A new vacuum pin chuck for ArF laser lithography To meet the demands of next-generation ArF excimer laser lithographya site flatness better than 0.03 ?m in a 30-mm square fielda new vacuum pin chuck was developed. A 2-mm wide static-pressure seal, which extends beyond the wafer edge, makes it possible to almost completely flatten the wafer periphery. Since the wafer back-surface contacts only the tips of the pins, the chuck can significantly reduce the influence of dust. In addition, conductive pore-free ceramics and a coating of SiC, as well as round pin corners and small roughness on the pin tops, prevent dust adhesion. It was found experimentally and theoretically that the flattening ability of the new chuck around the wafer periphery is several times higher than that of an ordinary ring-seal chuck. Such superior flattening was achieved by expanding the vacuum region by the wafer edge. Calculations showed that the new chuck can flatten an 8-inch concave wafer with a bow of 200 ?m to a residual bow of less than 0.03 ?m.

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

flattening ability
pin chuck
arf laser lithography


computational aspects of elliptic curves and modular forms The ultimate motivation for much of the study of Number Theory is the solution of Diophantine Equations -- finding integer solutions to systems of equations. Elliptic curves comprise a large, and important class of such equations. Throughout the history of their study Elliptic Curves have always had a strong algorithmic component. In the early 1960's Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer developed systematic algorithms to automate a generalization of a procedure called "descent" which went back to Fermat. The data they obtained was instrumental in formulating their famous conjecture, which is now one of the Clay Mathematical Institute's Millenium prizes.

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


Diagnosis under compound effects and multiple causes by means of the conditional causal possibility approach The paper addresses uncertain reasoning on a causal model given by two layered networks, where nodes in one layer express possible causes and those in the other are possible effects. Uncertainty of causalities is expressed in a novel manner, i.e. by Conditional Causal Possibilities. The expression has two advantages over the conventional way with conditional possibilities: it expresses the exact degrees of possibility of causalities, and the number of necessary conditional causal possibilities is far smaller than that of conditional possibilities. However, it has a weakness that it cannot handle causalities with compound effects such as synergistic and canceling effects by multiple causes. The paper discusses the weakness and proposes a solution. First, it discusses how to deal with the compound effects and proposes a new causal model with conditional causal possibilities by multiple causes. Then, it defines a causality consistency problem that calculates possibility of a hypothesis given some observed events, and shows a way to solve the problem. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


variable size population for dynamic optimization with genetic programming A new model of Genetic Programming with variable size population is presented in this paper and applied to the reconstruction of target functions in dynamic environments (i.e. problems where target functions change with time). The suitability of this model is tested on a set of benchmarks based on some well known symbolic regression problems. Experimental results confirm that our variable size population model finds solutions of the same quality as the ones found by standard Genetic Programming, but with a smaller amount of computational effort.

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

dynamic optimization
genetic programming


adapting materialized views after redefinitions We consider a variant of the view maintenance problem: How does one keep a materialized view up-to-date when the view definition itself changes? Can one do better than recomputing the view from the base relations? Traditional view maintenance tries to maintain the materialized view in response to modifications to the base relations; we try to "adapt" the view in response to changes in the view definition.Such techniques are needed for applications where the user can change queries dynamically and see the changes in the results fast. Data archaeology, data visualization, and dynamic queries are examples of such applications.We consider all possible redefinitions of SQL SELECT-FROM-WHERE-GROUPBY, UNION, and EXCEPT views, and show how these views can be adapted using the old materialization for the cases where it is possible to do so. We identify extra information that can be kept with a materialization to facilitate redefinition. Multiple simultaneous changes to a view can be handled without necessarily materializing intermediate results. We identify guidelines for users and database administrators that can be used to facilitate efficient view adaptation.

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

data visualization
dynamic queries
applications
views
adapt
examples
users
maintenance
definition
sql
data
queries
response
database
user
change

select efficiency guideline maintainability material administrator informal


Optimizing the configuration of a heterogeneous cluster with multiprocessing and execution-time estimation Although heterogeneous clusters are flexible and cost-effective, they entail intrinsic difficulties in optimization. Whereas it is simple to invoke multiple processes on fast processing elements (PEs) to alleviate load imbalance, the optimal process allocation is not obvious. Communication time is another problem. Though it is sometimes better to exclude slow PEs to avoid performance degradation, it is generally difficult to find the optimal PE configuration. In this study, the execution time is first modeled from the measurement results of various configurations. The derived models are then used to estimate the optimal PE configuration and process allocation. We implemented various models for HPL (High Performance Linpack benchmark) on a heterogeneous cluster, and estimated the optimal configurations for various problem sizes. In the case of a heterogeneous cluster of Athlon and Pentium-II, the execution time of the estimated optimal configuration was 0-7.4% longer than that of the actual optimal configuration. In a heterogeneous cluster of three kinds of processors that includes dual-processors, the excess time was 13.6-31.5%. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

heterogeneous cluster
optimization
high performance linpack

static load balancing
automatic configuration


Identification of ligand binding site on RXR gamma using molecular docking and dynamics methods Retinoid X receptors (RXR alpha, beta and gamma) are recently known to be cancer chemotherapies targets. The ligand binding domains of RXRs have been crystallized, but the information of RXR gamma ligand binding site is not yet available due to the lack of liganded complex. A thorough understanding of the ligand binding sites is essential to study RXRs and may result in cancer therapeutic breakthrough. Thus we aimed to study the RXR gamma ligand binding site and find out the differences between the three subtypes. Alignment and molecular simulation were carried out for identifying the RXR gamma ligand binding site, characterizing the RXR gamma ligand binding mode and comparing the three RXRs. The result has indicated that the RXR gamma ligand binding site is defined by helices H5, H10, beta-sheet s1 and the end loop. Besides hydrophobic interactions, the ligand 9-cis retinoic acid interacts with RXR gamma through a hydrogen bond with Ala106, a salt bridge with Arg95 and the pi-pi interactions with Phe217 and Phe218. The binding modes exhibit some similarities among RXRs, such as the interactions with Arg95 and Ala106. Nonetheless, owing to the absence of Ile47, Cys48, Ala50, Ala51 and residues 225 similar to 237 in the active site, the binding pocket in RXR gamma is two times larger than those of RXR alpha and RXR beta. Meanwhile, spatial effects of Trp84, Arg95, Ala106, Phe217 and Phe218 help to create a differently shaped binding pocket as compared to those of RXR alpha and RXR beta. Consequently, the ligand in RXR gamma undergoes a "standing" posing which is distinct from the other two RXRs.

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

9-cis retinoic acid
molecular dynamics simulation
retinoid x receptor


A Generalisation of Tverberg's Theorem We will prove the following generalisation of Tverberg's Theorem: given a set SaS,a"e (d) of (r+1)(k-1)(d+1)+1 points, there is a partition of S in k sets A (1),A (2),aEuro broken vertical bar,A (k) such that for any CaS,S of at most r points, the convex hulls of A (1)\C,A (2)\C,aEuro broken vertical bar,A (k) \C are intersecting. This was conjectured first by Natalia Garcia-Colin (Ph.D. thesis, University College of London, 2007).

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


An object-based approach for detecting small brain lesions: Application to Virchow-Robin spaces This paper is concerned with the detection of multiple small brain lesions from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. A model based on the marked point process framework is designed to detect Virchow-Robin spaces (VRSs). These tubular shaped spaces are due to retraction of the brain parenchyma from its supplying arteries. VRS are described by simple geometrical objects that are introduced as small tubular structures. Their radiometric properties are embedded in a data term. A prior model includes interactions describing the clustering property of VRS. A Reversible Jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm (RJMCMC) optimizes the proposed model, obtained by multiplying the prior and the data model. Example results are shown on T(1)-weighted MRI datasets of elderly subjects.

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

features extraction
marked point processes
reversible jump mcmc
virchow robin spaces


Agent framework services to reduce agent communication overhead in large-scale agent-based simulations Agent-based simulations are an essential tool in analyzing the behavior of real-world systems. Agent-based distributed simulations can be a useful in addressing the scale and complexity of such simulations. Because agents in such simulations intensively communicate with each other to perform their shared tasks, performance of the simulation is strongly related to the amount of inter-node message passing. In this paper, we propose two agent framework services to reduce the amount of inter-node message passing: dynamic agent distribution and search object-based middle agent services. We have implemented this framework in Java-based tool and used it to conduct simulations of up to 10,000 agents, where each agent represents a micro-UAV or a physical agent on the ground. In our experiments, the use of the dynamic agent distribution service reduces the runtime by 60%, and the use of the search object-based brokering service reduces the runtime by 50%. Although the performance improvements will vary in different simulations, our conjecture is that in cases where an agent-based simulation is affected by the temporal communication locality between agents, and there is complex agentenvironment interaction, the two services will considerably improve the overall performance of a simulation.

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

distributed simulation
agent-based simulation
load balancing
middle agent service


Modelling lateral spacing and separation for airborne separation assurance using Petri nets Airborne separation assurance is seen as a promising option for the future air traffic management concept to provide an increase in capacity and flight efficiency while maintaining flight safety. Sofar, studies or expectations are largely based on assumptions about the achievable spacing and separation criteria. These assumptions range from optimistic to reserved, when comparing these separation criteria to currently used radar surveillance-based values. In any case, there is a clear knowledge gap on this subject. Thus, it is important to assess the relationship between spacing and separation distances on one hand and safety on the other hand. This relationship directly affects the effectiveness of airborne separation assurance. The aim of this paper is to address this issue by conducting an accident risk assessment, including a bias and uncertainty assessment and an assessment of risk sensitivity to spacing and separation values. Each stage in the methodology used is illustrated by examples. It is shown that the methodology provides valuable feedback on both the airborne separation assurance operation and the accident risk assessment.

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

monte carlo simulation
stochastic modelling
collision risk
safety validation


Molecular insights into quorum sensing in Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans bacteria via molecular modelling of the transcriptional regulator AfeR and of the binding mode of long-chain acyl homoserine lactones Amino acid sequence alignments of the transcriptional regulator AfeR, which is involved in type 1 quorum sensing (QS) in Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans bacteria, with other acyl homoserine lactone (AHL)-dependent QS regulators, revealed the presence of strictly or highly conserved residues located in the active site of these proteins. As a consequence, a model of AfeR was constructed to study the binding mode of long-chain AHLs using molecular dynamics and subsequent rigid ligand docking. This study, performed on the tetradecanoyl homoserine lactone C14-AHL, showed that the binding mode involved a curved conformation. Based on these results, the binding mode of tetradec-7-Z enoyl homoserine lactone, an AHL that is conformationally constrained due to the presence of the cis double bond, was investigated. This mono-unsaturated AHL with its preferential curved shape conformation was found to be particularly well adapted to the active site of AfeR. These results should be helpful in the rational design of QS modulators with potential biotechnological applications and especially in the improvement of industrial bioleaching from ores.

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

long-chain acyl homoserine lactones
conformational analysis


Transform coding with integer-to-integer transforms A new interpretation of transform coding is developed that downplays quantization and emphasizes entropy coding, allowing a comparison of entropy coding methods with different memory requirements. With conventional transform coding, based on computing Karhunen-Loeve transform coefficients acid then quantizing them, vector entropy coding can be replaced by scalar entropy coding without an increase in rate, Thus the transform coding advantage is a reduction in memory requirements for entropy coding. This paper develops a transform coding technique where the source samples are first scalar-quantized and then transformed with an integer-to-integer approximation to a nonorthogonal linear transform. Among the possible advantages is to reduce the memory requirement further than conventional transform coding by using a single common scalar entropy codebook for all components. The analysis shows that for high-rate coding of a Gaussian source, this reduction in memory requirements comes without any degradation of rate-distortion performance.

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


The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) implementation of the Virtual Lifetime Electronic Record (VLER): Findings and lessons learned from Health Information Exchange at 12 sites VLER Health, a pioneer in HIE, made great strides in advancing HIE and standards. Mixed methods approach provided insightful, real-world HIE implementation lessons. Clinicians reported high perceived value, trust, and experience with VLER Health. Veterans reported high perceived value and few barriers/concerns about VLER HIE. Clinicians will sustain VLER Health use as data availability and quality improve.

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

health informatics
information technology
interoperability
veterans health
ehealth exchange
electronic health record


Feature selection for optimizing traffic classification Machine learning (ML) algorithms have been widely applied in recent traffic classification. However, due to the imbalance in the number of traffic flows, ML based classifiers are prone to misclassify flows as the traffic type that occupies the majority of flows on the Internet. To address the problem, a novel feature selection metric named Weighted Symmetrical Uncertainty (WSU) is proposed. We design a hybrid feature selection algorithm named WSU_AUC, which prefilters most of features with WSU metric and further uses a wrapper method to select features for a specific classifier with Area Under roc Curve (AUC) metric. Additionally, to overcome the impacts of dynamic traffic flows on feature selection, we propose an algorithm named SRSF that Selects the Robust and Stable Features from the results achieved by WSU_AUC. We evaluate our approaches using three classifiers on the traces captured from entirely different networks. Experimental results obtained by our algorithms are promising in terms of true positive rate (TPR) and false positive rate (FPR). Moreover, our algorithms can achieve >94% flow accuracy and >80% byte accuracy on average. (c) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

feature selection
traffic classification


Numerical determination of concentration-dependent Auger recombination coefficient in \(\varvec{n}\)-InGaN alloys Direct and phonon-assisted mechanisms of Auger recombination in bulk \(n\)-\(\hbox {In}_{\mathrm{x}}\hbox {Ga}_{1-\mathrm{x}}\hbox {N}\) wurtzite alloys are numerically investigated. The matrix elements of electronelectron and electronphonon interaction are calculated using the band structure and wave functions obtained by the empirical pseudopotential method. Phonon-assisted Auger process is analyzed by the spectral density functions approach. The dependences of Auger recombination coefficient on the energy band gap of \(n\)-\(\hbox {In}_{\mathrm{x}}\hbox {Ga}_{1-\mathrm{x}}\hbox {N}\) alloys, temperature and carrier concentration are presented. The calculated Auger coefficients for alloys corresponding to the visible spectrum exhibit strong reduction at high carrier concentration.

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

auger recombination
electronphonon interaction


Fractional Norm Regularization: Learning With Very Few Relevant Features Learning in the presence of a large number of irrelevant features is an important problem in high-dimensional tasks. Previous studies have shown that L1-norm regularization can be effective in such cases while L2-norm regularization is not. Furthermore, work in compressed sensing suggests that regularization by nonconvex (e. g., fractional) semi-norms may outperform L1-regularization. However, for classification it is largely unclear when this may or may not be the case. In addition, the nonconvex problem is harder to solve than the convex L1 problem. In this paper, we provide a more in-depth analysis to elucidate the potential advantages and pitfalls of nonconvex regularization in the context of logistic regression where the regularization term employs the family of Lq semi-norms. First, using results from the phenomenon of concentration of norms and distances in high dimensions, we gain intuition about the working of sparse estimation when the dimensionality is very high. Second, using the probably approximately correct (PAC)-Bayes methodology, we give a data-dependent bound on the generalization error of Lq-regularized logistic regression, which is applicable to any algorithm that implements this model, and may be used to predict its generalization behavior from the training set alone. Third, we demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by experiments and applications, where the PAC-Bayes bound is used to guide the choice of semi-norm in the regularization term. The results support the conclusion that the optimal choice of regularization depends on the relative fraction of relevant versus irrelevant features, and a fractional norm with a small exponent is most suitable when the fraction of relevant features is very small.

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

distance concentration
high dimensionality
pac-bayes analysis
sparse classification


A semidefinite optimization-based approach for global optimization of multi-row facility layout We present a new model for the Multi-Row Facility Layout Problem. We expresses the problem as a discrete optimization problem. We construct a semidefinite relaxation of the discrete optimization formulation. The proposed approach yields promising computational results. This is the first global optimization approach for general multi-row layouts.

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

facilities planning and design
flexible manufacturing systems
semidefinite programming
combinatorial optimization


A knowledge-based system for HAZOP studies. The knowledge representation structure The Chemical Process Industry is been forced by the society to improve its standards in safety, environmental effects and product quality. One approach used to address all these aspects in traditional process industries is the HAZOP study (HAzard and OPerability study). But, the application of this technique to a detailed chemical plant design is a complex and time consuming task. These two aspects and the availability of proved technology to develop computational systems able to manage qualitative knowledge, have motivated the construction of SERO, a knowledge-based system for HAZOP studies. The objective of this project is to generate a system aimed at enhancing the knowledge and creative power of the expert team involved in a HAZOP study. One of the main aspects of SERO, that is presented in this paper, is its knowledge representation structure, which has been developed to encode the different kinds of knowledge used in a HAZOP study. The knowledge representation structure of SERO has been designed and constructed using the object oriented paradigm.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 design, synthesis and integration


Supporting multiple isolation levels in replicated environments ? Replication is used by databases to implement reliability and provide scalability. However, achieving transparent replication is not an easy task. A replicated database is transparent if it can seamlessly replace a standard stand-alone database without requiring any changes to the components of the system. Database replication transparency can be achieved if: (a) replication protocols remain hidden for all other components of the system; and (b) the functionality of a stand-alone database is provided. The ability to simultaneously execute transactions under different isolation levels is a functionality offered by all stand-alone databases but not by their replicated counterparts. Allowing different isolation levels may improve overall system performance. For example, the TPC-C benchmark specification tolerates execution of some transactions at weaker isolation levels in order to increase throughput of committed transactions. In this paper, we show how replication protocols can be extended to enable transactions to be executed under different isolation levels.

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

replication protocol
isolation level
consistency


A Tool for the Model-Based Specification of Open Distributed Systems As the complexity of open distributed systems grows, the need to rely on concepts and notations for expressing and structuring their specifications becomes essential. However, having concepts and notations is not enough. The large size and complexity of the set of models that constitute the system specifications also forces the need to have tools for properly creating, handling, validating and maintaining these large models. This paper presents xODP, a tool for the model-based specification of open distributed systems according to the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) standards. Using the UML4ODP notation, it provides edition and validation facilities for ODP viewpoint models and for the correspondences between them, as well as early prototyping and execution of the ODP computational 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 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

rm-odp
model-driven engineering
mde tools


The n-Tier Hub technology During 2001, the Enterprise Engineering Laboratory at George Mason University was contracted by the Boeing Company to develop an eHub capability for aerospace suppliers in Taiwan. In a laboratory environment, the core technology was designed, developed, and tested, and now a large first-tier aerospace supplier in Taiwan is commercializing the technology. The project objective was to provide layered network and application services for transporting XML-based business transaction flows across multi-tier, heterogeneous data processing environments. This paper documents the business scenario, the eHub application, and the network transport mechanisms that were used to build the n-tier hub. Contrary to most eHubs, this solution takes the point of view of suppliers, pushing data in accordance with supplier requirements; hence, enhancing the probability of supplier adoption. The unique contribution of this project is the development of an eHub that meets the needs of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and first-tier suppliers.

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

extensible markup language (xml)
service provider
small and medium enterprises (smes)


Issues Mapping: A problem structuring method for addressing science and technology conflicts Issues Mapping and other problem structuring methods (PSMs) can help address science and technology risk conflicts. PSMs have advantages over traditional risk communication approaches. Issues Mapping is applied to the genetic engineering controversy in New Zealand. Participant and researcher evaluations of Issues Mapping are discussed.

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

problem structuring methods
issues mapping
science and technology conflicts
risk communication
genetic engineering


a study on a geometry transformation method for a geometry and scene modeler by a verbal interface The authors have developed a modeling system Do in three dimensional computer graphics (3D-CG) that, by verbal instructions in natural language, models geometrical shapes and renders the images. The former system is based on a step-by-step construction scheme using static instructions and a static display, that is, a static verbal instruction creates a static scene and an image. This static-based system scheme has a critical limitation at the conversation stage between a user and the system. In this paper, the authors propose a dynamic instruction and dynamic display methods for the modeling system. First, the dynamic display enables users to watch the animation indicating the change between the previous geometries and the next geometries with smooth transition during the execution of an instruction from the user. Second, the dynamic instruction enables users to give the next instruction before the animation ends. For those purposes, two geometrical transformation methods by affine transformation: (a) with a common difference matrix, and (b) with a common ratio matrix, are introduced and studied to generate frames for the animation. The proposed methods are implemented and evaluated by some experiments. The changes between instructions are observed naturally by the common ratio matrix method.

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

animation
natural language
computer graphics
geometry transformation
modeler


survey of hardware platforms for an energy efficient implementation of matching pursuits algorithm for shallow water networks Coral reefs worldwide are in serious decline. Underwater wireless sensor networks may be the answer to providing the persistent monitoring presence needed to obtain the data necessary to better understand how to protect these ecosystems for the future. Many advances have been made in underwater acoustic communication devices for underwater wireless sensor networks, but a major challenge that still remains is obtaining an energy efficient modem design. To begin to address this challenge, we implement the Matching Pursuits algorithm for channel estimation, an energy consuming portion of an existing underwater acoustic modem designed for shallow water networks, on a variety of hardware platforms. We determine that a dedicated field programmable gate array (FPGA) intellectual property core provides the most energy efficient hardware platform for Matching Pursuits which motivates future work to port the entire modem design to an FPGA for an energy efficient modem design.

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

shallow water networks
matching pursuits algorithm


A novel approach to fuzzy rough sets based on a fuzzy covering ? This paper proposes an approach to fuzzy rough sets in the framework of lattice theory. The new model for fuzzy rough sets is based on the concepts of both fuzzy covering and binary fuzzy logical operators (fuzzy conjunction and fuzzy implication). The conjunction and implication are connected by using the complete lattice-based adjunction theory. With this theory, fuzzy rough approximation operators are generalized and fundamental properties of these operators are investigated. Particularly, comparative studies of the generalized fuzzy rough sets to the classical fuzzy rough sets and Pawlak rough set are carried out. It is shown that the generalized fuzzy rough sets are an extension of the classical fuzzy rough sets as well as a fuzzification of the Pawlak rough set within the framework of complete lattices. A link between the generalized fuzzy rough approximation operators and fundamental morphological operators is presented in a translation-invariant additive group.

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

conjunction
implication
fuzzy covering
adjunction
rough sets
morphological operators

fuzzy logic
complete lattice
fuzzy rough approximations


INFORMATION ABOUT INFORMATION: A TAXONOMY OF VIEWS "Information" is poorly defined in the Information Systems research literature, and is almost always unspecified, a reflexive, all-purpose but indiscriminant solution to an unbounded variety of problems. We present a taxonomy of four views token, syntax, representation, and adaptation to enable scholars and practitioners to specify their concept of information. This taxonomy is normative, but we also provide a background review of the etymology and chronology of information, and we sample uses of the term in current IS research. IS research will improve as the term information, via the taxonomy we contribute, is employed more explicitly and consistently.

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

information taxonomy token syntax representation adaptation


Hybrid run-time power management technique for realtime embedded system with voltage scalable processor This paper presents a new run-time power management technique for real-time embedded systems which consist of a voltage scalable processor and power controllable peripheral devices. We have observed that there exist significant trade-offs in terms of energy consumption between the Dynamic Power Management (DPM) scheme and the Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) scheme over a wide range of system operating conditions. The proposed technique fully exploits workload-variation slack time by partitioning the task into several timeslots and shut down the unneeded peripheral device on timeslot-by-timeslot basis. Through extensive simulations, the novelty and the usefulness of the proposed technique are demonstrated.

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

run-time power management technique
real-time embedded system
dpm(dynamic power management
dvs(dynamic voltage scaling)


Clinical terminology: Why is it so hard? Despite years of work, no re-usable clinical terminology has yet been demonstrated in widespread use. Th is paper puts forward ten reasons why developing such terminologies is hard. All stem from underestimating the change entailed in using terminology in software for 'patient centred' systems rather than for its traditional functions of statistical and financial reporting. Firstly, the increase in scale and complexity are enormous, Secondly, the resulting scale exceeds what can be managed manually with the rigour required by software, but building appropriate rigorous representations on the necessary scale is, in itself, a hard problem. Thirdly, 'clinical pragmatics' - practical data entry, presentation and retrieval for clinical tasks - must be ta ken into account, so that the intrinsic differences between the needs of users and the needs of software are addressed. This implies that validation of clinical terminologies must include validation in use as implemented in software.

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

knowledge representation
medical records
natural language


can complex network metrics predict the behavior of nba teams? The United States National Basketball Association (NBA) is one of the most popular sports league in the world and is well known for moving a millionary betting market that uses the countless statistical data generated after each game to feed the wagers. This leads to the existence of a rich historical database that motivates us to discover implicit knowledge in it. In this paper, we use complex network statistics to analyze the NBA database in order to create models to represent the behavior of teams in the NBA. Results of complex network-based models are compared with box score statistics, such as points, rebounds and assists per game. We show the box score statistics play a significant role for only a small fraction of the players in the league. We then propose new models for predicting a team success based on complex network metrics, such as clustering coefficient and node degree. Complex network-based models present good results when compared to box score statistics, which underscore the importance of capturing network relationships in a community such as the NBA.

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

complex networks
predictability
sports leagues


An efficient algorithm for statistical multiple alignment on arbitrary phylogenetic trees We present an efficient algorithm for statistical multiple alignment based on the TKF91 model of Thorne, Kishino, and Felsenstein (1991) on an arbitrary k-leaved phylogenetic tree. The existing algorithms use a hidden Markov model approach, which requires at least O(root5(k)) states and leads to a time complexity of O(5(k) L-k), where L is the geometric mean sequence length. Using a combinatorial technique reminiscent of inclusion/exclusion, we are able to sum away the states, thus improving the time complexity to O(2(k) L-k) and considerably reducing memory requirements. This makes statistical multiple alignment under the TKF91 model a definite practical possibility in the case of a phylogenetic tree with a modest number of leaves.

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

statistical alignment
phylogeny
maximum likelihood


A practical method for proper modeling of structural damping in inelastic plane structural systems This study addresses some of the pitfalls of conventional numerical modeling of Rayleigh-type damping in inelastic structures. A practical modeling approach to solve these problems is proposed. Conventional modeling of Rayleigh-type damping for inelastic structures generates responses in which unrealistic damping forces are present that results in underestimation of peak displacement demands, overestimation of peak strength demands, and underestimation of buildings collapse potential. The approach proposed in this paper avoids these problems by modeling each structural element with an equivalent combination of one elastic element with stiffness-proportional damping, and two springs at its two ends with no stiffness proportional damping.

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

rayleigh damping
inelastic responses
dynamic analysis
seismic response
seismic evaluation


An optimal batch size for a production system operating under periodic delivery policy A manufacturing system that procures raw materials from suppliers in a lot and processes them into a finished product is considered in this research. An ordering policy is proposed for raw materials to meet the requirements of a production facility which, in turn, must deliver finished products demanded by outside buyers at fixed points in time. First, a general cost model is formulated considering both raw materials and finished products. Then, using this model, a simple procedure is developed to determine an optimal ordering policy for procurement of raw materials, and the manufacturing batch size, to minimize the total cost of meeting customer demands in time. The dependent relationships between production batch size and rawmaterial purchasing quantity, and various delivery patterns considered in recent literature are critically reviewed. The quality of the solution is evaluated. Numerical examples are provided. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

batch size
production system
delivery policy


Application of clustering techniques to software component architecture design This paper describes the application of two variants of clustering techniques to a matrix of requirements (use cases) vs. design units (classes), with the aim of augmenting the design of software component architectures. One algorithm used a modified COMO matrix-clustering algorithm, while the other is average-linkage agglomerative clustering based on similarity among classes as a measure of distance. Our results provide a shortcut for software engineers with limited experience in Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) who are constructing component architectures. This paper also evaluates the correlations between these two clustered results. We solicited feedback from experienced software developers who confirmed that the inferred hierarchies conformed to their conceptualizations of the software structure.

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

clustering analysis
object-oriented programing


Fuzzy MCDM approach for selecting the best environment-watershed plan In the real word, the decision-making problems are very vague and uncertain in a number of ways. Most of the criteria have interdependent and interactive features, so they cannot be evaluated by conventional measure method. Such as the feasibility, thus, to approximate the human subjective evaluation process, it would be more suitable to apply a fuzzy method in the environment-watershed plan topic. This paper describes the design of a fuzzy decision support system in multi-criteria analysis approach for selecting the best plan alternatives or strategies in environment watershed. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method is used to determine the preference weightings of criteria for decision makers by subjective perception (natural language). A questionnaire was used to find out from three related groups comprising 15 experts, including 5 from the university of expert scholars (include Water Resources Engineering and Conservation, Landscape and Recreation, Urban Planning, Environment Engineering, Architectural Engineering, etc.), 5 from the government departments, and 5 from industry. Subjectivity and vagueness analysis is dealt with the criteria and alternatives for selection process and simulation results by using fuzzy numbers with linguistic terms. It incorporated the decision-makers attitude towards the preference; overall performance value of each alternative can be obtained based on the concept of fuzzy multiple-criteria decision-making (FMCDM). This research also gives an example of evaluation consisting of five alternatives, solicited from an environment-watershed plan work in Taiwan, is illustrated to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed approach. The result is useful for destination planning and the sustainability of watershed tourism resources as well.

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

fuzzy multiple-criteria decision-making (fmcdm)


On Successive Refinement for the Kaspi/Heegard-Berger Problem Consider a source that produces independent copies of a triplet of jointly distributed random variables {X(i), Y(i), Z(i)}(i=1)(infinity). The process {X(i)} is observed at the encoder, and is supposed to be reproduced at two decoders, decoder Y and decoder Z, where {Y(i)} and {Z(i)} are observed, respectively, in either a causal or noncausal manner. The communication between the encoder and the decoders is carried in two successive stages. In the first stage, the transmission is available to both decoders and they reconstruct the source according to the received bit-stream and the individual side information ({Z(i)} or {Y(i)}). In the second stage, additional information is sent to both decoders and they refine the reconstructions of the source according to the available side information and the transmissions at both stages. It is desired to find the necessary and sufficient conditions on the communication rates between the encoder and decoders, so that the distortions incurred (at each stage) will not exceed given thresholds. For the case of causal availability of side information at the decoders, an exact single-letter characterization of the achievable region is derived for the case of pure source-coding. Then, for the case of communication between the encoder and decoders carried over independent memoryless discrete channels with random states known causally/noncausally at the encoder and with causal side information about the source at the decoders, a single-letter characterization of all achievable distortion in both stages is provided and it is shown that the separation theorem holds. The results are derived without assuming any structural restrictions on side information, such as a Markov structure, etc. Finally, for noncausal degraded side information, inner and outer bounds to the achievable rate-distortion region are derived. These bounds are shown to be tight for certain cases of reconstruction requirements at the decoders. Due to the system setup, these results also shed some light on a problem of successive refinement with side information which is not degraded in the usual sense.

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

separation theorem
successive refinement

causal/noncausal side information
channel capacity
degraded side-information
joint source-channel coding
source coding


Path similarity evaluation using Bloom filters The performance of several Internet applications often relies on the measurability of path similarity between different participants. In particular, the performance of content distribution networks mainly relies on the awareness of content sources topology information. It is commonly admitted nowadays that, in order to ensure either path redundancy or efficient content replication, topological similarities between sources is evaluated by exchanging raw traceroute data, and by a hop by hop comparison of the IP topology observed from the sources to the several hundred or thousands of destinations. In this paper, based on real data we collected, we advocate that path similarity comparisons between different Internet entities can be much simplified using lossy coding techniques, such as Bloom filters, to exchange compressed topology information. The technique we introduce to evaluate path similarity enforces both scalability and data confidentiality while maintaining a high level of accuracy. In addition, we demonstrate that our technique is scalable as it requires a small amount of active probing and is not targets dependent.

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


New resistorless tunable voltage-mode universal filter using single VDIBA To increase the universality of the recently introduced voltage differencing inverting buffered amplifier (VDIBA), this letter presents a new voltage- mode (VM) multi- input- single- output (MISO) universal filter. The proposed filter contains only single VDIBA, two capacitors, and one nMOS transistor, operated in triode region, and is used for resonance angular frequency tuning. Since in the structure no resistors are needed the filter can be classified as resistorless. The VM MISO filter compared with other active building block- based counterparts is very simple, it contains only few transistors, and has the smallest size area. Moreover, no component matching is required and it shows low sensitivity performance. The theoretical results are verified by SPICE simulations using TSMC 0.18 lm level- 7 SCN018 CMOS process parameters with +/- 0.9 V supply voltages. In addition, the behavior of the proposed VM filter was also experimentally verified using commercially available integrated circuits OPA660 and AD830.

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

voltage differencing inverting buffered amplifier (vdiba)


Model fusion for prediction of apple firmness using hyperspectral scattering image Hyperspectral scattering image is an advanced technology widely used in non-destructive measurement of fruit quality. To develop a better prediction model for apple firmness, the present study investigates a model fusion method coupled with wavelength selection algorithms. The current paper first discusses two wavelength selection algorithms, namely, uninformative variable elimination (UVE) and supervised affinity propagation (SAP). The selected effective wavelengths are then set as input to the partial least square (PLS) model. Six hundred Golden Delicious apples were analyzed. The first 450 apples were used as sample for the calibration model, whereas the remaining 150 were used for the prediction model. Compared with full wavelengths, the number of effective wavelengths based on the UVE and SAP algorithms decreased to 34% and 35%, but the correlation coefficient of prediction (Rp) increased from 0.791 to 0.805 and 0.814, whereas the root mean-square error of prediction (RMSEP) decreased from 6.00 to 5.73 and 5.71N, respectively. A fusion model was then developed using UVE-PLS and SAP-PLS models coupled with backpropagation neural network. A better prediction accuracy was achieved from the fusion model (Rp=0.828 and RMSEP=5.53N). The model fusion provides an effective modeling method for apple firmness prediction using hyperspectral scattering image technique.

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

hyperspectral scattering image
wavelength selection
uninformative variable elimination
model fusion

partial least squares
supervised affinity propagations


Broadband circularly polarized patch antenna with gap-coupled feed and resistor loading A broadband circularly polarized patch antenna with suspended structure is proposed. The suspended patch has a bow-tie structure and a gap-coupled feed. By connecting a resistor load to another gap-coupled feed port at the opposite position, a wide impedance and axial ratio (AR) bandwidths are obtained. The proposed design has a very simple antenna structure with an impedance bandwidth of 44.5% and a 3-dB AR bandwidth of 33.8%, respectively. The results show that the bandwidth of the patch antenna is successfully broadened using the suspended configuration, gap-coupled feed, and resistor loading. 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:587593, 2014.

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


Maximum lifetime suspect monitoring on the street with battery-powered camera sensors A camera sensor network is a sensor network of a group of camera sensors and is being deployed for various surveillance and monitoring applications. In this paper, we propose a new surveillance model for camera sensor network, namely half-view model, which requires a camera sensor network to capture the face image of any object if it moves forward to pass over an area of interest. Based on this new surveillance model, we introduce a new sleep-wakeup scheduling problem in camera sensor network, namely the maximum lifetime half-view barrier-coverage (MaxL-HV-BC) problem, whose goal is to find an on-off schedule of battery-operated camera sensors such that the continuous time duration providing half-view barrier-coverage over an area of interest is maximized. We develop a strategy to check if a region is half-view covered by a given set of camera sensors, and use this strategy to design two new heuristic algorithms for MaxL-HV-BC. We also conduct simulations to compare the average performance of the proposed algorithms with a trivial solution as well as the theoretical upper bound.

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

camera sensor networks
barrier coverage
half-view coverage
energy-efficiency


Description of a teleconferencing floor control protocol and its implementation In this paper, we present a formal specification of a teleconferencing floor control protocol and its implementation. The services provided by this protocol are described within the SCCP IETF document (Simple Conference Control Protocol). Finite state machines are used to model services behaviours part of this protocol. Temporal properties are defined as constraints of the teleconferencing system using SCCP protocol. The dynamic properties are described by the LTL logic (Linear Temporal Logic) and verified using the model-checker Spin/Promela. A prototype of a multimedia teleconferencing system is implemented and it is based on the specified protocol. This implementation uses UML notation and is developed with JMF (Java Media Framework) API.

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

floor control
sccp
specification
multimedia
teleconferencing

verification
ltl properties
promela/spin


Interoperable processing of digital elevation models in grid infrastructures Based on the service specifications of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) support the visualization, access to vector and raster data or managing and search for spatial data. A standard for distributed spatial data processing was missing for a long time. This issue was addressed by the development of the OpenGIS Web Processing Service (WPS) specification. However, to process and analyze massive Digital Elevation Models (DEM) computing power and disk memory are scarce commodities. Here we show that Grid Computing in combination with OGC Web Services (OWS) is well suited to accomplish high processing performance and storage capacity for large-scale processing tasks of the geo community. To process these massive amounts of geo-data we develop terrain processing services which are made available as grid services. Our results will be demonstrating how to bridge the gap between the grid world and the OGC world for more sophisticated terrain processing.

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

dem
grid computing
ogc web services
processing
sdi
wps


Hop-by-hop quality of service routing Based on the self-adaptive multiple constraints routing algorithm (SAMCRA), an improved and exact version of our QoS routing algorithm, the tunable accuracy multiple constraints routing algorithm (TAMCRA) we have investigated QoS routing in a hop-by-hop manner because it forms the basis of IP networking as e.g. in OSPF. In particular, we studied `hop-by-hop destination based only' (HbHDBO) QoS routing that ignores the source and previous path history (as in current IP routing). We demonstrate that an exact QoS algorithm assures the avoidance of routing loops in this HbHDBO setting. However, despite the use of an exact QoS routing algorithm as SAMCRA, the exact solution cannot be guaranteed with HbHDBO routing. Fortunately, large simulation results on various sizes of random graphs show that the overall quality of the HbHDBO QoS routing is remarkably good. Finally, we show that, by using active networking as opposed to current IP routing, exact QoS routing in a hop-by-hop way can be guaranteed.

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


On the modelling of actuator dynamics and the computation of prescribed trajectories The dynamics of actuator mechanisms is presented using a multibody modelling approach to concisely express the structure of the system equations. The Lagrange equations are used to obtain the NewtonEuler equations to which constraint equations are augmented to form a system of differential algebraic equations. The differential algebraic equations are cast as ordinary differential equations and computed using the numerical integrator LSODAR of Petzold and Hindmarsh. Constraint compliance is investigated to ensure the accuracy of the results. Animation of an excavator and wheel loader system is presented and graphs of constraint forces show the nature of the actuator dynamics involved in maintaining specified bucket trajectories. The model is general in nature and caters for arbitrary mechanism connectivity and physical properties.

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

actuator
differential algebraic equations
multibody modelling
newtoneuler equations
ordinary differential equations

contact forces
lagrange's equations
multibody dynamics
nonlinear dynamics
numerical computation
robotics


A methodology for engineering ontology acquisition and validation When engineering content is created and applied during the product life cycle, it is often stored and forgotten. Current information retrieval approaches based on statistical methods and keyword matching are not effective in understanding the context of engineering content. They are not designed to be directly applicable to the engineering domain. Therefore, engineers have very limited means to harness and reuse past designs. The overall objective of our research is to develop an engineering ontology (EO)-based computational framework to structure unstructured engineering documents and achieve more effective information retrieval. This paper focuses on the method and process to acquire and validate the EO. The main contributions include a new, systematic, and more structured ontology development method assisted by a semiautomatic acquisition tool. This tool is integrated with Protege ontology editing environment; an engineering lexicon (EL) that represents the associated lexical knowledge of the EO to bridge the gap between the concept space of the ontology and the word space of engineering documents and queries; the first large-scale EO and EL acquired from established knowledge resources for engineering information retrieval; and a comprehensive validation strategy and its implementations to justify the quality of the acquired EO. A search system based on the EO and EL has been developed and tested. The retrieval performance test further justifies the effectiveness of the EO and EL as well as the ontology development method.

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

engineering information retrieval
engineering ontology

knowledge acquisition
ontology validation


Independent research of China in Science Citation Index Expanded during 19802011 The study explores the characteristics of China's independent research articles published from 1980 to 2011, based on the database of Science Citation Index Expanded. The publication outputs of seven major industrialized countries including Canada, France, Japan, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the USA were compared with China. Annual production, field performance, research emphases and trends, top articles, as well as main institutional and individual contributors by its top cited articles were analyzed. Some newly developed indicators related to words in title, author keywords, KeyWords Plus, first author, corresponding author, and Y-index were employed to provide in-depth information on topic and author contributions. Results showed that China has been closing the gap with the USA with the greatest growth, and has stood the second since 2006. Most top cited articles were published in 2000s, made up approximately seven tenths of total articles. Pronounced activities were found in chemistry and physics related categories. The core categories included multidisciplinary chemistry, physical chemistry, multidisciplinary materials science, and applied physics. Moreover, China's performance of nanotechnology and science, especially carbon nanotubes, nanoparticles, nanowires, and nanostructures showed dramatic growth. Six top articles with at least 1000 citations were examined, and were observed to concern medicine, nanotube, and adsorption. In addition, main contributing institutions and authors were also revealed and evaluated. Chinese Academy of Sciences played a dominant role, and Tsinghua University, Peking University and five universities in Hong Kong showed good scientific performance.

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

bibliometric
web of science
y-index
country


LOGICAL CHARACTERIZATION OF RECOGNIZABLE SETS OF POLYNOMIALS OVER A FINITE FIELD The ring of integers and the ring of polynomials over a finite field share a lot of properties. Using a bounded number of polynomial coefficients, any polynomial can be decomposed as a linear combination of powers of a non-constant polynomial P playing the role of the base of the numeration. Having in mind the theorem of Cobham from 1969 about recognizable sets of integers, it is natural to study P-recognizable sets of polynomials. Based on the results obtained in the Ph.D. thesis of the second author, we study the logical characterization of such sets and related properties like decidability of the corresponding first-order 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 O O

recognizable set
first-order logic
polynomial over a finite field
cobham's theorem


Minimizing total completion time in two-machine flow shops with exact delays We study the problem of minimizing total completion time in the two-machine flow shop with exact delay model. This problem is a generalization of the no-wait flow shop problem which is known to be strongly NP-hard. Our problem has many applications but little results are given in the literature so far. We focus on permutation schedules. We first prove that some simple algorithms can be used to find the optimal schedules for some special cases. Then for the general case, we design some heuristics as well as metaheuristics whose performance are shown to be effective by computational experiments.

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

flow shop
exact delay
total completion time
metaheuristics


Studies of key issues in IS management around the world Information systems (IS) departments face many challenges in today's rapidly changing environment. One approach to understanding these challenges is to survey IS managers to elicit what they consider are key issues. Studies of key IS management issues have been conducted for some years in many nations and regions. Based on such studies and a theoretical framework, this paper predicts the following key issues into the 21st century: (1) improving links between information systems strategy and business strategy, (2) developing and implementing an information architecture, (3) implementing knowledge management systems, and (4) reducing IT projects completion time and budget deviations. For future studies of key issues in IS management around the world, this paper provides an overview of research approaches to initial key issues selection and key issues surveys.

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

survey approaches
international comparison
information systems management


Correlation-based algorithm for multi-dimensional single-tone frequency estimation In this paper, parameter estimation for a R-dimensional (R -D) single cisoid with R?2 R ? 2 in additive white Gaussian noise is addressed. By exploiting the correlation of the data samples, we construct R single-tone sequences which contain the R-D frequency parameters. Based on linear prediction and weighted linear squares techniques, two proposals are developed for fast and accurate frequency estimation from each constructed sequence. The two devised estimators are proved to be asymptotically unbiased while their variances achieve CramrRao lower bound when the signal-to-noise ratio and/or data length tend to infinity. Computer simulations are also included to compare the proposed approach with conventional R-D harmonic retrieval schemes in terms of mean square error performance and computational complexity.

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

multi-dimensional spectral analysis
fast algorithm


Learning model-free robot control by a Monte Carlo EM algorithm We address the problem of learning robot control by model-free reinforcement learning (RL). We adopt the probabilistic model for model-free RL of Vlassis and Toussaint (Proceedings of the international conference on machine learning, Montreal, Canada, 2009), and we propose a Monte Carlo EM algorithm (MCEM) for control learning that searches directly in the space of controller parameters using information obtained from randomly generated robot trajectories. MCEM is related to, and generalizes, the PoWER algorithm of Kober and Peters (Proceedings of the neural information processing systems, 2009). In the finite-horizon case MCEM reduces precisely to PoWER, but MCEM can also handle the discounted infinite-horizon case. An interesting result is that the infinite-horizon case can be viewed as a 'randomized' version of the finite-horizon case, in the sense that the length of each sampled trajectory is a random draw from an appropriately constructed geometric distribution. We provide some preliminary experiments demonstrating the effects of fixed (PoWER) vs randomized (MCEM) horizon length in two simulated and one real robot control tasks.

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

model-free robot control
probabilistic inference


Differences in prefrontal and motor structures learning dynamics depend on task complexity: A neural network model Neurons in the basal ganglia (BG) of monkeys learning a simple visual discrimination (VD) task show faster changes in activity than those in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This motivated the hypothesis that changes in the BG activity can lead those in the PFC. Given that the PFC is a key player in the learning of complex tasks, we tested the former hypothesis by using a neural network model that learns simple and complex contingencies as VD and delayed matching to sample (DMTS) tasks. Even though the model accounted for the results in the VD task no such lead was observed in the DMTS task. We propose that when the task requires learning high-order contingencies, such as in the DMTS case, motor structures quickly select the subset of responses allowing the subject to obtain reward, but learning in the cortico-BG loop progresses in a concurrent way in order to maximize reward.

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

premotor cortex
visuomotor learning
dopamine
computational neuroscience


Topology optimization with pressure load through a level set method The topology optimization problem with pressure load is solved by using a level set method. The free boundary and the pressure boundary of a structure are represented separately as two zero-level sets of two level set functions, and they are independently propagated during the optimization by solving two HamiltonJacobi equations. In order to prevent the two boundaries from touching or crossing each other, the design velocities of the two boundaries that amount to the steepest descent directions are modified. The optimization problem of minimum compliance with perimeter regularization is considered. The shape derivatives of the two boundaries are derived by using the material derivative approach and the adjoint method. The finite element analysis is done through an Eulerian method by employing a fixed mesh and an artificial weak material that represents void. Numerical examples in two dimensions are investigated.

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


Serial solutions and LinkFinderPlus at the University of Wales Swansea Purpose - To provide practical information on two electronic journal-related products implemented in Library and Information Services at University of Wales Swansea. Design/methodology/approach - An overview is provided of the evaluation of electronic journal management products undertaken and subsequent implementation. Findings - Serials Solutions was evaluated as the best product to assist in the management of electronic journals at Swansea University with LinkFinderPlus, an OpenURL resolver, being used to connect to the full-text journal articles from the library catalogue, citations, abstracts or other journal articles. Practical implications - Provides assistance to institutions in exploring a number of technical issues relating to electronic journal management systems and a process for evaluating and selecting a system. Originality/value - Both systems are still relatively new technology and many institutions will be considering the purchase of both types of system.

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


Atomic layer deposition of titanium nitride from TDMAT precursor TiN was grown by atomic layer deposition (ALD) from tetrakis(dimethylamino)titanium (TDMAT). Both thermal and plasma enhanced processes were studied, with N2 and NH3 as reactive gases. Using an optimized thermal ammonia based process, a growth rate of 0.06nm/cycle and a resistivity of 53103??cm were achieved. With an optimized plasma enhanced NH3 process, a growth rate of 0.08nm/cycle and a resistivity of 180 ?? cm could be obtained. X-ray photo electron spectroscopy (XPS) showed that the difference in resistivity correlates with the purity of the deposited films. The high resistivity of thermal ALD films is caused by oxygen (37%) and carbon (9%) contamination. For the film deposited with optimized plasma conditions, impurity levels below 6% could be achieved. The copper diffusion barrier properties of the TiN films were determined by in-situ X-ray diffraction (XRD) and were found to be as good as or better than those of films deposited with physical vapor deposition (PVD).

B I I 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 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

atomic layer deposition
titanium nitride
copper diffusion barrier


Are three heads better than two? How the number of reviewers and editor behavior affect the rejection rate Editors of peer-reviewed journals obtain recommendations from peer reviewers as guidance in deciding upon the suitability of a submitted manuscript for publication. To investigate whether the number of reviewers used by an editor affects the rate at which manuscripts are rejected, 500 manuscripts submitted to Monthly Weather Review during 15.5months in 20072008 were examined. Two and three reviewers were used for 306 and 155 manuscripts, respectively (92.2% of all manuscripts). Rejection rates for initial decisions and final decisions were not significantly different whether two or three reviewers were used. Manuscripts with more reviewers did not spend more rounds in review or have different rejection rates at each round. The results varied by editor, however, with some editors rejecting more two-reviewer manuscripts and others rejecting more three-reviewer manuscripts. Editors described using their scientific expertise in the decision-making process, either in determining the number of reviews to be sought or in making decisions once the reviews were received, approaches that differ from that of relying purely upon reviewer agreement as reported previously in the literature. A simple model is constructed for three decision-making strategies for editors: rejection when all reviewers recommend rejection, rejection when any reviewer recommends rejection, and rejection when a majority of reviewers recommend rejection. By plotting the probability of reviewer rejection against the probability of editor rejection, the decision-making process can be graphically illustrated, demonstrating that, for this dataset, editors are likely to reject a manuscript when any reviewer recommends rejection.

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

editor
monthly weather review
reviewer agreement


A Distributed Control Law for Load Balancing in Content Delivery Networks In this paper, we face the challenging issue of defining and implementing an effective law for load balancing in Content Delivery Networks (CDNs). We base our proposal on a formal study of a CDN system, carried out through the exploitation of a fluid flow model characterization of the network of servers. Starting from such characterization, we derive and prove a lemma about the network queues equilibrium. This result is then lever-aged in order to devise a novel distributed and time-continuous algorithm for load balancing, which is also reformulated in a time-discrete version. The discrete formulation of the proposed balancing law is eventually discussed in terms of its actual implementation in a real-world scenario. Finally, the overall approach is validated by means of simulations.

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

content delivery network (cdn)
control theory
request balancing


Active vibration control of an elastic plate using multiple piezoelectric sensors and actuators This paper is addressed to the vibration control of an elastic plate, clamped along one side and excited by an impulsive transversal force acting in correspondence of a free corner. The plate is equipped with three couples of piezoelectric patches, used as sensors and actuators. A modal model of the coupled electromechanical structure, obtained by employing a suitable finite-element formulation together with a modal reduction, is used in the controller design. Different H2 control laws have been designed and compared by simulation, in order to evaluate the performance obtained using different combinations of sensors and actuators together with models taking into account an increasing number of structural eigenmodes.

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

mimo vibration control
active damping
piezoelectric finite-elements


Fully collusion-resistant traitor tracing scheme with shorter ciphertexts A traitor tracing scheme allows a content distributor to detect at least one of the traitors whose secret key is used to create a pirate decoder. In building efficient traitor tracing schemes, reducing ciphertext size is a significant factor since the traitor tracing scheme must handle a larger number of users. In this paper, we present a fully collusion-resistant traitor tracing scheme where the ciphertext size is 2.8 times shorter and encryption time is 2.6 times faster, compared to the best cases of fully collusion-resistant schemes previously suggested. We can achieve these efficiency results without sacrificing other costs. Also, our scheme supports public tracing and black-box tracing. To achieve our goal, we use asymmetric bilinear maps in prime order groups, and we introduce a new cancellation technique that has the same effect as that in composite order groups.

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

broadcast encryption
collusion-resistance
piracy


Internet traffic engineering using multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) With the rising popularity of the Internet there have arisen corresponding requirements for network reliability, efficiency, and service quality. Internet service providers are responding to these developments by critically examining every aspect of their operational environment, looking for opportunities to scale their networks and optimize performance. In this context, traffic engineering has emerged as a major consideration in the design and operation of large public Internet backbone networks. However, the classical Internet interior gateway routing protocols hinder the practical realization of sophisticated traffic engineering policies in legacy IP networks. The advent of multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) offers the prospect to address some of the shortcomings associated with traffic engineering in IP networks. This paper discusses the techniques and practices of traffic engineering in contemporary IP networks, emphasizing the role of MPLS in performance optimization of the public Internet. We also examine the impact of generalized MPLS (GMPLS) on traffic engineering in IP-over-optical networks as the underlying technologies continue to mature.

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


Faster maximum likelihood estimation of very large spatial autoregressive models: An extension of the Smirnov-Anselin result Maximization of an auto-Gaussian log-likelihood function when spatial autocorrelation is present requires numerical evaluation of an n x n matrix determinant. Griffith and Sone proposed a solution to this problem. This article simplifies and then evaluates an alternative approximation that can also be used with massively large georeferenced data sets based upon a regular square tessellation; this makes it particularly relevant to remotely sensed image analysis. Estimation results reported for five data sets found in the literature confirm the utility of this newer approximation.

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

georeferenced data
spatial autocorrelation
maximum likelihood

spatial statistics
jacobian
normalizing constant
auto-gaussian


Mobile personal information management agent: Supporting natural language interface and application integration Managing personal information such as to-dos and contacts has become our daily routines, consuming more time than needed. Existing PIM tools require extensive involvement of human users. This becomes a problem in using mobile devices due to their physical constraints. To address the limitations of traditional PIM tools, we propose a model of mobile PIM agent (PIMA) that aims to improve PIM on mobile devices through natural language interface and application integration. We conducted a user study to evaluate PIMA empirically with prototype systems. The results show that mobile PIMA improved perceived usefulness, ease-of-use, and efficiency of PIM on mobile devices, which in turn accounted for positive attitude and intention to use the system. The findings of this study provide suggestions for designing and developing PIM applications on mobile devices.

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

personal information management
intention to use
natural language interface


Default Bayesian model determination methods for generalised linear mixed models A default strategy for fully Bayesian model determination for generalised linear mixed models (GLMMs) is considered which addresses the two key issues of default prior specification and computation. In particular, the concept of unit-information priors is extended to the parameters of a GLMM. A combination of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and Laplace approximations is used to compute approximations to the posterior model probabilities to find a subset of models with high posterior model probability. Bridge sampling is then used on the models in this subset to approximate the posterior model probabilities more accurately. The strategy is applied to four examples.

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

unit-information priors
laplace approximation


Data correction for gantry-tilted local CT The gantry-tilted helical cone-beam computed tomography (CT) has an inherent problem that the relative shift of the region of interest (ROI) blurs the reconstructed image. This problem becomes more serious in the gantry-tilted local CT imaging due to the nature of local scanning. This paper proposes a new method to improve the gantry-tilted local imaging by correcting the local scanning data. Computer simulations show that the proposed method can enhance the local imaging performance to a certain extent in terms of the image sharpening and artifacts reduction.

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

helical ct
gantry-tilted ct
local tomography


The role of regularity and synchrony of cerebellar Purkinje cells for pathological nystagmus Previous theories assumed that the beneficial effect of the potassium channel blocker 4-aminopyridine (4-AP) for patients suffering from downbeat nystagmus (DBN) or episodic ataxia type 2 (EA2) is due to an increase of excitability of cerebellar Purkinje cells (PC). Recent experimental results using therapeutic doses of 4-AP with a mouse model of EA2 challenged the theory showing that 4-AP does not change the firing rate of PC but their regularity. Based on a mathematical model of the ocular motor and cerebellar circuitry, we show that changes in regularity have no effect without synchrony in PC firing. Together with synchronous firing, an increase in regularity may lead to a decrease in overall inhibition and may invert the inhibitory to an excitatory response due to imprinting, a novel effect of synchronized neural inhibition. Both effects are unlikely to be the causative mechanism for the success of 4-AP in treating cerebellar disorders.

O O O O O O O O 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


Organization and problem ontology for supply chain information support system One means of effective supply chain management is through sharing knowledge among the supply chains constituents. Knowledge about a supply chain can be classified as organizational and problem specific. Organizational knowledge helps in understanding the domain requirements for supply chain management. Problem-specific knowledge provides input for problem-solving modules. The concept of ontology is applied to systematically document shared knowledge about issues and problems in the supply chain domain. Ontology development for a supply chaina collaborative process that crosses the individual organizational boundaries of its member and comprises knowledge capture, assembly, storage, and disseminationis described. The paper then discusses ontology server organization, which facilitates reuse of ontologies in an open environment.

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

ontologies
supply chain information support

decision support systems
knowledge modeling


On concurrent detection of errors in polynomial basis multiplication The detection of errors in arithmetic operations is an important issue. This paper discusses the detection of multiple-bit errors due to faults in bit-serial and bit-parallel polynomial basis (PB) multipliers over binary extension fields. Our approach is based on multiple parity bits. Experimental results presented here show that due to an increase in the number of parity bits, the area overhead tends to increase linearly, but the probability of error detection approaches unity fairly quickly, e.g., for eight parity bits. In bit-serial implementation of a GF(2(163)) PB multiplier using eight parity bits, the area overhead and the probability of error detection are 10.29% and 0.996, respectively. This is achieved without any increase in the computation time of the GF(2(163)) PB multiplier.

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

concurrent error detection (ced)
finite fields
polynomial basis (pb) multiplication