Toward the three-dimensional structure and lysophosphatidic acid binding characteristics of the LPA4/p2y9/GPR23 receptor: A homology modeling study Lysophosphatidic acid (LPA) is a naturally occurring phospholipid that initiates a broad array of biological processes, including those involved in cell proliferation, survival and migration via activation of specific G protein-coupled receptors located on the cell surface. To date, at least five receptor subtypes (LPA15) have been identified. The LPA13 receptors are members of the endothelial cell differentiation gene (Edg) family. LPA4, a member of the purinergic receptor family, and the recently identified LPA5 are structurally distant from the canonical Edg LPA13 receptors. LPA4 and LPA5 are linked to Gq, G12/13 and Gs but not Gi, while LPA13 all couple to Gi in addition to Gq and G12/13. There is also evidence that LPA4 and LPA5 are functionally different from the Edg LPA receptors. Computational modeling has provided useful information on the structureactivity relationship (SAR) of the Edg LPA receptors. In this work, we focus on the initial analysis of the structural and ligand-binding properties of LPA4, a prototype non-Edg LPA receptor. Three homology models of the LPA4 receptor were developed based on the X-ray crystal structures of the ground state and photoactivated bovine rhodopsin and the recently determined human ?2-adrenergic receptor. Docking studies of LPA in the homology models were then conducted, and plausible LPA binding loci were explored. Based on these analyses, LPA is predicted to bind to LPA4 in an orientation similar to that reported for LPA13, but through a different network of hydrogen bonds. In LPA13, the ligand polar head group is reported to interact with residues at positions 3.28, 3.29 and 7.36, whereas three non-conserved amino acid residues, S114(3.28), T187(EL2) and Y265(6.51), are predicted to interact with the polar head group in the LPA4 receptor models.

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

lysophosphatidic acid (lpa)
g protein-coupled receptors (gpcrs)
lpa4/p2y9/gpr23
automated docking


ant colony system based on receding horizon control for aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling The aircraft arrival sequencing and scheduling (ASS) problem is one of the most significant problems in the air traffic control (ATC). This paper makes the first attempt to design an ant colony system (ACS) based approach to solve this NP-hard problem. In order to reduce the computational effort of the optimization process, the receding horizon control (RHC) strategy is integrated into the ACS to divide the optimization process into several sub-processes and solve them one by one. This strategy can reduce the problem scale in each sub-optimization process, resulting in lighter computational effort and higher quality solution for the whole problem. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed RHC based ACS algorithm for the ASS problem (RHC-ACS-ASS). Simulation results show that the RHC-ACS-ASS not only outperforms the GA based approaches, but also the ACS based approach without using the RHC strategy.

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

receding horizon control
ant colony system
arrival sequencing and scheduling
air traffic control


Fade countermeasure using signal degradation estimation for demand-assignment satellite systems This paper describes a complete fade countermeasure system, designed for thin route user-oriented and fully meshed satellite networks. The signal degradation due to the residual up-link attenuation after up-power control intervention, plus the down-link attenuation, is compensated for by varying the FEC coding and bit rates of the data. Down and up-link signal degradations are evaluated separately: the former by collecting statistics of quantized levels of the demodulated PSK signal, and the latter by using a narrow band signal level estimator. Measurement times are optimized using a model to evaluate the scintillation variance. The performance evaluation of the whole system in the presence of additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), shows that very small link power margins can be adopted.

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 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


Solvability and approximate solvability of fuzzy relation equations We give here a discussion of approximate solvability of a system of fuzzy relation equations. We demonstrate how problems of interpolation and approximation of fuzzy functions are connected with solvability of systems of fuzzy relation equations. First we explain the general framework, and later on we prove some particular results related to the problem of the best approximation.

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 B I I 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

solvability and approximate solvability of a fuzzy relation equation system


Existence, uniqueness, calculus and properties of triangular approximations of fuzzy numbers under a general condition We consider a general family of parameters associated to a fuzzy number. We study the existence and uniqueness of triangular fuzzy numbers which preserve a fixed parameter in the family. We compute the nearest triangular fuzzy number of a fuzzy number which preserves the fixed parameter. Properties of the obtained approximation operator are studied.

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

triangular fuzzy number
triangular approximation
extended approximation


On Certain Values of Kloosterman Sums Let K(q)n (a) be a Kloosterman sum over the finite field F(q)n of characteristic p. In this note so called subfield conjecture is proved: if a not equal 0 belongs to the proper subfield F(q) of F(q)n, then K(q)n (a) not equal -1. This completes recent works on the subfield conjecture by Shparlinski, and Moisio and Lisonek. The problem is motivated by some applications to bent functions. Moreover, in the course of the proof a large class of translates of Dickson polynomials are shown to be irreducible.

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

dickson polynomial
lucas number
primitive divisor


MethylPCA: a toolkit to control for confounders in methylome-wide association studies In methylome-wide association studies (MWAS) there are many possible differences between cases and controls (e.g. related to life style, diet, and medication use) that may affect the methylome and produce false positive findings. An effective approach to control for these confounders is to first capture the major sources of variation in the methylation data and then regress out these components in the association analyses. This approach is, however, computationally very challenging due to the extremely large number of methylation sites in the human genome.

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

principal component analysis
methylome-wide association studies
eigen-decomposition
association test
mbd-seq


Parallel computing as a vehicle for engineering design of complex functional surfaces Thin liquid film flow over surfaces containing complex multiply connected topography is modelled using lubrication theory. The resulting time dependent nonlinear coupled set of governing equations for film thickness and pressure is solved on different parallel computing platforms using a purpose written portable and scalable parallel multigrid algorithm in order to achieve the fine-scale resolution required to guarantee mesh independent solutions. The robustness of the approach is demonstrated via the solution of three problems: one to establish the convergence characteristics viz. the partitioning and message passing strategies adopted, taking flow over a well-defined trench topography as a benchmark against existing experimental and corresponding numerical predictions; two, flow through a sparsely distributed set of occlusions with computations performed on different parallel architectures; three, free-surface planarisation with respect to flow over complex topography the first an engineered functional substrate, the second a naturally occurring surface.

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

adaptive time-stepping
parallelisation
thin film flow
lubrication approximation


Exploiting local linear geometric structure for identifying correct matches ? ?? We focus on identifying correct matches from a set of tentative correspondences. A subset of correct matches is first obtained for identifying all correct matches. We test the method on both matching image pairs and re-ranking images. The performance of the method is satisfactory compared with the state-of-the-art.

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

local geometric structure
image matching
image re-ranking


A game-theoretic approach to fault diagnosis and identification of hybrid systems Physical systems can fail. For this reason the problem of identifying and reacting to faults has received a lot of attention in the control and computer science communities. In this paper we study the fault diagnosis problem for hybrid systems from a game-theoretical point of view. A hybrid system is a system mixing continuous and discrete behaviours that cannot be faithfully modelled neither by using a formalism with continuous dynamics only nor by a formalism including only discrete dynamics. We model hybrid systems as Hybrid Automata and add distinguished actions to describe faults. We define a Fault Identification Game on them, using two players: the environment and the identifier. The environment controls the evolution of the system and chooses whether and when a fault occurs. The identifier observes the external behaviour of the system and announces whether a fault has occurred or not. Existence of a winning strategy for the identifier implies that faults can be detected correctly, while computing such a winning strategy corresponds to implementing an identifier for the system. We will show how to determine the existence of a winning strategy, and how to compute it, for all decidable classes of hybrid automata that admit a finite bisimulation quotient. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

hybrid systems
fault identification
bisimulation


The Influence of Computer Graphics on the Recall of Information This article describes an experiment that examined the influence of computer plots of three dimensional graphics on the recall of information. Three dimensional graphics and a tabular mode of presentation were used to convey information to two experimental groups of subjects. The graphics were produced by using perspective projections. The outcome was that the three dimensional graphics did not result in greater recall of information than did a tabular presentation for the task that was assigned.

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

computer graphics
three dimensional graphics

mis management
information recall
information systems


A BIST scheme for RTL circuits based on symbolic testability analysis This paper introduces a novel scheme for testing register-transfer level (RTL) controller/data paths using built-in self-test (BIST), The scheme uses the controller netlist and the data path of a circuit to extract a test control/data flow (TCDF) graph. This TCDF is used to derive a set of symbolic justification and propagation paths (known as test environment) to test some of the operations and variables present in it. If it becomes difficult to generate such test environments with the derived TCDF's, a few test multiplexers are added at suitable points in the circuit to increase its controllability and observability, The test environment of an operation (variable) guarantees the existence of a path from the primary inputs of the circuit to the inputs of the module (register) to which the operation (variable) is mapped, and a path from the output of the module (register) to a primary output of the circuit. Since the search for a test environment is done symbolically, it is very fast and needs to be done only once for each module or register in the circuit, This test environment can then be used to exercise a module or register in the circuit with pseudorandom pattern generators which are placed only at the primary inputs of the circuit. The test responses can be analyzed with signature analyzers which are only placed at the primary outputs of the circuit, Unlike many RTL BIST schemes, an increase in the data path bit-width does not adversely impact the complexity of our testability analysis scheme since the analysis is symbolic. Every module in the module library is made random-pattern testable, whenever possible, using gate-level testability insertion techniques, This is a one-time cost. Finally, a BIST controller is synthesized to provide the necessary control signals to form the different test environments during testing, and a BIST architecture is superimposed on the circuit, Experimental results on a number of industrial and university benchmarks show that high fault coverage (> 99 %) can be obtained with our scheme. The average area overhead of the scheme is 6.9 % which is much lower than many existing logic-level BIST schemes. The average delay overhead is only 2.5 %, The test application time to achieve the high fault coverage for the whole circuit is also quite low.

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

built-in self-test
controller/data path
rtl testability
test control/data flow


Dynamic programming algorithms for RNA secondary structure prediction with pseudoknots ? ?? This paper shows simple dynamic programming algorithms for RNA secondary structure prediction with pseudoknots. For a basic version of the problem (i.e., maximizing the number of base pairs), this paper presents an O(n4) time exact algorithm and an O(n4??) time approximation algorithm. The latter one outputs, for most RNA sequences, a secondary structure in which the number of base pairs is at least 1?? of the optimal, where ?,? are any constants satisfying 0<?,?<1. Several related results are shown too.

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

rna secondary structure
dynamic programming

pseudoknot
approximation algorithms
computational biology


Learning object models from semistructured Web documents This paper presents an automated approach to learning object models by means of useful object data extracted from data-intensive semistructured web documents such as product descriptions. Modeling intensive data on the Web involves the following three phrases: First, we identify the object region covering the descriptions of object data when irrelevant contents from the web documents are excluded. Second, we partition the contents of different object data appearing in the object region and construct object data using hierarchical XML outputs. Third, we induce the abstract object model from the analogous object data. This model will match the corresponding object data from a Web site more precisely and comprehensively than the existing handcrafted ontologies. The main contribution of this study is in developing a fully automated approach to extract object data and object model from semistructured web documents using kernel-based matching and View Syntax interpretation. Our system, OnModer, can automatically construct object data and induce object models from complicated web documents, such as the technical descriptions of personal computers and digital cameras downloaded from manufacturers' and vendors' sites. A comparison with the available hand-crafted ontologies and tests on an open corpus demonstrate that our framework is effective in extracting meaningful and comprehensive 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 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

intelligent web services and semantic web

computational geometry and object modeling


Robotic impact-acoustics system for tile-wall bonding integrity inspection Impact acoustic is an effective non-destructive evaluation (NDE) method for many applications especially for inspecting the bonding quality of mosaic tile-walls. However, the audio noise can affect the power spectrum density (PSD) distribution of an acquired signal seriously. So, the traditional method of using PSD as the main identification tool is not sufficient. This paper proposes an evaluation method based on wavelet packet decomposition (WPD). Using WPD, the PSD of the signal is allocated into certain component fields. Investigation on the component PSD indicates it can reveal the bonding quality even in a noisy environment. An artificial neural network (ANN) is chosen as a classifier to simplify the evaluation system and makes it more effective and efficient. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated experimentally. It is verified that this WPD approach can be applied to impact acoustic method to enhance its evaluation capability in a noisy environment. For practical implementation an automatic, gondola based climbing robot, called WICBOT, is being developed. To reduce the difficulty in handling large amount of cables, ZigBee and Bluetooth wireless network are used to transmit the inspection results and sample data from the climbing robot to the ground station. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

non-destructive evaluation
wavelets
climbing service robot


Chebyshev's approximation algorithms and applications We introduce a new family of multipoint methods to approximate a solution of a nonlinear operator equation in Banach spaces. An existence-uniqueness theorem and error estimates are provided for these iterations using a technique based on a new system of recurrence relations. To finish, we apply the results obtained to some nonlinear integral equations of the Fredholm type. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

multipoint iteration
a priori error bounds


An asynchronous architecture for modeling intersegmental neural communication This paper presents an asynchronous VLSI architecture for modeling the oscillatory patterns seen in segmented biological systems. The architecture emulates the intersegmental synaptic connectivity observed in these biological systems. The communications network uses address-event representation (AER), a common neuromorphic protocol for data transmission. The asynchronous circuits are synthesized using communicating hardware processes (CHP) procedures. The architecture is scalable, supports multichip communication, and operates independent of the type of silicon neuron (spiking or burst envelopes). A 16-segment prototype system was developed, tested, and implemented; data from this system are presented.

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 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

asynchronous circuits
silicon neuron
vlsi architecture

address event representation (aer)
central pattern generator (cpg)
neurobiological modeling
neuromorphic engineering


Systematic prediction of linear dependencies in the concentration profiles and implications on the kinetic hard-modelling of spectroscopic data A novel method is presented for the systematic identification of the minimum requirements regarding mathematical pre-treatment, a priori information. or experimental design, in order to allow optimising rate constants and pure component spectra associated with a kinetic model via multivariate kinetic hard-modelling of spectroscopic data. Rank deficiencies in the kinetic concentration matrix represent a major problem for the calibration free method developed by Maeder and Zuberbuhler, as its pseudo-inverse, required for the optimisation process, is not defined. In this contribution, the underlying linear dependencies in the concentration profiles are systematically elucidated and appropriate strategies are discussed in order to break them. Also, conditions are predicted for which full spectral resolution can be expected. The method is based on the kernel of a time invariant augmented matrix covering potential rank deficiency due to stoichiometry and rate laws, also relevant for the concentration matrix. Compared to employing the full concentration matrix. this augmented matrix does not require a numerical integration of the differential equations describing the kinetic model and thus can easily be set up. The kernel can be calculated numerically by Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) or determined in a symbolical way, the latter allowing the detection of particular stoichiometric conditions leading to spectral resolution of species. The capabilities of the method are demonstrated analysing three kinetic mechanisms of increasing complexity covering consecutive and parallel reactions. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

a priori information and experimental design


Coral Point Count with Excel extensions (CPCe): A Visual Basic program for the determination of coral and substrate coverage using random point count methodology Photographic and video methods are frequently used to increase the efficiency of coral reef monitoring efforts. The random point count method is commonly used on still images or frame-grabbed video to estimate the community statistics of benthos. A matrix of randomly distributed points is overlaid on an image, and the species or substrate-type lying beneath each point is visually identified. Coral Point Count with Excel extensions (CPCe) is a standalone Visual Basic program which automates, facilitates, and speeds the random point count analysis process. CPCe includes automatic frame-image sequencing, single-click species/substrate labeling, auto-advancement of data point focus, zoom in/out, zoom hold, and specification of random point number, distribution type, and frame border location. Customization options include user-specified coral/substrate codes and data point shape, size, and color. CPCe can also perform image calibration and planar area and length calculation of benthic features. The ability to automatically generate analysis spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel based upon the supplied species/substrate codes is a significant feature. Data from individual frames can be combined to produce both inter- and intra-site comparisons. Spreadsheet contents include header information, statistical parameters of each species/substrate type (relative abundance, mean, standard deviation, standard error) and the calculation of the Shannon-Weaver diversity index for each species. Additional information can be found at http:// www.nova.edu/ocean/cpce/. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

coral point count
random point count
coral reef monitoring

coral reef assessment
coral area measurement


Universal zero-delay joint source-channel coding We consider zero-delay joint source-channel coding of individual source sequences for a general known channel. Given an arbitrary finite set of schemes with finite-memory (not necessarily time-invariant) decoders, a scheme is devised that does essentially as well as the best in the set on all individual source sequences. Using this scheme, we construct a universal zero-delay joint source-channel coding scheme that is guaranteed to achieve, asymptotically, the performance of the best zero-delay encoding-decoding scheme with a finite-state encoder and a Markov decoder, on all individual sequences. For the case where the channel is a discrete memoryless channel (DMC), we construct an implementable zero-delay joint source-channel coding scheme that is based on the "follow the perturbed leader" scheme of Gyorgy et al. for lossy source coding of individual sequences. Our scheme is guaranteed to attain asymptotically the performance of the best in the set of all encoding-decoding schemes with a "symbol-by-symbol" decoder (and arbitrary encoder), on all individual sequences'.

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

discrete memoryless channel (dmc)
finite-state encoder/decoder
joint source-channel coding
markov encoder/decoder
zero-delay schemes


Controlled non-uniform random generation of decomposable structures Consider a class of decomposable combinatorial structures, using different types of atoms Z = {Z(1), . . . , Z(vertical bar Z vertical bar)}. We address the random generation of such structures with respect to a size n and a targeted distribution in k of its distinguished atoms. We consider two variations on this problem. In the first alternative, the targeted distribution is given by k real numbers mu(1), . . . , mu(k) such that 0 = 0 is the number of undistinguished atoms. The structures must be generated uniformly among the set of structures of size n that contain exactly n(i) atoms Z(i) (1 <= i <= k). We give a O(r(2) Pi(k)(i=1) n(i)(2) + mnk log n) algorithm for generating m structures, which simplifies into a O(r Pi(k)(i=1) n(i) + mn) for regular specifications. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

random generation
decomposable structures

combinatorics
combinatorial specification
non-uniform distribution


Extraction of fuzzy rules from fuzzy decision trees: An axiomatic fuzzy sets (AFS) approach In this study, we introduce a new type of coherence membership function to describe fuzzy concepts, which builds upon the theoretical findings of the Axiomatic Fuzzy Set (AFS) theory. This type of membership function embraces both the factor of fuzziness (by capturing subjective imprecision) and randomness (by referring to the objective uncertainty) and treats both of them in a consistent manner. Furthermore we propose a method to construct a fuzzy rule-based classifier using coherence membership functions. Given the theoretical developments presented there, the resulting classification systems are referred to as AFS classifiers. The proposed algorithm consists of three major steps: (a) generating fuzzy decision trees by assuming some level of specificity (detailed view) quantified in terms of threshold; (b) pruning the obtained rule-base; and (c) determining the optimal threshold resulting in a final tree. Compared with other fuzzy classifiers, the AFS classifier exhibits several essential advantages being of practical relevance. In particular, the relevance of classification results is quantified by associated confidence levels. Furthermore the proposed algorithm can be applied to data sets with mixed data type attributes. We have experimented with various data commonly present in the literature and compared the results with that of SVM, KNN, C4.5, Fuzzy Decision Trees (FDTs), Fuzzy SLIQ Decision Tree (FS-DT), FARC-HD and FURIA. It has been shown that the accuracy is higher than that being obtained by other methods. The results of statistical tests supporting comparative analysis show that the proposed algorithm performs significantly better than FDTs, FS-DT, KNN and C4.5.

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

fuzzy decision trees
fuzzy rules
comparative analysis

afs fuzzy logic
knowledge representation


A sensitivity analysis of vibrations in cracked turbogenerator units versus crack position and depth The dynamic behaviour of heavy, horizontal axis, turbogenerator units affected by transverse cracks can be analysed in the frequency domain by means of a quasi linear approach, using a simplified breathing crack model applied to a traditional finite element model of the shaft-line. This allows to perform a series of analyses with affordable computational efforts. Modal analysis combined to a simplified approach for simulating the dynamical behaviour allows to predict the severity of the crack-excited vibrations, resolving the old-age question on how deep a crack must be to be detected by means of vibration measurements of the machine during normal operating conditions. The model of a 320MW turbogenerator unit has been used to perform a numerical sensitivity analysis, in which the vibrations of the shaft-line, and more in detail the vibrations of the shaft in correspondence to the bearings, have been calculated for all possible positions of the crack along the shaft-line, and for several different values of the depth of the crack.

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

cracked rotors
rotor dynamics
sensitivity to crack depth


Positron emission tomography for the evaluation and treatment of cardiomyopathy Congestive heart failure accounts for tremendous morbidity and mortality worldwide. There are numerous causes of cardiomyopathy, the most common of which is coronary artery disease. Positron emission tomography (PET) has an established and expanding role in the evaluation of patients with cardiomyopathy. The specific application of PET to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, cardiac sarcoidosis, and diabetic cardiomyopathy has been studied extensively and promises to be a useful tool for managing these patients. Furthermore, evaluating the efficacy of standard treatments for congestive heart failure is important as health care costs continue to rise. Recently, there have been significant developments in the field of cardiovascular stem cell research. Familiarity with the mechanisms by which stem cells benefit patients with cardiovascular disease is the key to understanding these advances. Molecular imaging techniques including PET/CT imaging play an important role in monitoring stem cell therapy in both animals and humans. These noninvasive imaging techniques will be highlighted in this paper.

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

cardiomyopathy
stem cells
positron emission tomography
congestive heart failure
molecular imaging


Sequentially two-leveled egalitarianism for TU games: Characterization and application ? A new linear value for cooperative transferable utility games is introduced. The recursive definition of the new value for an n-person game involves a sequential process performed at n?1 stages, applying the value to subgames with a certain size k,1?k<n, combining with the rule of two-leveled egalitarianism (additive normalization) in order to guarantee the efficiency property for the new value, sequentially two-leveled egalitarianism, shortly S2EG value, applied to subgames of size k+1. The new value will be characterized in various ways. The S2EG value differs from the Shapley value since, besides efficiency, linearity, and symmetry, it verifies an additional property with respect to so-called scale-dummy player (replacing dummy player property). Consequently, the S2EG value of a game may be determined as the solidarity value of the per-capita game (incorporating the proportional rule due to different levels of efficiency). Various potential representations of the new value are established. In the application to a land corn production economy, it yields allocations, in which the landlords interest coincides with striving for a maximum production level. For economies with the linear production function, not only the unique landlord but also all the workers have incentives to increase the scale of the economy.

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

transferable utility game
two-leveled egalitarianism
scale-dummy
sequential approach
potential representation


The minimum size instance of a Pallet Loading Problem equivalence class The Pallet Loading Problem (PLP) maximizes the number of identical rectangular boxes placed within a rectangular pallet. Boxes may be rotated 90 so long as they are packed with edges parallel to the pallets edges, i.e., in an orthogonal packing. This paper defines the Minimum Size Instance (MSI) of an equivalence class of PLP, and shows that every class has one and only one MSI. We develop bounds on the dimensions of box and pallet for the MSI of any class. Applying our new bounds on MSI dimensions, we present an algorithm for MSI generation and use it to enumerate all 3,080,730 equivalence classes with an area ratio (pallet area divided by box area) smaller than 101 boxes. Previous work only provides bounds on the ratio of box dimensions and only considers a subset of all classes presented here.

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


semantic email This paper investigates how the vision of the Semantic Web can be carried overto the realm of email. We introduce a general notion of semantice mail, in which an email message consists of an RDF query or update coupled with corresponding explanatory text. Semantic email opens the door to a wide range of automated, email-mediated applications with formally guaranteed properties. In particular, this paper introduces a broad class of semantic email processes . For example consider the process of sending an email to a program committee asking who will attend the PC dinner automatically collecting the responses and tallying them up. We define bothlogical and decision-theoretic models where an email process ismodeled as a set of updates to a data set on which we specify goals via certain constraints or utilities. We then describe a set ofinference problems that arise while trying to satisfy these goals and analyze their computational tractability. In particular weshow that for the logical model it is possible to automatically infer which email responses are acceptable w.r.t. a set ofconstraints in polynomial time and for the decision-theoreticmodel it is possible to compute the optimal message-handling policy in polynomial time. Finally we discuss our publicly available implementation of semantic email and outline research challenges inthis realm.

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

formal model
satisfiability
decision-theoretic


Investigating the concordance of Gene Ontology terms reveals the intra- and inter-platform reproducibility of enrichment analysis Reliability and Reproducibility of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) are essential for the biological interpretation of microarray data. The microarray quality control (MAQC) project launched by US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) elucidated that the lists of DEGs generated by intra- and inter-platform comparisons can reach a high level of concordance, which mainly depended on the statistical criteria used for ranking and selecting DEGs. Generally, it will produce reproducible lists of DEGs when combining fold change ranking with a non-stringent p-value cutoff. For further interpretation of the gene expression data, statistical methods of gene enrichment analysis provide powerful tools for associating the DEGs with prior biological knowledge, e.g. Gene Ontology (GO) terms and pathways, and are widely used in genome-wide research. Although the DEG lists generated from the same compared conditions proved to be reliable, the reproducible enrichment results are still crucial to the discovery of the underlying molecular mechanism differentiating the two conditions. Therefore, it is important to know whether the enrichment results are still reproducible, when using the lists of DEGs generated by different statistic criteria from inter-laboratory and cross-platform comparisons. In our study, we used the MAQC data sets for systematically accessing the intra- and inter-platform concordance of GO terms enriched by Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) and LRpath.

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

dna microarray
intra-/inter-platform comparison
gene ontology enrichment
microarray quality control (maqc)


Mining Discriminative Patterns for Classifying Trajectories on Road Networks Classification has been used for modeling many kinds of data sets, including sets of items, text documents, graphs, and networks. However, there is a lack of study on a new kind of data, trajectories on road networks. Modeling such data is useful with the emerging GPS and RFID technologies and is important for effective transportation and traffic planning. In this work, we study methods for classifying trajectories on road networks. By analyzing the behavior of trajectories on road networks, we observe that, in addition to the locations where vehicles have visited, the order of these visited locations is crucial for improving classification accuracy. Based on our analysis, we contend that (frequent) sequential patterns are good feature candidates since they preserve this order information. Furthermore, when mining sequential patterns, we propose to confine the length of sequential patterns to ensure high efficiency. Compared with closed sequential patterns, these partial (i.e., length-confined) sequential patterns allow us to significantly improve efficiency almost without losing accuracy. In this paper, we present a framework for frequent pattern-based classification for trajectories on road networks. Our comparative study over a broad range of classification approaches demonstrates that our method significantly improves accuracy over other methods in some synthetic and real trajectory data.

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

trajectory classification
frequent pattern-based classification
road network analysis


Ferroresonance suppression in power transformers using chaos theory The main goal of this paper is the determination of the effect of the metal oxide varistor (MOV) on various ferroresonance modes including fundamental resonance, subharmonic and chaos mode which are generated in electrical power systems. Chaos theory is used for analyzing this effect. Also, the bifurcation, phase plan diagram and time domain simulation are used for this purpose. The proposed power system contains a no-load or lightly loaded power transformer. The magnetization curve of the transformer core is modeled by a single-value two-term polynomial. The core loss is modeled based on the flux of the transformer. The MOV modeled as a nonlinear voltage dependent resistance. The suppression effect of MOV on chaotic ferroresonance in power transformer is studied in this paper. The simulation results confirm that connecting the MOV to the transformer has a considerable suppression effect on ferroresonance phenomena.

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

metal oxide varistor
bifurcation
ferroresonance
power transformers


The complexity of approximating bounded-degree Boolean #CSP The degree of a CSP instance is the maximum number of times that any variable appears in the scopes of constraints. We consider the approximate counting problem for Boolean CSP with bounded-degree instances, for constraint languages containing the two unary constant relations {0} and {1}. When the maximum allowed degree is large enough (at least 6) we obtain a complete classification of the complexity of this problem. It is exactly solvable in polynomial time if every relation in the constraint language is affine. It is equivalent to the problem of approximately counting independent sets in bipartite graphs if every relation can be expressed as conjunctions of {0}, {1} and binary implication. Otherwise, there is no FPRAS unless NP = RP. For lower degree bounds, additional cases arise, where the complexity is related to the complexity of approximately counting independent sets in hypergraphs. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

counting constraint satisfaction problem


Quasi-reversibility and truncation methods to solve a Cauchy problem for the modified Helmholtz equation In this paper, the Cauchy problem for the modified Helmholtz equation in a rectangular domain is investigated. We use a quasi-reversibility method and a truncation method to solve it and present convergence estimates under two different a priori boundedness assumptions for the exact solution. The numerical results show that our proposed numerical methods work effectively. (C) 2009 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

cauchy problem
modified helmholtz equation
truncation method
convergence estimates


secure code distribution in dynamically programmable wireless sensor networks Remote reprogramming of in situ wireless sensor networks (WSNs) via the wireless link is an important capability. Securing the process of reprogramming allows each sensor node to authenticate each received code image. Due to the resource constraints of WSNs, public key schemes must be used sparingly. This paper introduces a mechanism for secure and efficient code distribution that employs public key cryptography only to sign the root of a combined structure consisting of both hash chains and hash trees. The chain based scheme works best when packets are received in the order they are sent with very few losses. Our hash tree based scheme allows nodes to authenticate packets and verify their integrity quickly, even when the packets may arrive out of order, but can result in too many public key operations. Integrating hash chains and hash trees produces a mechanism that is both resilient to losses and lightweight in terms of reducing memory consumption and the number of public key operations that a node has to perform. Simulation shows that the proposed secure reprogramming schemes add only a modest amount of overhead to a conventional non-secure reprogramming scheme, namely Deluge, and are therefore feasible and practical in a wireless sensor network.

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


Detecting adaptive evolution and functional divergence in aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate synthase (ACS) gene family Ethylene is an essential plant gaseous hormone that controls many aspects of plant growth and development, especially the fruit ripening. It is important to know how this hormone is synthesized and how its production is regulated to understand the roles of ethylene in plant development. The aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate synthase (ACS) gene is a rate-limiting enzyme in the ethylene biosynthesis pathway, which is encoded by a highly divergent multi-gene family in plant species. Although many ACS genes have been cloned from a wide variety of plant species previously, their origin and evolutionary process are still not clear. In this study, we conducted a phylogenetic analysis based on an updated dataset including 107 members of plant ACS genes and eight ACS-like genes from animal as well as six AATase genes. The motifs were identified and the positive selection and functional divergence in the ACS gene family were detected. The results obtained from these analyses are consistent with previous division of the ACS gene family in angiosperm, i.e., three distinct clades, and show that the duplications of three subclades (I, II and III) ACS genes have occurred after the divergence of gymnosperm and angiosperm. We conclude that the ACS genes could have experienced three times significant positive selection as they underwent expansion in land plants and gain the full-scale ethylene biosynthesis and regulatory functions, and all plant ACS genes originated from plant-ACS-like genes which come from AATase genes.

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

gene family
adaptive evolution
functional divergence


Suitable switching policies for FMS scheduling Switching server, otherwise known as hybrid dynamical approaches can be used highly effectively to solve flexible manufacturing systems scheduling problems. Papers published in this field have accepted that the demand rates determining the production tasks have some given values. In the present paper it is shown that the demand rates should be selected from some given domains. The "control variables" to realize suitable processes are the switching policies, and the demand rates. These uniquely determine the processes through the switching time sequences. In the present paper, two variants: the single machine processing, and the multiple machine processing cases are analyzed. It is very problematic to use continuously coupled parts flows for stable and effective production. To eliminate this difficulty, in the present paper, the method called controlled buffer technique is proposed, which uses the opportunity that the computer controlled "virtual buffers" can be filled up before the regular working time, and used for part flow compensation. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

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

switching server
scheduling
demand rates
controlled buffer technique

hybrid dynamical approach
flexible manufacturing system (fms)
single and multiple machine processing
virtual buffer


A lower bound for the job insertion problem This note deals with the job insertion problem in job-shop scheduling: Given a feasible schedule of n jobs and a new job which is not scheduled, the problem is to find a feasible insertion of the new job into the schedule which minimises the makespan. Since the problem is NP-hard, a relaxation method is proposed to compute a strong lower bound. Conditions under which the relaxation provides us with the makespan of the optimal insertion are derived. After the analysis of the polytope of feasible insertions, a polynomial time procedure is proposed to solve the relaxed problem. Our results are based on the theory of perfect graphs and elements of polyhedral theory.

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


In silico study of potential autoimmune threats from rotavirus infection Rotaviral outer capsid protein VP6 shares two eight amino acid regions with ryanodine receptor 2, a target in myasthenia gravis, a neurodegenerative disorder. These two regions remain conserved among most circulating rotavirus strains isolated from all over the world. These regions are potential B cell with considerable relative surface availability and antigenecity. These regions are potential T cell epitope with respect to HLA subtypes associated with myasthenia gravis.

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

rota virus
molecular mimicry
autoimmunity


LucasKanade based entropy congealing for joint face alignment ? Entropy Congealing is an unsupervised joint image alignment method, in which the transformation parameters are obtained by minimizing a sum-of-entropy function. Our previous work presented a forward formulation of entropy Congealing to estimate all the transformation parameters at the same time. In this paper, we propose an inverse compositional LucasKanade formulation of entropy Congealing. This yields constant parts in Jacobian and Hessian which can be precomputed to decrease the computational complexity. Moreover, we combine Congealing with POEM descriptor to catch more information about face. Experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm performs better than other alignment methods, regarding several evaluation criteria on different databases. Concerning the complexity, the proposed algorithm is more efficient than other considered approaches. Also, compared to the forward formulation, the inverse method produces a speed improvement of 20%.

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

entropy congealing
face alignment
poem descriptor


A neural network-based sliding-mode control for rotating stall and surge in axial compressors A decoupled sliding-mode neural network variable-bound control system (DSMNNVB) is proposed to control rotating stall and surge in jet engine compression systems in presence of disturbance and uncertainty. The control objective is to drive the system state to the original equilibrium point and it proves that the control system is asymptotically stable. In this controller, an adaptive neural network (NN) control scheme is employed for unknown dynamic of nonlinear plant without using a model of the plant. Moreover, no prior knowledge of the plant is assumed. The proposed DSMNNVB controller ensures Lyapunov stability of the nonlinear dynamic of the system. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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 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


PVM based 3-D Kirchhoff depth migration using dynamically computed travel-times: An application in seismic data processing Seismic depth migration is an image reconstruction technique used to generate realistic images of the Earth's interior from surface recordings of sound waves reflected by buried geological structures. Migration algorithms that have been developed for digitally recorded seismic data are computationally intensive and are typically implemented on massively parallel architecture. In this paper we describe a highly accurate method of computing seismic travel-times and study the feasibility of a PVM-based SPMD parallelization of a migration algorithm based on this method. The parallel algorithm developed in this study is coarse grained and utilizes a simple geometrical decomposition of the input problem. We show that near linear speedup can be achieved on a homogeneous cluster and the algorithm can be ported to a variety of platforms, i.e. clusters of Sun workstations, Cray Y-MP, nCUBE-2, Cray T3E and SGI Origin 2000. The performance of the scheme on different computational platforms ultimately depends on a number of different factors, e.g., machine architecture, machine speed, network configuration etc. For a simple test case that was studied in this research, the performances of modest PVM clusters were found to be encouraging. This underscores the advantages of adopting a strategy based on parallelizing computationally intensive tasks and also demonstrates the suitability of the travel-time scheme for developing coarsely parallel applications.

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


Jump on the innovators train: cognitive principles for creating appreciation in innovative product designs In everyday life, we find shared preferences for idiosyncratic product features paradigmatically displayed by bestselling gadgets like Apples iPhones touch screen, which after gaining acceptance and appreciation are susceptible to being copied by competitors. Psychological research on the phenomenon of shared preferences for innovative design features and the probable benefit of copying them is still lacking. We tested gains of acceptance for imitators through an adaptation paradigm where typicality and liking of potentially innovative features were analysed dynamically. We found significant changes in typicality and liking for imitators being highly similar to the original. These adaptation processes in combination with transfer effects create the specific opportunity for imitators to jump on the innovators train by providing similar innovative features and thereby participating in the initial innovators success. Importantly, they participate best not by solely copying a specific novel feature, but by additionally generally looking very similar to the innovator.

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

aesthetic appreciation
prototypicality
dynamics
after effects
imitation
copycats
innovation


Top-k Diversity Queries over Bounded Regions Top-k diversity queries over objects embedded in a low-dimensional vector space aim to retrieve the best k objects that are both relevant to given user's criteria and well distributed over a designated region. An interesting case is provided by spatial Web objects, which are produced in great quantity by location-based services that let users attach content to places and are found also in domains like trip planning, news analysis, and real estate. In this article we present a technique for addressing such queries that, unlike existing methods for diversified top-k queries, does not require accessing and scanning all relevant objects in order to find the best k results. Our Space Partitioning and Probing (SPP) algorithm works by progressively exploring the vector space, while keeping track of the already seen objects and of their relevance and position. The goal is to provide a good quality result set in terms of both relevance and diversity. We assess quality by using as a baseline the result set computed by MMR, one of the most popular diversification algorithms, while minimizing the number of accessed objects. In order to do so, SPP exploits score-based and distance-based access methods, which are available, for instance, in most geo-referenced Web data sources. Experiments with both synthetic and real data show that SPP produces results that are relevant and spatially well distributed, while significantly reducing the number of accessed objects and incurring a very low computational overhead.

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

design experimentation performance scoring top-k ranking aggregation


Biomedical Informatics Publications: a Global Perspective Part II: Journals Background: Biomedical Informatics (BMI) is a broad discipline, having evolved from both Medical Informatics (MI) and Bioinformatics (BI). An analysis of publications in the field-should provide an indication about the geographic distribution of BMI research contributions and possible lessons for the future, both for research and professional practice. Objectives: In part I of our analysis of biomedical informatics publications we presented results from BMI conferences. In this second part, we analyse BMI journals, which provide a broader perspective and comparison between data from conferences and journals that ought to confirm or suggest alternatives to the original distributional findings from the conferences. Methods:We manually collected data about authors and their geographical origin from various MI journals: the International Journal of Medical Informatics (IJMI), the Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI), Methods of Information in Medicine (MIM) and The Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA). Focusing on first authors, we also compared these findings with data from the journal Bioinformatics. Results: Our results confirm those obtained in our analysis of BMI conferences that local and regional authors favor their corresponding MI journals just as they do their conferences. Consideration of other factors, such as the increasingly open source nature of data and software tools, is consistent with these findings Conclusions: Our analysis suggests various indicators that could lead to further, deeper analyses, and could provide additional insights for future BMI research and professional activities.

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

biomedical informatics
medical informatics
bioinformatics

conference rankings
journal impact factor


Designing an information system for updating land records in Bangladesh: Action design ethnographic research (ADER) Information Systems (IS) has developed through adapting, generating and applying diverse methodologies, methods, and techniques from reference disciplines. Further, Action Design Research (ADR) has recently developed as a broad research method that focuses on designing and redesigning IT and IS in organizational contexts. This paper reflects on applying ADR in a complex organizational context in a developing country. It shows that ADR requires additional lens for designing IS in such a complex organizational context. Through conducting ADR, it is seen that an ethnographic framework has potential complementarities for understanding complex contexts thereby enhancing the ADR processes. This paper argues that conducting ADR with an ethnographic approach enhances design of IS and organizational contexts. Finally, this paper aims presents a broader methodological framework, Action Design Ethnographic Research (ADER), for designing artefacts as well as IS. This is illustrated through the case of a land records updating service in Bangladesh.

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

action design research
action design ethnographic research
land records
bangladesh


On multi-level kappa-ranges for range search We investigate an implementation of the multi-level or l-level k-range data structure. The l-level k-range is compared to naive and R*tree search over N randomly generated k-dimensional points. Results indicate that multi-level k-ranges are not competitive due to their (previously unreported) complexity. We show that storage is S(N, k, l) = O(N(1+2(k-1)/l)) and S(N, k) = Theta(N(1+2(k-1)/log2 N)). Our results also indicate that the l-level k-range requires Q(N, k, l) = O((2l)(k)(log N + A)) time for range search, for A = number of points reported in range.

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

multidimensional orthogonal range search


Gamification for smarter learning: tales from the trenches Gamification has been explored recently as a way to promote content delivery in education, yielding promising results. However, little is known regarding how it helps different students experience learning and acquire knowledge. In this paper we study and analyze data from a gamified engineering course, to search for distinct behavior patterns. We examined data collected from two gamified years, between which game changes took place. By clustering students according to their performance, we identified three distinct student types, common to both years: Achievers, Disheartened, and Underachievers. Interestingly, in the second year a new type of student emerged: the Late Awakeners. In this paper we carefully describe each student type, and explain how gamification can provide for smarter learning by catering to students with different profiles. Furthermore, we discuss how our findings, both in gamification and cluster analysis can be used to develop adaptive and smart learning environments.

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


Communication and control system for a 15-channel hermetic retinal prosthesis ? A small, hermetic, wirelessly-controlled retinal prosthesis has been developed for pre-clinical studies in Yucatan minipigs. The device was attached conformally to the outside of the eye in the socket and received both power and data wirelessly from external sources. Based on the received image data, the prosthesis drove a subretinal thin-film polyimide array of sputtered iridium oxide stimulating electrodes. The implanted device included a hermetic titanium case containing a 15-channel stimulator and receiver chip and discrete circuit components. Feedthroughs in the hermetic case connected the chip to secondary power- and data-receiving coils, which coupled to corresponding external power and data coils driven by power amplifiers. Power was delivered by a 125kHz carrier, and data were delivered by amplitude shift keying of a 15.5MHz carrier at 100kbps. Stimulation pulse strength, duration and frequency were programmed wirelessly from an external computer system. The final assembly was tested in vitro in physiological saline and in vivo in two minipigs for up to five and a half months by measuring stimulus artifacts generated by the implant's current drivers.

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

rp retinitis pigmentosa
amd age-related macular degeneration
pxi pci extensions for instrumentation
ask amplitude shift keying
sirof sputtered iridium oxide film
pwm pulse width modulation
erg electroretinogram
pdms poly(dimethylsiloxane)


Structural tendencies in complex systems development and their implication for software systems Contemporary distributed software systems, exposed to highly unpredictable environments, are reaching extremely high complexity levels. For example, open heterogeneous multi-agent systems that may potentially be spread all around the globe are interacting with different types of dynamically changing web-services and web-technologies. Traditional control-based handling of adaptability may not be suitable anymore in such systems. Therefore there is a tendency for exploring different adaptability models inspired by biological phenomena. Biological systems inherently are faced with complexity and unpredictable environments, and they exhibit high levels of adaptability. In this article, we present a theoretical model of development of complex system, which was built originally by Andrzej Gecow, as a computational model in evolutionary biology. This model represents a generic complex system subjected to long sequences of adaptive changes. The model was used for analysis of development processes and also structural tendencies. By tendencies we mean some phenomena that should be expected in any complex system, subjected to a long development process. Some of these tendencies are not desirable, for example bloat of the system. Some of the phenomena, however, show characteristics of changes that improve the system. These characteristics can be applied to optimisation of self-producing and self-adapting algorithms of self-maintaining complex software systems. The main structural tendencies described in this article are: terminal modifications, terminal majority of additions, and covering ( reconstructing within the system itself disappearing environmental signals).

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

adaptable architectures
software life cycle


Mobile robot localization based on Ultra-Wide-Band ranging: A particle filter approach This article addresses the problem of mobile robot localization using Ultra-Wide-Band (UWB) range measurements. UWB is a radio technology widely used for communications, that is recently receiving increasing attention for positioning applications. In these cases, the position of a mobile transceiver is determined from the distances to a set of fixed, well-localized beacons. Though this is a well-known problem in the scientific literature (the trilateration problem), the peculiarities of UWB range measurements (basically, distance errors and multipath effects) demand a different treatment to other similar solutions, as for example, those based on laser. This work presents a thorough experimental characterization of UWB ranges within a variety of environments and situations. From these experiments, we derive a probabilistic model which is then used by a particle filter to combine different readings from UWB beacons as well as the vehicle odometry. To account for the possible offset error due to multipath effects, the state tracked by the particle filter includes the offset of each beacon in addition to the planar robot pose (x,y,?) ( x , y , ? ) , both estimated sequentially. We show navigation results for a robot moving in indoor scenarios covered by three UWB beacons that validate our proposal.

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

mobile robot localization
particle filter


Adaptive stabilization for generator excitation system Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to develop a controller for damping of oscillations of a synchronous generator connected to the electric network. The goal is to determine the configuration of the controller and to set up the procedure for determination of the controller parameters. Design/methodology/approach - On the basis of the analytical and numerical analysis of the so-far proposed stabilizers, the new directions towards improved and efficient stabilizer have been established. The advantage of the proposed approach has been confirmed with simulations and experimental results. Findings - Three main contributions can be highlighted: on the basis of the synchronous generator analysis, it is shown that the conventional power system stabilizer is inappropriate for optimal oscillation damping through the entire operating range; the possibility of application of the model reference adaptive control theory for stabilizer design is confirmed; and the rules have been set up for selection of the stabilizer parameters. Research limitations/implications - The power system control is rather conservative and does not allow new approaches to the control concepts. Originality/value - The paper's originality lies in the fact that the proposed adaptive approach for realizing the control system for damping of oscillations is presented completely. The configuration of the controller is presented, as well as the method for determining the adaptation mechanism parameters.

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

generators
stability (control theory)
control technology


A concurrency control scheme for mobile transactions in broadcast disk environments Broadcast disk technique has been often used to disseminate frequently requested data efficiently to a large volume of mobile clients over wireless channels. In broadcast disk environments, a server often broadcasts different data items with differing frequencies to reflect the skewed data access patterns of mobile clients. Previously proposed concurrency control methods for mobile transactions in wireless broadcast environments are focused on the mobile transactions with uniform data access patterns. These protocols perform poorly in broadcast disk environments where the data access patterns of mobile transactions are skewed. In broadcast disk environments, the time length of a broadcast cycle usually becomes large to reflect the skewed data access patterns. This will often cause read-only transactions to access old data items rather than the latest data items. Furthermore, updating mobile transactions will be frequently aborted and restarted in the final validation stage due to the update conflict of the same data items with high access frequencies. This problem will increase the average response time of the update mobile transactions and waste the uplink communication bandwidth. In this paper, we extend the existing FBOCC concurrency control method to efficiently handle mobile transactions with skewed data access patterns in broadcast disk environments. Our method allows read-only transactions to access the more updated data, and reduces the average response time of updating transactions through early aborts and restarts. Our method also reduces the amount of uplink communication bandwidth for the final validation of the update transactions. We present an in-depth experimental analysis of our method by comparing with existing concurrency control protocols. Our performance analysis shows that it significantly decreases the average response time and the amount of uplink bandwidths over existing methods.

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

mobile databases
wireless broadcast channels
data dissemination
broadcast data
broadcast disks
mobile computing


3D-VIEWER: An atlas-based system for individual and statistical investigations of the human brain 3D-VIEWER is a new software tool for neurosurgical planning and population studies. It is based on digitized three-dimensional brain atlases derived from standard stereotactic atlases that can be adapted to an individual's brain and shown as a series of displayed images. If the patient's brain has been imaged in different modalities, the standardized anatomical information can be adapted to the individual images, which will bring the images into registration. The 3D-VIEWER can be used as a tool for combining multimodal information from the same patient. In addition, several tools are available that allow oblique views of anatomical structures or the view along the intended trajectory during a neurosurgical intervention. Furthermore, using the atlas transformation matrices, anatomical information can be determined when comparing an individual's brain to the anatomy of the atlas brain. Thus, standardized anatomical information from the atlas Gan be introduced into individual images. This standardization is used to perform individual-group and group-by-group comparisons between patients and normal controls in anatomical studies.

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

brain atlas
multimodal registration
intersubject standardization


Beyond mirroring: multi-version disk arraywith improved performance and energy efficiency Performance and power consumption are two important design objectives for data centers consisting of thousands or tens of thousands of disks (or disk arrays). To leverage the two objectives, in this study we propose a multi-version disk array (MDA). The main idea of MDA is to exploit the I/O workload characteristics to guide the replication strategy by replicating multiple versions of the popular data blocks and simply offloading the write data to the free space of the reserved version region, thus achieving high performance in the burst period and low power consumption in the idle period. Our prototype implementation of MDA and the performance evaluations show that the performance of MDA outperforms that of traditional RAID10 by up to 34.4% and 42.3% in terms of the average response time for the online transaction processing (OLTP) application I/O and search engine I/O, respectively. Moreover, the energy efficiency of MDA outperforms that of RAID10 by up to 48.7% and 36.4%, respective to the aforementioned measures.

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 O O O O O 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


Numerical analysis of a dental implant system in three-dimension One of the important problems in dental implant systems is screw loosening. In order to prevent this loosening a preload is applied to the retaining screw. However, this measure has not been able to eliminate its occurrence. In this study the effect of a washer in a Branemark-type implant on the loosening conditions of the retaining screw was investigated using a finite element simulation in three-dimensional models. The simulation indicated that a washer has an important affect against loosening. This also increases the flexibility of implant system against the deformation. The application of a washer is easy and cheap.

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


maximum likelihood resolution of multi-block genotypes We present a new algorithm for the problems of genotype phasing and block partitioning. Our algorithm is based on a new stochastic model, and on the novel concept of probabilistic common haplotypes. We formulate the goals of genotype resolving and block partitioning as a maximum likelihood problem, and solve it by an EM algorithm. When applied to real biological SNP data, our algorithm outperforms two state of the art phasing algorithms. Our algorithm is also considerably more sensitive and accurate than a previous method in predicting and identifying disease association.

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

algorithm
genotype
snp
disease association
maximum likelihood

haplotype
haplotype block
haplotype resolution
haplotyping
genotype phasing


A characterization of c.e. random reals A real alpha is computably enumerable if it is the limit of a computable, increasing, converging sequence of rationals. A real a is random if its binary expansion is a random sequence. Our aim is to offer a self-contained proof, based on the papers (Calude et al.. in: M. Morvan, C. Meinel, D. Krob (Eds.), Proc. 15th Symp. on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, Paris, Springer, Berlin, 1998, pp. 596-606; Chaitin, J. Assoc. Comput. Mach. 22 (1975) 329; Slaman, manuscript, 14 December 1998, 2 pp., Solovay, unpublished manuscript, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Yorktown Heights, New York, May 1975, 215 pp,), of the following theorem: a real is ce. and random if and only, if it is a Chaitin Omega real, i.e., the halting probability of some universal self-delimiting Turing machine. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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


Employee job attitudes and organizational characteristics as predictors of cyberloafing Cyberloafing is the personal use of the Internet by employees while at work. The purpose of this study is to examine whether employee job attitudes, organizational characteristics, attitudes towards cyberloafing, and other non-Internet loafing behaviors serve as antecedents to cyberloafing behaviors. We hypothesize that the employee job attitudes of job involvement and intrinsic involvement are related to cyberloafing. In addition, we hypothesize that organizational characteristics including the perceived cyberloafing of ones coworkers and managerial support for internet usage are related to cyberloafing. We also hypothesize that attitudes towards cyberloafing and the extent to which employees participate in non-Internet loafing behaviors (e.g., talking with coworkers, running personal errands) will both be related to cyberloafing. One hundred and forty-three working professional from a variety of industries were surveyed regarding their Internet usage at work. As hypothesized, the employee job attitudes of job involvement and intrinsic involvement were negatively related to cyberloafing. Also as predicted, the organizational characteristics of the perceived cyberloafing of ones coworkers and managerial support for internet usage were positively related to cyberloafing. Finally, results showed that attitudes towards cyberloafing and participation in non-Internet loafing behaviors were positively related to cyberloafing. Implications for both organizations and employees are discussed.

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

cyberloafing
internet
organizations
job attitudes

computer mediated communication
production deviance


Using homography relationship for auto-calibration in mobile smart-project device system As technology advances, mobile devices have become indispensable 3C products. Smart phones and tablet computers have become the favorite products of technology, and they are commonly seen everywhere. In addition to making phone calls and sending messages, people also use smart phones and tablet computers to browse the Internet, listen to music, take videos and pictures, and play games, all of which have become an integral part of peoples lives. In addition, according to a market survey, the most expected function of future smart phones by consumers is the projection. However, the projection will accelerate the battery power consumption. In this paper, we conducted an auto-calibration based on homography relationship in mobile smart-project device system to take advantage of the capability of the projector to project an image onto any opaque and unflat plane, thus breaking through the restricted display interfaces of mobile devices. Moreover, we also proposed the method that named FDPA (standing for Fast Detecting Projection Area) to reduce the battery power consumption via decreasing the calculation cost of the auto-calibration. The experimental results show that FDPA is able to improve the dynamic projection performance and to reduce battery power consumption in the mobile smart-projector device system. This was expected to help further develop an interactive projection system between mobile devices, adding diversity to mobile device applications and development.

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

mobile device
dynamic projection
homography relationship


Region matching with missing parts We present a variational approach to the problem of registering planar shapes despite missing parts. Registration is achieved through the evolution of a partial differential equation that simultaneously estimates the shape of the missing region, the underlying 'complete shape' and the collection of group elements (Euclidean, affine) corresponding to the registration. Our technique can be used both for shapes, for instance represented as characteristic functions (binary images) and for grayscale images where it can be interpreted as region 'inpainting.' The novelty of the approach lies on the fact that, rather than estimating the missing region in each image independently. we pose the problem as a joint registration with respect to an underlying 'complete shape' from which the complete version of the original data is obtained via a group action. We simultaneously estimate the complete shape and the group action in an alternating minimization scheme. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

shape variational registration inpainting


A 2 GHz phase-locked loop frequency synthesizer with on-chip VCO This paper discusses the implementation of the building blocks for a 2 GHz phase-locked loop frequency synthesizer in a standard 0.5 mu m BICMOS process. These blocks include a low-power optimized dual modulus prescaler which is able to operate with input frequencies up to 2.7 GHz, a phase detector with extremely constant gain throughout the input phase difference range, a chargepump with a rail-to-rail output, and an on-chip voltage-controlled oscillator.

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

frequency synthesis
phase-locked loop
radio frequency
voltage-controlled oscillator


SoC with an integrated DSP and a 2.4-GHz RF transmitter We present a system-on-chip (SoC) that integrates a TMS320C54x digital signal processor (DSP), which is commonly used in cellular phones, with a multigigahertz digital RF transmitter that meets the Bluetooth specifications. The RF transmitter is tightly coupled with the DSP and is directly mapped to its address space. The transmitter architecture is based on an all-digital phase-locked loop (ADPLL), which is built from the ground up using digital techniques and digital creation flow that exploit high speed and high density of a deep-submicrometer CMOS process while avoiding its weaker handling of voltage. The frequency synthesizer features a wideband frequency modulation capability. As part of the digital flow, the digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) and a class-E power-amplifier are created as ASIC cells with digital I/Os. All digital blocks, including the 2.4-GHz logic, are synthesized from VHDL and auto routed. The use of VHDL allows for a tight and seamless integration of RF with the DSP. To take advantage of the direct DSP-RF coupling and to demonstrate a software-defined radio (SDR) capability, a DSP program is written to perform modulation of the GSM standard. The chip is fabricated in a baseline 130-nm CMOS process with no analog extensions and features high logic gate density of 150 kgates per mm(2). The RF transmitter area occupies only 0.54 mm(2), and the current consumption (including the companion DSP) is 49 mA at 1.5-V supply and 4 mW of RF output. This proves attractiveness and competitiveness of the "digital RF" approach, whose goal is to replace RF functions with high-speed digital logic gates.

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

bluetooth
frequency synthesizer
integration
transmitter

all-digital
digital signal processor (dsp)
phase domain
single-chip
system-on-chip (soc)


Performance of one's complement caches On-chip caches to reduce average memory access latency are commonplace in today's commercial microprocessors. These on-chip caches generally have low associativity and small cache sizes. Cache line conflicts are the main source of cache misses, which are critical for overall system performance. This paper introduces an innovative design for on-chip data caches of microprocessors, called one's complement cache. While binary complement numbers have been successfully used in designing arithmetic units, to the best of our knowledge, no one has ever considered using such complement numbers in cache memory designs. This paper will show that such complement numbers help greatly in reducing cache misses in a data cache, thereby improving data cache performance. By parallel computation of cache addresses and memory addresses, the new design does not increase the critical hit time of cache accesses. Cache misses caused by line interference are reduced by evenly distributing data items referenced by program loops across all sets in a cache. Even distribution of data in the cache is achieved by making the number of sets In the cache a prime or an odd number, so that the chance of related data being mapped to a same set is small. Trace-driven simulations are used to evaluate the performance of the new design. Performance results on benchmarks show that the new design improves cache performance significantly with negligible additional hardware cost. (C) 1998 Academic Press.

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

memory conflicts
memory hierarchy
performance evaluation


Synthesis of robust water reuse networks for single-component retrofit problems using symmetric fuzzy linear programming Water integration techniques can be used to minimize the utility water consumption and effluent generation of process plants through the implementation of reuse or recycle networks. There are a number of graphical and mathematical programming techniques available for the synthesis of such water reuse networks. However, effective use of these methods requires the availability of reliable process data, which in reality might be difficult to acquire. This paper describes a procedure for the synthesis of robust water reuse networks from imprecise data using symmetric fuzzy linear programming (SFLP). Two model variants, one based on mass exchange units and the other on source/sink allocation, are presented. Each variant is illustrated with a numerical example. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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 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

process integration
water reuse network
water pollution