within business organizations This study establishes a model by drawing from key postulates and findings under coopetition to explain the formation of perceived job effectiveness in team collaboration. In the proposed model, perceived job effectiveness is influenced directly by knowledge sharing, cooperative attitude, and competitive conflict, while knowledge sharing is influenced by cooperative attitude and competitive conflict. Accordingly, perceived job effectiveness is influenced indirectly by shared value, perceived trust and perceived benefit via the mediation of cooperative attitude and competitive conflict. Empirical testing of this model, by investigating personnel in information technology (IT) organizations, confirms the applicability of coopetition in virtual teams. The test results indicate that all the model paths except one (linking shared vision and competitive conflict) are significant. Finally, managerial implications and limitations of the research are provided.

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

coopetition
knowledge sharing
perceived job effectiveness


A Compression Model for DNA Multiple Sequence Alignment Blocks A particularly voluminous dataset in molecular genomics, known as whole genome alignments, has gained considerable importance over the last years. In this paper, we propose a compression modeling approach for the multiple sequence alignment (MSA) blocks, which make up most of these datasets. Our method is based on a mixture of finite-context models. Contrarily to other recent approaches, it addresses both the DNA bases and gap symbols at once, better exploring the existing correlations. For comparison with previous methods, our algorithm was tested in the multiz28way dataset. On average, it attained 0.94 bits per symbol, approximately 7% better than the previous best, for a similar computational complexity. We also tested the model in the most recent dataset, multiz46way. In this dataset, that contains alignments of 46 different species, our compression model achieved an average of 0.72 bits per MSA block symbol.

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

finite-context models
lossless compression
multiple sequence alignments (msas)


Quadratic model for allocating operational budget in public and nonprofit organizations We develop a quadratic model for allocating operational budgets in public and nonprofit organizations. The allocations for each organizational unit have lower and upper bounds. The objective function is to minimize the weighted sum of the quadratic deviations of each allocation from its bounds. The optimal allocations are mostly around the midpoint between the bounds. A simple algorithm is presented to derive the solution. The new quadratic model is compared to the familiar linear model for budget allocation, which almost always, provides extreme allocations on the bounds: for some units on the upper bound, while for others, on the lower bound. We perform sensitivity analyses, and resolve special cases of the model with closed form solution. Moreover, we show various properties of the quadratic budget allocation model and prove that its fairness index is higher than that of the linear model. The model, with its variants, was actually used for allocating budgets in various university setups; some examples are presented here.

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

budgeting
quadratic programming
resource allocation
decision analysis
planning
public sector


stimulating social engagement in a community network One of the most challenging problems facing builders and facilitators of community networks is to create and sustain social engagement among members. In this paper, we investigate the drivers of social engagement in a community network through the analysis of three data sources: activity logs, a member survey, and the content analysis of the conversation archives. We describe three important ways to encourage and support social engagement in online communities: through system design elements such as conversation channeling and event notification, by various selection criteria for community members, and through facilitation of specific kinds of discussion topics.

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

communities
engagement
system design
survey
event
analysis
data
support
social
paper
notification
community networks
conversation

select
empirical studies
activation
online communities
social engagement
community-support systems
content analysis
social awareness
archival


An evidence-based approach to damage location on an aircraft structure This paper discusses the use of evidence-based classifiers for the identification of damage. In particular, a neural network approach to DempsterShafer theory is demonstrated on the damage location problem for an aircraft wing. The results are compared with a probabilistic classifier based on a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network and shown to give similar results. The question of fusing classifiers is considered and it is shown that a combination of the DempsterShafer and MLP classifiers gives a significant improvement over the use of individual classifiers for the aircraft wing data.

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

dempsterschafer theory
structural health monitoring


Managing Networks and Services of the Future Today, we see several emerging environments, with a large diversity of devices, networks, providers and service domains, characterized as the networks and services of the future. This special issue contains four papers on how to manage important topics of these environments: policy model to support ontology-driven reasoning for autonomic computing, SOA-based NGM management, metrics to distinguish application traffic, and SLA design and service provisioning for outsourced services.

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

next generation networked applications and services


Dual BIE approaches for modeling electrostatic MEMS problems with thin beams and accelerated by the fast multipole method Three boundary integral equation (BIE) formulations are investigated for the analysis of electrostatic fields exterior to thin-beam structures as found in some micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). The three BIE formulations are: (1) the regular BIE using only the single-layer potential; (2) the dual BIE (a) using the regular BIE on one surface of a beam and the gradient BIE on the other surface; and (3) the dual BIE (b) using a linear combination of the regular BIE and gradient BIE on all the surfaces of the beam. Similar to crack problems in elasticity, the regular BIE degenerates when the beam thickness tends to zero, while the two dual BIE formulations do not degenerate. Most importantly, the dual BIE (b) is found to be well conditioned for all the values of the beam thickness, and thus well suited for implementation with the fast multipole BEM. The fast multipole BEM for both the regular BIE and the dual BIE (b) formulations are developed and tested on a simplified comb-drive model. The numerical results clearly show that the dual BIEs are very effective in solving MEMS problems with thin beams and the fast multipole BEM with the dual BIE (b) formulation is very efficient in solving large-scale MEMS models.

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

boundary element method
electrostatic problems


Probability-based Dynamic Time Warping and Bag-of-Visual-and-Depth-Words for Human Gesture Recognition in RGB-D We present a probability-based DTW for gesture segmentation. We present the BoVDW framework for gesture classification. New VFHCRH descriptor for depth images.

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

dynamic time warping
human gesture recognition


Multiscale rank-based ordered dither algorithm for digital halftoning In this paper, we proposed a simple and efficient algorithm that is based on the ranking of brightness within block. It builds the cumulative intensity quadtree for each block and generates the digital halftone?s image using its information. We did the quality assessment for the result image of the proposed algorithm. As a result of experiment, it generates the digital halftone?s image that is a little worse than that generated by error diffusion method, but it has merits to be implemented easily in parallel hardware because of block processing and simple operations. So we can conclude that the proposed algorithm is a very practical method to apply to the hardware implementation.

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

ordered dither
error diffusion
halftoning

multiscale error diffusion
thresholding
dither array


Radiation-Hard Field-Programmable Gate Arrays Configuration Technique Using Silicon on Sapphire Once largely the domain of space-borne applications, the effects of high energy charged particles on electronics systems are now also a concern for conventional terrestrial devices. The configuration memory within reconfigurable components, such as SRAM-based field-programmable gate arrays are particularly vulnerable to radiation-induced single event effects. We present a silicon on insulator (SOI)-based configuration memory system for use in a radiation hard reconfigurable system. A nonvolatile storage cell, able to be manufactured in a standard single polysilicon SOI CMOS process with no special layers, is combined with a Schmitt amplifier, which results in a final structure that exhibits two unique characteristics enhancing its resistance to radiation. First, it is impossible for a radiation-induced event to permanently flip the configuration state. Second, a partial de-programming resulting in a reduction in the magnitude of the storage cell voltage causes a large change in static current that can very easily be detected using a conventional sense amplifier. A simple current detector of the type used in conventional RAM circuits allows the configuration memory to be set up to exhibit self-correcting, or "auto-scrubbing" behavior. Failure estimates indicate a mean time between failures for a single cell to be in the order of 10(34) years.

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

auto-scrubbing
field-programmable gate arrays (fpgas)
silicon on insulator (soi)
silicon on sapphire (sos)
single event upset (seu)
total ionization dose (tid)


on relational interfaces In this paper we extend the work of Alfaro, Henzinger et al. on interface theories for component-based design. Existing interface theories often fail to capture functional relations between the inputs and outputs of an interface. For example, a simple synchronous interface that takes as input a number n ? 0 and returns, at the same time, as output n + 1, cannot be expressed in existing theories. In this paper we provide a theory of relational interfaces, where such input-output relations can be captured. Our theory supports synchronous interfaces, both stateless and stateful. It includes explicit notions of environments and pluggability, and satisfies fundamental properties such as preservation of refinement by composition, and characterization of pluggability by refinement. We achieve these properties by making reasonable restrictions on feedback loops in interface compositions.

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


The turnaround of the London Ambulance Service Computer-Aided Despatch system (LASCAD) The implementation of the Computer-Aided Despatch system at the London Ambulance Service has been one of the most notorious cases of failure within the information systems (IS) literature. What is less well known is that there followed, some time later, a much more successful implementation, described as a turnaround. This paper, based on a case study approach, describes the context and detail of that implementation. A framework from the literature, used in an analysis of the initial failure, is used to analyse and compare the similarities and differences in the development of the two systems. The framework provides four interacting elements and relationships for analysis. These elements are Supporters, Project Organisation, Information System, and the Environment in which they operate. The turnaround system was found to address directly almost all the issues identified as problematic in the failure. These included the approach taken by management to understand the needs of users, including issues unrelated to the system itself, their involvement in the development process, an improvement in the availability of resources ( brought about in some part because of the previous failure), the ability to follow a relaxed timeline driven by users' acceptance levels, the preparation of infrastructure projects to develop confidence, participation and prototyping, thorough testing, phased and simple implementation, and trust building. Certain environmental factors could not be so directly addressed but nevertheless were overcome by attention to detail and internal needs. Conclusions indicate that the factors addressed are not new and are to be found in the success literature. What is unusual is that they were implemented in this case in such unlikely circumstances.

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

london ambulance service
information system
implementation
systems
failure
case study


Service-Oriented Methodology for Systems Development Despite advances in software development practices, organizations struggle to implement methodologies that match the risk in a project environment with needed coordination capabilities. Plan-driven and agile software development methodologies each have strengths and risks. However, most project environments cannot be classified as entirely "risky" or "stable," suggesting the need for hybrid approaches. We leverage a design science approach to implement a novel hybrid methodology based on concepts from the service-oriented paradigm. We motivate the approach using theory on interdependence and coordination, and design the methodology using theory on modularity and service-dominant logic. We also examine the effects of its adoption at a large electrical power company over a three-year period. The results imply that service-oriented theory should be applied to the human processes involved in systems development in order to achieve better fit between project risk, interdependencies, and the selected methodology(ies) in order to improve overall project performance.

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

modularization
project management
service orientation


Objective characterization of oesophageal voice supporting medical diagnosis, rehabilitation and monitoring Otolaryngologists use computational tools in the objective diagnosis of vocal folds pathologies by means of a set of acoustic parameters among others. This can be achieved in the cases of slight pathologies, but it does not exist any commercial software suitable for severe degradations of speech, as they are the oesophageal voice of laryngectomees. The present article shows a high-accuracy algorithm for the detection of the periodicity cycles of both oesophageal and laryngeal voices with low quality which allows the accurate and automatic estimation of pitch, jitter and shimmer. As the proposed algorithm works also with slighter pathologies, it is a useful contribution which allows doctors to perform an objective control during rehabilitation and monitoring stages. Thus, a patient can be controlled during oesophageal voice learning stage and it can also be saved a medical record with the results of the acoustic parameters measurements in order to detect possible relapses.

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

medical informatics
rehabilitation engineering
signal processing
acoustical measurements
speech disorder database


real-time human action search using random forest based hough voting Many existing techniques in content based video retrieval treat a video sequence as a whole to match it against a query video or to assign a text label. Such an approach has serious limitations when applied to human action retrieval because an action may occur only in a sub-region and last for a small portion of the video length. In situations like this, we essentially need to match the subvolumes of the video sequences against the query video. A naive exhaustive search is impractical due to large number of possible subvolumes for each video sequence. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for action retrieval which performs pattern matching at subvolume level and is very efficient in handling large corpus of videos. We construct an unsupervised random forest to index the video database, generate a score volume with Hough voting and then employ a max sub-path strategy to quickly search for the temporal and spatial positions of all the video sequences in the database. We present action search experiments on challenging datasets to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our system.

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

random forest indexing
max sub-path search


Broadcasting in colorless WDM-PON using spectrum-sliced wavelength conversion We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel wavelength-division-multiplexed passive optical network (WDM-PON) scheme for providing broadcasting service by using an inverted amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) from a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). In this scheme, single pump signal is converted into multiple wavelengths signal by spectrum sliced wavelength conversion. We expect it could be very practical and cost-effective solution for broadcasting in WDM-PON due to its simplicity.

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

wdm-pon
cross gain modulation (xgm)
semiconductor optical amplifier (soa)


Privacy-preserving SOM-based recommendations on horizontally distributed data To produce predictions with decent accuracy, collaborative filtering algorithms need sufficient data. Due to the nature of online shopping and increasing amount of online vendors, different customers preferences about the same products can be distributed among various companies, even competing vendors. Therefore, those companies holding inadequate number of users data might decide to combine their data in such a way to present accurate predictions with acceptable online performance. However, they do not want to divulge their data, because such data are considered confidential and valuable. Furthermore, it is not legal disclosing users preferences; nevertheless, if privacy is protected, they can collaborate to produce correct predictions. We propose a privacy-preserving scheme to provide recommendations on horizontally partitioned data among multiple parties. In order to improve online performance, the parties cluster their distributed data off-line without greatly jeopardizing their secrecy. They then estimate predictions using k-nearest neighbor approach while preserving their privacy. We demonstrate that the proposed method preserves data owners privacy and is able to suggest predictions resourcefully. By performing several experiments using real data sets, we analyze our scheme in terms of accuracy. Our empirical outcomes show that it is still possible to estimate truthful predictions competently while maintaining data owners confidentiality based on horizontally distributed data.

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


HARDNESS OF LEARNING HALFSPACES WITH NOISE Learning an unknown halfspace (also called a perceptron) from labeled examples is one of the classic problems in machine learning. In the noise-free case, when a halfspace consistent with all the training examples exists, the problem can be solved in polynomial time using linear programming. However, under the promise that a halfspace consistent with a fraction (1 - epsilon) of the examples exists (for some small constant epsilon > 0), it was not known how to efficiently find a halfspace that is correct on even 51% of the examples. Nor was a hardness result that ruled out getting agreement on more than 99.9% of the examples known. In this work, we close this gap in our understanding and prove that even a tiny amount of worst-case noise makes the problem of learning halfspaces intractable in a strong sense. Specifically, for arbitrary epsilon, delta > 0, we prove that given a set of examples-label pairs from the hypercube, a fraction (1 - epsilon) of which can be explained by a halfspace, it is NP-hard to find a halfspace that correctly labels a fraction (1/2 + delta) of the examples. The hardness result is tight since it is trivial to get agreement on 1/2 the examples. In learning theory parlance, we prove that weak proper agnostic learning of halfspaces is hard. This settles a question that was raised by Blum et al., in their work on learning halfspaces in the presence of random classification noise [Algorithmica, 22 (1998), pp. 35-52], and raised by authors of some more recent works as well. Along the way, we also obtain a strong hardness result for another basic computational problem: solving a linear system over the rationals.

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

hardness of approximation
computational learning


Coherent Phrase Model for Efficient Image Near-Duplicate Retrieval This paper presents an efficient and effective solution for retrieving image near-duplicate (IND) from image database. We introduce the coherent phrase model which incorporates the coherency of local regions to reduce the quantization error of the bag-of-words (BoW) model. In this model, local regions are characterized by visual phrase of multiple descriptors instead of visual word of single descriptor. We propose two types of visual phrase to encode the coherency in feature and spatial domain, respectively. The proposed model reduces the number of false matches by using this coherency and generates sparse representations of images. Compared to other method, the local coherencies among multiple descriptors of every region improve the performance and preserve the efficiency for IND retrieval. The proposed method is evaluated on several benchmark datasets for IND retrieval. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, our proposed model has been shown to significantly improve the accuracy of IND retrieval while maintaining the efficiency of the standard bag-of-words model. The proposed method can be integrated with other extensions of BoW.

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

bag-of-word (bow)
image near-duplicate (ind)
trecvid


Curve fitting and fairing using conic splines We present an efficient geometric algorithm for conic spline curve fitting and fairing through conic arc scaling. Given a set of planar points, we first construct a tangent continuous conic spline by interpolating the points with a quadratic Bzier spline curve or fitting the data with a smooth arc spline. The arc spline can be represented as a piecewise quadratic rational Bzier spline curve. For parts of the G1 conic spline without an inflection, we can obtain a curvature continuous conic spline by adjusting the tangent direction at the joint point and scaling the weights for every two adjacent rational Bzier curves. The unwanted curvature extrema within conic segments or at some joint points can be removed efficiently by scaling the weights of the conic segments or moving the joint points along the normal direction of the curve at the point. In the end, a fair conic spline curve is obtained that is G2 continuous at convex or concave parts and G1 continuous at inflection points. The main advantages of the method lies in two aspects, one advantage is that we can construct a curvature continuous conic spline by a local algorithm, the other one is that the curvature plot of the conic spline can be controlled efficiently. The method can be used in the field where fair shape is desired by interpolating or approximating a given point set. Numerical examples from simulated and real data are presented to show the efficiency of the new method.

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


On improved bounds on the decoding error probability of block codes over interleaved fading channels, with applications to turbo-like codes We derive here improved upper bounds on the decoding error probability of block codes which are transmitted over fully interleaved Rician fading channels, coherently detected and maximum-likelihood (ML) decoded. We assume that the fading coefficients during each symbol are statistically independent (due to a perfect channel interleaver), and that perfect estimates of these fading coefficients are provided to the receiver. The improved upper bounds on the block and bit error probabilities are derived for fully interleaved fading channels with various orders of space diversity, and are found by generalizing some recently introduced upper bounds for the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The advantage of these bounds over the ubiquitous union bound is demonstrated for some ensembles of turbo codes and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, and it is especially pronounced in a portion of the rate region exceeding the cutoff rate. Our generalization of the Duman and Salehi bound which is based on certain variations of Gallager's bounding technique, is demonstrated to be the tightest reported upper bound. We therefore apply it to calculate numerically upper bounds on the thresholds of some ensembles of turbo-like codes, referring to the optimal NIL decoding. For certain ensembles of uniformly interleaved turbo codes, the upper bounds derived here also indicate good match with computer simulation results of efficient iterative decoding algorithms.

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

block codes
bounds
decoding error probability
fading channels
thresholds

distance spectrum
input-output weight distribution
maximum likelihood (ml) decoding
turbo-like codes


Development and application of a framework for comparing early design methods for young children When designing with young children, designers usually select user centred design methods based on the children's required level of engagement and the inspiration expected to be created according to the designer. User centred design methods should be selected for their suitability for children and for the quality of the output of the design method. To understand the suitability of design methods, a framework was developed to describe design methods in terms of required design skills as identified by the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The proposed framework could provide the basis for a tool to compare design methods and to generate hypotheses about what design method would work optimally with children in a specific school grade. The initial examination of the viability of the framework is a comparison of design methods by the number of skills involved; earlier work showed that the involvement of more skills (as with, e.g. low-fi prototyping) could result in more options for a design problem than the involvement of fewer skills (as with e.g. brainstorming). Options and Criteria were counted to understand the quality of the method in terms of the amount of design-information. The results of the current paper indicate that 8-to-10-year-old children generate significantly more options in prototyping sessions than when they are involved in sessions applying a Nominal Group Technique. The paper indicates that (a) with the framework we can generate hypotheses to compare design methods with children and (b) that the outcome of various design methods, which might lead to very different representations, can be compared in terms of Options and Criteria. Further usage of the framework is expected to result in empirical support for selecting a design method to be applied with young children. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

user centered design
design space exploration
design skills


A cluster-based wavelet feature extraction method and its application In this paper, a new cluster-based approach is proposed for extracting features from the coefficients of a two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform. The wavelet coefficients from the matrix of each frequency channel are segregated into non-overlapping clusters in an unsupervised mode using a set of application-specific representative images. In practical situations, this set of representative images can be the same as the ones kept aside for training a classifier. The proposed method divides the matrices of computed wavelet coefficients into disjoint clusters that are centered around the position of dominant coefficients. The features that can distinguish images of one class from those of other classes are obtained by computing energies of the clusters. The feature vectors so obtained are then presented as input patterns to an image classifier, such as a neural network. Experimental results based on the applications for texture classification and wood surface defect detection have shown that the proposed cluster-based wavelet feature extraction method is able to effectively extract important intrinsic information content from the test images, and increase the overall classification accuracy as compared with conventional feature extraction methods.

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

wavelet
feature extraction
texture classification
surface defect


Electrostatics and heat conduction in high contrast composite materials We present a robust integral equation method for the calculation of the electrostatic and thermal properties of systems made of piecewise homogeneous, high contrast materials. By high contrast, we mean that the electrical or thermal conductivity ratios are high. Our approach involves a modification of the standard integral representation using, in electrostatic terms, the polarization charge as an unknown. It is related to the perturbation approach proposed by Tausch and White [J. Tausch, J. White, Capacitance extraction of 3-D conductor systems in dielectric media with high-permittivity ratios, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., 47 (1999) 18-26], but based on a simple form of projection rather than on the solution of auxiliary integral equations. Numerical implementation is straightforward in the multiple dielectric case. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

dielectric materials
boundary integral equation


High performance general-purpose microprocessors: Past and future It can be observed from looking backward that processor architecture is improved through spirally shifting from simple to complex and from complex to simple. Nowadays we are facing another shifting from complex to simple, and new innovative architecture will emerge to utilize the continuously increasing transistor budgets. The growing importance of wire delays, changing workloads, power consumption, and design/verification complexity will drive the forthcoming era of Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs). Furthermore, typical CMP projects both from industries and from acadernics are investigated. Through going into depths for some primary theoretical and implementation problems of CMPs, the great challenges and opportunities to future CMPs are presented and discussed. Finally, the Godson series microprocessors designed in China are introduced.

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

high performance general-purpose microprocessor


An analytical method for reliability aware instruction set extension Random variations and low reliability of nanometer new silicons are the most important concerns for the fault-tolerant design of large-area powerful integrated circuits. Logic faults in terms of soft errors or transient faults are now serious problems for embedded processing cores. Recently, augmenting an embedded processor with application specific custom instructions is widely used for improving the performance of a processor. Although area, power, and performance of an augmented processor have been considered for efficient custom instruction selection, its reliability consideration is much needed. This is impeding because this action needs exhaustive fault injection and lengthy and expensive simulations. This demand becomes more serious in the case of many-core, larger area and, therefore, more fault-prone integrated circuits, e.g., tera-computing processors. In this work, we propose an analytical modeling solution for such a demanding problem. First, a simple analytical method is introduced that can evaluate the vulnerability of a custom instruction in a time-saving manner. Using this method and our configurable custom instruction vulnerability analysis framework, the effects of type, order, and word length of various operations of different custom instruction subgraphs on the vulnerability of an extensible processor have been explored analytically and experimentally. Based on our results, for example, replacing orders of operators in custom functional units could yield different vulnerabilities to soft errors. Therefore, our approach enables designers to optionally constrain the operand types and also the custom functional unit structures to reach an acceptable vulnerability level at low computational and design time costs.

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

instruction set extension
custom instruction
vulnerability analysis

analytic method
architectural vulnerability factor
soft error


Markerless tracking of complex human motions from multiple views We present a method for markerless tracking of complex human motions from multiple camera views. In the absence of markers, the task of recovering the pose of a person during such motions is challenging and requires strong image features and robust tracking. We propose a solution which integrates multiple image cues such as edges, color information and volumetric reconstruction. We show that a combination of multiple image cues helps the tracker to overcome ambiguous situations such as limbs touching or strong occlusions of body parts. Following a model-based approach, we match an articulated body model built from superellipsoids against these image cues. Stochastic Meta Descent (SMD) optimization is used to find the pose which best matches the images. Stochastic sampling makes SMD robust against local minima and lowers the computational costs as a small set of predicted image features is sufficient for optimization. The power of SMD is demonstrated by comparing it to the commonly used LevenbergMarquardt method. Results are shown for several challenging sequences showing complex motions and full articulation, with tracking of 24 degrees of freedom in ?1 frame per second.

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

markerless tracking
smd
volumetric reconstruction

full body tracking
multi-view tracking
markerless motion capture
multiple cues


digital watermarking security considerations In this paper, we review our past experience with security of copy control audio watermarks, particularly related to SDMI. We also classify and analyze attacks published in literature and propose a number of security enhancement techniques for copy control and other digital watermarking applications. One type of security measure is based on uncoordinated selection of hiding places between embedders and extractors, with statistical analysis of expected matches. This approach reduces the repeatability of attacks and opens up the possibility of system renewal.Other security measures are introduced, based on weak watermark detections, time diversity extraction, weight accumulation, soft decision decoding, and extraction expansion or focusing. Finally, we propose a number of methods to conceal watermark presence, location and properties using random embedding, extraction and reporting, and random host signal modification techniques design to counter differential analysis or scrambling attacks.

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

digital rights management
watermark attacks


Boosted coefficient models Regression methods typically construct a mapping from the covariates into the real numbers. Here, however, we consider regression problems where the task is to form a mapping from the covariates into a set of (univariate) real-valued functions. Examples are given by conditional density estimation, hazard regression and regression with a functional response. Our approach starts by modeling the function of interest using a sum of B-spline basis functions. To model dependence on the covariates, the coefficients of this expansion are each modeled as functions of the covariates. We propose to estimate these coefficient functions using boosted tree models. Algorithms are provided for the above three situations, and real data sets are used to investigate their performance. The results indicate that the proposed methodology performs well. In addition, it is both straightforward, and capable of handling a large number of covariates.

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

conditional density estimation
hazard regression

boosting
functional regression
regression trees


A simple simulated annealing algorithm for the maximum clique problem Simulated annealing technique has mostly been used to solve various optimization and learning problems, and it is well known that the maximum clique problem is one of the most studied NP-hard optimization problems owing to its numerous applications. In this note, a simple simulated annealing algorithm for the maximum clique problem is proposed and tested on all 80 DIMACS maximum clique instances. Although it is simple, the proposed simulated annealing algorithm is efficient on most of the DIMACS maximum clique instances. The simulation results show that the proposed simulated annealing algorithm outperforms a recent efficient simulated annealing algorithm proposed by Xu and Ma, and the solutions obtained by the proposed simulated annealing algorithm have the equal quality with those obtained by a recent trust region heuristic algorithm of Stanislav Busygin.

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

simulated annealing algorithm
maximum clique problem
heuristic algorithm

minimum vertex cover problem
np-hard optimization problem


On two accurate methods for computing 3D Green?s function and its first and second derivatives in piezoelectricity ? In this paper, we present two accurate methods for the calculation of the Green?s function and its derivatives for three-dimensional anisotropic piezoelectric solids. In the first method, the Stroh formalism is used. The Green?s function is expressed explicitly in terms of the Stroh eigenvectors, which are eigenvectors of the fundamental piezoelectricity matrix. The explicit derivatives of the 3D Green?s function in terms of the derivatives of the Stroh eigenvalues and Stroh eigenvectors are derived for generally anisotropic piezoelectric materials. In the second method, we first express the Green?s function and its derivatives in terms of novel infinite line integrals. Then the explicit expressions are obtained by the application of the Cauchy?s residue theorem. The accuracies of both methods are verified by the numerical results compared with analytical solutions. Both explicit expressions are only applicable when the Stroh eigenvalues are distinct, which can be ensured by a small perturbation on some material constants in the case of degenerated eigenvalues.

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

green?s function
derivatives of green?s function
cauchy?s residue theorem


Pellet: A practical OWL-DL reasoner In this paper, we present a brief overview of Pellet: a complete OWL-DL reasoner with acceptable to very good performance, extensive middleware, and a number of unique features. Pellet is the first sound and complete OWL-DL reasoner with extensive support for reasoning with individuals (including nominal support and conjunctive query), user-defined datatypes, and debugging support for ontologies. It implements several extensions to OWL-DL including a combination formalism for OWL-DL ontologies, a non-monotonic operator, and preliminary support for OWL/Rule hybrid reasoning. Pellet is written in Java and is open source.

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

web ontology language
description logics
tableau theorem proving


Comparison of GIS-based methodologies for the landslide susceptibility assessment In this paper, two simple GIS-based methodologies have been used to assess the landslide susceptibility in a basin located in Southern Italy. The methodologies at issue, based on the spatial distribution of landslides and/or of causal factors, are bivariate statistics-based and expert-based, respectively. The spatial distribution of both the landslides and the causal factors has been investigated by integrating pre-existing and original data, which have been processed using ArcView GIS 3.2 software. The obtained results, consisting of landslide susceptibility maps have been compared and discussed. The bivariate statistics-based method has provided the most satisfying results. On the contrary, the expert-based method has provided a classification of the study area in terms of landslide susceptibility which does not completely fit with the surveyed spatial distribution of the landslides.

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

landslide susceptibility
gis
southern italy


A homogeneous mobile robot team that is fault-tolerant This paper introduces a design methodology of a fault-tolerant autonomous multi-robot system (MRS). An important fundamental topic for this type of system is the design of an on-line autonomous behavior acquisition mechanism that is capable of developing cooperative roles as well as assigning them to a robot appropriately in a noisy embedded environment. Our approach is to apply reinforcement learning that adopts the Bayesian discrimination method for segmenting a continuous state space and a continuous action space simultaneously. In addition, a neural network is provided for predicting the average of the other robots postures at the next time step in order to stabilize the reinforcement-learning environment. Computer simulations are conducted to illustrate the fault-tolerance of our MRS against a system change that occurs after the MRS achieves stable behavior.

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

multi-robot system
autonomous specialization
fault-tolerance


Constraint preserving boundary conditions for the Ideal Newtonian MHD equations We study and develop constraint preserving boundary conditions for the Newtonian magnetohydrodynamic equations and analyze the behavior of the numerical solution upon considering different possible options. We concentrate on both the standard ideal MHD system and the one augmented by a pseudo potential to control the divergence free constraint. We show how the boundary conditions developed significantly reduce the violations generated at the boundaries at the numerical level and how lessen their influence in the interior of the computational domain by making use of the available freedom in the equations.

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


Track assignment ? We consider a station in which several trains might stop at the same track at the same time. The trains might enter and leave the station from both sides, but the arrival and departure times and directions are fixed according to a given time table. The problem is to assign tracks to the trains such that they can enter and leave the station on time without being blocked by any other train. We consider some variation of the problem on linear time tables as well as on cyclic time tables and show how to solve them as a graph coloring problem on special graph classes. One of these classes are the so called circular arc containment graphs for which we give an optimal O(nlogn) O ( n log n ) coloring 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

graph coloring
circular arc containment graphs


TPMSVM: A novel twin parametric-margin support vector machine for pattern recognition A novel twin parametric-margin support vector machine (TPMSVM) for classification is proposed in this paper. This TPMSVM, in the spirit of the twin support vector machine (TWSVM), determines indirectly the separating hyperplane through a pair of nonparallel parametric-margin hyperplanes solved by two smaller sized support vector machine (SVM)-type problems. Similar to the parametric-margin ??support ? ? support vector machine (par-??SVM ? ? SVM ), this TPMSVM is suitable for many cases, especially when the data has heteroscedastic error structure, that is, the noise strongly depends on the input value. But there is an advantage in the learning speed compared with the par-??SVM ? ? SVM . The experimental results on several artificial and benchmark datasets indicate that the TPMSVM not only obtains fast learning speed, but also shows good generalization.

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

twin support vector machine
nonparallel hyperplanes
heteroscedastic noise structure
parametric-margin model


Fault detection and identification using FIRFMS This paper deals with two of the main tasks of fault monitoring systems (FMS):fault detection and fault identification. During fault detection, the FMS should recognize that the plant behavior is abnormal, and therefore. that the plant is not working properly. During fault identification, the FMS should conclude which type of failure has occurred. The main goal of this work is to present, in the context of the Fuzzy Inductive Reasoning Fault Monitoring System (FIRFMS), a new fault detection technique called enveloping and an enhancement of the fault identification method based on the model acceptability, measure. Both contributions allow a more robust and reliable FIRFMS fault detection and identification processes. The enveloping technique and the model acceptability measure are applied to three applications of quite different areas. The first one corresponds to an electric circuit model previously used for such purpose in the literature. The second one is a biomedical system, the human central nervous system (CNS) control. It is the first attempt to apply the FIRFMS to support medical decisions. The third and last one corresponds to a water demand distribution system. The electric circuit is used to show that the enhanced FIRFMS outperforms the previous FIRFMS. The biomedical and water demand distribution systems are presented to show the good performance of the new FIRFMS.

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

inductive reasoning
fault monitoring systems
water demand


Prediction of vehicle reliability performance using artificial neural networks Product development is an important but also dynamic, lengthy and risky phase in the life of a new product. The optimisation of the product development phase through extensive knowledge of the involved procedures is believed to reduce the risks and improve the final product quality. Artificial intelligence and expert systems have been used successfully in optimising the development phase of some new products as it will be demonstrated by the first sections of this publication. This paper presents the first module of an expert system, a neural network architecture that could predict the reliability performance of a vehicle at later stages of its life by using only information from a first inspection after the vehicles prototype production. The paper demonstrates how a tool like neural networks can be designed and optimised for use in reliability performance predictions. Also, this paper presents an optimisation methodology that enabled the neural network to deal with the limited amount of available training data, common during new product development, and to finally achieve acceptable prediction performance with small error. A case example is presented to demonstrate the methodology.

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

neural networks
product development
knowledge


The syntax of Why-Stripping This study investigates a clausal ellipsis construction involving the adverbial wh-phrase why and a non-wh-remnant, hereafter Why-Stripping. We show that Why-Stripping exhibits movement properties such as connectivity effects in the same way as Sluicing (with argument wh-phrases) and Stripping, and claim that Why-Stripping involves movement of the focused phrase (e.g. Mary) followed by clausal ellipsis. Furthermore, based on the fact that Why-Stripping does not show strict locality restrictions, unlike Sluicing with why, we claim that why in Why-Stripping is base-generated in the Spec_CP position while Sluicing with why involves adjunct wh-movement. According to this view, there are two types of why: one that moves and the other that does not move. It is shown that the latter induces focus association and participates in Why-Stripping. Thus, the investigation of Why-Stripping contributes to revealing the nature of the syntax of why itself.

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

ellipsis
stripping
sluicing
why
connectivity effects


Data-Driven Biped Control We present a dynamic controller to physically simulate under-actuated three-dimensional full-body biped locomotion. Our datadriven controller takes motion capture reference data to reproduce realistic human locomotion through realtime physically based simulation. The key idea is modulating the reference trajectory continuously and seamlessly such that even a simple dynamic tracking controller can follow the reference trajectory while maintaining its balance. In our framework, biped control can be facilitated by a large array of existing data-driven animation techniques because our controller can take a stream of reference data generated on-the-fly at runtime. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through examples that allow bipeds to turn, spin, and walk while steering its direction interactively.

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

character animation
bipedal locomotion
physically based animation
data-driven control


An industrially effective environment for formal hardware verification The Forte formal verification environment for datapath-dominated hardware is described. Forte has proven to be effective in large-scale industrial trials and combines an efficient linear-time logic model-checking algorithm, namely the symbolic trajectory evaluation (STE), with lightweight theorem proving in higher-order logic. These are tightly integrated in a general-purpose functional programming language, which both allows the system to be easily customized and at the same time serves as a specification language. The design philosophy behind Forte is presented and the elements of the verification methodology that make it effective in practice are also described.

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

formal verification
symbolic trajectory evaluation
theorem proving


Variable selection in regression-a tutorial This paper provides a practical guide to variable selection in chemometrics with a focus on regression-based calibration models. Several approaches, such as genetic algorithms (GAs), jack-knifing, forward selection, etc., are explained; it is also explained how to choose between different kinds of variable selection methods. The emphasis in this paper is on how to use variable selection in practice and avoid the most common pitfalls. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

variable selection
calibration
chemometrics


Improved Approximation Algorithms for the Facility Location Problems with Linear/Submodular Penalties We consider the facility location problem with submodular penalties (FLPSP) and the facility location problem with linear penalties (FLPLP), two extensions of the classical facility location problem (FLP). First, we introduce a general algorithmic framework for a class of covering problems with submodular penalties, extending the recent result of Geunes et al. (Math Program 130:85106, 2011) with linear penalties. This framework leverages existing approximation results for the original covering problems to obtain corresponding results for their counterparts with submodular penalties. Specifically, any LP-based \(\alpha \)-approximation for the original covering problem can be leveraged to obtain an \(\left( 1-e^{-1/\alpha }\right) ^{-1}\)-approximation algorithm for the counterpart with submodular penalties. Consequently, any LP-based approximation algorithm for the classical FLP (as a covering problem) can yield, via this framework, an approximation algorithm for the counterpart with submodular penalties. Second, by exploiting some special properties of submodular/linear penalty function, we present an LP rounding algorithm which has the currently best \(2\)-approximation ratio over the previously best \(2.375\) by Li et al. (Theoret Comput Sci 476:109117, 2013) for the FLPSP and another LP-rounding algorithm which has the currently best \(1.5148\)-approximation ratio over the previously best \(1.853\) by Xu and Xu (J Comb Optim 17:424436, 2008) for the FLPLP, respectively.

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

approximation algorithm
facility location problem
lp rounding


An integrated supply chain model for new products with imprecise production and supply under scenario dependent fuzzy random demand In the present day business scenario, instant changes in market demand, different source of materials and manufacturing technologies force many companies to change their supply chain planning in order to tackle the real-world uncertainty. The purpose of this paper is to develop a multi-objective two-stage stochastic programming supply chain model that incorporates imprecise production rate and supplier capacity under scenario dependent fuzzy random demand associated with new product supply chains. The objectives are to maximise the supply chain profit, achieve desired service level and minimise financial risk. The proposed model allows simultaneous determination of optimum supply chain design, procurement and production quantities across the different plants, and trade-offs between inventory and transportation modes for both inbound and outbound logistics. Analogous to chance constraints, we have used the possibility measure to quantify the demand uncertainties and the model is solved using fuzzy linear programming approach. An illustration is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. Sensitivity analysis is performed for maximisation of the supply chain profit with respect to different confidence level of service, risk and possibility measure. It is found that when one considers the service level and risk as robustness measure the variability in profit reduces.

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

new products
fuzzy random demand
possibility measure

supply chain management
two-stage stochastic programming


Adaptive artificial datasets through learning classifier systems for classification tasks In producing an artificial dataset, humans usually play a major role in creating and controlling the problem domain. In particular, humans set up and tune the problems difficulty. If humans can set up the difficulty levels appropriately, then learning systems can solve classification tasks successfully. This paper introduces an autonomous classification problem generation approach. The problems difficulty is adapted based on the classification agents performance within the defined attributes. An automated problem generator has been created to evolve simulated datasets whilst the classification agent, in this case a learning classifier system (LCS), attempts to learn the evolving datasets. The idea here is to tune the problems difficulty autonomously such that the problems characteristics may be determined effectively. Furthermore, this framework can empirically test the learning bounds of the classification agent whilst lowering human involvement. Initially, tabu search was integrated in the problem generator to discover the best combination of domain features in order to adjust the problems difficulty. In order to overcome stagnation in local optimum, a Pittsburgh-style LCSs, A-PLUS, was adapted for the first time to the problem generator. In this way, the effect of the problems characteristics, e.g. noise, which alter the classification agents performance, becomes human readable. Experiments confirm that the problem generator was able to tune the problems difficulty either to make the problem harder or easier so that it can either increase or decrease the classification agents performance.

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 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

learning classifier system
artificial dataset


Contour reconstruction using recursive smoothing splines - Algorithms and experimental validation In this paper, a recursive smoothing spline approach for contour reconstruction is studied and evaluated. Periodic smoothing splines are used by a robot to approximate the contour of encountered obstacles in the environment. The splines are generated through minimizing a cost function subject to constraints imposed by a linear control system and accuracy is improved iteratively using a recursive spline algorithm. The filtering effect of the smoothing splines allows for usage of noisy sensor data and the method is robust to odometry drift. The algorithm is extensively evaluated in simulations for various contours and in experiments using a SICK laser scanner mounted on a PowerBot from ActivMedia Robotics.

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


In-silico prediction of blood-brain barrier permeability The ability of penetration of the bloodbrain barrier is one of the significant properties of a drug or drug-like compound for the central nervous system (CNS), which is commonly expressed by log?BB (log?BB?=?log?(C brain/C blood)). In this work, a dataset of 320 compounds with log?BB values was split into a training set including 198 compounds and a test set including 122 compounds according to their structure properties by a Kohonen's self-organizing map (SOM). Each molecule was represented by global and shape descriptors, 2D autocorrelation descriptors and RDF descriptors calculated by ADRIANA.Code. Several quantitative models for prediction of log?BB were built by a multilinear regression (MLR), a support vector machine (SVM) and an artificial neural network (ANN) analysis. The models show good prediction performance on the test set compounds.

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

quantitative structure-activity relationships (qsar)


The intention to download music files in a P2P environment: Consumption value, fashion, and ethical decision perspectives Downloading unauthorized music file, being framed as a problem of crime, is deemed unethical, but the peer-to-peer systems have boosted its popularity and have become the killer application for the music industry. Two factors, cost savings from CD purchase and the low moral reasoning ability of Internet users, have been frequently attributed as rationales for this behavior. Music download, however, can also be interpreted as a value maximizing behavior that chooses between the values from consuming illicit and legitimate music, wherein the consumption value is partly dependent on one's degree of fashion involvement since music is fashionable. This paper presents a conceptual model of music download by looking at and integrating these seldom noticed perspectives with traditional explanations. An analysis of 834 samples drew from a survey of P2P users in Taiwan reveals that: people are maximizing value while down-loading music; and that fashion involvement influences the perception of consumption value from music download. This study also found that moral reasoning moderate the relationships among fashion involvement, consumption value, and behavioral intention to download music. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

music download
behavioral intention
fashion
moral reasoning
consumption value


Multivariate pade approximation for solving partial differential equations (PDE) In this paper, numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) is considered by multivariate pade approximations. We applied these method to two examples. First, PDE has been converted to power series by two-dimensional differential transformation, Then the numerical solution of equation was put into multivariate pade series form. Thus, we obtained numerical solution of PDE. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

B I 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 B I 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

multivariate pade approximation
numerical solution
differential transformation


The communication hierarchy of time and space bounded parallel machines We describe the communicating alternating machines and their simulation. We show that, in the case of communicating alternating machines which are bounded, simultaneously, by polynomial time and logarithmic space, the use of three communication levels instead of two does not increase computational power of communicating alternating machines. This resolves an open problem [2] concerning the exact position of machines with three communication levels in the hierarchy.

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

computational complexity
synchronized alternation


Ray tracing four spheres at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron By using ray tracing to simulate multiple reflections of light rays between spheres with their centers at the vertices of a regular tetrahedron, fractal images can be produced that simulate, for artistic purposes, a number of phenomena. These include the Sierpin-ski gasket, an explosion, sea anemones, and a sunset.

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


Understanding anti-plagiarism software adoption: An extended protection motivation theory perspective This study investigates factors affecting the adoption of anti-plagiarism software. Using protection motivation theory as a basis, this research examines the influence of threat and coping appraisals, along with social influences, moral obligation, and actual control variables, on the adoption of anti-plagiarism software. A field survey of 218 faculty members working at U.S. public universities reveals that threat appraisals have a stronger influence on the adoption of anti-plagiarism software than do coping appraisals. The faculty members' moral obligation, academic rank, class size, percentage of creative assignments, and gender significantly affect software adoption, whereas social influence does not. Key implications for theory and practice are discussed.

O O O O O O B I I 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

internet plagiarism
anti-plagiarism software
partial least squares


The SROV program for data analysis and regression model identification A new stepwise regression program (SROV) for the construction of optimal (stable and of highest possible accuracy) regression models comprised of linear combination of independent variables and their non-linear functions is described. The program uses for regression QR decomposition based on Gram-Schmidth orthogonalization, which is highly resilient to numerical error propagation. Variables are selected to enter the regression model according to their level of correlation with the dependent variable and they are removed from further consideration when their residual information gets below the noise level. The use of this program is demonstrated in two examples. In both examples the program identifies an optimal and stable regression model and several sub-optimal models. The existence of sub-optimal models provides additional insight regarding the relationships that exist between the explanatory variables, between the explanatory variables and the dependent variable and information on model related uncertainties caused by sample size and experimental error. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

colinearity
non-influential variable
precision


hierarchical layout verification As custom designs approach one million transistor complexity, more emphasis must be placed on hierarchical verification and synthesis tools. This paper describes a hierarchical layout verification system that includes schematic to layout netlist comparison and design rule checking. A hierarchical cell structure definition is presented along with some of the restrictions deemed necessary for a practical implementation. A method for oversizing and undersizing geometries in the context of this hierarchical cell structure, and some of the ramifications of hierarchical design are also discussed.

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

hierarchical
layout verification
design rule checking
method
structure
definition
design
context
implementation
layout
verification
custom
complexity
synthesis
paper
practical
tools

connectivity verification
systems
comparisons


Characteristics of international collaboration in sport sciences publications and its influence on citation impact Some bibliometric research has been carried out in sport sciences, but compared with other disciplines there is still no intensive study at macro level, especially on international collaboration. This study attempts to observe the status and trend of international collaboration in sport sciences at macro level, and to look at its relationship with academic impact. 20,804 publications from 63 consistently issued journals belonging to the Sport Sciences category in Web of Science database in 20002001 and 20102011 were analyzed. The main objects include co-authorship links of country pairs, the share of international co-authored publications, tendency and affinity in collaboration, and citation impact of international publications. Differences between countries and periods were observed. There is a rapid increase of the share of international collaboration in sport sciences. In some countries the share is even above 2/3; Co-authorship networks imply some cultural, political or geographical factors for collaboration, and their changes exhibit some new trends; Selected countries have strong tendency in collaboration; International collaborated publications have a higher performance than domestic ones in citation impact. But gaps between countries are narrowing. International collaboration really intensified in this field. European, especially Nordic countries are very fond of collaboration and have gained outstanding performance as a partner. It is meaningful to further explore the underlying motivation behind international collaboration in sport science research.

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


Motility bar: A new tool for motility analysis of endoluminal videos We propose computer vision tools for the analysis of the motility bar image [1]. A method for contraction analysis is proposed. A method for lumen perimeter change characterization is introduced. An algorithm for stable motility segments detection is described. Quick analysis time with good qualitative and quantitative results.

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

small intestine
wce
image classification


A Systematic Literature Review on the Quality of UML Models The quality of conceptual models directly affects the quality of the understanding of the application domain and the quality of the final software products that are ultimately based on them. This paper describes a systematic literature review (SLR) of peer-reviewed conference and journal articles published from 1997 through 2009 on the quality of conceptual models written in UML, undertaken to understand the state-of-the-art, and then identify any gaps in current research. Six digital libraries were searched, and 266 papers dealing specifically with the quality of UML models were identified and classified into five dimensions: type of model quality, type of evidence, type of research result, type of diagram, and research goal. The results indicate that most research focuses on semantic quality, with relatively little on semantic completeness; as such, this research examines new modeling methods vs. quality frameworks and metrics, as well as quality assurance vs. understanding quality issues. The results also indicate that more empirical research is needed to develop a theoretical understanding of conceptual model quality. The classification scheme developed in this paper can serve as a guide for both researchers and practitioners.

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

conceptual model quality
conceptual models
software
systematic literature review


Minimizing datacenter flow completion times with server-based flow scheduling Minimizing flow completion times (FCT) is a critical issue in datacenter networks. Existing approaches either cannot minimize FCT (i.e., DCTCP) or are costly to deploy with hardware modification on switches (i.e., pFabric). This paper presents a server-based flow scheduling (SFS) scheme for enabling easy and rapid deployment in servers while almost retaining the same minimal FCT as state-of-the-art pFabric. SFS combines traffic control and flow scheduling to keep in-switch queue very short, hence switches do not need to schedule flows and such function can be moved to servers. With SFS, each server keeps its highest-priority flow active and pauses the other low-priority ones. Then flows are completed one by one for minimizing FCT. We propose two novel techniques to achieve SFS. First, the bidirectional flow scheduling technique is used for each server to locally schedule sent or received flows. Second, the most recently seen flow coordination technique is used to coordinate senders and receivers to address the priority disagreement problem. We show that SFS scales to thousands of senders in Incast scenario and achieves zero-queue in the entire networks. Experimental results on NS2 show that SFS outperforms DCTCP and pFabric in Incast scenario. On real workloads in FatTree, SFS achieves 4 faster than DCTCP and closely approaches pFabric in tail FCT of short flows.

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