Assistive mobility devices focusing on Smart Walkers: Classification and review In an aging society it is extremely important to develop devices, which can support and aid the elderly in their daily life. This demands means and tools that extend independent living and promote improved health. Thus, the goal of this article is to review the state of the art in the robotic technology for mobility assistive devices for people with mobility disabilities. The important role that robotics can play in mobility assistive devices is presented, as well as the identification and survey of mobility assistive devices subsystems with a particular focus on the walkers technology. The advances in the walkers field have been enormous and have shown a great potential on helping people with mobility disabilities. Thus it is presented a review of the available literature of walkers and are discussed major advances that have been made and limitations to be overcome.

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

assistive mobility technology
rehabilitation


Adaptive dissemination of data in time-critical asymmetric communication environments The proliferation of new data-intensive applications in asymmetric communication environments has led to an increasing interest in the development of push-based techniques, in which the information is broadcast to a large population of clients in order to achieve the most efficient use of the limited server and communication resources. It is important to note that quite often the data that is broadcast is time-critical in nature. Most of the related current research focuses on a pure push-based approach ( Broadcast Disks model), where the transmission of data is done without allowing explicit requests from the users. More recently, some bidirectional models incorporating a low-capacity uplink channel have been proposed in order to increase the functionality of the Broadcast Disks model. However, the impact of integration of the uplink channel has been investigated using only static client profiles or ignoring the existence of time-sensitive data. None of the existing models integrates all the characteristics needed to perform effectively in a real-world, dynamic time-critical asymmetric communication environment. In this paper we present an adaptive data dissemination model and the associated on-line scheduling algorithms. These improve the functionality and performance of bidirectional broadcast models, maximizing the total number of satisfied users in asymmetric communication environments with dynamic client profiles and time requirements ( e. g., mobile systems). This is achieved by means of dynamic adaptation of the broadcast program to the needs of the users, taking into account the bandwidth constraints inherent in asymmetric communication environments and the deadline requirements of the user requests. Performance is evaluated by simulation of a real-time asymmetric communication environment.

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

broadcast data dissemination
time-critical data
push-based techniques


Optimizing stable in-place merging In 2000, Geffert et al. (Theoret. Comput. Sci. 237 (2000) 159) presented an asymptotically efficient algorithm for stable merging in constant extra space. The algorithm requires at most m(1)(t + 1) + m(2)/2' + o(m(1)) comparisons (t = [log(2)(m(2)/m(1))]) and 5m(2) + 12m(1) + o(m(1)) moves, where m(1) and m(2) are the sizes of two ordered sublists to be merged, and in m(1) less than or equal to m(2). This paper optimizes the algorithm. The optimized algorithm is simpler than their algorithm, and makes at most m(1)(t + 1) + m(2)/2' + o(m(1) + m(2)) comparisons and 6m(2) + 7m(1) + o(m(1) + m(2)) Moves. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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Integrating Global and Local Voting of Classifiers Many data mining problems involve an investigation of the relationships between features in heterogeneous data sets, where different learning algorithms can be more appropriate for different regions. The author proposes herein a technique of integrating global and local voting of classifiers. A comparison with other well-known combining methods on standard benchmark data sets was performed, and the accuracy of the proposed method was greater.

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

classification
ensembles of classifiers
machine learning


how to hire 100 student employees in 4 hours In this paper, we describe the process of hiring student employees in one day.

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


First-order and second-order statistical analysis of 3d and 2d image structure In the first part of this article, we analyze the relation between local image structures (i.e., homogeneous, edge-like, corner-like or texture-like structures) and the underlying local 3D structure (represented in terms of continuous surfaces and different kinds of 3D discontinuities) using range data with real-world color images. We find that homogeneous image structures correspond to continuous surfaces, and discontinuities are mainly formed by edge-like or corner-like structures, which we discuss regarding potential computer vision applications and existing assumptions about the 3D world. In the second part, we utilize the measurements developed in the first part to investigate how the depth at homogeneous image structures is related to the depth of neighbor edges. For this, we first extract the local 3D structure of regularly sampled points, and then, analyze the coplanarity relation between these local 3D structures. We show that the likelihood to find a certain depth at a homogeneous image patch depends on the distance between the image patch and a neighbor edge. We find that this dependence is higher when there is a second neighbor edge which is coplanar with the first neighbor edge. These results allow deriving statistically based prediction models for depth interpolation on homogeneous image structures.

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


Bus-driven floorplanning with bus pin assignment and deviation minimization As the number of buses increase substantially in multi-core SoC designs, the bus planning problem has become the dominant factor in determining the performance and power consumption of SoC designs. To cope with the bus planning problem, it is desirable to consider this issue in early floorplanning stage. Recently, the bus-driven floorplanning problem has attracted much attention in the literature. However, current algorithms adopt an over-simplified formulation which ignores the orientation of the bus pin, the chip performance may be deteriorated. In this paper, we propose the bus-driven floorplanning algorithm that fully considers the impact of the bus pin. By fully utilizing the position and orientation of the bus pin, bus bendings are not restricted to occur at the module of the same bus, then more flexible bus shape is obtained. With more flexibility on the bus shape, the size of the solution space is increased and a better bus-driven floorplanning solution can be obtained. In conference version, compared with the bus-driven floorplanner 161, experimental results show that our algorithm performs better in runtime by 3.5 x, bus wirelength by 1.4 x, and deadspace by 1.2 x, respectively. In this paper, we improve the algorithm in [111 to obtain better driver-load delay variation among all bus bits. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Constructive multi-output extreme learning machine with application to large tanker motion dynamics identification In this paper, a novel constructive multi-output extreme learning machine (CM-ELM) is proposed to deal with a large tanker motion dynamics identification. The significant contributions are as follows. (1) Driven by generated tanker dynamics data from the reference model, the CM-ELM method is proposed to identify multi-output dynamic models. (2) The candidate pool for CM-ELM is randomly generated by the ELM strategy, and ranked chunk-by-chunk based on a novel improved multi-response sparse regression (I-MRSR) incorporated with ?weighting. (3) Consequently, the constructive model selection works with fast speed due to chunk-type training process, which also benefits stable hidden node selection and corresponding generalization. (4) Furthermore, output weight update on the final CM-ELM model randomly selected from the elite subset is conducted to enhance the overall performance of the resulting CM-ELM scheme. Finally, the convincing performance of the complete CM-ELM paradigm is verified by simulation studies on not only tanker motion dynamics identification but also benchmark multi-output regressions. Comprehensive comparisons of the CM-ELM with ELM and OP-ELM indicate the remarkable superiority in terms of generalization capability and stable compact structure. Conclusions are steadily drawn that the CM-ELM method is feasibly effective for tanker motion dynamics identification and multi-output regressions.

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

extreme learning machine
tanker motion dynamics


Using embodied conversational agents in video games to investigate emotional facial expressions The perception of emotional facial expressions has been diligently studied in psychology for the last 40years. The stimuli mainly used in these studies were photos or short film clips. Today, video games and their development frameworks allow researchers to design, model, and animate embodied conversational agents (ECAs). This research paper introduces an experimental setting to observe and measure the perception of facial expression performed by embodied conversational agents. The experimental setup is based on the research efforts of the psychologist Harald G. Wallbott and uses the CryENGINE to visualize the ECAs in various contextual settings. A new paradigm, coined Interaction-Paradigm, is integrated in the experimental setting, which is derived from the video-games domain. It utilizes the benefits of video games as a research tool: the setup grants participants an interactive experience of a given emotional situation, which allows the investigation of the perception process in a more realistic setting. In contrast to the traditional approaches in emotion theory research, the usage of video games ensures that situational aspects are not presented by simply showing subjects a piece of paper containing descriptions of a situation. Based on an extensive state of the art on using video games and games development frameworks in research, this article shows how to set up experiments using video game technology. The aim of the study is to establish a comparative experimental framework to analyze subjects judgment on emotional stimuli in different context dimensions. The findings show that the importance of information channels changes, when people decide for the emotional quality of a situation. While in still images the majority of people bases the decision on the facial expression, rather than based on the text description, in interactive scenarios only 11.8% of the participants relied on the facial expressions, with the majority using the contextual description. We present the results of the experiment in detail and summarize how video games and games development frameworks can support research in the area of ECAs and emotion perception.

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

embodied conversational agents
emotion theory
games


Sensitivity analysis for biometric systems: A methodology based on orthogonal experiment designs ? The purpose of this paper is to introduce an effective and structured methodology for carrying out a biometric system sensitivity analysis. The goal of sensitivity analysis is to provide the researcher/developer with insight and understanding of the key factorsalgorithmic, subject-based, procedural, image quality, environmental, among othersthat affect the matching performance of the biometric system under study. This proposed methodology consists of two steps: (1) the design and execution of orthogonal fractional factorial experiment designs which allow the scientist to efficiently investigate the effect of a large number of factorsand interactionssimultaneously, and (2) the use of a select set of statistical data analysis graphical procedures which are fine-tuned to unambiguously highlight important factors, important interactions, and locally-optimal settings. We illustrate this methodology by application to a study of VASIR (Video-based Automated System for Iris Recognition)NIST iris-based biometric system. In particular, we investigated k=8 algorithmic factors from the VASIR system by constructing a (26?13141) orthogonal fractional factorial design, generating the corresponding performance data, and applying an appropriate set of analysis graphics to determine the relative importance of the eight factors, the relative importance of the 28 two-term interactions, and the local best settings of the eight algorithms. The results showed that VASIRs performance was primarily driven by six factors out of the eight, along with four two-term interactions. A virtue of our two-step methodology is that it is systematic and general, and hence may be applied with equal rigor and effectiveness to other biometric systems, such as fingerprints, face, voice, and DNA.

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

sensitivity analysis
vasir
orthogonal
fractional factorial

iris recognition
biometrics
experiment design
video-based biometric system
characterization
uncertainty


The break scheduling problem: complexity results and practical algorithms Break scheduling problems arise in working areas where breaks are indispensable, e.g., in air traffic control, supervision, or assembly lines. We regard such a problem from the area of supervision personnel. The objective is to find a break assignment for an existing shiftplan such that various constraints reflecting legal demands or ergonomic criteria are satisfied and such that staffing requirement violations are minimised. We prove the NP-completeness of this problem when all possible break patterns for each shift are given explicitly as part of the input. To solve our problem we propose two variations of a memetic algorithm. We define genetic operators, a local search based on three neighbourhoods, and a penalty system that helps to avoid local optima. Parameters influencing the algorithms are experimentally evaluated and assessed with statistical methods. We compare our algorithms, each with the best parameter setting according to the evaluation, with the state-of-the-art algorithm on a set of 30 real-life and randomly generated instances that are publicly available. One of our algorithms returns improved results on 28 out of the 30 benchmark instances. To the best of our knowledge, our improved results for the real-life instances constitute new upper bounds for this problem

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

memetic algorithms
hybrid genetic algorithms
real-life application


Diagnostic system with an artificial neural network which determines a diagnostic information for the servicing of a reparable technical object In this paper, the features of a diagnostic measurement setup have been determined. The purpose of the setup was registration of diagnostic signals taken from an electronically controlled gasoline-powered engine. Special attention has been paid to the presentation of the features of an analogdigital converter card used, as well as to the possibility of its practical use. Another important aspect is the design and programming of computer software dedicated for action along with the setup. The results of the work have been presented using the example of the engines microprocessor control module. A diagnostic analysis was conducted, as a result of which sets of the functional elements of the object and its diagnostic signals were determined. Also, the methodology of the diagnostic examination of the technical system was presented. The result was a functional and diagnostic model, which constituted the basis for initial diagnostic information, which is provided by the sets of information concerning the elements of the basic modules and their output signals.

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

diagnostic systems
technical diagnostics
neural networks
knowledge bases


real time avl security system Vehicle stealing is now a day's common problem. Keeping this in consideration we are trying to build a project which can recover your vehicle after stolen. For this we need to developed and install some system inside vehicle which will tell you the vehicle location after stolen. We also are trying to develop GPS and GSM enabled system which will help customer track his vehicle remotely using just a mobile phone and one internet application. If customer want to track his vehicle location he only need to make a SMS to system installed in to vehicle then vehicle will detect it's position using GPS system and just send reply customer the location of vehicle in the form of SMS. After getting SMS reply customer can get vehicle location by providing location as an input to Google Earth software. A wireless and intelligent vehicle alarm system that sends signals directly to your mobile phone through mobile GSM and GPS signals to let you know your vehicle is safe. If your vehicle is moved or the door is opened you can send signals to your vehicle to cut off the gas or power supply for the ultimate in vehicle security. GPS functions also allow you to know where your vehicle is at all times. The best in vehicle security is right at your fingertips.

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


Optimal Indexes for Sparse Bit Vectors We consider the problem of supporting rank and select operations on a bit vector of length m with n 1-bits. The problem is considered in the succinct index model, where the bit vector is stored in read-only memory and an additional data structure, called the index is created during pre-processing to help answer the above queries. We give asymptotically optimal density-sensitive trade-offs, involving both m andn, that relate the size of the index to the number of accesses to the bit vector (and processing time) needed to answer the above queries. The results are particularly interesting for the case where n=o(m).

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

succinct data structures
bit-vectors
systematic encoding
information-theoretic lower bound
redundancy


Design configuration selection for hard-error reliable processors via statistical rules Lifetime reliability is becoming a first-order concern in processor manufacturing in addition to conventional design goals including performance, power consumption and thermal features since semiconductor technology enters the deep submicron era. This requires computer architects to carefully examine each design option and evaluate its reliability, in order to prolong the lifetime of the target processor. However, the complex wear-out mechanisms which cause processor failure and their interactions with varying microarchitectural configurations are still far from well understood, making the early optimization for chip reliability a challenging problem. To address this issue, we investigate the relationship between processor reliability and the design configuration by exploring a large processor design space in this paper. We employ a rule search strategy to generate a set of rules to identify the optimal configurations for reliability and its tradeoff with other design goals. In addition to the wear-out effects, the ever-shrinking feature size of modern transistors makes process variation a significant issue in the chip fabrication. Process variation results in unexpected distributions of key design parameters, thus remarkably impacting important features of the target processor. Therefore, we also extend our investigation to identify the optimal configurations in the presence of process variation.

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


Joint production and maintenance strategy for economic production quantity model with imperfect production processes In this study, an economic production quantity (EPQ) model is generalized by considering maintenance and production programs for an imperfect process involving a deteriorating production system with increasing hazard rate. There are two types of preventive maintenance (PM), namely imperfect PM and perfect PM. The probability that perfect PM is performed depends on the number of imperfect maintenance operations performed since the last renewal cycle. Following a failure, the delayed repair performs some restorations and reduces production rate to restore the system into an operating state (in-control state), but leaves its lower production rate until perfect PM is performed. That is, the production run period not always starts in normal production rate. This study considers backorders, as well as loss of inventory due to the lower production rate. For the EPQ model, the optimum run time, which minimizes the total cost, is discussed. Various special cases are considered, including the maintenance learning effect. Finally, a numerical example is presented to illustrate the effects of PM ability, repair cost and production decreasing rate on total costs and production period.

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

production
imperfect maintenance
learning effect
optimum


Distributed dynamic storage in wireless networks This paper assumes a set of identical wireless hosts, each one aware of its location. The network is described by a unit distance graph whose vertices are points on the plane two of which are connected if their distance is at most one. The goal of this paper is to design local distributed solutions that require a constant number of communication rounds, independently of the network size or diameter. This is achieved through a combination of distributed computing and computational complexity tools. Starting with a unit distance graph, the paper shows: 1. How to extract a triangulated planar spanner; 2. Several algorithms are proposed to construct spanning trees of the triangulation. Also, it is described how to construct three spanning trees of the Delaunay, triangulation having pairwise empty intersection, with high probability. These algorithms are interesting in their own right, since trees are a popular structure used by many network algorithms; 3. A load balanced distributed storage strategy on top of the trees is presented, that spreads replicas of delta stored in the hosts in a way that the difference between the number of replicas stored by any two hosts is small. Each of the algorithms presented is local, and hence so is the final distributed storage solution, obtained by composing all of them. This implies that the solution adapts very quickly, in constant time, to network topology changes. We present a thorough experimental evaluation of each of the algorithms supporting our claims.

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

delaunay triangulation
distributed dynamic storage

backup protocol
spanning tree
unit disk graph
wireless network


NONLINEAR CONTROLLER DESIGN OF A SHIP AUTOPILOT The main goal here is to design a proper and efficient controller for a ship autopilot based on the sliding mode control method. A hydrodynamic numerical model of CyberShip II including wave effects is applied to simulate the ship autopilot system by using time domain analysis. To compare the results similar research was conducted with the PD controller, which was adapted to the autopilot system. The differences in simulation results between two controllers are analyzed by a cost function composed of a heading angle error and rudder deflection either in calm water or in waves. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the method in the presence of nonlinearities and disturbances, and high performance of the proposed controller.

O O O 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

nonlinear control
disturbance rejection
ship control


Feature selection using Bayesian and multiclass Support Vector Machines approaches: Application to bank risk prediction This paper presents methods of banks discrimination according to the rate of NonPerforming Loans (NPLs), using Gaussian Bayes models and different approaches of multiclass Support Vector Machines (SVM). This classification problem involves many irrelevant variables and comparatively few training instances. New variable selection strategies are proposed. They are based on Gaussian marginal densities for Bayesian models and ranking scores derived from multiclass SVM. The results on both toy data and real-life problem of banks classification demonstrate a significant improvement of prediction performance using only a few variables. Moreover, Support Vector Machines approaches are shown to be superior to Gaussian Bayes models.

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

multiclass banks risk
gaussian bayes classifier
stepwise algorithm
risk factors


Kohonen classification applying 'missing variables' criterion to evaluate the p-boronophenylalanine human-body-concentration decreasing profile of boron neutron capture therapy patients The irradiation dose in tumor and healthy tissue of a boron neutron capture therapy (BNCT) patient depends on the boron concentration in blood. In most treatments, this concentration is experimentally determined before and after irradiation but not while irradiation is being carried out because it is troublesome to take the blood samples when the patient remains isolated in the irradiation room. A few models are used to predict the boron profile during that period, which until now involves a biexponential decay. For the prediction of decay concentration profiles of the p-boronophenylalanine (BPA) in the human body during BNCT treatment, a Kohonen-based neural network method is suggested. The results of various (20 x 20 x 40 Kohonen network) models based on different trainings on the data set of 67 concentration sets (profiles) are described and discussed. The prediction ability and robustness of the modeling method were tested by the leave-one-out procedure. The results show that the method is very robust and mostly independent of small variations. It can yield predictions, root mean squared prediction error (RMSPE), with a maximum of 3.30 mu g g(-1) for the present cases. In order to show the abilities and limitations of the method, the best and the few worst results are discussed in detail. It should be emphasized that one of the main advantages of this method is the automatic improvement in the prediction ability and robustness of the model by feeding it with an increasing number of data. Copyright (C) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

artificial neural networks
boron neutron capture therapy (bnct)
tumor irradiation


communication and coordination support in ad hoc networks for emergency management scenarios In recent years the world has witnessed many catastrophic events where the intervention of first responders was required to manage massive disaster scenarios. To be effective, emergency management teams must be able to coordinate and communicate efficiently. To the best of our knowledge no solution has been proposed to support the communication and coordination of these teams in an integrated fashion. In this paper we propose MUSTUS, an architecture that provides communication mechanisms and coordination primitives, based on the interaction through a tuple space, whose semantics are specifically designed to support the needs of emergency management applications.

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

tuple space
coordination
emergency management


topic discovery of web video using star-structured k-partite graph As the explosive growth of web videos on video-shared sites like YouTube, the discovery of video topics has become a hot research area. In order to utilize all kinds of characteristics in web video such as visual features (SIFT, shape or color) and contextual cues (such as title or tags) effectively, this paper proposes an approach to represent the explicit and implicit correlations hidden in web videos by a star-structured K-partite graph model, and then a co-clustering process is conducted to discover video topics. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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

star-structured k-partite graph
co-clustering


Computing matrix functions arising in engineering models with orthogonal matrix polynomials Trigonometric matrix functions play a fundamental role in the solution of second order differential equations. Hermite series truncation together with Paterson-Stockmeyer method and the double angle formula technique allow efficient computation of the matrix cosine. A careful error bound analysis of the Hermite approximation is given and a theoretical estimate for the optimal value of its parameters is obtained. Based on the ideas above, an efficient and highly-accurate Hermite algorithm is presented. A MATLAB implementation of this algorithm has also been developed and made available online. This implementation has been compared to other efficient state-of-the-art implementations on a large class of matrices for different dimensions, obtaining higher accuracy and lower computational costs in the majority of cases. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


Exploiting multi-scale support vector regression for image compression ? Unlike traditional neural networks that require predefined topology of the network, support vector regression (SVR) approach can model the data within the given level of accuracy with only a small subset of the training data, which are called support vectors (SVs). This property of sparsity has been exploited as the basis for image compression. In this paper, for still image compression, we propose a multi-scale support vector regression (MS-SVR) approach, which can model the images with steep variations and smooth variations very well resulting in good performance. We test our proposed MS-SVR based algorithm on some standard images. The experimental results verify that the proposed MS-SVR achieves better performance than standard SVR. And in a wide range of compression ratio, MS-SVR is very close to JPEG in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) but exhibits better subjective quality. Furthermore, MS-SVR even outperforms JPEG on both PSNR and subjective quality when the compression ratio is higher enough, for example 25:1 for Lena image. Even when compared with JPEG-2000, the results show greatly similar trend as those in JPEG experiments, except that the compression ratio is a bit higher where our proposed MS-SVR will outperform JPEG-2000.

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

image compression
support vector regression
jpeg


On design for I-DDQ-based diagnosability of CMOS circuits using multiple power supplies This paper presents a novel approach to improving the I-DDQ-based diagnosability of a CMOS circuit by dividing the circuit into independent partitions and using a separate power supply for each partition. This technique makes it possible to implement multiple I-DDQ measurement points, resulting in improved I-DDQ-based diagnosability. The paper formalizes the problem of partitioning a circuit for this purpose and proposes optimal and heuristic based solutions. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated through experimental results.

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

fault diagnosis
i-ddq
transistor leakage fault model
multiple power supply
circuit partitioning


Identifying software project risks in Nigeria: an International Comparative Study We report a study where software project risk factors were solicited in Nigeria. The study repeats a research design, which has been used in a Delphi study in the U.S., Finland, and Hong Kong to rank software development risks. The study produces a rank-order list of software risk factors and compares results with the earlier study, showing significant differences. Obtained rankings signal the importance of the infrastructure related and socio-economic software risks in developing countries like Nigeria. This demonstrates the importance of understanding the broader socio-economic context in identifying and managing software risks. The study also shows that some risks in Nigeria are located on a different scale. The choice of contingent mitigation strategies of project managers play a less important role, because the risks are so deeply engrained with the poor quality of basic infrastructure services.

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

information system development
risk management


improved sharing of apl workspaces and libraries Years of experience have revealed deficiencies in APL's traditional library structure and its facilities for managing saved workspaces. As part of the development of a new file system, STSC undertook to resolve these deficiencies in a revised design. The rules governing the use of shared workspaces have been broadened and placed under the control of an access matrix , giving the user great flexibility in controlling how invidual workspaces are used. APL libraries have been generalized and likewise placed under access-matrix control. System facilities are provided that allow any workspace-management action to be performed under program control. The concept of the APL workspace has hardly changed since the earliest APL systems; it is worthwhile to wonder why. To programmers weary from battling the job control languages of that era's operating systems, the workspace must have seemed a concept of charming and startling simplicity. To the computer novice, who found in APL a shortcut through the maze of technical lore, the notion of the workspace was quickly assimilated into intuition.

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

sharing structure use design concept flexibility experience novice access libraries rules control user action

developer
language
computation
operating system
general
file systems
shared workspace
management
programmer
control systems


Queueing systems fed by many exponential on-off sources: an infinite-intersection approach In queueing theory, an important class of events can be written as 'infinite intersections'. For instance, in a queue with constant service rate c, busy periods starting at 0 and exceeding L > 0 are determined by the intersection of the events boolean AND(t is an element of[0,L]){Q(0)=0,At>ct}, i.e., queue Q(t) is empty at 0 and for all t is an element of[0, L] the amount of traffic A(t) arriving in [0,t) exceeds the server capacity. Also the event of exceeding some predefined threshold in a tandem queue, or a priority queue, can be written in terms of this kind of infinite intersections. This paper studies the probability of such infinite intersections in queueing systems fed by a large number n of i.i.d. traffic sources (the so-called 'many-sources regime'). If the sources are of the exponential on-off type, and the queueing resources are scaled proportional to n, the probabilities under consideration decay exponentially; we explicitly characterize the corresponding decay rate. The techniques used stem from large deviations theory (particularly sample-path large deviations).

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

sample-path large deviations
on-off processes
busy period


Strategies in combined learning via logic programs We discuss the adoption of a three-valued setting for inductive concept learning. Distinguishing between what is true, what is false and what is unknown can be useful in situations where decisions have to be taken on the basis of scarce, ambiguous, or downright contradictory information. In a three-valued setting, we learn a definition for both the target concept and its opposite, considering positive and negative examples as instances of two disjoint classes. To this purpose, we adopt Extended Logic Programs (ELP) under a Well-Founded Semantics with explicit negation (WFSX) as the representation formalism for learning, and show how ELPs can be used to specify combinations of strategies in a declarative way also coping with contradiction and exceptions. Explicit negation is used to represent the opposite concept, while default negation is used to ensure consistency and to handle exceptions to general rules. Exceptions are represented by examples covered by the definition for a concept that belong to the training set for the opposite concept. Standard Inductive Logic Programming techniques are employed to learn the concept and its opposite. Depending on the adopted technique, we can learn the most general or the least general definition. Thus, four epistemological varieties occur, resulting from the combination of most general and least general solutions for the positive and negative concept. We discuss the factors that should be taken into account when choosing and strategically combining the generality levels for positive and negative concepts. In the paper, we also handle the issue of strategic combination of possibly contradictory learnt definitions of a predicate and its explicit negation. All in all, we show that extended logic programs under well-founded semantics with explicit negation add expressivity to learning tasks, and allow the tackling of a number of representation and strategic issues in a principled way. Our techniques have been implemented and examples run on a state-of-the-art logic programming system with tabling which implements WFSX.

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

inductive logic programming
explicit negation

non-monotonic learning
multi-strategy learning
contradiction handling


Judgmental consistency and consensus in stochastic multicriteria decision making Stochastic multicriteria decision making methods are a class of multicriteria decision making methods in which judgments are not taken to be certain. Recently, this class of models has generated increasing interest in the literature. We unify the notions of judgmental consistency and intra-group consensus under a framework of preference homogeneity in the context of this class of models. We propose new methods and measures for examining departures from consistency by using the KullbackLeibler divergence. We also propose a new method, the jackknifed KullbackLeibler divergence, that characterizes the extent to which a group member exhibits preference consensus with the remaining members of the group.

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

inconsistency
bayesian inference
group decision making


The co-adaptive neural network approach to the Euclidean Travelling Salesman Problem In this paper we consider the Euclidean Travelling Salesman Problem (ETSP). This is the problem of finding the shortest tour around a number of cities where the cities correspond to points in the Euclidean plane and the distances between cities are given by the usual Euclidean distance metric. We present a review of the literature with respect to neural network (NN) approaches for the ETSP, and the computational results that have been reported. Based upon this review we highlight two areas that are, in our judgement, currently neglected/lacking in the literature. These are: failure to make significant use of publicly available ETSP test problems in computational work failure to address co-operation between neurons. Drawing upon our literature survey this paper presents a new Self-Organising NN approach, called the Co-Adaptive Net, which involves not just unsupervised learning to train neurons, but also allows neurons to co-operate and compete amongst themselves depending on their situation. Our Co-Adaptive Net algorithm also includes a number of algorithmic mechanisms that, based upon our literature review, we consider to have contributed to the computational success of previous algorithms. Results for 91 publicly available standard ETSP's are presented in this paper. The largest of these problems involves 85,900 cities. This paper presents: the most extensive computational evaluation of any NN approach on publicly available ETSP test problems that has been made to date in the literature a NN approach that performs better, with respect to solution quality and/or computation time, than other NN approaches given previously in the literature. Drawing upon computational results produced as a result of the DIMACS TSP Challenge, we highlight the fact that none of the current NN approaches for the ETSP can compete with state of the art Operations Research heuristics. We discuss why we consider continuing to study and develop NN approaches for the ETSP to be of value.

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

self-organising nn
co-adaptive net algorithm


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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 B O O O O

hg
transiente stabilitt
dasm
facts
off grid operation
hvdc
transient stability
dfim


New classes of fast lower bounds for bin packing problems The bin packing problem is one of the classical NP-hard optimization problems. In this paper, we present a simple generic approach for obtaining new fast lower bounds, based on dual feasible functions. Worst-case analysis as well as computational results show that one of our classes clearly outperforms the previous best "economical" lower bound for the bin packing problem by Martello and Toth. which can be understood as a special case. In particular, we prove an asymptotic worst-case performance of 3/4 for a bound that can be computed in linear time for items sorted by size. In addition, our approach provides a general framework for establishing new bounds.

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

bin packing
lower bounds
dual feasible functions


FPGA implementation and experimental evaluation of a multizone network cache Network routers rely on content addressable memories (CAMs) to accelerate the process of looking up the next hop of a packet. The input for this lookup is the destination address of the packet. This article describes our implementation and evaluation of a versatile prototype for a CAM. This prototype allows the empirical evaluation of the idea of caching lookup results in a multizone cache organized according to the length of the network prefix portion of the addresses. Implementing a cache in an FPGA efficiently required the design of a new cache replacement policy, the Bank Nth Chance policy. In this article we present results from a functional simulator that allows the comparison of this new policy with existing ones such as least recently used, first in, first out and Second Chance. With a complete and functional prototype in a Xilinx Virtex 2000E device, we also report frequency of operation and occupation of the device. We present programmable logic design techniques that enable the implementation of ternary logic CAM cells, the efficient implementation of the new policy reference fields, and the pipelining of lookups.

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


security of social information from query analysis in daas Databases as a Service (DaaS) are recently in the spotlight as an essential component of the cloud computing framework. We can more easily develop applications to facilitate users' collaboration than without DaaS. Unfortunately, DaaS brings a new risk of data compromise because most data are currently stored and managed by the service provider. Securing users' information, the data are generally encrypted at a trusted client. Although encryption ensures that no one can sneak a look at the data, malicious users still have opportunities to take users' relational information. The relational information, which we name social information as opposed to personal information, has not been adequately examined, but it is becoming important because of improvement of social analysis. As described herein, we first introduce an attack model of obtaining social information from analyses of query logs in DaaS; then we provide a solution to the problem. Our method converts some different queries in the same query, so that malicious attackers cannnot analyze the query logs. We also define an overhead cost of the translation and propose a method that can optimize the conversion using extensible hashing.

O O B I 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 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 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 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


Passive geolocalization of radio transmitters: Algorithm and performance in narrowband context Passive localization commonly consists of a two steps strategy. In the first step, intermediate parameters, often called measurements (such as angles of arrival (AOA), times of arrival (TOA), etc.) are measured on several base stations equipped with sensor arrays. In a second step, the transmitted intermediate parameters are then used to estimate the position at a central processing unit. Such approach is suboptimal. To overcome this limitation, one step algorithms were recently proposed. They exploit simultaneously all received signals of all base stations seen as a global array in order to provide the source positions directly. In this paper, we propose an original one step algorithm called global MUSIC approach (GMA). The GMA offers better performance in narrowband context. Moreover it does not require the use of filter banks in the wideband signal context, contrary to the recently proposed direct position determination (DPD). GMA appears to outperform the DPD in wideband context. We also investigate in this paper by means of a CramerRao bound analysis the potential gain achievable by a one step approach compared to a conventional two steps approach. Finally, numerical results illustrate the improvement of the proposed method compared to existing techniques in terms of location error and robustness to the time-bandwidth product.

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

emitter geolocalization
array processing
aoa estimation
cramerrao bounds


Analysis and Design of a Low-Voltage Low-Power Double-Tail Comparator The need for ultra low-power, area efficient, and high speed analog-to-digital converters is pushing toward the use of dynamic regenerative comparators to maximize speed and power efficiency. In this paper, an analysis on the delay of the dynamic comparators will be presented and analytical expressions are derived. From the analytical expressions, designers can obtain an intuition about the main contributors to the comparator delay and fully explore the tradeoffs in dynamic comparator design. Based on the presented analysis, a new dynamic comparator is proposed, where the circuit of a conventional double-tail comparator is modified for low-power and fast operation even in small supply voltages. Without complicating the design and by adding few transistors, the positive feedback during the regeneration is strengthened, which results in remarkably reduced delay time. Post-layout simulation results in a 0.18-mu m CMOS technology confirm the analysis results. It is shown that in the proposed dynamic comparator both the power consumption and delay time are significantly reduced. The maximum clock frequency of the proposed comparator can be increased to 2.5 and 1.1 GHz at supply voltages of 1.2 and 0.6 V, while consuming 1.4 mW and 153 mu W, respectively. The standard deviation of the input-referred offset is 7.8 mV at 1.2 V supply.

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

high-speed analog-to-digital converters (adcs)


three highly available data streaming techniques and their tradeoffs The Recall All Your Senses (RAYS) project envisions a social networking system that empowers its users to store, retrieve, and share data produced by streaming devices. An example device is the popular Apple iPhone that produces continuous media, audio and video clips. This paper focuses on the stream manager of RAYS, RAYS-SM, and its peer-to-peer overlay network. For a request that streams data from a device, RAYS-SM initiates more than one stream in order to minimize loss of data when nodes in its network fail. We present the design of 3 data availability techniques, quantifying their throughput and Mean Time To Data Loss (MTTDL). These two metrics highlight the tradeoff between the resource usage of each technique during normal mode of operation in order to minimize loss of data in the presence of node failures.

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


handling control Non-local control transfer and exception handling have a long tradition in higher-order programming languages such as Common Lisp, Scheme and ML. However, each language stops short of providing a full and complementary approachcontrol handling is provided only if the corresponding control operator is first-order. In this work, we describe handlers in a higher-order control setting. We invoke our earlier theoretical result that all denotational models of control languages invariably include capabilities that handle control. These capabilities, when incorporated into the language, form an elegant and powerful higher-order generalization of the first-order exception-handling mechanism.

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

ml
capabilities
lisp
exception handling
control
language
scheme

operability
order
general
model
locality
programming language


Model-Based Correction of Velocity Measurements in Navigated 3-D Ultrasound Imaging During Neurosurgical Interventions In neurosurgery, information of blood flow is important to identify and avoid damage to important vessels. Three-dimensional intraoperative ultrasound color-Doppler imaging has proven useful in this respect. However, due to Doppler angle-dependencies and the complexity of the vascular architecture, clinical valuable 3-D information of flow direction and velocity is currently not available. In this work, we aim to correct for angle-dependencies in 3-D flow images based on a geometric model of the neurovascular tree generated on-the-fly from free-hand 2-D imaging and an accurate position sensor system. The 3-D vessel model acts as a priori information of vessel orientation used to angle-correct the Doppler measurements, as well as provide an estimate of the average flow direction. Based on the flow direction we were also able to do aliasing correction to approximately double the measurable velocity range. In vitro experiments revealed a high accuracy and robustness for estimating the mean direction of flow. Accurate angle-correction of axial velocities were possible given a sufficient beam-to-flow angle for at least parts of a vessel segment (< 70 degrees). In vitro experiments showed an absolute relative bias of 9.5% for a challenging low-flow scenario. The method also showed promising results in vivo, improving the depiction of flow in the distal branches of intracranial aneurysms and the feeding arteries of an arteriovenous malformation. Careful inspection by an experienced surgeon confirmed the correct flow direction for all in vivo examples.

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


A cross-layer optimized adaptive modulation and coding scheme for transmission of streaming media over wireless links In this paper, a novel cross-layer Adaptive Modulation and Coding scheme that optimizes the overall packet loss (by both transmission errors and excessive delays) probability under a given arrival process is developed. To this end, an improved Large Deviations approximation for the fraction of packets that suffer from excessive queuing delay is proposed. This approximation is valid for G/G/1 queues with infinite buffers that are driven by stationary arrival and service processes which satisfy certain conditions. Such models can capture the time correlations in the amount of traffic generated by streaming media sources and the time varying service capacity of a wireless link. Through numerical examples, the proposed AMC policy is shown to achieve a significant reduction in the overall packet loss rate compared to previously proposed schemes. This algorithmic performance gain can be translated into a sizeable decrease in the required transmit power or an analogous increase in the rate of the arrival process, subject to a given maximum packet loss rate Quality of Service constraint. Furthermore, the proposed AMC policy can be combined with ARQ in order to achieve an even lower overall packet loss probability.

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

adaptive modulation and coding
large deviations
arq

wireless transmission of streaming media


City model enrichment The combination of mobile communication technology with location and orientation aware digital cameras has introduced increasing interest in the exploitation of 3D city models for applications such as augmented reality and automated image captioning. The effectiveness of such applications is, at present, severely limited by the often poor quality of semantic annotation of the 3D models. In this paper, we show how freely available sources of georeferenced Web 2.0 information can be used for automated enrichment of 3D city models. Point referenced names of prominent buildings and landmarks mined from Wikipedia articles and from the OpenStreetMaps digital map and Geonames gazetteer have been matched to the 2D ground plan geometry of a 3D city model. In order to address the ambiguities that arise in the associations between these sources and the city model, we present procedures to merge potentially related buildings and implement fuzzy matching between reference points and building polygons. An experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the presented methods.

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

internet/web georeferencing registration retrieval


Assessing self organizing maps via contiguity analysis Contiguity analysis is a straightforward generalization of linear discriminant analysis in which the partition of elements is replaced by a more general graph structure. Applied to the graph induced by a Self Organizing Map (SOM), contiguity analysis provides a set of linear projectors leading to a planar representation as close as possible to the SOM. As expected, such projectors may only concern local parts of the SOMs. They allow us to visualize the shapes of the clusters (convex hulls of the projections of the elements belonging to a cluster) and the pattern of the elements within each cluster. In some contexts, it is possible to project the bootstrap replicates of the elements, and therefore to produce confidence areas for elements via a standard partial bootstrap procedure.

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


Demand-driven propagation-based strategies for testing changes Test-suite augmentation techniques enhance test suites for software changes. In previous work, we introduced an augmentation technique that enumerates the conditions for the propagation of the effects of changes. Empirical studies showed that this technique can test changes effectively but, because of the high complexity of the technique, the experiments were small and the propagation distances from each change were limited. In this paper, we present a new, demand-driven approach for performing this propagation-based testing of changes that achieves much greater distances and that enables larger and more significant studies. We implemented this new approach and studied it on a set of changes in Java programs by comparing, to a larger extent than possible before, propagation-based strategies with other change testing techniques. Our results confirm, with statistical significance, the superiority of propagation-based strategies over other techniques, and show that these strategies are especially effective for those changes that are the most difficult to test.Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

regression testing
test-suite augmentation
dependence analysis


personalization of user interfaces for browsing xml content using transformations built on end-user requirements Personalization of user interfaces for browsing content is a key concept to ensure content accessibility. In this direction, we introduce concepts that result in the generation of personalized multimodal user interfaces for browsing XML content. Users requirements concerning the browsing of a specific content type can be specified using user-friendly description languages. According to these specifications, transformation rules are generated in order to produce personalized user interfaces for browsing specific content types. With the emergence of the semantic Web and connected XML applications, such customized multimodal user interfaces can be useful for many kinds of users, especially individuals with various type of impairment.

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

adaptable user interfaces
transformational approaches
model-based user interfaces


incremental maintenance of views with duplicates We study the problem of efficient maintenance of materialized views that may contain duplicates. This problem is particularly important when queries against such views involve aggregate functions, which need duplicates to produce correct results. Unlike most work on the view maintenance problem that is based on an algorithmic approach, our approach is algebraic and based on equational reasoning. This approach has a number of advantages: it is robust and easily extendible to new language constructs, it produces output that can be used by query optimizers, and it simplifies correctness proofs.We use a natural extension of the relational algebra operations to bags (multisets) as our basic language. We present an algorithm that propagates changes from base relations to materialized views. This algorithm is based on reasoning about equivalence of bag-valued expressions. We prove that it is correct and preserves a certain notion of minimality that ensures that no unnecessary tuples are computed. Although it is generally only a heuristic that computing changes to the view rather than recomputing the view from scratch is more efficient, we prove results saying that under normal circumstances one should expect, the change propagation algorithm to be significantly faster and more space efficient than complete recomputing of the view. We also show that our approach interacts nicely with aggregate functions, allowing their correct evaluation on views that change.

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

use scratch evaluation robust change incremental propagation reasoning views space language aggregate maintenance queries algorithm query

efficiency
computation
express
extensibility
normalization
minimal
relation algebra
correctness proof
operability
heuristics
completeness


minimum-hot-spot query trees for wireless sensor networks We propose a distributed algorithm to construct a balanced communication tree that serves in gathering data from the network nodes to a sink. Our algorithm constructs a near-optimally balanced communication tree with minimum overhead. The balancing of the node degrees results in the minimization of packet collisions during query execution, that would otherwise require numerous retransmissions and reduce the lifetime of the network. We compare our simple distributed algorithm against previous work and a centralized solution and show that for most network layouts it outperforms competition and achieves tree balance very close to the centralized algorithm. It also has the smallest energy overhead possible to construct the tree, increasing the lifetime of the network even more.

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

collision
optimization
wireless sensor network
query tree
communication cost


AM1*parameters for copper and zinc Our extension of the AM1 semiempirical molecular orbital technique, AM1*, has been parameterized for the elements Cu and Zn. The basis sets for both metals contain a set of d-orbitals. The zinc parameterization uses a filled d-shell to give 12 valence electrons. Thus, AM1* parameters are now available for H, C, N, O and F (which use the original AM1 parameters), Al, Si, P, S, Cl, Ti, Cu, Zn, Zr and Mo. The performance and typical errors of AM1* are discussed for the newly parameterized elements.

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

am1*
copper parameters
semiempirical mo-theory
zinc parameters


Extending multimedia research: How do prerequisite knowledge and reading comprehension affect learning from text and pictures Multimedia effects and modality effects were limited to immediate recall. A redundant presentation of text proved harmful for delayed performance. Reading comprehension did not moderate effects of multimedia design. High scientific-literacy learners showed a multimedia effect for delayed recall. Better cognitive prerequisites were associated with less forgetting over time.

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

multimedia effect
reading comprehension
prerequisite knowledge

modality effect
redundancy effect
delayed testing
scientific literacy


Self-identifying patterns for plane-based camera calibration Determining camera calibration parameters is a time-consuming task despite the availability of calibration algorithms and software. A set of correspondences between points on the calibration target and the camera image(s) must be found, usually a manual or manually guided process. Most calibration tools assume that the correspondences are already found. We present a system which allows a camera to be calibrated merely by passing it in front of a panel of self-identifying patterns. This calibration scheme uses an array of fiducial markers which are detected with a high degree of confidence, each detected marker provides one or four correspondence points. Experiments were performed calibrating several cameras in a short period of time with no manual intervention. This marker-based calibration system was compared to one using the OpenCV chessboard grid finder which also finds correspondences automatically. We show how our new marker-based system more robustly finds the calibration pattern and how it provides more accurate intrinsic camera parameters.

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


E E -super vertex magic labelings of graphs Let G G be a finite simple graph with p p vertices and q q edges. A vertex magic total labeling is a bijection from V(G)?E(G) V ( G ) ? E ( G ) to the consecutive integers 1,2,3,,p+q 1 , 2 , 3 , , p + q with the property that for every u?V(G) u ? V ( G ) ,f(u)+?v?N(u)f(uv)=k f ( u ) + ? v ? N ( u ) f ( u v ) = k for some constant k k . Such a labeling isE E -super if f(E(G))={1,2,3,,q} f ( E ( G ) ) = { 1 , 2 , 3 , , q } . A graph G G is called E E -super vertex magic if it admits a E E -super vertex magic labeling. In this paper, we study some basic properties of such labelings and we establish E E -super vertex magic labeling of some families of graphs. The main focus of this paper is on the E E -super vertex magicness of Hm,n H m , n and on some necessary conditions for a graph to be E E -super vertex magic.

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


FRACTAL CONSTRUCTION OF AN ATOMIC ARCHIMEDEAN EFFECT ALGEBRA WITH NON-ATOMIC SUBALGEBRA OF SHARP ELEMENTS Does there exist an atomic Archimedean lattice effect algebra with non-atomic subalgebra of sharp elements? An affirmative answer to this question is given.

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

atomic archimedean lattice effect algebra


A BEM solution of steady-state flow problems in discrete fracture networks with minimization of core storage ? A boundary element method (BEM) solution for the problem of the fluid flow in a three-dimensional discrete fracture network (DFN) is proposed. A DFN is an assembling of polygons which resemble the fractures in a rock mass. The position, extension, orientation and transmissivity of each fracture of the network are excluded by specific statistical distributions. For a single problem, a significant number of DFNs has to be generated and the fluid flow has to be assessed in each of them in the context of a Monte-Carlo procedure. Even for relatively small domains, a DFN may include a large number of fractures. As a consequence, in order to solve the whole problem with standard finite-element method (FEM) codes, a big amount of core memory and large input data files are required. The main advantage of the proposed solution is mainly the minimization of the core memory. This is attained by handling the flow quantities in such a way the equation system of the overall network is never assembled. Only a relation per each fracture among nodal fluxes and heads of the traces (i.e., intersections among fractures) is defined and stored in a random access file. This relation is obtained by means of the application of the BEM to each single fracture of the network. Both constant and quadratic element representations are used in order to define the relevant nodal quantities. The use of constant elements allows to avoid the direct treatment of the points of flux discontinuity. No special care is applied to the discretization of the boundary of each fracture. The overall problem is solved by means of an iterative procedure, by retrieving the necessary coefficients from the random access file. The results are in acceptable agreement with the ones provided by a commercial FEM code. We remark that saving core memory without special care in the discretization of the DFN makes the solution competitive, especially when dealing with networks with a high number of fractures.

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

boundary element method
discrete fracture network

fractured media
relaxation procedure
steady-state fluid flow


Non-invasive measurement of systolic blood pressure on the arm utilising photoplethysmography: development of the methodology Photoplethysmography (PPG) can be used to measure systolic blood pressure at the brachial artery. With a specially designed probe, positioned in the most distal position beneath a pressure cuff on the upper arm, this is possible. The distance between the light source (880 nm) and the photodetector was 20 mm. A test was performed on neuro-intensive care patients by determining blood pressure from the PPG curves, and, when it was compared with systolic blood pressure obtained from inserted indwelling arterial catheters, a correlation factor of r = 0.95 was achieved. The difference between blood pressure obtained using PPG and invasive blood pressure measurement was 3.9 +/- 9.1 mmHg (mean +/- SD), n = 19. The depth to the brachial artery was 13.9 +/- 4.1 mm (mean +/- SD), n = 18. A digital PPG system utilising pulsating light was also developed.

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

photoplethysmography
blood pressure
arm
ppg


Cellular particle swarm optimization This paper proposes a cellular particle swarm optimization (CPSO), hybridizing cellular automata (CA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) for function optimization. In the proposed CPSO, a mechanism of CA is integrated in the velocity update to modify the trajectories of particles to avoid being trapped in the local optimum. With two different ways of integration of CA and PSO, two versions of CPSO, i.e. CPSO-inner and CPSO-outer, have been discussed. For the former, we devised three typical lattice structures of CA used as neighborhood, enabling particles to interact inside the swarm; and for the latter, a novel CA strategy based on smart-cell is designed, and particles employ the information from outside the swarm. Theoretical studies are made to analyze the convergence of CPSO, and numerical experiments are conducted to compare the proposed algorithm with different variants of PSO. According to the experimental results, the proposed method performs better than other variants of PSO on benchmark test functions.

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

cellular particle swarm optimization
cellular automata
particle swarm optimization
function optimization


Surface mesh denoising with normal tensor framework In this paper, we propose a novel method for feature-preserving mesh denoising based on the normal tensor framework. We utilize the normal tensor voting directly for the mesh denoising whose eigenvalues and eigenvectors are used for detecting saliency, and introduce an algorithm that updates a vertex by the Laplacian of curvature which minimizes a difference of the curvature in one neighborhood. By connecting the feature saliency with a distance metric in the normal tensor space, our algorithm preserves sharp features more robustly and clearly for noisy mesh data. Comparing our method with the existing ones, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm against some synthetic noisy data and real-world scanned data.

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

mesh denoising
normal tensor
laplacian of curvature


Failure modelling in finite element analyses: Element erosion with crack-tip enhancement A method to better handle fracture using element erosion in finite element analyses is proposed. It is assumed that the crack-tip is blunt and that the solution in the vicinity of the crack-tip is separable when described in local polar co-ordinates. The numerical solution is enhanced by scaling strain rates at integration points to better match the state at the crack-tip. This material specific scaling function is empirically determined for modus I steady-state propagation and is applied to two problems. The results show that the method reduces mesh dependency such that the chosen fracture energy can be better matched for different element sizes.

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

finite element analysis
crack-tip enhancement
steady-state propagation


Analytical and numerical computation of the no-load magnetic field in induction motors In the paper a comparison between the analytical and numerical method of no-load computation will be made taking into account the initial hypothesis and computational effort face to the concrete obtainable results. It is concluded that the reduced fixed-mesh FEM analysis of the induction motors is very suitable for no-load computation because it relates directly to the well known equivalent circuit parameters. The symmetry of the machine allows for the computation only on a small part of the magnetic circuit so that the time of computation can be reduced even when a relatively fine mesh is used. However, for the optimal design of the motor it appears that analytical methods are very suitable owing to the simplicity and accuracy of the design.

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


Complexity and mathematical tools toward the modelling of multicellular growing systems This paper deals with a multiscale modelling approach to complex biological systems constituted by several interacting entities. The methodology is based on mathematical kinetic theory for active particles and is focused on the modelling of complex multicellular systems under therapeutic actions at the cellular level and mutations with onset of new populations. Asymptotic hyperbolic methods are developed to derive models at the macroscopic scale of tissues from the underlying description at the level of cells for a open system with variable number of populations. (C) 2009 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 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 O O O

living matters
evolution
system biology
nonlinear interactions
stochastic games


effect of time delays on agents' interaction dynamics While speaking about social interaction, psychology claims as crucial the temporal correlations between interactants' behaviors: to give to their partners a feeling of natural interaction, interactants, be human, robotic or virtual, must be able to react on appropriate time. Recent approaches consider autonomous agents as dynamical systems and the interaction as a coupling between these systems. These approaches solve the issue of time handling and enable to model synchronization and turn-taking as phenomenon emerging with the coupling. But when complex computations are added to their architecture, such as processing of video and audio signals, delays appear within the interaction loop and disrupt this coupling. We model here a dyad of agents where processing delays are controlled. These agents, driven by oscillators, synchronize and take turns when there is no delay. We describe the methodology enabling to evaluate the synchrony and turn-taking emergence. We test oscillators coupling properties when there is no delay: coupling occurs if coupling strength is inferior to the parameter controlling oscillators natural period and if the ratio between oscillators periods is inferior to 1/2. We quantify the maximal delays between agents which do not disrupt the interaction: the maximal delay tolerated by agents is proportional to the natural period of the coupled system and to the strength of the coupling. These results are put in perspective with the different time constraints of human-human and human-agent interactions.

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

modeling the dynamics of mas
human-robot/agent interaction
agent commitments
emergent behavior
peer to peer coordination


Self-affinity of vehicle demand on the ferry-boat system The transportation problems are in evidence due to their importance. This type of problem is usually studied by nonlinear dynamics. In this paper, we study time series of vehicle demand by using the ferry-boat system between Salvador city and Itaparica island, in Bahia, Brazil. We observe an interesting behavior since these time series allow to observe genuine self-affinity effects. The scaling exponent alpha and the density of crossing points rho are variables to describe long-range correlations (self-affinity) in time series of the vehicle demand. As the result we show alpha and rho variation year by year.

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


PISA: A framework for integrating uncooperative peers into P2P-based federated search In the past years, federated search over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks has attracted considerable attention from the information retrieval community. Most previous work assumes a so-called cooperative environment, where each peer can actively participate in information publishing and document indexing in a distributed manner. In contrast, little prior work has addressed the problem of incorporating uncooperative peers, which do not publish their own corpus statistics over a network. In this paper, we present a P2P-based federated search framework named PISA, which incorporates uncooperative peers when providing search service. Specifically, we (i) propose a heuristic query-based sampling approach named HQBS, which can obtain high-quality resource descriptions from uncooperative peers at a low communication cost; (ii) present two result merging methods, called RISE and RISE+, to merge the results returned by uncooperative peers: (iii) develop a method called Controlled and Selective Update (CSU) to efficiently maintain the index directory of PISA. Our extensive experiments on the TREC WT10g data set demonstrate that PISA can provide high-quality search results and integrate uncooperative peers at low cost. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Building a 100 Mpixel graphics device for the OptIPuter Wide area optical lambda networks create new possibilities for data-intensive scientific research and collaboration. One initiative to create novel infrastructure is the OptIPuter project which aims to build a distributed virtual computer using optical networks. At the iGrid2005 venue, an experiment was conducted on how a 100 Mpixel display device in San Diego could be driven by a remote 100 Mpixel graphics device in Amsterdam. The experiment showed the viability of such a setup, thereby validating one specific part of the OptIPuter concept: geographic separation of 100 Mpixel graphics- and display device. A key element in our setup is the use of unreliable communication.

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

streaming video
udp
remote visualization
ultra-high resolution visualization
lambda switching


Texture Analysis and Segmentation Using Modulation Features, Generative Models, and Weighted Curve Evolution In this work, we approach the analysis and segmentation of natural textured images by combining ideas from image analysis and probabilistic modeling. We rely on AM-FM texture models and, specifically, on the Dominant Component Analysis (DCA) paradigm for feature extraction. This method provides a low-dimensional, dense, and smooth descriptor, capturing the essential aspects of texture, namely, scale, orientation, and contrast. Our contributions are at three levels of the texture analysis and segmentation problems: First, at the feature extraction stage, we propose a Regularized Demodulation Algorithm that provides more robust texture features and we explore the merits of modifying the channel selection criterion of DCA. Second, we propose a probabilistic interpretation of DCA and Gabor filtering in general, in terms of Local Generative Models. Extending this point of view to edge detection facilitates the estimation of posterior probabilities for the edge and texture classes. Third, we propose the Weighted Curve Evolution scheme that enhances curve evolution-based segmentation methods by allowing for the locally adaptive combination of heterogeneous cues. Our segmentation results are evaluated on the Berkeley Segmentation Benchmark and compare favorably to current state-of-the-art methods.

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

texture analysis
demodulation
generative models
curve evolution

image segmentation
am-fm models
cue combination


A population dynamics model to describe gene frequencies in evolutionary algorithms The performance of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) may heavily depend severely on a suitable choice of parameters such as mutation and crossover rates. Several methods to adjust those parameters have been developed in order to enhance EA performance. For this purpose, it is important to understand the EA dynamics, i.e., to appreciate the behavior of the population. Hence, this paper presents a new model of population dynamics to describe and predict the diversity in any particular generation. The formulation is based on selecting the probability density function of each individual. The population dynamics proposed is modeled for a generational population. The model was tested in several case studies of different population sizes. The results suggest that the prediction error decreases as the population size increases.

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

population dynamics
evolutionary algorithms
diversity