Telecommunications companies: One meeting with any competitor is enough to violate the EU's competition laws and result in fines This commentary's purpose is to review how Telfort, T-Mobile, Vodafone, and others discovered that one meeting of any type with any telecommunications competitor could result in fines up to 10 percent of total turnover under EU competition law Regulation no. 1/2003, Article 23(2)(a), and to provide planning tips on how to eliminate the potential for those adverse consequences. While competition laws do not apply solely to the telecommunications industry, they do seem to affect it disproportionately. Telecommunications companies have global reach, and some of the most stringent competition law exists in Europe. Thus, all should review the most recent telecommunications ruling from the European Court of Justice, T-Mobile Netherlands BV v. Raad van bestuur van der Nederlandse Mededingingsautoriteit C-8/08 (2009). 1 The ruling deals with whether the one meeting was concerted activity in violation of Article 81(1) EC.

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

telecommunications competition law fines


a systemc based case study of a sensor application using the becom modeling methodology for virtual prototyping For the rapid prototyping of mixed-signal systems in the automotive industry, tools such as MatrixX or Simulink permit the validation of control concepts. However, the physical properties of analog circuits must often be modeled. In this case, behavioral models are created and used in a real time simulation as a virtual prototype.This paper gives an overview of methods that allow us to generate analog circuit models in C++, these portions of C++ can be used as a "virtual prototype". In order to achieve the necessary performance, the generation of behavioral models is combined with very fast simulation methods.

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


Extraction of percept-related induced local field potential during spontaneously reversing perception The question of how perception arises from neuronal activity in the visual cortex is of fundamental importance in cognitive neuroscience. To address this question, we adopt a unique experimental paradigm in which bistable structure-from-motion (SFM) stimuli are employed to dissociate the visual input from perception while monitoring the cortical neural activity called local field potential (LFP). Consequently, the stimulus-evoked activity of LFP is not related to perception but the oscillatory induced activity of LFP may be percept-related. In this paper we focus on extracting the percept-related features of the induced activity from LFP in a monkeys visual cortex for decoding its bistable structure-from-motion perception. We first estimate the stimulus-evoked activity via a wavelet-based method and remove it from the single-trial LFP. We then use the common spatial patterns (CSP) approach to design spatial filters to extract the percept-related features from the remaining induced activity. We exploit the linear discriminant analysis (LDA) classifier on the extracted features to decode the reported perception on a single-trial basis. We demonstrate that our approach has excellent performance in estimating the stimulus-evoked activity, outperforming the Wiener filter, least mean square (LMS), and a local regression method called the locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (LOWESS), and that our approach is effective in extracting the discriminative features of the percept-related induced activity from LFP, which leads to excellent decoding performance. We also discover that the enhanced gamma band synchronization and reduced alpha band desynchronization may be the underpinnings of the induced activity.

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

stimulus-evoked and induced activity
feature extraction
wavelet transform
common spatial patterns (csp)
linear discriminant analysis (lda)
synchronization and desynchronization


A taxonomy of strategic decisions and tactics for uncovering alternatives The study determined how decision-makers uncovered alternatives for eight frequently occurring decisions and the success that was realized. A cyclical search in which repeated searches were carried out to learn about opportunities was successful for most of decisions, but rarely used. Integrated benchmarking, which merged useful practices and procedures from several sources, was successful for decisions about services. Design was successful when used for decisions involving products, reorganizations, and internal operations. Low effort tactics of simple benchmarking, single search, and idea were applied to nearly all of the decision types but were seldom successful. These findings will be used to suggest ways to improve practice.

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

decision making
indentifying alternatives


Using Formal Verification to Evaluate Human-Automation Interaction: A Review Failures in complex systems controlled by human operators can be difficult to anticipate because of unexpected interactions between the elements that compose the system, including human-automation interaction (HAI). HAI analyses would benefit from techniques that support investigating the possible combinations of system conditions and HAIs that might result in failures. Formal verification is a powerful technique used to mathematically prove that an appropriately scaled model of a system does or does not exhibit desirable properties. This paper discusses how formal verification has been used to evaluate HAI. It has been used to evaluate human-automation interfaces for usability properties and to find potential mode confusion. It has also been used to evaluate system safety properties in light of formally modeled task analytic human behavior. While capable of providing insights into problems associated with HAI, formal verification does not scale as well as other techniques such as simulation. However, advances in formal verification continue to address this problem, and approaches that allow it to complement more traditional analysis methods can potentially avoid this limitation.

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

cognitive task analysis
formal methods
human performance modeling
human-automation interaction (hai)
model checking
theorem proving


A model for carbon nanotube FETs in the ballistic limit As we know, a ballistic MOS-Like carbon nanotube FET can be simulated by using a self-consistent procedure between the charge and the Poisson equations. Because of the integral form of the charge equation, this model cannot be implemented in the commercially available circuit simulators, such as SPICE. In this paper, we propose an analytical solution for estimating the charge equation, so that the above mentioned procedure could be used in the aforementioned circuit simulators. We investigated the accuracy of the proposed model for various values of the physical parameters and biasing condition. Further investigations were performed in order to evaluate the model accuracy in the sub-threshold region and in presence of the short channel effects. The results of these investigations were compared with those obtained by some other models developed earlier in the literatures. All of these demonstrate superior accuracy of the proposed model with comparison to the other models.

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


Capturing contextual relationship for effective media search One of the central problems regarding media search is the semantic gap between the low-level features computed automatically from media data and the human interpretation of them. This is because the notion of similarity is usually based on high-level abstraction but the low-level features do not sometimes reflect the human perception. In this paper, we assume the semantics of media is determined by the contextual relationship in a dataset, and introduce the method to capture the contextual information from a large media (especially image) dataset for effective search. Similarity search in an image database based on this contextual information shows encouraging experimental results.

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

contextual relationship
media search
semantic gap
similarity search


Estimation of Stress-Strength Reliability for the Generalized Pareto Distribution Based on Progressively Censored Samples This paper deals with the estimation of stress-strength reliability parameter, \(R = P\left( Y < X \right) \), based on progressively type II censored samples when stress, strength are two independent generalized Pareto random variables. The maximum likelihood estimators, their asymptotic distributions, asymptotic confidence intervals, bootstrap based confidence intervals and Bayes estimators are derived for \(R\). Using Monte Carlo simulations, the MSE, Bayes risk estimators, credible sets and coverage probabilities are computed and compared.

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

generalized pareto distribution
progressively type ii censored samples

uniformly minimum variance unbiased estimator


Limits of learning-based superresolution algorithms Learning-based superresolution (SR) is a popular SR technique that uses application dependent priors to infer the missing details in low resolution images (LRIs). However, their performance still deteriorates quickly when the magnification factor is only moderately large. This leads us to an important problem: "Do limits of learning-based SR algorithms exist?" This paper is the first attempt to shed some light on this problem when the SR algorithms are designed for general natural images. We first define an expected risk for the SR algorithms that is based on the root mean squared error between the superresolved images and the ground truth images. Then utilizing the statistics of general natural images, we derive a closed form estimate of the lower bound of the expected risk. The lower bound only involves the covariance matrix and the mean vector of the high resolution images (HRIs) and hence can be computed by sampling real images. We also investigate the sufficient number of samples to guarantee an accurate estimate of the lower bound. By computing the curve of the lower bound w.r.t. the magnification factor, we could estimate the limits of learning-based SR algorithms, at which the lower bound of the expected risk exceeds a relatively large threshold. We perform experiments to validate our theory. And based on our observations we conjecture that the limits may be independent of the size of either the LRIs or the HRIs.

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


A new algorithm for wavelet-based heart rate variability analysis One of the most promising non-invasive markers of the activity of the autonomic nervous system is heart rate variability (HRV). HRV analysis toolkits often provide spectral analysis techniques using the Fourier transform, which assumes that the heart rate series is stationary. To overcome this issue, the Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) is often used. However, the wavelet transform is thought to be a more suitable tool for analyzing non-stationary signals than the STFT. Given the lack of support for wavelet-based analysis in HRV toolkits, such analysis must be implemented by the researcher. This has made this technique underutilized. This paper presents a new algorithm to perform HRV power spectrum analysis based on the Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Packet Transform (MODWPT). The algorithm calculates the power in any spectral band with a given tolerance for the band's boundaries. The MODWPT decomposition tree is pruned to avoid calculating unnecessary wavelet coefficients, thereby optimizing execution time. The center of energy shift correction is applied to achieve optimum alignment of the wavelet coefficients. This algorithm has been implemented in RHRV, an open-source package for HRV analysis. To the best of our knowledge, RHRV is the first HRV toolkit with support for wavelet-based spectral analysis.

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

heart rate variability
wavelet transform
rhrv


Masking-based ?-order MMSE speech enhancement This paper considers an effective approach for attenuating acoustic noise and mitigating its effect in a speech signal. In this approach, human perceptual auditory masking effect is incorporated into an adaptive ?-order minimum mean-square error (MMSE) speech enhancement algorithm. The relationship between the value of ? and the noise-masking threshold is introduced and analyzed. The algorithm is based on a criterion by which the inaudible noise may be masked rather than suppressed. It thereby reduces the chance of distortion introduced to speech due to the enhancement process. In order to obtain an optimal estimation of the masking threshold, a modified way to measure the relative threshold offset is described. The performance of the proposed masking-based ?-order MMSE method has been evaluated through objective speech distortion measurement, spectrogram inspection and subjective listening tests. It is shown that the proposed method can achieve a more significant noise reduction and a better spectral estimation over the conventional adaptive ?-order MMSE method and the conventional over subtraction noise-masking 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

minimum mean-square error (mmse)
masking properties


Consistent data for inconsistent XML document ? XML document may contain inconsistencies that violate predefined integrity constraints, which causes the data inconsistency problem. In this paper, we consider how to get the consistent data from an inconsistent XML document. There are two basic concepts for this problem: Repair is the data consistent with the integrity constraints, and also minimally differs from the original one. Consistent data is the data common for every possible repair. First we give a general constraint model for XML, which can express the commonly discussed integrity constraints, including functional dependencies, keys and multivalued dependencies. Next we provide a repair framework for inconsistent XML document with three basic update operations: node insertion, node deletion and node value modification. Following this approach, we introduce the concept of repair for inconsistent XML document, discuss the chase method to generate repairs, and prove some important properties of the chase. Finally we give a method to obtain the greatest lower bound of all possible repairs, which is sufficient for consistent data. We also implement prototypes of our method, and evaluate our framework and algorithms in the experiment.

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


Design of educational multiplayer videogames: A vision from collaborative learning Videogames and their specific devices can be used to improve learning process since they are very attractive for children. In this way, pupils increase their cognitive skills, the time dedicated to learn, their motivation for learning, their concentration and their attention while they are working/playing. The subject of learning by play is behind the introduction of recreational educational techniques in the classroom. If we also consider the increasing presence of new technologies in society in general and in classrooms in particular, we encounter a new way of teaching/learning. Moreover, several studies in the area of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) have proved that learning in a group environment (both actively and interactively) is much more productive for pupils than traditional education. Our main objective is to reduce the complexity of introducing the collaborative learning techniques into development of educational videogames. So, in this paper we analyze the use of videogames as a particular case of new technologies in the classroom and we present a set of design guidelines to enable us to incorporate the features of collaborative learning in the videogame development process. We also explore how these guidelines affect the videogame architecture and how they can be applied when designing a videogame. As a practical example of using our proposal we have designed an educational videogame with group activities which aim is to learn the vowels.

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

videogame design
e-learning
collaborative systems
adaptive systems


Learning Tools for Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation In this project report, we describe ongoing research on supporting the development of agent-based simulation models. The vision is that the agents themselves should learn their (individual) behavior model, instead of letting a human modeler test which of the many possible agent-level behaviors leads to the correct macro-level observations. To that aim, we integrate a suite of agent learning tools into SeSAm, a fully visual platform for agent-based simulation models. This integration is the focus of this contribution.

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


IoTs Enable Active Contour Modeling Based Energy Efficient and Thermal Aware Object Tracking on FPGA Object tracking based on active contour modeling is an image processing related technology that uses snapshots of the object under consideration to track it via robot in the real world. Nowadays, the word is moving towards the internet of things (IoTs) and having significant effect on our daily life. In this work, we have designed IoTs enable power efficient and thermal aware frame buffer to store the frames and uses that frame to detect changes in object position. In order to make IoTs enable design, we are embedding a 128-bit IPv6 address into frame buffer. In order to test the compatibility of this design with wireless network, we are operating this design with different operating frequency of WLAN channel. The operating frequency of WLAN Channel 802.11ah, 802.11b/g/n, 802.11y, 802.11a/h/j/n/ac, 802.11p and 802.11d are 900MHz, 2.4, 3.6, 5, 5.9 and 60GHz respectively. There is no change in signal power, clock power, IO power, when we scale down ambient temperature from 70 to 30C. There are 9889% saving in signal power, 285% reduction in clock power, 9099% saving in IO power with WLAN Channel 802.11ah, 802.11b/g/n, 802.11y, 802.11a/h/j/n/ac, 802.11p in compare to power dissipation with 802.11ad. There is 71.11, 72.60, 73.96, 74.28, and 74.42% reduction in leakage power with WLAN Channel 802.11ah, 802.11b/g/n, 802.11y, 802.11a/h/j/n/ac, and 802.11p, when we scale down ambient temperature from 70 to 30C. IoTs enable frame buffer design can be controlled from any part of this globe. Another design characteristic of this frame buffer is that it is 3-D frame buffer which gives us an added advantage over 2-D frame buffer that store image only in X, Y orientation. Capability to analyze third dimension helps us to track object more efficiently.

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

object tracking
active contour modeling
image processing
frame buffer
energy efficient
thermal aware


Correspondence matching using kernel principal components analysis and label consistency constraints This paper investigates spectral approaches to the problem of point pattern matching. We make two contributions. First, we consider rigid point-set alignment. Here we show how kernel principal components analysis (kernel PCA) can be effectively used for solving the rigid point correspondence matching problem when the point-sets are subject to outliers and random position jitter. Specifically, we show how the point- proximity matrix can be kernelised, and spectral correspondence matching transformed into one of kernel PCA. Second, we turn our attention to the matching of articulated point-sets. Here we show label consistency constraints can be incorporated into definition of the point proximity matrix. The new methods are compared to those of Shapiro and Brady and Scott and Longuet-Higgins, together with multidimensional scaling. We provide experiments on both synthetic data and real world data.

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

correspondence matching
kernel pca
constraints


On the frontiers of polynomial computations in tropical geometry We study some basic algorithmic problems concerning the intersection of tropical hypersurfaces in general dimension: deciding whether this intersection is nonempty, whether it is a tropical variety, and whether it is connected, as well as counting the number of connected components. We characterize the borderline between tractable and hard computations by proving NP-hardness and #P-hardness results under various strong restrictions of the input data, as well as providing polynomial time algorithms for various other restrictions. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

tropical geometry
polynomial time algorithms

tropical varieties
tropical prevarieties
computational complexity
np-hard


Least-cost design of water distribution systems under demand uncertainty: the robust counterpart approach In this study, a non-probabilistic robust counterpart (RC) approach is demonstrated and applied to the least-cost design/rehabilitation problem of water distribution systems (WDSs). The uncertainty of the information is described by a deterministic user-defined ellipsoidal uncertainty set that implies the level of risk. The advantages of the RC approach on previous modelling attempts to include uncertainty are in making no assumptions about the probability density functions of the uncertain parameters and their interdependencies, having no requirements on the construction of a representative sample of scenarios, and the deterministic equivalent problem preserves the same size (i.e. computational complexity) as the original problem. The RC is coupled with the cross-entropy heuristic optimization technique for seeking robust solutions. The methodology is demonstrated on an illustrative example and on the Hanoi network. The results show considerable promise of the proposed approach to incorporate uncertainty in the least-cost design problem of WDSs. Further research is warranted to extend the model for more complex WDSs, incorporate extended period simulations, and develop RC schemes for other WDSs related management problems.

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


Content-based video copy detection based on motion vectors estimated using a lower frame rate We propose a motion vector-based video content-based copy detection method. One of the signatures of a given video is motion vectors extracted from image sequences. However, when consecutive image frames are used, the resulting motion vectors are not descriptive enough because most vectors are either too small or they appear to scatter in all directions. We calculate motion vectors in a lower frame rate than the actual frame rate of the video to overcome this problem. As a result, we obtain large vectors and they represent a given video in a robust manner. We carry out experiments for various parameters and present the results.

O B I I O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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-based copy detection
similar video detection
sequence matching


Description and Evaluation of an Introductory Course to Matlab for a Heterogeneous Group of University Students This paper presents the experience of the authors in teaching the Matlab (TM) software to students with different levels of academic training, even though all of them belong to the field of Science. Matlab (TM) is a worldwide standard in technical programming and computing, and its use is still growing; therefore, it is taught in many different university degree programs (Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, etc.). The course analyzed in this paper contains examples of different fields of knowledge to show the students the versatility and power of this tool. At the end of each course, which consists of 30 h, the students expressed their opinions about the content in a private opinion poll (questionnaire). The results of these opinion polls show that the methodology followed is considered appropriate and useful by the students who attended the course. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 18: 750-756, 2010; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com; DOI 10.1002/cae.20282

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


Role of Interleukin-6 in Stress Response in Normal and Tumorous Adrenal Cells and during Chronic Inflammation Interleukin-6 (IL-6) is the end-product of a cytokine signaling cascade and is secreted by specialized immune cells during inflammation. It has a great influence on many functions, including differentiation, stimulation, and activation of immune cells, or other cells of neuroendocrine origin. Thus, IL-6 serves as a key messenger in its communication with the neuroendocrine system, and serves as a potent activator of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis at all levels. Changes in the levels of expression of this cytokine and its receptor have been observed during chronic inflammatory disease, and have been associated with tumorigenesis. Therefore, we studied the effect of IL-6 on normal and adenomatous human adrenal cells in vitro. The expression of IL-6 receptor mRNA was quantified within the same tissue. IL-6 potently stimulated cortisol secretion from dispersed normal human adrenal cells. We found immunoreactivity for the IL-6 receptor on cultured cells and paraffin-embedded sections of adrenal tissues. Further, there was a more pronounced expression of IL-6 mRNA in adrenal adenomas of patients with Cushing's syndrome, compared to normal human adrenals. Despite this fact, the sensitivity of cells of adenomatous adrenal glands to IL-6 was significantly decreased relative to cells from normal controls. These results were confirmed employing the permanent adrenocortical cancer cell line model NCI-H295. We infer that the loss of responsivity of tumorous adrenal cells to IL-6, and in part corticotropin, is an important step in the process of adrenal tumorigenesis by which regulation by differentiating proteins is bypassed.

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


A Case of Depth-3 Identity Testing, Sparse Factorization and Duality The polynomial identity testing (PIT) problem is known to be challenging even for constant depth arithmetic circuits. In this work, we study the complexity of two special but natural cases of identity testing-first is a case of depth-3 PIT, the other of depth-4 PIT. Our first problem is a vast generalization of verifying whether a bounded top fan-in depth-3 circuit equals a sparse polynomial (given as a sum of monomial terms). Formally, given a depth-3 circuit C, having constant many general product gates and arbitrarily many semidiagonal product gates test whether the output of C is identically zero. A semidiagonal product gate in C computes a product of the form , where m is a monomial, l (i) is a linear polynomial, and b is a constant. We give a deterministic polynomial time test, along with the computation of leading monomials of semidiagonal circuits over local rings. The second problem is on verifying a given sparse polynomial factorization, which is a classical question (von zur Gathen, FOCS 1983): Given multivariate sparse polynomials f, g1, . . . , gt explicitly check whether . For the special case when every gi is a sum of univariate polynomials, we give a deterministic polynomial time test. We characterize the factors of such g (i) 's and even show how to test the divisibility of f by the powers of such polynomials. The common tools used are Chinese remaindering and dual representation. The dual representation of polynomials (Saxena, ICALP 2008) is a technique to express a product-of-sums of univariates as a sum-ofproducts of univariates. We generalize this technique by combining it with a generalized Chinese remaindering to solve these two problems (over any field).

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

identity testing
arithmetic circuits
factorization


Near-optimal scheduling of device activation in water distribution systems to reduce the impact of a contamination event This paper proposes an innovative procedure for identifying, in the event of accidental or intentional contamination of a water distribution system, the optimal scheduling of activation of a pre-selected set of flow control devices which will serve to minimise the volume of contaminated water consumed by users after the detection of the contaminant in the system. The constraints are represented by the number of available response teams and the maximum speed at which these teams can travel along the roadway. The optimal scheduling of device activation is sought by means of an optimisation process based on a genetic algorithm (GA) which interacts with a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) solver in order to ensure the feasibility of the scheduling identified. The optimisation procedure is coupled to a hydraulic and quality simulator, which enables a calculation of the volumes of contaminated water consumed by users, and a dynamic cache memory, which, by storing information on the system's behaviour as the optimisation process progresses, serves to limit the computational times. The application of the procedure to a highly complex real water distribution system shows that the optimisation process is robust and efficacious and produces a smaller volume of contaminated water consumed by the users than when the activation of all the devices was completed in the shortest amount of time.

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

contamination
genetic algorithm
mixed integer linear programming
optimal scheduling
water distribution systems


An extended evolutionary clustering algorithm for an adaptive recommender system The usage of internet and Web services has tremendously increased since the past decade. This usage has made life easier in many respects, especially in finding the required information with the help of search engines. However, the problem of finding relevant information still persists primarily due to an increasing number of choices presented by the search engines. As recommender systems (RSs) are evolving, these new generation RSs are adopted by many web services to build long-term relation with customers. RSs aid users in finding relevant information on the web. Several techniques deal with this problem and data mining is widely used among them. They target the information overload problem and also strive to present updated suggestions as new information arrives. The goal of presenting updated information to users is one of the foremost challenge in the area of RS research as users interests also keeps on changing with time together with system data. This paper addresses the problem of user requirements changing over a period of time in seeking information on web and how RSs deal with them. We propose a Dynamic Recommender system based on evolutionary clustering algorithm that preludes the widely used matrix factorization techniques in RS. This clustering algorithm makes clusters of similar users and evolves them depicting accurate and relevant user preferences over time. Particularly, the approach proposes an optimization function that uses temporal parameters in a clustering algorithm for attaining the accurate evolution of user interest in the form of clusters. The new approach is empirically tested and compared with other clustering algorithm depicting considerable improvement in the quality of clusters that in turn can be used for predicting user changing preferences in a RS.

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

evolutionary
clustering
algorithm
recommender system
data mining


Order-k alpha-hulls and alpha-shapes We introduce order-k alpha-hulls and alpha-shapes - generalizations of alpha-hulls and alpha-shapes. Being also a generalization of k-hull (known in statistics as "k-depth contour"), order-k alpha-hull provides a link between shape reconstruction and statistical depth. As a generalization of alpha-hull, order-k alpha-hull gives a robust shape estimation by ignoring locally up to k outliers in a point set. Order-k alpha-shape produces an "inner" shape of the set, with the amount of "digging" into the points controlled by k. As a generalization of k-hull, order-k alpha-hull is capable of determining "deep" points amidst samples from a multimodal distribution: it correctly identifies points which lie outside clusters of samples. The order-k alpha-hulls and alpha-shapes are related to order-k Voronoi diagrams in the same way in which alpha-hulls and alpha-shapes are related to Voronoi diagrams. This implies that order-k alpha-hull and alpha-shape can be readily built from order-k Voronoi diagram, and that the number of different order-k alpha-shapes for all possible values of a is proportional to the complexity of order-k Voronoi diagram. (C) 2013 Elsevier BM. All rights reserved.

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


Development of a compressive surface capturing formulation for modelling free-surface flow by using the volume-of-fluid approach With the aim of accurately modelling free-surface flow of two immiscible fluids, this study presents the development of a new volume-of-fluid free-surface capturing formulation. By building on existing volume-of-fluid approaches, the new formulation combines a blended higher resolution scheme with the addition of an artificial compressive term to the volume-of-fluid equation. This reduces the numerical smearing?of the interface associated with explicit higher resolution schemes while limiting the contribution of the artificial compressive term to ensure the integrity of the interface shape is maintained. Furthermore, the computational efficiency of the the higher resolution scheme is improved through the reformulation of the normalised variable approach and the implementation of a new higher resolution blending function. The volume-of-fluid equation is discretised via an unstructured vertex-centred finite volume method and solved via a Jacobian-type dual time-stepping approach. Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

surface capturing
higher resolution schemes
artificial compressive term


Software selection: a case study of the application of the analytical hierarchical process to the selection of a multimedia authoring system This paper discusses the multimedia processing environment, the applicability of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in problem solving, and how AHP can be applied to the selection of multimedia authorizing systems (MAS) in a group decision environment. A MAS selection model is proposed to facilitate the group's decision making in the selection of MAS. Six software engineers, who are technically competent and experienced, participated in our study. They were trained to use AHP and then applied this technique to evaluate three MAS products for adoption decision. The results indicated that AHP offers chances for every participant to fully understand, discuss, and objectively evaluate all MAS products before identifying and selecting the most efficient MAS.

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

analytic hierarchy processes
authoring systems
information systems
decision making/processes


assessing motion-coherency in video watermarking Motion coherent watermarking has been recently proposed as a means to combat temporal frame averaging along the motion axis (MC-TFA). The fundamental idea consists in exploiting motion-compensation primitives to force a physcal point of the scene to always carry the same watermark sample wherever it is projected in the video. However, for a given watermarking system, there is no simple tool to assess whether the produced watermark is motion-coherent or not. Today, this assessment relies on a computationally expensive procedure, namely (i) embed a watermark, (ii) perform the MC-TFA attack, (iii) check for the presence of the watermark. Therefore, the goal of this article is to provide the community with an efficient and accurate oracle which reports whether a video sequence contains any non-motion coherent component or not. This is done in practice by looking at the statistics of the difference between a frame and a motion predicted version of it.

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 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


Fast eigenvalue calculations in a massively parallel plasma turbulence code Magnetic fusion aims at providing CO2 CO 2 free energy for the 21st century and well beyond. However, the success of the international fusion experiment ITER (currently under construction) will depend to a large degree on the value of the so-called energy confinement time. One of the most advanced tools describing the underlying physical processes is the highly scalable (up to at least 32,768 cores) plasma turbulence code GENE. GENE solves a set of nonlinear partial integro-differential equations in five-dimensional phase space by means of the method of lines, with a 4th order explicit RungeKutta scheme for time integration. To maximize its efficiency, the code computes the eigenspectrum of the linearized equation to determine the largest possible timestep which maintains the stability of the method. This requires the computation of the largest (in terms of its magnitude) eigenvalue of a complex, non-Hermitian matrix whose size may range from a few millions to even a billion. SLEPc, the Scalable Library for Eigenvalue Problem Computations, is used to effectively compute this part of the spectrum. Additionally, eigenvalue computations can provide new insight into the properties of plasma turbulence. The latter is driven by a number of different unstable modes, including dominant and subdominant ones, that can be determined employing SLEPc. This computation is more challenging from the numerical point of view, since these eigenvalues can be considered interior, and also because the linearized operator is available only in implicit form. We analyze the feasibility of different strategies for computing these modes, including matrix-free spectral transformation as well as harmonic projection methods.

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

plasma physics
complex non-hermitian eigenproblem
rightmost eigenvalues


Noninvasive Clinical Assessment of Trunk Deformities Associated With Scoliosis Besides the spinal deformity, scoliosis modifies notably the general appearance of the trunk resulting in trunk rotation, imbalance, and asymmetries that constitutes patients' major concern. Existing classifications of scoliosis, based on the type of spinal curve as depicted on radiographs, are currently used to guide treatment strategies. Unfortunately, even though a perfect correction of the spinal curve is achieved, some trunk deformities remain, making patients dissatisfied with the treatment received. The purpose of this study is to identify possible shape patterns of trunk surface deformity associated with scoliosis. First, trunk surface is represented by a multivariate functional trunk shape descriptor based on 3-D clinical measurements computed on cross sections of the trunk. Then, the classical formulation of hierarchical clustering is adapted to the case of multivariate functional data and applied to a set of 236 trunk surface 3-D reconstructions. The highest internal validity is obtained when considering 11 clusters that explain up to 65% of the variance in our dataset. Our clustering result shows a concordance with the radiographic classification of spinal curves in 68% of the cases. As opposed to radiographic evaluation, the trunk descriptor is 3-D and its functional nature offers a compact and elegant description of not only the type, but also the severity and extent of the trunk surface deformity along the trunk length. In future work, new management strategies based on the resulting trunk shape patterns could be thought of in order to improve the esthetic outcome after treatment, and thus patients satisfaction.

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


The multiple criteria and sub-criteria for electronic service quality evaluation An interdependence perspective Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to evaluate multiple criteria and sub-criteria of e-SQ with the interdependence perspective, utilising three phases of measurement for the proposed e-SQ evaluation. Design/methodology/approach - The paper utilises literature reviews to address the question of interdependence in the context of e-SQ and constructs an interdependent network structure for e-SQ evaluation. Then a method and three phases of measurement are proposed that combine the consistent fuzzy preference relations method with the analytic network process (ANP) technique, to evaluate e-SQ by using senior experts who work at travel web site companies as research participants. Findings - First, this study discovered the interdependence perspective of criteria and sub-criteria for e-SQ evaluation. Second, it was found out that the weights of criteria and sub-criteria have reverse situations after considering the interdependence perspective. Third, the findings indicate that the interdependence perspective among criteria and sub-criteria should be taken into consideration, and the authors remind practitioners of the need to implement overall improvements instead of independently addressing each criterion or sub-criterion of e-SQ individually. Originality/value - The authors propose a scientific and systematic method for e-SQ evaluation that can enable managers of online web sites to determine the important factors, and further to achieve total e-SQ control management. Moreover the proposed method can deal with imprecise information when evaluating e-SQ, as well as considering interdependent relationships among factors, and is thus faster and more efficient at addressing the inconsistency problems involved in multiple decision making than conventional methods.

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

customer services quality
electronic commerce


Electronic administration in Spain: From its beginnings to the present This study presents the basic lines of electronic administration in Spain. The complexity of the Spanish political-administrative system makes such a study challenging, in view of the considerable degree of autonomy and competences of the regional administrative bodies and local agencies with respect to the central government, the former being more visible in the 17 regions of Spain. Nonetheless, the central government maintains a series of legal instruments that allow a certain common framework of action to be imposed, aside from what is put into effect through diverse programs aimed precisely to develop common tools for the regions and municipalities of Spain. After an introduction that provides some necessary background, this study describes the legislative framework in which Spain's electronic administrative system has developed. The data included in the study refer to investment in information and communication technologies (ICT) and the services offered by the different Administrations on the internet; internet access by citizens, homes, businesses, and employees, as well as the interactivity existing with administrations by means of the internet; the origins and rise of various political initiatives of the Central Government involving electronic administration; and finally, the situation of civil service personnel, as catalysts of the success of Information Society in the Public Administration within Spain.

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


efficiently finding web services using a clustering semantic approach Efficiently finding Web services on the Web is a challenging issue in service-oriented computing. Currently, UDDI is a standard for publishing and discovery of Web services, and UDDI registries also provide keyword searches for Web services. However, the search functionality is very simple and fails to account for relationships between Web services. Firstly, users are overwhelmed by the huge number of irrelevant returned services. Secondly, the intentions of users and the semantics in Web services are ignored. Inspired by the success of partitioning approach used in the database design, we used a novel clustering semantic algorithm to eliminate irrelevant services with respect to a query. Then we utilized Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA), a machine learning method, to capture the semantics hidden behind the words in a query, and the descriptions in the services, so that service matching can be carried out at the concept level. This paper reports upon the preliminary experimental evaluation that shows improvements over recall and precision.

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


Model relations between conceptual and detail design Conceptual design, as an essential step towards successful mechatronic product development, should be supported by good models for the design map, which in turn expresses the relationship between the design parameters and the functional requirements. If feasible, these models should be mathematical. In this paper the close correlation between a good concept and its models is postulated. A theory is presented how these models are related to models employed for detail design and how good concept models can be characterised. The practical realisation of this characterisation relies on the decomposability of the whole design map in several low dimensional decoupled parts. This corresponds to Suh's independence axiom. Modelling aspects of the development of an energy saving hydraulic variable valve train for combustion engines are used as a demonstrative example. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


Medical imaging challenges photogrammetry In its current status, medical imaging involves a wide range of imaging modalities and is faced with a range of interesting research questions, while trying to automatically convert the huge floods of image data to useful information. The major characteristic of the developed techniques is the exploitation of visual similarities or differences; that is basically qualitative treatment of the information inherent in the images. This proves to be a major shortcoming, leading to erroneous or unreliable results in many cases. To this end, technology transfer from the part of photogrammetry can be proven very beneficial. Such a contribution can be geared by the fact that photogrammetry has developed efficient tools for accounting for imaging formation geometry. These tools, appropriately tuned for medical applications, can accelerate the technology transfer across the involved disciplines. Understanding the possible photogrammetric contributions by the medical imaging experts, and realizing the medical problems in photogrammetric terms by the photogrammetrists, remains a major barrier to this transfer. The intended scope of this paper is to provide a foundation for exchange of ideas and provoke photogrammetric research interest in these issues.

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

medical photogrammetry
biostereometrics
image matching
sensor geometry
image fusion
image segmentation
motion tracking


A Biologically Inspired Architecture for an Autonomous and Social Robot Lately, lots of effort has been put into the construction of robots able to live among humans. This fact has favored the development of personal or social robots, which are expected to behave in a natural way. This implies that these robots could meet certain requirements, for example, to be able to decide their own actions (autonomy), to be able to make deliberative plans (reasoning), or to be able to have an emotional behavior in order to facilitate human-robot interaction. In this paper, the authors present a bioinspired control architecture for an autonomous and social robot, which tries to accomplish some of these features. In order to develop this new architecture, authors have used as a base a prior hybrid control architecture (AD) that is also biologically inspired. Nevertheless, in the later, the task to be accomplished at each moment is determined by a fix sequence processed by the Main Sequencer. Therefore, the main sequencer of the architecture coordinates the previously programmed sequence of skills that must be executed. In the new architecture, the main sequencer is substituted by a decision making system based on drives, motivations, emotions, and self-learning, which decides the proper action at every moment according to robot's state. Consequently, the robot improves its autonomy since the added decision making system will determine the goal and consequently the skills to be executed. A basic version of this new architecture has been implemented on a real robotic platform. Some experiments are shown at the end of the paper.

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

cognitive robotics
control architectures
decision making systems


ANALYSIS OF FINITE-LENGTH ACOUSTIC ECHO CANCELLATION SYSTEM The acoustic echo canceler using an adaptive transversal filter and the least mean-square (LMS) algorithm is the most effective technique to reduce acoustic echoes in a hands-free telephone system. However, the requirement of a very high order filter for each microphone results in difficulties in convergence and hardware implementation. In this paper, the performance of the finite length adaptive filter is studied. A formula which relates the echo cancellation to the filter size, N, is established. Detailed analysis shows that this finite filter length will have better performance using speech than white noise.

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

performance analysis of finite length aec


Evaluating ground fault current distribution on overhead transmission lines using an iterative nodal analysis Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to present an original iterative nodal approach to calculate the fault current distribution on overhead lines. Design/methodology/approach - By changing the mutual couplings among different conductors into the equivalent voltage sources, node voltages are updated iteratively by using conventional nodal analysis with those additional sources until the convergence is achieved. Findings - The proposed algorithm can handle the complicated topology of a power transmission line and has no difficulties in taking all physical couplings into account. The fault current distribution calculated by this method is in good agreement with those published in the literature. Although the proposed approach is iterative, the CPU time needed is still reasonable compared to the direct solution approach. The memory requirement is low because the coefficient matrix is highly sparse for the nodal analysis of each iteration loop. Originality/value - The proposed approach can serve as an alternative in calculating the fault current because of its efficiency and ease of implementation.

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

electric current
fault currents
electric power transmission


an adaptive architecture of applying vulnerability analysis to ids alerts With increasing intrusions and attacks on the Internet, there is an urgent need to develop techniques for network security. Current standalone network security products, such as the firewall systems, the Intrusion Detection System (IDS), the anti-virus software, the vulnerability scanning software are not capable of withstanding the onslaught of various network threats. As a result, new security paradigms, which integrate some security devices closely to provide accurate alerts and attain enhanced protection are emerging. In order to achieve better network security, in this paper we present an adaptive architecture of applying vulnerability analysis for multiple detection sensors to detect network intrusions. The architecture is designed as a layer above intrusion detection aimed at classifying the alerts overload with different severity by correlating results from multiple sensors and integrating vulnerability analysis. Intrusion Detection produces basic alerts for further evaluation, whereas vulnerability analysis provides important information to help identify the alerts. At the same time, the whole process is made more efficient and effective by using predicate-based evaluation.

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

vulnerability analysis
network security
intrusion detection


On the use of piecewise linear wavelets for fast construction of sparsified moment matrices in solving the thin-wire EFIE Multiresolution wavelet expansion technique has been successfully used in the method of moments (MoM), and sparse matrix equations have been attained. Solving boundary integral equations arising in electromagnetic (EM) problems by the wavelet-based moment method (WMM) involves a time-consuming double numerical integration for each entry of the resultant matrix which in turn can outweigh the advantages of achieving a sparse matrix. The paper presents an alternative computational model to speed up the WMM by excluding double numerical integrations in the evaluation of matrix elements. In this regard, pieces of linear wavelet bases are replaced by proper sinusoidal functions for which closed-form analytical expressions are available. In addition, by introducing approximate closed-form expressions for radiating EM fields of wavelet current elements, the thresholding procedure is modified so that one can compute only the matrix elements of interest. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, the thin-wire electric field integral equation (EFIE) is numerically solved by non-orthogonal linear spline wavelet bases.

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 I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

electric field integral equations
sinusoidal monopoles
sparse matrices


Quantitative structure-affinity relationship of 5-HT(1A) receptor ligands by the classification tree method The influence of molecular structure of 346 ligands on their affinity for 5-HT(1A) receptors was investigated. It was shown that the effectiveness of the proposed novel approach for interpretation of decision tree models compared favourably with the PLS method. In the context of the proposed approach, molecular fragments and their values of the relative influence on the affinity for 5-HT(1A) receptors were defined.

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

serotonin 5-ht(1a) receptors
arylpyperazines


Heinz von Foerster's heuristics course A factor in the development of second-order cybernetics in the United States Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the heuristics course co-taught by Heinz von Foerster, Herbert Brun, and Humberto Maturana (1968-1969) influenced cybernetic research in the USA. Design/methodology/approach - The author accessed the archived material from three sources: the Herbert Brim Library, the University of Illinois Library, and the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) and interpreted these materials in light of the cybernetics literature, and the publications of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC). Findings - The heuristics course had major consequences in von Foerster's evolving critique of education, and in Brun's work towards founding a School for Designing a Society. von Foerster radically reoriented the BCL toward unconventional course proposals. He also began to critique objectivity and positivism, shifting the foundations of cybernetics and proposing a meta-cybernetics. The year that von Foerster retired, the BCL and the ASC ceased to function. When the ASC returned in the 1980s it took on new emphases, including education and design. It appears von Foerster was pivotal in the shift of emphasis. Originality/value - The findings add new dimensions to the story of the decline of the BCL in the 1970s, and the re-emergence of the ASC in the 1980s with new emphases (such as design) that are not traditionally found in scientific research.

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

united states of america
composition
constructivism
desire
language


I/O Deduplication: Utilizing Content Similarity to Improve I/O Performance Duplication of data in storage systems is becoming increasingly common. We introduce I/O Deduplication, a storage optimization that utilizes content similarity for improving I/O performance by eliminating I/O operations and reducing the mechanical delays during I/O operations. I/O Deduplication consists of three main techniques: content-based caching, dynamic replica retrieval, and selective duplication. Each of these techniques is motivated by our observations with I/O workload traces obtained from actively-used production storage systems, all of which revealed surprisingly high levels of content similarity for both stored and accessed data. Evaluation of a prototype implementation using these workloads showed an overall improvement in disk I/O performance of 28 to 47% across these workloads. Further breakdown also showed that each of the three techniques contributed significantly to the overall performance improvement.

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

design
i/o deduplication
content-based caching
content-based i/o scheduling


GRAMOFON: General model-selection framework based on networks Ensembles constitute one of the most prominent class of hybrid prediction models. One basically assumes that different models compensate each other's errors if one combines them in an appropriate way. Often, a large number of various prediction models are available. However, many of them may share similar error characteristics, which highly depress the error compensation effect. Thus the selection of an appropriate subset of models is crucial. In this paper, we address this issue. As major contribution, for the case if large number of models is present, we propose a network-based framework for model selection while paying special attention to the interaction effect of models. In this framework, we introduce four ensemble techniques and compare them to the state-of-the-art in experiments on publicly available real-world data.

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


Revisiting the thermodynamics of hardening plasticity for unsaturated soils A thermodynamically consistent extension of the constitutive equations of saturated soils to unsaturated conditions is often worked out through the use of a unique effective interstitial pressure, accounting equivalently for the pressures of the saturating fluids acting separately on the internal solid walls of the pore network. The natural candidate for this effective interstitial pressure is the space averaged interstitial pressure. In contrast experimental observations have revealed that, at least, a pair of stress state variables was needed for a suitable framework to describe stressstrainstrength behaviour of unsaturated soils. The thermodynamics analysis presented here shows that the most general approach to the behaviour of unsaturated soils actually requires three stress state variables: the suction, which is required to describe the invasion of the soil by the liquid water phase through the retention curve; two effective stresses, which are required to describe the soil deformation at water saturation held constant. However a simple assumption related to the plastic flow rule leads to the final need of only a Bishop-like effective stress to formulate the stressstrain constitutive equation describing the soil deformation, while the retention properties still involve the suction and possibly the deformation. Commonly accepted models for unsaturated soils, that is the Barcelona Basic Model and any approach based on the use of an effective averaged interstitial pressure, appear as special extreme cases of the thermodynamic formulation proposed here.

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

constitutive relations
partial saturation
pore pressures
theoretical analysis


a practical method for code generation based on exhaustive search An original method for code generation has been developed in conjunction with the construction of a compiler for the C programming language on the DEC-10 computer. The method is comprehensive, determining evaluation order and doing register allocation and instruction selection simultaneously. It uses exhaustive search rather than heuristics, and is table-driven, with most machine-specific information isolated in the tables. Testing and evaluation have shown that the method is effective, that the search process is not too time consuming, and that the compiler is capable of producing code as good as that of other optimizing compilers.

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

order
method
register allocation
code
instruction
process
tables
heuristics
practical
evaluation
search
programming language

select
optimizing compiler
test
computation
compilation
timing
effect
informal
code generation


Understanding networked youth and online privacy: Questions, methods and implications Young people's social practices online and use of digital media have been conceptualized both as an opportunity and a threat to society. While the mass media has often focused on moral panic related to dramatic examples of social media-related harm to young people, research within Library and Information Science has taken multiple methodological approaches to investigate the ways digital youth navigate and negotiate privacy in online spaces. Findings from such studies offer insight into youth cultures and technology design that supports online privacy.

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

tweens
teens
online safety
cybersecurity
cyber-safety
parents
digital literacy
digital youth


Automated and Efficient Method for Extraction of Tunnel Cross Sections Using Terrestrial Laser Scanned Data An automated and efficient method for extraction of tunnel cross sections using terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) data is presented. In this process, a three-dimensional (3D) point cloud acquired from the TLS is projected onto a horizon plane, converted to a two-dimensional (2D) planar image, and skeletonized to estimate the tunnel centerline. Stations from which cross sections are extracted are estimated from that centerline, which is vectorized and smoothed for better estimation. From those stations, cross-sectional planes are estimated, and point groups surrounding the planes are extracted. By using these point groups, the azimuth angles of the cross-sectional planes are adjusted, and the final cross sections are generated by projecting the nearby points to the adjusted planes. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated by applying it to a real tunnel and comparing the results with those from a conventional method that uses a total station. In the results, the cross sections were extracted at the stations corresponding to the conventional method. The proposed method proved itself to offer advantages, including detailed description and improved surveying and data processing efficiencies. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CP.1943-5487.0000211. (C) 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.

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


Tree automata for schema-level filtering of XML associations In this paper we present query-filtering techniques based on bottom-up tree automata for XML access control. In our authorization model (RXACL), RDF statements are used to represent security objects and to express the security policy. We present the concepts of a simple security object and an association security object. Our model allows us to express and enforce access control on XML trees and their associations. We propose a query-filtering technique that evaluates XML queries to detect disclosure of association-level security objects. We use tree automata to model-security objects. Intuitively a query Q discloses a security object o if and only if the (tree) automata corresponding to o accepts Q. We show that our schema-level method detects all possible disclosures, i.e., it is complete.

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

association object
flexible security granularity
xml security


a comparison of sender-initiated and receiver-initiated reliable multicast protocols Sender-initiated reliable multicast protocols, based on the use of positive acknowledgments (ACKs), lead to an ACK implosion problem at the sender as the number of receivers increases. Briefly, the ACK implosion problem refers to the significant overhead incurred by the sending host due to the processing of ACKs from each receiver. A potential solution to this problem is to shift the burden of providing reliable data transfer to the receiversthus resulting in a receiver-initiated multicast error control protocol based on the use of negative acknowledgments (NAKs). In this paper we determine the maximum throughputs of the sending and receiving hosts for generic sender-initiated and receiver-initiated protocols. We show that the receiver-initiated error control protocols provide substantially higher throughputs than their sender-initiated counterparts. We further demonstrate that the introduction of random delays prior to generating NAKs coupled with the multicasting of NAKs to all receivers has the potential for an additional substantial increase in the throughput of receiver-initiated error control protocols over sender-initiated protocols.

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

use throughput multicast data demonstrate paper control generic

reliability delay process randomization comparisons errors posit


Tree-based data broadcast in IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee networks This paper studies efficient and simple data broadcast in IEEE 802.15.4-based ad hoc networks ( e. g., ZigBee). Since finding the minimum number of rebroadcast nodes in general ad hoc networks is NP-hard, current broadcast protocols either employ heuristic algorithms or assume extra knowledge such as position or two-hop neighbor table. However, the ZigBee network is characterized as low data rate and low cost. It cannot provide position or two-hop neighbor information, but it still requires an efficient broadcast algorithm that can reduce the number of rebroadcast nodes with limited computation complexity and storage space. To this end, this paper proposes self-pruning and forward node selection algorithms that exploit the hierarchical address space in ZigBee networks. Only one-hop neighbor information is needed; a partial list of two-hop neighbors is derived without exchanging messages between neighboring nodes. The ZigBee forward node selection algorithm finds the minimum rebroadcast nodes set with polynomial computation time and memory space. Using the proposed localized algorithms, it is proven that the entire network is covered. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance improvement in terms of the number of rebroadcast nodes, number of duplicated receivings, coverage time, and communication overhead.

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


A scenario-based object-oriented hypermedia design methodology This paper defines an object-oriented methodology for developing hypermedia information systems. The methodology consists of six phases: domain analysis; object modeling; view design; navigation design; implementation design; and construction. Users' requirements are analyzed with a responsibility-driven technology using scenarios. Object-oriented views are generated as the result of object modeling, and then used for the subsequent navigation and implementation design. The implementation design phase deals with database schema, page structure and flow, and user interface. This methodology integrates enterprise databases with distributed hypermedia systems via Internet, Intranet, or Electronic Commerce.

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

object
hypermedia
intranet
design methodology


The compactness of adaptive routing tables The compactness of a routing table is a complexity measure of the memory space needed to store the routing table on a network whose nodes have been labelled by a consecutive range of integers. It is defined as the smallest integer k such that, in every node u, every set of labels of destinations having the same output in the table of u can be represented as the union of k intervals of consecutive labels. While many works studied the compactness of deterministic routing tables, few of them tackled the adaptive case when the output of the table, for each entry, must contain a fixed number ? of routing directions. We prove that every n-node network supports shortest path routing tables of compactness at most n/? for an adaptiveness parameter ?, whereas we show a lower bound of n/?O(1).

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


Efficient communication using message prediction for clusters of multiprocessors With the increasing uniprocessor and symmetric multiprocessor computational power available today, interprocessor communication has become an important factor that limits the performance of clusters of workstations/multiprocessors. Many factors including communication hardware overhead, communication software overhead, and the user environment overhead (multithreading, multiuser) affect the performance of the communication subsystems in such systems. A significant portion of the software communication overhead belongs to a number of message copying operations. Ideally, it is desirable to have a true zero-copy protocol where the message is moved directly from the send buffer in its user space to the receive buffer in the destination without any intermediate buffering. However, due to the fact that message-passing applications at the send side do not know the final receive buffer addresses, early arrival messages have to be buffered at a temporary area. In this paper, we show that there is a message reception communication locality in message-passing applications. We have utilized this communication locality and devised different message predictors at the receiver sides of communications. In essence, these message predictors can be efficiently used to drain the network and cache the incoming messages even if the corresponding receive calls have not yet been posted. The performance of these predictors, in terms of hit ratio, on some parallel applications are quite promising and suggest that prediction has the potential to eliminate most of the remaining message copies. We also show that the proposed predictors do not have sensitivity to the starting message reception call, and that they perform better than (or at least equal to) our previously proposed predictors. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.

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

message prediction
clusters
communication locality

message passing interface (mpi)
zero-copy


Exact Outage Probability of a Decode-and-Forward Scheme with Best Relay Selection Under Physical Layer Security As demand for highly reliable data transmission in wireless networks has increased rapidly, cooperative communication technology has attracted a great deal of attention. In cooperative communication, some nodes, called eavesdroppers, illegally receive information that is intended for other communication links at the physical layer because of the broadcast characteristics of the wireless environment. Hence, Physical Layer Security is proposed to secure the communication link between two nodes against access by the eavesdroppers. In this paper, we propose and analyze the performance of decode-and-forward schemes with the best relay selection under Physical Layer Security with two operation protocols: first, only cooperative communication, and second, a combination of direct transmission and cooperative communication (the incremental protocol). In these schemes, a source transmits data to a destination with the assistance of relays, and the source-destination link is eavesdropped by one other node. The best relay is chosen in these proposals based on the maximum Signal-to-Noise ratio from the relays to the destination, and satisfies the secure communication conditions. The performance of each system is evaluated by the exact outage probability of the data rate over Rayleigh fading channels. Monte-Carlo results are presented to verify the theoretical analysis and are compared with a direct transmission scheme under Physical Layer Security and compared with each other.

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

cooperative communication
physical layer security
best relay selection
outage probability
rayleigh fading


Multi-channel SAR imaging based on distributed compressive sensing The rapid development of compressive sensing (CS) shows that it is possible to recover a sparse signal from very limited measurements. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging based on CS can reconstruct the target scene with a reduced number of collected samples by solving an optimization problem. For multichannel SAR imaging based on CS, each channel requires sufficient samples for separate imaging and the total number of samples could still be large. We propose an imaging algorithm based on distributed compressive sensing (DCS) that reconstructs scenes jointly under multiple channels. Multi-channel SAR imaging based on DCS not only exploits the sparsity of the target scene, but also exploits the correlation among channels. It requires significantly fewer samples than multi-channel SAR imaging based on CS. If multiple channels offer different sampling rates, DCS joint processing can reconstruct target scenes with a much more flexible allocation of the number of measurements offered by each channel than that used in separate CS processing.

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

synthetic aperture radar
compressive sensing

multi-channel synthetic aperture radar
distributed compressive sensing


Effective Unconstrained Face Recognition by Combining Multiple Descriptors and Learned Background Statistics Computer vision systems have demonstrated considerable improvement in recognizing and verifying faces in digital images. Still, recognizing faces appearing in unconstrained, natural conditions remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present a face-image, pair-matching approach primarily developed and tested on the "Labeled Faces in the Wild" (LFW) benchmark that reflects the challenges of face recognition from unconstrained images. The approach we propose makes the following contributions. 1) We present a family of novel face-image descriptors designed to capture statistics of local patch similarities. 2) We demonstrate how unlabeled background samples may be used to better evaluate image similarities. To this end, we describe a number of novel, effective similarity measures. 3) We show how labeled background samples, when available, may further improve classification performance, by employing a unique pair-matching pipeline. We present state-of-the-art results on the LFW pair-matching benchmarks. In addition, we show our system to be well suited for multilabel face classification (recognition) problem, on both the LFW images and on images from the laboratory controlled multi-PIE database.

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

face and gesture recognition
image descriptors


A comparison of MC/DC, MUMCUT and several other coverage criteria for logical decisions Many testing criteria, including condition coverage and decision coverage, are inadequate for software characterised by complex logical decisions, such as those in safety-critical software. In the past decade, more sophisticated testing criteria have been advocated. In particular, compliance of the MC/DC criterion has been mandated in the commercial aviation industry for the approval of airborne software. Recently, the MUMCUT criterion has been proposed as it guarantees the detection of certain faults in logical decisions in disjunctive normal form in which no variable is redundant. This paper compares MC/DC, MUMCUT and several other related coverage criteria for logical decisions by both formal and empirical analysis, focusing on the fault-detecting ability of test sets satisfying these testing criteria. Our results show that MC/DC test sets are effective, but they may still miss some faults that can almost always be detected by test sets satisfying the MUMCUT criterion. (c) 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

condition coverage
coverage criteria
decision coverage
logical decisions
mumcut


A Theorem Prover for Boolean BI While separation logic is acknowledged as an enabling technology for large-scale program verification, most of the existing verification tools use only a fragment of separation logic that excludes separating implication. As the first step towards a verification tool using full separation logic, we develop a nested sequent calculus for Boolean BI (Bunched Implications), the underlying theory of separation logic, as well as a theorem prover based on it. A salient feature of our nested sequent calculus is that its sequent may have not only smaller child sequents but also multiple parent sequents, thus producing a graph structure of sequents instead of a tree structure. Our theorem prover is based on backward search in a refinement of the nested sequent calculus in which weakening and contraction are built into all the inference rules. We explain the details of designing our theorem prover and provide empirical evidence of its practicality.

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

verification
separation logic
boolean bi
theorem prover
nested sequent calculus


Soft computing based intention reading techniques as a means of human-robot interaction for human centered system Friendly interaction between robot and human is vital in the design of a human centered system. Among several interaction technologies, the intention reading of the user plays an important role for the human centered system. We focus on the aspect of intention reading in rehabilitation robots, and implement its capability for the wheelchair-based robotic arm system, called KARES (KAIST Rehabilitation Engineering Service System) II. An effective intention reading scheme is proposed on the basis of several soft computing techniques to handle uncertainty of the user's intention. Two application examples of intention reading in KARES II are discussed: one is visual servoing of the user's face, and the other is emergency stop of the robot by using EMG signals of the user's arm.

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

soft computing techniques
intention reading
human centered system

human-robot interaction
rehabilitation robotics


Can organizational knowledge capabilities affect knowledge sharing behavior? Recent concerns about the issue of knowledge management (KM) within an organization have accentuated the need for more efficient and effective knowledge sharing - that is, knowledge sharing plays an increasingly significant role in determining the outcomes of KM. Most scholars explore this issue from the economic perspective, while only a few research studies have focussed on organizational capabilities. Drawing from the theories of resource-based view and KM, this study aims to investigate the relationship between organizational knowledge capabilities (OKC) and knowledge sharing (KS). Using regression analysis with data from questionnaires collected in different industries with a valid response rate of 62.4%, the results show that OKC have a positive association with KS. Technical, structural, and human knowledge capabilities are significant for organizational knowledge sharing. Moreover, the effects of implementing KM on OKC and KS are also significant.

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