Learning by teaching with virtual peers and the effects of technological design choices on learning Advancements in technology have brought about new forms of learning and online instruction that allow communication through virtual representations without physically meeting in person. This study builds on previous work involving recursive feedback that tests the hypothesis that an important facet of learning-by-teaching is the opportunity to watch one's pupil perform. Sixty graduate students examined the value of recursive feedback that occurred when tutors observed their pupil subsequently apply what they had been taught. The study took place in the virtual environment Second Life where adults tutored another adult about human biology through their virtual representations. The tutors who observed their pupil avatar interact with an examiner exhibited superior learning relative to several control conditions that included learning-by-teaching elements but not recursive feedback. The second study examined the effect of popular design choices on recursive feedback during learning-by-teaching (e.g., customization, look-alike features). The customization condition involved tutoring a pupil avatar that the participant customized prior to the study and observing the pupil avatar answer questions. The doppelganger look-alike condition involved tutoring a pupil avatar that looked like the participant and observing the pupil avatar answer questions. Results showed that conscious awareness of look-alike features and the extent to which one customizes the pupil avatar influences learning. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

virtual reality
teaching/learning strategies
cooperative/collaborative learning
computer-mediated communication
interactive learning environments


multi objective higher order mutation testing with gp Mutation testing is a powerful software engineering technique for fault finding. It works by injecting known faults (mutations) into software and seeing if the test suite finds them. It remains very expensive and the few valuable traditional mutants that resemble real faults are mixed in with many others that denote unrealistic faults. The expense and lack of realism inhibit industrial uptake of mutation testing. Genetic programming searches the space of complex faults to find realistic higher order mutants. Despite the much larger search space, we have found mutants composed of multiple changes to the C source code that challenge the tester and which cannot be represented in the first order space.

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

higher order mutation
genetic programming
mutation testing

tcas
triangle
pareto optimality
schedule


On realization of S5-modality by evidence terms We introduce a logic of evidence-based knowledge S5(n)LP(S5)in which the evidence part is based on logic of proofs with negative checker LP(S5). The later is obtained from the Logic of proofs LP by adding a new unary operation of negative checker '?' and the corresponding axiom. We define Kripke-style models for S5(n)LP(S5) and prove the completeness with respect to this semantics. We also define the logic of justified knowledge for S5(n)LP(S5).

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 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

logic of evidence-based knowledge
epistemic modal logic s5
logic of proofs with negative checker


a performance investigation of web caching architectures Web caching has been recognized as an effective approach to improve performance by storing frequently-accessed documents from originating servers at storage sites "closer" to requesting clients in order to reduce the load on the network bandwidth which in turn can reduce user response time. In this paper, we examine the performance of various architectures for cache cooperation in a web environment. The architectures under consideration include: distributed, hierarchical, and a hybrid of the two. A hierarchical web caching architecture utilizes a series of caches placed at different levels of the network (i.e. client, institutional, regional, and national) and user requests are satisfied at the lowest level possible (the first one that stores the desired document). Distributed web caching incorporates multiple cooperating caches all at the same level. The hybrid approach chosen in this paper contains a hierarchy of distributed caches in the hopes of exploiting advantages from both distributed and hierarchical caching. Using simulation as the tool, we compare the performance (mean response time, overall cache hit rates) of these architectures under a variety of different scenarios in an attempt to identify the conditions under which each is beneficial.

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

distributed systems
performance modeling
resource management


MAXENPER: a program for maximum entropy spectral estimation with assessment of statistical significance by the permutation test The maximum entropy spectral estimator is widely used because of its high spectral resolution, but it lacks an easy procedure for evaluating the statistical significance of the spectral estimates. We implemented the non-parametric computer intensive permutation test in order to evaluate the statistical significance of the maximum entropy spectral estimates. There is the possibility of choosing between an underlying red or white noise in the permutation procedure. Two case studies, with a long and a short time series, illustrate the performance of the method. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

cyclostratigraphy
correlogram
autoregressive model
yule-walker equations
levinson recursion
burg's algorithm
achieved significance level
random permutation
red noise


Effect of social commerce factors on user purchase behavior: An empirical investigation from renren.com The UGC and the platform supports are significantly impact on the consumer's purchasing intention. Empirically tested the effect of third-party infomediaries, product uncertainty and seller uncertainty on the consumers purchase intention. Enrich social support theory for studying consumers interactive behavior that affects the purchasing behavior in social commerce.

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

social commerce
social support
seller uncertainty
product uncertainty

consumer purchasing intentions
third-party infomediaries


Generalized bridging domain method for coupling finite elements with discrete elements The concurrent coupling of finite elements and discrete elements is an effective DOF reduction methodology for reproducing the granular flow phenomenon as discrete element method does. In this paper, we present a novel coupling strategy named the generalized bridging domain method. This method introduces independent functions to weight the material properties of the continuum and those of the discrete element model, and then the equilibrium of each new model is guaranteed by imposing compensation forces. The compensation force of continuum is determined by force and displacement compatibility requirements of continuum with respect to discrete elements, and vice versa. Utilizing different weighting functions, four typical coupling methods, the bridging domain method, edge-to-edge coupling, separate domain coupling, and separate edge coupling, are obtained. Additionally, a new integration algorithm with multiple time steps is developed for the separate edge coupling. The numerical performance of the separate domain coupling, where displacement compatibility condition of continuum and that of discrete elements are individually enforced by the Lagrange multiplier method, has been investigated in detail. Results of several numerical examples show that the separate domain coupling outperforms other methods in avoiding spurious reflection and the separate edge coupling is effective enough for coupling finite elements with discrete elements. Due to the truncation of high frequency waves, there exists energy loss but at an acceptable level if the waves can be resolved by the macroscopic finite element model.

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

discrete element method
granular flow phenomenon

finite element method
multiscale method
spurious wave reflection


Phase-field based topology optimization with polygonal elements: a finite volume approach for the evolution equation Uniform grids have been the common choice of domain discretization in the topology optimization literature. Over-constraining geometrical features of such spatial discretizations can result in mesh-dependent, sub-optimal designs. Thus, in the current work, we employ unstructured polygonal meshes constructed using Voronoi tessellations to conduct structural topology optimization. We utilize the phase-field method, derived from phase transition phenomenon, which makes use of the Allen-Cahn differential equation and sensitivity analysis to update the evolving structural topology. The solution of the Allen-Cahn evolution equation is accomplished by means of a centroidal Voronoi tessellation (CVT) based finite volume approach. The unstructured polygonal meshes not only remove mesh bias but also provide greater flexibility in discretizing complicated (e.g. non-Cartesian) domains. The features of the current approach are demonstrated using various numerical examples for compliance minimization and compliant mechanism problems.

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

topology optimization
voronoi tessellation

polygonal finite elements
phase-field method
allen-cahn equation


using simulations to assess the stability and capacity of cloud computing systems For applications hosted in a cloud computing system, where there are many servers to handle incoming invocations of the application, the assessment of stability of the cloud is very important for both the planning of new applications and the expansion of existing applications. However, a general assessment is always hard to achieve as there are still no standard definitions of techniques used in cloud computing and an actual cloud computing system could be very large and complex. This paper presents a simulation for a cloud computing environment. It enables an assessment of the cloud's logical stability under various configurations without performing experiments on the actual cloud environment. The correctness of the simulation is verified by the theoretical calculation results of the well known M/M/1 queuing system.

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


eye movement study of reading text on a mobile phone using paging, scrolling, leading, and rsvp Which text presentation format is best to use on a mobile phone? We have evaluated Scrolling, Paging, Leading, and Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) in a balanced repeated-measurement study employing 16 subjects on a mobile phone. Besides monitoring reading speed, comprehension, and task load, we also tracked eye movements while reading. The results show that text presented in the Page format is read significantly faster than both the Scrolling and the RSVP format without any significant differences in comprehension. The Page format was moreover significantly less demanding to use compared to Leading and RSVP for most factors according to NASA-TLX. RSVP was found to significantly decrease eye movements whereas Leading was found to increase them. Leading yielded very irregular eye movements, but this did not affect reading speed. These results show that Paging offers best readability on a mobile phone, an interesting finding given that Scrolling is the format predominantly used today.

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


Full mobile agent interoperability in an IEEE-FIPA context The existence of heterogeneous mobile agent systems hinders the interoperability of mobile agents. Several solutions exist, but they are limited in some aspects. This article proposes a full interoperability solution, in the context of the IEEE-FIPA agent standards, composed of three parts. The first part is a simple language-independent agent interface that enables agents to visit locations with different types of middlewares. The second part is a set of design models for the middlewares to support agents developed for different programming languages and architectures. And the third part is a method based on agents with multiple codes and a common agent data encoding mechanism to enable interoperability between middlewares that do not support the same programming languages. Furthermore two agent interoperability implementations, and its corresponding performance comparison, carried out over the JADE and AgentScape agent middlewares are presented.

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

mobile agent interoperability
agent interface
performance

programming language independence
agent state


Arranging and Interpolating Sparse Unorganized Feature Points With Geodesic Circular Arc A novel method to reconstruct object boundaries with geodesic circular arc is proposed in this paper. Within this framework, an energy of circular are spline is utilized to simultaneously arrange and interpolate each member in the set of sparse unorganized feature points from the desired boundaries. A general form for a family of parametric circular arc spline is firstly derived and followed by a novel method of arranging these feature points by minimizing an energy term depending on the circular arc spline configuration defined on these feature points. With regard to the fact that the energy function is usually nonconvex and nondifferentiable at its critical points, an improved scheme of particle swarm optimizer is given to find the minimum for the energy in this paper. With this improved scheme, each pair of neighboring feature points along the boundaries of the desired objects are picked out from the set of sparse unorganized feature points, and the corresponding directional chord tangent angles are computed simultaneously to finish interpolation. We show experimentally and comparatively that the proposed method can perform effectively to restrict leakage on weak boundaries and premature convergence on long concave boundaries. Besides, it has good noise robustness and can as well extract multiple and open boundaries.

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

circular arc spline
geodesic circular arc
interpolation

arrangement
boundary extraction
feature point
geodesic active contour
particle swarm optimization
subgradient


Solving the single-machine sequencing problem using integer programming Various integer programming models have been proposed for sequencing problems. However, little is known about the practical value of these models. This paper reports a comparison of six different integer programming formulations of the single-machine total tardiness problem. We created a set of especially difficult test problems and attempted to solve them with each of the formulations, using CPLEX software. We found that one formulation performs much more effectively than the others. A generic integer programming approach is still not capable of solving problems with hundreds of jobs, so in that respect, it does not compete with state-of-the-art tardiness algorithms. However, the integer programming approach remains viable for problems containing as many as 40 or 50 jobs and may be the better algorithmic choice when convenience in implementation is considered. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

sequencing
integer programming
tardiness problem


Design of adaptive hypermedia learning systems: A cognitive style approach In the past decade, a number of adaptive hypermedia learning systems have been developed. However, most of these systems tailor presentation content and navigational support solely according to students' prior knowledge. On the other hand, previous research suggested that cognitive styles significantly affect student learning because they refer to how learners process and organize information. To this end, the study presented in this paper developed an adaptive hypermedia learning system tailored to students' cognitive styles, with an emphasis on Pask's Holist-Serialist dimension. How students react to this adaptive hypermedia learning system, including both learning performance and perceptions, was examined in this study. Forty-four undergraduate and postgraduate students participated in the study. The findings indicated that, in general, adapting to cognitive styles improves student learning. The results also showed that the adaptive hypermedia learning system have more effects on students' perceptions than performance. The implications of these results for the design of adaptive hypermedia learning systems are discussed. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

adaptive educational hypermedia
holist-serialist


Re-Scheduling of Unit Commitment Based on Customers' Fuzzy Requirements for Power Reliability The development of the electricity market enables us to provide electricity of varied quality and price in order to fulfill power consumers' needs. Such customers choices should influence the process of adjusting power generation and spinning reserve, and, as a result, change the structure of a unit commitment optimization problem (UCP). To build a unit commitment model that considers customer choices, we employ fuzzy variables in this study to better characterize customer requirements and forecasted future power loads. To measure system reliability and determine the schedule of real power generation and spinning reserve, fuzzy Value-at-Risk (VaR) is utilized in building the model, which evaluates the peak values of power demands under given confidence levels. Based on the information obtained using fuzzy VaR, we proposed a heuristic algorithm called local convergence-averse binary particle swarm optimization (LCA-PSO) to solve the UCP. The proposed model and algorithm are used to analyze several test systems. Comparisons between the proposed algorithm and the conventional approaches show that the LCA-PSO performs better in finding the optimal solutions.

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

power supply reliability
fuzzy set theory
fuzzy value-at-risk
particle swarm optimization algorithm


Internalizing labelled deduction This paper shows how to internalize the Kripke satisfaction definition using the basic hybrid language, and explores the proof theoretic consequences of doing so. The basic hybrid language enables the transfer of classic Gabbay-style labelled deduction methods from the metalanguage to the object language, and the logical handling of labelling discipline. This internalized approach to labelled deduction links neatly with the Gabbay-style rules now widely used in modal Hilbert-systems, enables completeness results for a wide range of first-order definable frame classes to be obtained automatically, and extends to many richer languages. The paper discusses related work by Jerry Seligman and Miroslava Tzakova and concludes with some reflections on the status of labelling in modal logic.

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


STRATEGIES TO SCAN PICTURES WITH AUTOMATA BASED ON WANG TILES Wang automata are devices for picture language recognition recently introduced by us, which characterize the class REC of recognizable picture languages. Thus, Wang automata are equivalent to tiling systems or online tessellation acceptors, and are based like Wang systems on labeled Wang tiles. The present work focus on scanning strategies, to prove that the ones Wang automata are based on are those following four kinds of movements: boustrophedonic, "L-like", "U-like", and spirals.

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

picture languages
wang systems
scanning strategies


Bespoke Physics for Living Technology In the physics of the natural world, basic tasks of life, such as homeostasis and reproduction, are extremely complex operations, requiring the coordination of billions of atoms even in simple cases. By contrast, artificial living organisms can be implemented in computers using relatively few bits, and copying a data structure is trivial. Of course, the physical overheads of the computers themselves are huge, but since their programmability allows digital "laws of physics" to be tailored like a custom suit, deploying living technology atop an engineered computational substrate might be as or more effective than building directly on the natural laws of physics, for a substantial range of desirable purposes. This article suggests basic criteria and metrics for bespoke physics computing architectures, describes one such architecture, and offers data and illustrations of custom living technology competing to reproduce while collaborating on an externally useful computation.

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

indefinite scalability
movable feast machine
spatial computing


Rickettsia felis, from Culture to Genome Sequencing Abstract: Rickettsia felis has been recently cultured in XTC2 cells. This allows production of enough bacteria to create a genomic bank and to sequence it. The chromosome of R. felis is longer than that of previously sequenced rickettsiae and it possess 2 plasmids. Microscopically, this bacterium exhibits two forms of pili: one resembles a conjugative pilus and another forms hair-like projections that may play a role in pathogenicity. R. felis also exhibits several copies of ankyrin-repeat genes and tetratricopeptide encoding gene that are specifically linked to pathogenic host-associated bacteria. It also contains toxin-antitoxin system encoding genes that are extremely rare in intracellular bacteria and may be linked to plasmid maintenance.

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

rickettsia felis
pili
gene
genome sequencing
plasmid


Finding approximate and constrained motifs in graphs One of the most relevant topics in the analysis of biological networks is the identification of functional motifs inside a network. A recent approach introduced in literature, called Graph Motif, represents the network as a vertex-colored graph, and the motif M as a multiset of colors. An occurrence of a motif M in a vertex-colored graph G is a connected induced subgraph of G whose vertex set is colored exactly as M. In this paper we investigate three different variants of the Graph Motif problem. The first two variants, Minimum Adding Motif (Min-Add Graph Motif) and Minimum Substitution Motif (Min-Sub Graph Motif), deal with approximate occurrences of a motif in the graph, while the third variant, Constrained Graph Motif (CGM), constrains the motif to contain a given set of vertices. We investigate the computational and parameterized complexity of the three problems. We show that Min-Add Graph Motifand Min-Sub Graph Motifare both NP-hard, even when M is a set, and the graph is a tree with maximum degree 4 in which each color appears at most twice. Then, we show that Min-Sub Graph Motifis fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the size of M. Finally, we consider the parameterized complexity of the CGMproblem; we give a fixed-parameter algorithm for graphs of bounded treewidth, and show that the problem is W[2]-hard when parameterized by vertical bar M vertical bar, even if the input graph has diameter 2. (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V.

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

computational biology
algorithms
computational complexity


Priority queueing models for cognitive radio networks with traffic differentiation In this paper, we present a new queueing model providing the accurate average system time for packets transmitted over a cognitive radio (CR) link for multiple traffic classes with the preemptive and non-preemptive priority service disciplines. The analysis considers general packet service time, general distributions for the channel availability periods and service interruption periods, and a service-resume transmission. We further introduce and analyze two novel priority service disciplines for opportunistic spectrum access (OSA) networks which take advantage of interruptions to preempt low priority traffic at a low cost. Analytical results, in addition to simulation results to validate their accuracy, are also provided and used to illustrate the impact of different OSA network parameters on the average system time. We particularly show that, for the same average CR transmission link availability, the packet system time significantly increases in a semi-static network with long operating and interruption periods compared to an OSA network with fast alternating operating and interruption periods. We also present results indicating that, due to the presence of interruptions, priority queueing service disciplines provide a greater differentiated service in OSA networks than in traditional networks. The analytical tools presented in this paper are general and can be used to analyze the traffic metrics of most OSA networks carrying multiple classes of traffic with priority queueing service differentiation.

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

cognitive radio
priority queueing
differentiation


Real-time hierarchical stereo Visual SLAM in large-scale environments In this paper we present a new real-time hierarchical (topological/metric) Visual SLAM system Focusing on the localization of a vehicle in large-scale outdoor urban environments It is exclusively based on the visual information provided by a cheap wide-angle stereo camera. Our approach divides the whole map into local sub-maps identified by the so-called fingerprints (vehicle poses). At the sub-map level (low level SLAM), 3D sequential mapping of natural landmarks and the robot location/orientation are obtained using a top-down Bayesian method to model the dynamic behavior A higher topological level (high level SLAM) based on fingerprints has been added to reduce the global accumulated drift, keeping real-time constraints. Using this hierarchical strategy, we keep the local consistency of the metric sub-maps, by mean of the EKF, and global consistency by using the topological map and the MultiLevel Relaxation (MLR) algorithm. Some experimental results for different large-scale outdoor environments are presented, showing an almost constant processing time. (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserved.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 the handoff arrival process in cellular communications Handoffs in cellular communication systems cause interactions among cells that can be modeled using multi-dimensional birth-death process approaches and the concept of system stare. However. exact numerical calculation of traffic performance characteristics is hindered by unmanageably large system state spaces even for systems of modest size. Previous analytical models get around the difficulty by isolating a cell of interest and invoking a Poisson process assumption for handoff arrivals to the cell. Interactions among cells are characterized by relating the mean handoff and departure rates from cells. The current paper seeks to explore the interactions in more detail. Two additional approximate analytical models are developed for this purpose. Each of these is more complicated than the simple Poisson process model, but is analytically tractable - at least for small system sizes. One model isolates a cluster of cells (rather than just the cell of interest) from the system and invokes a Poisson process assumption for cells on the cluster periphery. Performance is calculated for the central cell. The second model also isolates a cluster of cells surrounding the cell of interest, but uses an equivalent two-state Markov Modulated Poisson Process (MMPP) to characterize handoff arrival processes to the cell of interest from each of the neighboring cells. Poisson handoff arrivals to cells on the cluster periphery are assumed. This approach has fewer states than the cluster approach. Finally we present the exact solution for a regional coverage area consisting of a single seven-cell cluster. Teletraffic performance characteristics are computed for each modeling technique and are compared. It was found that all are in close agreement with the original "single isolated cell, Poisson handoff arrival model." which requires the least stares.

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

telecommunications traffic performance
handoffs handovers


Pattern recognition as a tool to support decision making in the management of the electric sector. Part II: A new method based on clustering of multivariate time series Method new of clustering and pattern recognition of multivariate time series. Proposes a approach to recognize consumption patterns in the electricity sector. Unlike Fuzzy C-Means method, the number of clusters is obtained automatically. The results demonstrate its good performance in samples with heterogeneous data.

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

clustering
pattern
multivariate time series


Predicting

anti-HIV

activity:

computational

approach

using

a

novel

topological

descriptor

The

discriminating

power

of

a

novel

topological

descriptor

termed

as

eccentric

adjacency

index

in

the

estimation

of

anti-HIV

activity,

for

a

data

set

of

1-[(2-hydroxyethoxy)methyl]-6-(phenylthio)thymine

(HEPT)

derivatives

was

investigated

in

the

present

study.

The

value

of

eccentric

adjacency

index

of

each

derivative

was

computed

and

active

range

was

identified

using

moving

average

analysis.

Subsequently,

each

derivative

was

assigned

a

biological

activity

which

was

then

compared

with

the

reported

anti-HIV

activity.

The

accuracy

of

prediction

was

found

to

be

more

than

ninety

percent

in

the

active

range

using

eccentric

adjacency

index.

The

proposed

index

offers

a

vast

potential

for

structure-activity/property

studies.

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

first order molecular connectivity index


O(N) parallel tight binding molecular dynamics simulation of carbon nanotubes We report an O(N) parallel tight binding molecular dynamics simulation study of (10 x 10) structured carbon nanotubes (CNT) at 300 K. We converted a sequential O(N-3) TBMD simulation program into an O(N) parallel code, utilizing the concept of parallel virtual machines (PVM). The code is tested in a distributed memory system consisting of a cluster with 8 PC's that run under Linux (Slackware 2.2.13 kernel). Our results on the speed up, efficiency and system size are given. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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


generative models for name disambiguation Name ambiguity is a special case of identity uncertainty where one person can be referenced by multiple name variations in different situations or evenshare the same name with other people. In this paper, we present an efficient framework by using two novel topic-based models, extended from Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Our models explicitly introduce a new variable for persons and learn the distribution of topics with regard to persons and words. Experiments indicate that our approach consistently outperforms other unsupervised methods including spectral and DBSCAN clustering. Scalability is addressed by disambiguating authors in over 750,000 papers from the entire CiteSeer dataset.

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


Feasibility and effort estimation models for medium and small size information mining projects We are interested in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) Information Systems. Our research focuses on managing Information Mining Projects (IMP) in SMEs. We propose a model for assessing IMP feasibility in SMEs. We propose a model for estimating resources required to carry out IMP in SMEs. Proposed models are validated in IMP real projects.

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

data mining
effort estimation model
feasibility model


On Quickselect, partial sorting and Multiple Quickselect We present explicit solutions of a class of recurrences related to the Quickselect algorithm. Thus we are immediately able to solve recurrences arising at the partial sorting problem, which are contained in this class. Furthermore we show how the partial sorting problem is connected to the Multiple Quickselect algorithm and present a method for the calculation of solutions for a class of recurrences related to the Multiple Quickselect algorithm. Further an analysis of an algorithm for sorting a subarray A[r...r + p -1], given the array A[1...n], is provided. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

algorithms
analysis of algorithms
selection


Boosting search with variable elimination in constraint optimization and constraint satisfaction problems There are two main solving schemas for constraint satisfaction and optimization problems: i) search, whose basic step is branching over the values of a variables, and ii) dynamic programming, whose basic step is variable elimination. Variable elimination is time and space exponential in a graph parameter called induced width, which renders the approach infeasible for many problem classes. However, by restricting variable elimination so that only low arity constraints are processed and recorded, it can be effectively combined with search, because the elimination of variables may reduce drastically the search tree size. In this paper we introduce BE-BB(k), a hybrid general algorithm that combines search and variable elimination. The parameter k controls the tradeoff between the two strategies. The algorithm is space exponential in k. Regarding time, we show that its complexity is bounded by k and a structural parameter from the constraint graph. We provide experimental evidence that the hybrid algorithm can outperform state-of-the-art algorithms in constraint satisfaction, Max-CSP and Weighted CSP. Especially in optimization tasks, the advantage of our approach over plain search can be overwhelming.

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

constraint satisfaction
constraint optimization

soft constraints
bucket elimination
branch and bound


Testing netwowk-on-chip communication fabrics Network-on-chip (NoC) communication fabrics will be increasingly used in many large multicore system-on-chip designs in the near future. A relevant. challenge that arises from this trend is that the test costs associated with NoC infrastructures may account for a significant part of the total test budget. In this paper, we present a novel methodology for testing such NoC architectures. The proposed methodology offers a tradeoff between test time and on-chip self-test resources. The fault models used are specific to deep submicrometer technologies and account for crosstalk effects due to interwire coupling. The novelty of our approach lies in the progressive reuse of the NoC infrastructure to transport test data to the components under test in a recursive manner. It exploits the inherent parallelism of the data transport mechanism to reduce the test time and, implicitly, the test cost. We also describe a suitable test-scheduling approach. In this manner, the test methodology developed in this paper is able to reduce the test time significantly as compared to previously proposed solutions, offering speedup factors ranging from 2x to 34x for the NoCs considered for experimental evaluation.

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

interconnect infrastructure
multicast test
network-on-chip (noc)
test optimization
unicast test


A reformative kernel Fisher discriminant analysis A reformative kernel Fisher discriminant method is proposed, which is directly derived from the naive kernel Fisher discriminant analysis with superiority in classification efficiency. In the novel method only a part of training patterns, called significant nodes, are necessary to be adopted in classifying one test pattern. A recursive algorithm for selecting significant nodes, which is the key of the novel method, is presented in detail. The experiment on benchmarks shows that the novel method is effective and much efficient in classifying.

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


using functor categories to generate intermediate code In the early 80's Oles and Reynolds devised a semantic model of Algol-like languages using a category of functors from a category of store shapes to the category of predomains. Here we will show how a variant of this idea can be used to define the translation of an Algol-like language to intermediate code in a uniform way that avoids unnecessary temporary variables, provides control-flow translation of boolean expressions, permits online expansion of procedures, and minimizes the storage overhead of calls of closed procedures. The basic idea is to replace continuations by instruction sequences and store shapes by descriptions of the structure of the run-time stack.

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

translation structure code language storage instruction online

variability
procedure
express
semantic models
timing
control flow
shape
continuation
sequence


plane embeddings of planar graph metrics Embedding metrics into constant-dimensional geometric spaces, such as the Euclidean plane, is relatively poorly understood. Motivated by applications in visualization, ad-hoc networks, and molecular reconstruction, we consider the natural problem of embedding shortest-path metrics of unweighted planar graphs (planar graph metrics) into the Euclidean plane. It is known that, in the special case of shortest-path metrics of trees, embedding into the plane requires ?(? n ) distortion in the worst case [19, 1], and surprisingly, this worst-case upper bound provides the best known approximation algorithm for minimizing distortion. We answer an open question posed in this work and highlighted by Matouek [21] by proving that some planar graph metrics require ?( n 2/3 ) distortion in any embedding into the plane, proving the first separation between these two types of graph metrics. We also prove that some planar graph metrics require ?( n ) distortion in any crossing-free straight-line embedding into the plane, suggesting a separation between low-distortion plane embedding and the well-studied notion of crossing-free straight-line planar drawings. Finally, on the upper-bound side, we prove that all outerplanar graph metrics can be embedded into the plane with O(?n) distortion, generalizing the previous results on trees (both the worst-case bound and the approximation algorithm) and building techniques for handling cycles in plane embeddings of graph metrics.

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


Discursive Equality and Everyday Talk Online: The Impact of Superparticipants Empirical studies of online debate almost universally observe a dominant minority of posters. Informed by theories of deliberative democracy, these are typically framed negativelyyet research into their impact on debate is scant. To address this, a typology of what we call super-participation (super-posters, agenda-setters and facilitators) is developed and applied to the http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ forum. Focusing on the first of these, we found 2,052 superposters (0.4%) contributing 47% of 25m+ posts. While superposters were quantitatively dominant, qualitative content analysis of the discursive practices of 25 superposters (n=40,044) found that most did not attempt to stop other users from posting (curbing) or attack them (flaming). In fact, in contradiction to the received wisdom, super-posters discursively performed a range of positive roles.

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

deliberation
political talk
public sphere
virtual community


SHORT-TERM TREND PREDICTION OF FOREIGN EXCHANGE RATES WITH A NEURAL-NETWORK BASED ENSEMBLE OF FINANCIAL TECHNICAL INDICATORS This paper is about designing, developing and training a neural network for short-term forecasting of buy-sell trends in foreign exchange markets. We use a set of established financial technical indicators as inputs to the neural network and we develop the architecture to predict a trend and then train the network based on the accuracy of the prediction. We perform extensive real time testing with the closing prices (one per minute) of the USD/EUR exchange rates for a one-year period. The overall approach delivers a system that predicts trends substantially better than individual technical indicators.

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

technical analysis
neural networks
trend forecasting


A cellular automaton methodology for the simulation of integrated circuit fabrication processes This paper presents a methodology for the simulation of physical processes with local interactions using cellular automata. Such processes are common in integrated circuit fabrication, and their simulation presents one of the most difficult problems in developing technology computer aided design (TCAD) systems. The simulated integrated circuit fabrication processes considered are lithography, oxidation, and deposition processes. The proposed methodology establishes the ability to capture the essential features of these integrated circuit fabrication processes and to translate them into a suitable form, in order to obtain an effective cellular automaton model, for each process. Several numerical experiments were carried out, in this work, using the cellular automaton algorithms obtained, and their results were found to be in very good agreement with published experimental results. Furthermore, cellular automaton algorithms exploit the inherent parallelism of the cellular automaton model and run fast on serial computers.

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


A Dynamic Geometry Reconstruction Technique for Mobile Devices Using Adaptive Checkerboard Recognition and Epipolar Geometry This paper describes a technique for reconstructing dynamic scene geometry using a handheld video projector-camera system and a single checkerboard image as a structured light pattern. The proposed technique automatically recognizes a dense checkerboard pattern under dynamic conditions. The pattern-recognition process is adaptive to different light conditions and an object's color, thereby avoiding the need to set threshold values manually for different objects when the scanning device is moving. We also propose a technique to find corresponding positions for the checkerboard pattern, when displayed by a projector, without needing any position-encoding techniques. The correspondence matching process is based on epipolar geometry, enabling the checkerboard pattern to be matched even if parts of it are occluded. By using a dense checkerboard pattern, we can construct a handheld projector-camera system that can acquire the geometry of objects in real time, and we have verified the feasibility of the proposed techniques.

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 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 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 O O O O

pattern recognition
pattern matching
handheld projector-camera


Signal estimation with nonlinear uncertain observations using covariance information This paper addresses the signal estimation problem in situations where the observations are nonlinear functions of the signal and the measure mechanism is prone to failure or some observations are accidentally lost (uncertain observations). A recursive filtering and fixed-point smoothing algorithm is proposed assuming that the Bernoulli random variables describing the uncertainty in the observations are independent and the state-space model generating the signal is unknown and only the covariance functions of the processes involved in the observation equation are available. A numerical simulation example concerning the phase modulation problem shows the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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

least-squares estimation
nonlinear observations


on capturing malware dynamics in mobile power-law networks The increasing convergence of power-law networks such as social networking and peer-to-peer sites, web applications and mobile platforms makes today's users highly vulnerable to entirely new generations of malware that exploit vulnerabilities in web applications and mobile platforms for new infections, while using the power-law connectivity for finding new victims. The traditional epidemic models based on assumptions of homogeneity, averagedegree distributions, and perfect-mixing are inadequate to model this type of malware propagation. In this paper, we study three aspects crucial to modeling malware propagation in such environments: application-level interactions among users of such networks, local network structure , and user mobility . Since closed-form solutions of malware propagation in such environments are difficult to obtain, we describe an open-source, flexible agent-based emulation framework that can be used by malware researchers for studying today's complex malware. The framework, called Agent-Based Malware Modeling (AMM), allows different applications, network structure and user mobility in either a geographic or a logical domain to study various infection and propagation scenarios. The majority of the parameters used in the framework can be derived from real-life network traces collected from these networks, and therefore, represent realistic malware propagation and infection scenarios. As representative examples, we examine two well-known malware spreading mechanisms: (i) a malicious virus such as Cabir spreading among the subscribers of a cellular network using Bluetooth, and (ii) a hybrid worm that exploit email and file-sharing to infect users of a social network. In both cases, we identify the parameters most important to the spread of the epidemic based upon our extensive simulation results.

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

agent-based modeling
worms
power-law networks
mobile viruses


A randomised controlled trial of a self-guided internet intervention promoting well-being Positive psychology is paving the way for interventions that enduringly enhance well-being and the internet offers the potential to disseminate these interventions to a broad audience in an accessible and sustainable manner. There is now sufficient evidence demonstrating the efficacy of internet interventions for mental illness treatment and prevention, but little is known about enhancing well-being. The current study examined the efficacy of a positive psychology internet-based intervention by adopting a randomised controlled trial design to compare a strengths intervention, a problem solving intervention and a placebo control. Participants (n=160) completed measures of well-being (PWI-A, SWLS, PANAS, OTH) and mental illness (DASS-21) at pre-assessment, post-assessment and 3-month follow-up. Well-being increased for the strengths group at post- and follow-up assessment on the PWI-A, but not the SWLS or PANAS. Significant changes were detected on the OTH subscales of engagement and pleasure. No changes in mental illness were detected by group or time. Attrition from the study was 83% at 3-month follow-up, with significant group differences in adherence to the intervention: strengths (34%), problem solving (15.5%) and placebo control (42.6%). Although the results are mixed, it appears possible to enhance the cognitive component of well-being via a self-guided internet intervention.

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

subjective well-being
cognitive-behavioural therapy
happiness
health promotion


Real-time emergency response: improved management of real-time information during crisis situations The decision-making process during crisis and emergency scenarios intertwines human intelligence with infocommunications. In such scenarios, the tasks of data acquisition, manipulation, and analysis involve a combination of cognitive processes and information and communications technologies, all of which are vital to effective situational awareness and response capability. To support such capabilities, we describe our real time emergency response (rtER) system, implemented with the intention of helping to manage the potential torrents of data that are available during a crisis, and that could easily overwhelm human cognitive capacity in the absence of technological mediation. Specifically, rtER seeks to address the research challenges surrounding the real-time collection of relevant data, especially live video, making this information rapidly available to a team of humans, and giving them the tools to manipulate, tag, and filter the most critical information of relevance to the situation.

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


Hardware design of a localization system for staff in high-risk manufacturing areas In this paper, we propose a hardware design for an effective real time indoor localization system for staff working in high-risk manufacturing areas. Because of the special requirements of our system, the chirp spread spectrum (CSS) is the most suitable indoor localization technology. The details of the new localization system are described. The system involves several anchors, tags, and a gateway, all of which use the nanoLOC TRX transceiver (NA5TR1) RF chip (Nanotron Co., Germany), which is based on the CSS technology. To validate the effectiveness of our system, both ranging and localization tests were carried out. The difference between the ranging accuracy indoors and outdoors was small. The localization system can position indoor mobile staff precisely, enabling the establishment of an emergency rescue mechanism.

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

wireless indoor localization
high-risk manufacturing area
chirp spread spectrum (css)
nanoloc trx transceiver (na5tr1)


Extensions of rich words A word w is rich if it has |w|+1 | w | + 1 many distinct palindromic factors, including the empty word. This article contains several results about rich words, particularly related to extending them. A word w can be eventually extended richly in n ways if there exists a finite word u and n distinct letters a?Alph(w) a ? Alph ( w ) such that wua is rich. We will prove that every (non-unary) rich word can be eventually extended richly in at least two different ways, but not always in three or more ways. We will also prove that every rich word can be extended to both periodic and aperiodic infinite rich words. The defect of a finite word w is defined by D(w)=|w|+1?|Pal(w)| D ( w ) = | w | + 1 ? | Pal ( w ) | . This concept has been studied in various papers. Here, we will define a new concept, infinite defect. For a finite word w the definition is D ? ( w ) = min { D ( z ) | z is an infinite word which has factor w } . We will show that the infinite defect of a finite word is always finite and give some upper bounds for it. The difference between defect and infinite defect is also investigated. We will also give an upper and a lower bound for the number of rich words. A new class of words, two-dimensional rich words, is also introduced.

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

combinatorics on words
palindromes
sturmian words
two-dimensional words


On the Mapping of Incremental Redundancy into a Physical Layer ASIC Incremental Redundancy (IR) was introduced in GSM/EDGE and later adopted in Evolved EDGE in order to keep the throughput at an acceptable level. Legacy 2G networks with their ubiquitous coverage are apt to provide a fallback solution for the latest LTE networks. On the other hand, they provide a reliable data link for emerging M2M or IoT applications. IR data processing and controlling is specified in several layers of the GSM/EDGE protocol stack. In many state-of-the-art designs this leads to decentralized data processing, and thus to costly data movements between memories and hardware accelerators. This is prohibitive for emerging M2M designs, which demand lowest possible hardware resources. In this work, IR is implemented as part of a dedicated hardware baseband signal processing unit in order to unburden higher layer processing units from IR, reduce area, power consumption, and costs. The open source baseband framework MatPHY is extended for packet switched operation to facilitate the development of efficient IR hardware architectures. With the design parameters obtained from performance evaluations computed with MatPHY an IR architecture in a 130 nm CMOS technology is presented. Said architecture proves the suitability of an ASIC IR unit instead of a software solution distributed over various layers and components.

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

edge
incremental redundancy
matphy
m2m
iot


code construction for multiple sources network coding In several wireless applications multiple sources transmit information to one or more receivers, many times over unknown topologies. This is especially so in mobile networks where learning the topology may have prohibitive complexity. Network coding techniques allow to achieve the min-cut capacity even when the topology is unknown. Our contribution in this paper is to develop algebraic code constructions for multiple sources network coding.

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

subspace coding
coding theory
netwoek coding


Trusting the messenger because of the message: feedback dynamics from information quality to source evaluation Information provided by a source should be assessed by an intelligent agent on the basis of several criteria: most notably, its content and the trust one has in its source. In turn, the observed quality of information should feed back on the assessment of its source, and such feedback should intelligently distribute among different features of the sourcee.g., competence and sincerity. We propose a formal framework in which trust is treated as a multi-dimensional concept relativized to the sincerity of the source and its competence with respect to specific domains: both these aspects influence the assessment of the information, and also determine a feedback on the trustworthiness degree of its source. We provide a framework to describe the combined effects of competence and sincerity on the perceived quality of information. We focus on the feedback dynamics from information quality to source evaluation, highlighting the role that uncertainty reduction and social comparison play in determining the amount and the distribution of feedback.

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

information dynamics
argumentation
information sources
socio-cognitive models


Advances in knowledge acquisition and representation The articles in this special issue represent advances in several areas of knowledge acquisition and knowledge representation. In this article we attempt to place these advances in the context of a fundamental challenge in AI; namely, the automated acquisition of knowledge from data and the representation of this knowledge to support understanding and reasoning. We observe that while this work does indeed advance the field in important areas, the need exists to integrate these components into an end-to-end system and begin to extract general methodologies for this challenge. At the heart of this integration is the need for performance feedback throughout the process to guide the selection of alternative methods, the support for human interaction in the process, and the definition of general metrics and testbeds to evaluate progress.

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

knowledge acquisition
knowledge representation


Video Super-Resolution Using Simultaneous Motion and Intensity Calculations In this paper, we propose an energy-based algorithm for motion-compensated video super-resolution (VSR) targeted on upscaling of standard definition (SD) video to high-definition (HD) video. Since the motion (flow field) of the image sequence is generally unknown, we introduce a formulation for the joint estimation of a super-resolution (SR) sequence and its flow field. Via the calculus of variations, this leads to a coupled system of partial differential equations for image sequence and motion estimation. We solve a simplified form of this system and, as a by-product, we indeed provide a motion field for super-resolved sequences. To the best of our knowledge, computing super-resolved flows has not been done before. Most advanced SR methods found in literature cannot be applied to general video with arbitrary scene content and/or arbitrary optical flows, as it is possible with our simultaneous VSR method. A series of experiments shows that our method outperforms other VSR methods when dealing with general video input and that it continues to provide good results even for large scaling factors up to 8 x 8.

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

motion compensation
motion super-resolution
partial differential equations (pdes)
super-resolution
variational methods
video processing
video upscaling


(delta, star)-equality of fuzzy sets The Cai delta-equality of fuzzy sets corresponds to the Lukasiewicz t-norm. In this paper we study the notion of (star, delta)-equality, a concept which generalizes the delta-equality to the case of the fuzzy set theory based on an arbitrary continuous t-norm star. We investigate the robustness of some fuzzy implication operators in terms of (star, delta)-equality.

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


forward area light map projection We present a new method for soft shadow visualization. This two-stage approach generates high-quality soft shadow images by projecting sampled surface points, which are kept in a "layered area light map", onto the viewing screen. The layered area light map is created in the preprocessing stage, and is multi-layered in the sense that each map cell keeps the visibility ratio of the area light source with respect to multiple surface points at varying depth. In the forward projection stage, we project the sampled surface points in the layered area light map onto the screen buffer to attenuate a shadowless reference image in order to quickly generate the final image. Dynamic splatting and object surface-based convolution are used in the process to fill "holes" and to smooth out minor artifacts that are caused by insufficient sampling. When a series of images for a given scene are to be produced this forward projection rendering technique is much faster than ray tracing and still results in soft shadows with comparable quality.

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


Data classification using an ensemble of filters Ensemble learning has been the focus of much attention, based on the assumption that combining the output of multiple experts is better than the output of any single expert. Many methods have been proposed of which bagging and boosting were the most popular. In this research, the idea of ensembling is adapted for feature selection. We propose an ensemble of filters for classification, aimed at achieving a good classification performance together with a reduction in the input dimensionality. With this approach, we try to overcome the problem of selecting an appropriate method for each problem at hand, as it is overly dependent on the characteristics of the datasets. The adequacy of using an ensemble of filters rather than a single filter was demonstrated on synthetic and real data, paving the way for its final application over a challenging scenario such as DNA microarray classification.

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

ensemble learning
feature selection
classification


A new predictive model for compressive strength of HPC using gene expression programming In this study, gene expression programming (GEP) is utilized to derive a new model for the prediction of compressive strength of high performance concrete (HPC) mixes. The model is developed using a comprehensive database obtained from the literature. The validity of the proposed model is verified by applying it to estimate the compressive strength of a portion of test results that are not included in the analysis. Linear and nonlinear least squares regression analyses are performed to benchmark the GEP model. Contributions of the parameters affecting the compressive strength are evaluated through a sensitivity analysis. GEP is found to be an effective method for evaluating the compressive strength of HPC mixes. The prediction performance of the optimal GEP model is better than the regression models.

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

high performance concrete
gene expression programming
compressive strength
sensitivity analysis
prediction


Iris liveness detection using regional features ? Regional features with both low level features and high level feature distribution. Intensity and local descriptors as low level features. Spatial pyramid model seeking feature distribution in regions with varying size. Relational measure expressing feature distribution in regions with varying shape. Experiments on both NIR and colour datasets.

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

iris liveness detection
local descriptors


Proof-term synthesis on dependent-type systems via explicit substitutions Typed lambda -terms are used as a compact and linear representation of proofs in intuitionistic logic. This is possible since the Curry-Howard isomorphism relates proof-trees with typed lambda -terms. The proofs-as-terms principle can be used to verify the validity of a proof by type checking the lambda -term extracted from the complete proof-tree. In this paper we present a proof synthesis method for dependent-type systems where typed open terms are built incrementally at the same time as proofs are done. This way, every construction step, not just the last one, may be type checked. The method is based on a suitable calculus where substitutions as well as meta-variables are first-class objects. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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

higher-order unification
lambda calculus


Parallel 3D-TLM algorithm for simulation of the Earth-ionosphere cavity ? A parallel 3D algorithm for solving time-domain electromagnetic problems with arbitrary geometries is presented. The technique employed is the Transmission Line Modeling (TLM) method implemented in Shared Memory (SM) environments. The benchmarking performed reveals that the maximum speedup depends on the memory size of the problem as well as multiple hardware factors, like the disposition of CPUs, cache, or memory. A maximum speedup of 15 has been measured for the largest problem. In certain circumstances of low memory requirements, superlinear speedup is achieved using our algorithm. The model is employed to model the Earth-ionosphere cavity, thus enabling a study of the natural electromagnetic phenomena that occur in it. The algorithm allows complete 3D simulations of the cavity with a resolution of 10km, within a reasonable timescale.

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

parallelization
multi-core efficiency
schumann resonances


A computational model of synaptic transmission at the calyx of Held The calyx of Held is a giant glutamatergic synapse in the mammalian auditory pathway designed to ensure faithful transmission of high frequency action potential trains. Pre- and postsynaptic recordings from this synapse reveal several forms of facilitation and depression. A computational model of synaptic transmission has been developed to investigate the mechanisms underlying modulation at the calyx of Held. The model includes paired-pulse facilitation and depression due to vesicle depletion and postsynaptic AMPA receptor desensitization. Accurately matching the experimental time course and magnitude of the depression requires both slow and fast replenishment of vesicles at the presynaptic release sites. The model demonstrates that the temporal accuracy of postsynaptic spike generation depends on the amplitude of the EPSC and so accuracy decreases as the EPSCs depress.

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


Solution for the broadcasting in the Kademlia peer-to-peer overlay Structured peer-to-peer networks are capable of fast and efficient lookup operations as a distributed hash table. The topology of these networks makes it possible to send broadcast messages among nodes, either for the purpose of providing a complex query service for participants, or to disseminate information valuable for all nodes. In this article a broadcast algorithm for the Kademlia XOR topology is presented. The algorithm, which was developed specifically for Kademlia, uses replication mechanisms similar to that of the storage and retrieval service of this overlay topology. This allows for increased reliability and speed of the broadcast, and also efficient operation, as the routing table for lookups are already available and can be used. An analytical model is presented, which can be used to calculate the required level of replication for any desired reliability at runtime, and is validated with simulation as well.

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

distributed hash table
kademlia
broadcast


Implementation

of

the

Hamiltonian

symmetry

for

the

DMRG

algorithm

In

the

Density

Matrix

Renormalization

Group

(DMRG)

algorithm

(White,

Hamiltonian

symmetries

play

an

important

rle.

Using

symmetries,

the

matrix

representation

of

the

Hamiltonian

can

be

blocked.

Diagonalizing

each

matrix

block

is

more

efficient

than

diagonalizing

the

original

matrix.

This

paper

explains

how

the

the

DMRG++

code

(Alvarez,

has

been

extended

to

handle

the

non-local

symmetry

in

a

model

independent

way.

Improvements

in

CPU

times

compared

to

runs

with

only

local

symmetries

are

discussed

for

the

one-orbital

Hubbard

model,

and

for

a

two-orbital

Hubbard

model

for

iron-based

superconductors.

The

computational

bottleneck

of

the

algorithm

and

the

use

of

shared

memory

parallelization

are

also

addressed.

Program

summary

Program

title:

DMRG++

Catalog

identifier:

Program

summary

URL:

Program

obtainable

from:

CPC

Program

Library,

Queens

University,

Belfast,

N.

Ireland

Licensing

provisions:

Special

license.

See

No.

of

lines

in

distributed

program,

including

test

data,

etc.:

No.

of

bytes

in

distributed

program,

including

test

data,

etc.:

Distribution

format:

tar.gz

Programming

language:

C++.

Computer:

PC.

Operating

system:

Multiplatform,

tested

on

Linux.

Has

the

code

been

vectorized

or

parallelized?:

Yes.

to

processors

with

MPI,

to

cores

with

pthreads.

RAM:

is

enough

to

run

the

included

test)

Classification:

Catalog

identifier

of

previous

version:

Journal

reference

of

previous

version:

Comput.

Phys.

Comm.

External

routines:

BLAS

and

LAPACK

Nature

of

problem:

Strongly

correlated

electrons

systems,

display

a

broad

range

of

important

phenomena,

and

their

study

is

a

major

area

of

research

in

condensed

matter

physics.

In

this

context,

model

Hamiltonians

are

used

to

simulate

the

relevant

interactions

of

a

given

compound,

and

the

relevant

degrees

of

freedom.

These

studies

rely

on

the

use

of

tight-binding

lattice

models

that

consider

electron

localization,

where

states

on

one

site

can

be

labeled

by

spin

and

orbital

degrees

of

freedom.

The

calculation

of

properties

from

these

Hamiltonians

is

a

computational

intensive

problem,

since

the

Hilbert

space

over

which

these

Hamiltonians

act

grows

exponentially

with

the

number

of

sites

on

the

lattice.

Solution

method:

The

DMRG

is

a

numerical

variational

technique

to

study

quantum

many

body

Hamiltonians.

For

one-dimensional

and

quasi

one-dimensional

systems,

the

DMRG

is

able

to

truncate,

with

bounded

errors

and

in

a

general

and

efficient

way,

the

underlying

Hilbert

space

to

a

constant

size,

making

the

problem

tractable.

Running

time:

Varies.

The

test

suite

provided

takes

about

to

run

on

a

serial

machine.

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

density-matrix renormalization group
generic programming


Filtering in a unit quaternion space for model-based object tracking The main idea in object tracking is to support the processing of incoming images by predicting future object's poses and features using the knowledge about the object's previous motion. In this paper we present a new method for the prediction and adjustment of motion parameters to the current measurements using the quaternion representation for the orientation and the Gauss-Newton iteration on the unit sphere S-3. Unlike other trackers, our tracker searches for estimates directly in the space of rigid body motions (represented by R-3 x S-3) and takes into account the differential and geometric properties of this space. We present some results showing the successful tracking in synthetic and real image sequences. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Modern Algorithms of Simulation for Getting Some Random Numbers In order to carry out the simulation, we need a source of random numbers distributed according to the desired probability distribution. In this paper we have constructed algorithms for generating both continuous and discrete random variables. One simulates a discrete random variable having a geometric distribution, which is used in reliability. We also create some algorithms for generating: a normal continuous variable, other continuous variables having exponential distribution, Weibull distribution, gamma distribution. The aim of this paper is to see that if we have random numbers generated according to some distribution, we may perform a transformation to generate the desired distribution.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 test likelihood ratio
parametric classification criterion
maximum likelihood estimates
likelihood function


Kinematic analysis of a hybrid serial-parallel manipulator The kinematic analysis of a new type hybrid serial-parallel manipulator is presented. This manipulator is based on two kinds of 3-UPU parallel mechanisms (PM). Each 3-UPU possesses one platform, one base and three limbs, and hence has 3 degrees of freedom (DOF). Each limb comprises of universal (U), prismatic (P), and universal (U) joints in series. Therefore the hybrid manipulator has totally 6 degrees of freedom and has also an elegant structure. The moving platform (mid platform) of the first PM moves with pure translation with respect to the fixed base and the moving platform (end platform) in the second PM only changes its orientation with respect to the mid platform. In this paper, closed-form kinematic solutions are obtained for this type of mechanism and related theoretical results have been verified numerically.

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

parallel mechanism (pm)
forward kinematic analysis
3-upu


A new concept of compatibility structure in new product development Notwithstanding the existence of few publications addressing the compatibility issues in new product development, an axiomatic basis supporting this literature and driving new contributions to the subject is still lacking. In this paper, we propose a definition of a compatibility structure that lays down the foundations of an axiomatic basis for modelling compatibility in new product development. Regarding the number of conditions comprised in this definition, a minimal representation of compatibility structure is proposed to ease the use and manipulation of a compatibility structure. The definition of compatibility structure and its minimal representation are inspired by those of preference structure in preference modelling. The similarities and dissimilarities between preference structures and compatibility structures are emphasized. The construction and the characterization of a compatibility structure without incomparability using the proposed definition are provided. In this paper, we also propose a method to evaluate the crisp compatibility relations between two alternatives with respect to attributes/criteria. The compatibility relations are evaluated by investigating the impact that an alternative has on another, and vice-versa with respect to a single attribute/criterion. Future research related to the compatibility structure proposed in this paper is described.

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

compatibility structure
preference structure
minimal representation
impact
new product development


The impact of vaporware, reliable software, vendor dependence and fulfilled promises on customers' perceptions/experiences and vendor reputation This study was designed to test two hypotheses: H-1: Reliable software, fulfilled promises and timely delivery of software can positively affect a software vendor's reputation and credibility. H-2: Dependence of customers on software vendors and extent of investment in software are negatively correlated with reliable software, fulfilled promises and timely delivery of software. To measure the dependent and independent variables, a survey was sent to 500 IS managers and database administrators. Canonical correlation results show a positive correlation between reputation/credibility and reliable/on-time software and fulfilled promises. With respect to the second hypothesis, there was no correlation between the dependent and independent variables. 0963-9314 (C) 1998 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

O O O B 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

promised software
product preannouncement


Modeling and simulation of a low-grade urinary bladder carcinoma We present a model of a low-grade urinary bladder carcinoma. We simulate oxygen diffusion, carcinogen penetration and angiogenesis. We combine cellular automata with nonlinear diffusionabsorption equations. A view is on therapy personalization by simulation of cancer progression.

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

bladder cancer
nonlinear diffusion?absorption equation
hybrid model


Change profiles of a reused class framework vs. two of its applications Software reuse is expected to improve software productivity and quality. Although many empirical studies have investigated the benefits and challenges of software reuse from development viewpoints, few studies have explored reuse from the perspective of maintenance. This paper reports on a case study that compares software changes during the maintenance and evolution phases of a reused Java class framework with two applications that are reusing the framework. The results reveal that: (1) The reused framework is more stable, in terms of change density, than the two applications that are reusing it. (2) The reused framework has profiles for change types that are similar to those of the applications, where perfective changes dominate. (3) The maintenance and evolution lifecycle of both the reused framework and its applications is the same: initial development, followed by a stage with extending capabilities and functionality to meet user needs, then a stage in which only minor defect repairs are made, and finally, phase-out. However, the reused framework goes faster from the stage of extending capabilities to the stage in which only minor defect repairs are made than its applications. (4) We have validated that several factors, such as are functionalities, development practice, complexity, size, and age, have affected the change densities and change profiles of the framework and applications. Thus, all these factors must be considered to predict change profiles in the maintenance and evolution phase of software.

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

software reuse
case study
class framework


Ridge extraction of a smooth 2-manifold surface based on vector field This paper presents a general scheme to compute ridges on a smooth 2-manifold surface from the standpoint of a vector field. A ridge field is introduced. Starting with an initial ridge, which may or may not be umbilical, a ridge line is then traced by calculating an associated integral curve of this field in conjunction with a new projection procedure to prevent it from diverging. This projection is the first that can optimize a ridge guess to lie on a ridge line uniquely and accurately. In order to follow this scheme, we not only develop practical ridge formulae but also address their corresponding computational procedures for an analytical surface patch, especially for an implicit surface. In contrast to other existing methods, our new approach is mathematically sound and characterized by considering the full geometric structures and topological patterns of ridges on a generic smooth surface. The resulting ridges are accurate in the numerical sense and meet the requirement of high accuracy with complete topology. Although the objective of this paper is to develop a mathematically sound framework for ridges on a smooth surface, we give a comprehensive review of relevant works on both meshes and smooth surfaces for readers. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

invariant feature
line of curvature
parametric surface
principal curvature
principal direction
umbilical point


Suppression of Time-varying Multi-tone Interference Based on Frequency Domain Interference Detection Existing active multi-tone interference (MTI) suppression methods used in direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) consider the interference to be time-invariant. However, in most practical scenarios, the interference is time-varying. These conventional analytic models cannot be directly applied to current realistic systems with time-varying interference. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel approach based on frequency domain interference detection to suppress MTI experiencing a time-varying fading channel. Our approach operates in two steps. Firstly, we calculate the interference decision threshold by the probability of false alarm based on the Neyman-Pearson (NP) criterion. Secondly, we consider that the frequency bin is corrupted by interference, and the corresponding point is set to zero if the magnitude of the received signal exceeds the threshold. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed method can mitigate time-varying MTI effectively, and can approach the interference-free performance limit over practical ranges of interference power levels and mobility levels.

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

dsss
probability of false alarm
decision threshold

time-varying multi-tone interference suppression


BOUNDS FOR PROJECTIVE CODES FROM SEMIDEFINITE PROGRAMMING We apply the semidefinite programming method to derive bounds for projective codes over a finite field.

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

projective codes
semidefinite programming
bounds


A study of lacunarity-based texture analysis approaches to improve urban image classification The traditional spectral based classifiers are normally considered ineffective in digitally classifying urban land-use and land-cover classes from high-resolution remotely sensed data due to the lack of consideration of images spatial properties. To identify the complex arrangements of urban features in high-resolution image data, the texture information contained in a group of pixels needs to be considered. This paper discusses the concept of lacunarity and the use of two lacunarity estimation methods (i.e., binary, gray scale) in texture analysis and classification of urban images. Lacunarity has been introduced to characterize different texture appearances, which may share the same fractal dimension value. Lacunarity measures the distribution of gap sizes: low lacunarity geometric objects are homogeneous because all gap sizes are the same, whereas high lacunarity objects are heterogeneous. Using different moving windows (i.e., 1313, 2121, 2929), the above lacunarity methods were employed to classify urban features and to observe the effects of the size of moving windows in characterizing urban texture features. Results from this study show that traditional spectral based classification approach is inaccurate in classifying urban land categories from high-resolution image data, with an accuracy of 55%, whereas lacunarity approaches can be used to improve urban classification accuracy dramatically to 92%.

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