Cryptographic methods for collusion-secure fingerprinting of digital data We give a survey of cryptographic techniques for collusion-secure fingerprinting. Fingerprinting of digital data is a method for copyright protection in which an individual version of the data to be sold is created for each buyer by the introduction of minor errors, called marks, into the data. If the method guarantees that even collusions of dishonest buyers are not able to create versions of the data which are untraceable it is called collusion-secure fingerprinting. D. Boneh and J. Shaw gave [Proc. of CRYPTO'95, Springer, Berlin, 1995, pp. 425465] a model for collusion-secure symmetric fingerprinting and the most efficient method known so far for its realization. B. Pfitzmann and M. Schunter extended this model [Proc. of EUROCRYPT'96, Springer, Berlin, 1996, pp. 8495] by the invention of asymmetric fingerprinting which protects innocent buyers from accusation by cheating merchants. We will explain techniques presented in Ref. I. Biehl and B. Meyer [Proc. of STACS'97, Springer, Berlin, 1997, pp. 399412] which allow to use each arbitrary symmetric fingerprinting scheme for the construction of an asymmetric fingerprinting scheme of almost the same efficiency (measured in the number of watermarks included in the marked data). Moreover, we explain the idea of anonymous fingerprinting presented by B. Pfitzmann and M. Waidner [Proc. of EUROCRYPT'97, Springer, Berlin, 1997, pp. 88102] which achieves collusion-secure fingerprinting of data while protecting the anonymity of the buyers. Finally, we sketch a construction for anonymous fingerprinting schemes.

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

copy and usage control
watermarking
labeling of multimedia data
broadcast data


Smart In-Network Deduplication for Storage-aware SDN In order to efficiently handle the rapid growth of data and reduce the overhead of network transmission, we propose an in-network deduplication for storage-aware Software Defined Network (SDN), called SMIND. Unlike conventional source or destination deduplication schemes, SMIND implements in-network deduplication via SDN. Moreover, to address the performance bottleneck of accessing and indexing SDN controller, we implement an SDN-enabled Flash Translation Layer (FTL) in a real prototype of Solid State Disk (SSD). Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of SMIND.

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 B I I 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


APRICOD: An Access-Pattern-Driven Distributed Caching Middleware for Fast Content Discovery of Noncontinuous Media Access Content discovery is a major source of latency in peer-to-peer (P2P) media streaming systems, especially in the presence of noncontinuous user access, such as random seek in Video-on-Demand (VoD) streaming and teleportation in a Networked Virtual Environment (NVE). After the aforementioned user interactions, streaming systems often need to initiate the content discovery process to identify where to retrieve the requested media objects. Short content lookup latency is demanded to ensure smooth user experience. Existing content discovery systems based on either a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) or gossip mechanism cannot cope with noncontinuous access efficiently due to their long lookup latency. In this work, we propose an access-pattern-driven distributed caching middleware named APRICOD, which caters for fast and scalable content discovery in peer-to-peer media streaming systems, especially when user interactions are present. APRICOD exploits correlations among media objects accessed by users, and adapts to shift in the user access pattern automatically. We first present a general APRICOD design that can be used with any existing content discovery system. We then present an implementation of APRICOD on top of Pastry, which we use to evaluate APRICOD. Our evaluation in a 1024-node system, using a Second Life trace with 5, 735 users and a VoD trace with 54 users, shows that APRICOD can effectively resolve all continuous access queries with a single hop deterministically with node failure as an exception, and resolve noncontinuous access queries with a single hop with high probability.

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

design
content discovery
caching
access pattern
noncontinuous media access


Efficient collaboration between main and sub-suppliers Many sub-suppliers are interested in closer integration with main suppliers for product development. However, main suppliers have much work that needs to be coordinated, and close integration with suppliers is used only when it is required, and when additional value is created through integration. The main objective of this paper, is therefore, to discuss different supplier roles and increase the understanding of how suppliers can be integrated with the main supplier. The result is based on a case study with one main supplier and nine of its sub-suppliers, where the main supplier develops, assembles, and delivers a complete, complex product to the customer, and the sub-suppliers develop and manufacture sub-systems for the main supplier. The results give new insights into what the sub-suppliers could do in order to improve integration with the main supplier. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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

supplier integration
design coordination
collaborative product development
sme research


A Hybrid Variable Neighborhood Search Algorithm for Solving Multi-Objective Flexible Job Shop Problems In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid variable neighborhood search algorithm combining with the genetic algorithm (VNS+GA) for solving the multi-objective flexible job shop scheduling problems (FJSPs) to minimize the makespan, the total workload of all machines, and the workload of the busiest machine. Firstly, a mix of two machine assignment rules and two operation sequencing rules are developed to create high quality initial solutions. Secondly, two adaptive mutation rules are used in the hybrid algorithm to produce effective perturbations in machine assignment component. Thirdly, a speed-up local search method based on public critical blocks theory is proposed to produce perturbation in operation sequencing component. Simulation results based on the well-known benchmarks and statistical performance comparisons are provided. It is concluded that the proposed VNS+GA algorithm is superior to the three existing algorithms, i.e.,AL+CGA algorithm, PSO+SA algorithm and PSO+TS algorithm, in terms of searching quality and efficiency.

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

genetic algorithm
variable neighborhood search

flexible job shop scheduling problem
multi-objective


Intelligent map agents An ubiquitous personalized GIS ? The Intelligent Map Agents (IMA) is an agent-based framework aimed at providing access to, and support for the manipulation of, spatial information. The IMA is designed as an open architecture that can accommodate a large number of mobile users and services possibly distributed across a wide geographical area. Today's users are mobile and are equipped with small powerful devices. Using wireless communication, these devices are/will be capable of exchanging digital data and voice from almost any location. In this paper, we present the IMA architecture which is aimed at replacing the monolithic approach to geographic information systems with a new dynamic, lean, and customizable system supporting spatially-oriented applications. We present this vision, describe the design of the IMA and discuss a sample application.

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

intelligent agents
ubiquitous computing
distributed spatial processing


A systematic stochastic efficiency analysis model and application to international supplier performance evaluation The selection of suppliers and the evaluation of their performance are challenging complex task faced by manufacturing managers in a global market. This is mainly due to three hurdles: (1) various criteria that characterize the supplier performance, (2) risk and uncertainty associated with supplier performance on multiple measures and (3) intangible attributes in cross- countries such as the political, legal, economic, socio-cultural and technological features. The paper develops a stochastic efficiency analysis model to deal with these three hurdles. The model is a new methodological extension to data envelopment analysis (DEA) and applicable to efficiency analysis for entities from different systems with imbedded uncertainty. The application of the proposed model to the international supplier evaluation is the first attempt to model suppler performance from different sub-systems with different environment factors and uncertainty using Stochastic DEA.

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 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

stochastic data envelopment analysis (sdea)


A mobility framework to improve heterogeneous wireless network services We propose and investigate the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) enabled mobility framework to improve the user mobility experience in heterogenous wireless networks. The framework considers the traditional IP network infrastructure, IPv6 based mobility support, multihoming, traffic flow transparent handovers and flat/dynamic mobility policy enforcement to guarantee the Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) with ubiquitous connectivity. Using Network Mobility (NEMO) we can provide a flexible network integration mechanism across WiFi, WiMax and UMTS systems vertically. The flexible approach overcomes the limitation of different networks access denial when nodes move using two operations: Policy enforced handover management and Dynamic handover implementation. The paper describes the design rationale behind the solution, introduces an experimental testbed and simulation models, validates mobility related services performance, and discusses our research findings.

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

qos
quality of service
qoe
quality of experience
mobility
handover
heterogenous
ipv6
policy enforcement
flexible network


lightweight object specification with typestates Previous work has proven typestates to be useful for modeling protocols in object-oriented languages. We build on this work by addressing substitutability of subtypes as well as improving precision and conciseness of specifications. We propose a specification technique for objects based on abstract states that incorporates state refinement, method refinement, and orthogonal state dimensions. Union and intersection types form the underlying semantics of method specifications. The approach guarantees substitutability and behavioral subtyping. We designed a dynamic analysis to check existing object-oriented software for protocol conformance and validated our approach by specifying two standard Java libraries. We provide preliminary evidence for the usefulness of our approach.

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

software
refinement
union and intersection types
substitutability
method
behavioral subtyping
object
proven
dynamic analysis
evidence
libraries

precise
intersection
use
typestate
abstraction
semantic
behavior
types
standardization
model
object-oriented
subtype
object oriented language


Finite integration method for nonlocal elastic bar under static and dynamic loads The finite integration method is proposed in this paper to approximate solutions of partial differential equations. The coefficient matrix of this finite integration method is derived and its superior accuracy and efficiency is demonstrated by making comparison with the classical finite difference method. For illustration, the finite integration method is applied to solve a nonlocal elastic straight bar under different loading conditions both for static and dynamic cases in which Laplace transform technique is adopted for the dynamic problems. Several illustrative examples indicate that high accurate numerical solutions are obtained with no extra computational efforts. The method is readily extendable to solve more complicated problems of nonlocal elasticity.

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

nonlocal elasticity
finite integration method
laplace transform
static and dynamic loads


Full soft sets and full soft decision systems The purpose of this paper is to investigate the notion of full soft sets [6], which is a generalized notion of bijective soft sets [11] and exclusive disjunctive soft sets [21], and to simplify the notion of uncertain elements defined in exclusive disjunctive soft sets. We also investigate some operations and soft decision systems induced by full soft sets: restricted/relaxed AND operations, Type I(II)-dependency between full soft sets and bijective soft sets, full soft decision systems, reduction of full soft decision systems, decision rules in full soft decision systems.

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

full soft sets
exclusive disjunctive soft sets
full soft decision systems

soft set
bijective soft set
restricted/relaxed and operations
type i(ii)-dependency


Approximation schemes for packing with item fragmentation We consider two variants of the classical bin packing problem in which items may be fragmented. This can potentially reduce the total number of bins needed for packing the instance. However, since fragmentation incurs overhead, we attempt to avoid it as much as possible. In bin packing with size increasing fragmentation ( BP-SIF), fragmenting an item increases the input size ( due to a header/footer of fixed size that is added to each fragment). In bin packing with size preserving fragmentation (BP-SPF), there is a bound on the total number of fragmented items. These two variants of bin packing capture many practical scenarios, including message transmission in community TV networks, VLSI circuit design and preemptive scheduling on parallel machines with setup times/setup costs. While both BP-SPF and BP-SIF do not belong to the class of problems that admit a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS), we show in this paper that both problems admit a dual PTAS and an asymptotic PTAS. We also develop for each of the problems a dual asymptotic fully polynomial time approximation scheme (AFPTAS). Our AFPTASs are based on a non-standard transformation of the mixed packing and covering linear program formulations of our problems into pure covering programs, which enables to efficiently solve these programs.

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

polynomial time approximation schemes
linear programming
algorithms


program transformation for numerical precision This article introduces a new program transformation in order to enhance the numerical accuracy of floating-point computations. We consider that a program would return an exact result if the computations were carried out using real numbers. In practice, roundoff errors due to the finite representation of values arise during the execution. These errors are closely related to the way formulas are evaluated. Indeed, mathematically equivalent formulas, obtained using laws like associativity, distributivity, etc., may lead to very different numerical results in the computer arithmetic. We propose a semantics-based transformation in order to optimize the numerical accuracy of programs. This transformation is expressed in the abstract interpretation framework and it aims at rewriting pieces of numerical codes in order to obtain results closer to what the computer would output if it used the exact arithmetic.

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

abstract interpretation
numerical precision
program transformation

compiler optimizations
floating-point numbers


Measuring the blame of each formula for inconsistent prioritized knowledge bases It is increasingly recognized that identifying the degree of blame or responsibility of each formula for inconsistency of a knowledge base (i.e. a set of formulas) is useful for making rational decisions to resolve inconsistency in that knowledge base. Most current techniques for measuring the blame of each formula with regard to an inconsistent knowledge base focus on classical knowledge bases only. Proposals for measuring the blames of formulas with regard to an inconsistent prioritized knowledge base have not yet been given much consideration. However, the notion of priority is important in inconsistency-tolerant reasoning. This article investigates this issue and presents a family of measurements for the degree of blame of each formula in an inconsistent prioritized knowledge base by using the minimal inconsistent subsets of that knowledge base. First of all, we present a set of intuitive postulates as general criteria to characterize rational measurements for the blames of formulas of an inconsistent prioritized knowledge base. Then we present a family of measurements for the blame of each formula in an inconsistent prioritized knowledge base under the guidance of the principle of proportionality, one of the intuitive postulates. We also demonstrate that each of these measurements possesses the properties that it ought to have. Finally, we use a simple but explanatory example in requirements engineering to illustrate the application of these measurements. Compared to the related works, the postulates presented in this article consider the special characteristics of minimal inconsistent subsets as well as the priority levels of formulas. This makes them more appropriate to characterizing the inconsistency measures defined from minimal inconsistent subsets for prioritized knowledge bases as well as classical knowledge bases. Correspondingly, the measures guided by these postulates can intuitively capture the inconsistency for prioritized knowledge bases.

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

inconsistency measures
prioritized knowledge base
minimal inconsistent subsets


Numerical modeling of the long term behavior of Municipal Solid Waste in a bioreactor landfill This paper presents a thermo-hydro-biochemo-mechanical model for simulating the long term behavior of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in a bioreactor landfill, in which the multi-physics coupling mechanism plays a dominant role. In the model, a two-stage anaerobic biochemical model based on McDougalls formulation is incorporated into a fully coupled thermo-hydro-mechanical models originally developed for unsaturated porous medium. The mechanical model is a modified Camclay model allowing for biochemical hardening/softening, while the thermal model is described by a classical energy balance equation with a source term accounting for the heat generation from the biodegradation of organic matter. The hydraulic model is an unsaturated flow model using Richards equation. The derived coupled model is implemented into an in-house built multi-physics finite element code. Finally, numerical simulations were performed to illustrate the capability of the proposed model for estimating long-term settlement of a bioreactor landfill and its aptitude as a landfill management tool for optimizing the landfill operation.

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

municipal solid waste
bioreactor landfill
biodegradation

multi-physics coupling
waste settlements


A STABLE DIRECT SOLUTION OF PERSPECTIVE-THREE-POINT PROBLEM The perspective-three-point problem (P3P) is a classical problem in computer vision. The existing direct solutions of P3P have at least three limitations: (1) the numerical instability when using different vertex permutations, (2) the degeneration in the geometric singularity case, and (3) the dependence on particular equation solvers. A new direct solution of P3P is presented to deal with these limitations. The main idea is to reduce the number of unknown parameters by using a geometric constraint we called "perspective similar triangle" (PST). The PST method achieves high stability in the permutation problem and in the presence of image noise, and does not rely on particular equation solvers. Furthermore, reliable results can be retrieved even in "danger cylinder", a typical kind of geometric singularity of P3P, where all existing direct solutions degenerate significantly.

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

perspective-three-point problem (p3p)
camera pose estimation


Statistical analysis of the three dimensional joint complex Although three-dimensional data capture has become routine, statistical methods that take appropriate advantage of these multivariate data have not been widely developed. Researchers frequently rely on multiple isolated univariate statistical methods in the analysis of a joint's several axes of rotation and their associated motions. This approach reflects an inherent flaw in that it fails to appreciate the unbreakable link among these descriptors. We propose a new analytical perspective. Borrowing from the techniques of geometric morphometrics, data that describe multiple joint axis orientations and the motions about them are converted into a shape, an axis triangle, that is viewable in a three-dimensional space. In this format, multivariate statistical analyses can be conducted using conventional analytical packages. The axis triangle technique represents a significant advance over current analytical approaches in that it provides an encompassing method of appreciating joint rotations, as well as comprehensive consideration of joint function by linking rotational axis orientations with associated motion patterns.

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

multivariate statistics
oblique axes
rotational movement


SPONTANEOUS SPEECH DIALOG SYSTEM TOSBURG-II AND ITS EVALUATION We have developed a spontaneous speech dialogue system TOSBURG II, employing keyword-based spontaneous speech understanding and multimodal response generation, with adaptive speech response cancellation. Since in multimodal interaction, the user understands the system's response by a visual output before its speech response is completed, the user often interrupts the system's speech response. Therefore, our adaptive speech response cancellation serves to facilitate natural human-computer interaction by allowing the user's interruption. We have also developed an evaluation environment for dialogue data collection and the performance of TOSBURG II. Unlike conventional data collection systems, TOSBURG II collection in this environment not only speech data and the final results of speech understanding but also its intermediate results as dialogue data, to use them for the evaluation and improvement of the system. The results of our dialogue experiments using TOSBURG II prove the effectiveness of adaptive speech response cancellation for natural interaction, confirming that the dialogue data and the evaluation environment will contribute to a further development of spontaneous speech dialogue systems.

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

speech recognition
word spotting
multimodal dialog
active noise cancellation


Improving performance and energy efficiency of embedded processors via post-fabrication instruction set customization Encapsulating critical computation subgraphs as application-specific instruction set extensions is an effective technique to enhance the performance and energy efficiency of embedded processors. However, the addition of custom functional units to the base processor is required to support the execution of custom instructions. Although automated tools have been developed to reduce the long design time needed to produce a new extensible processor for each application, short time-to-market, significant non-recurring engineering and design costs are issues. To address these concerns, we introduce an adaptive extensible processor in which custom instructions are generated and added after chip-fabrication. To support this feature, custom functional units (CFUs) are replaced by a reconfigurable functional unit (RFU). The proposed RFU is based on a matrix of functional units which is multi-cycle with the capability of conditional execution. To generate more effective custom instructions, they are extended over basic blocks and hence, multiple-exits custom instruction and intuition behind it are introduced. Conditional execution capability has been added to the RFU to support the multi-exit feature of custom instructions. Because the proposed RFU has limitations on hardware resources (i.e., connections and processing elements), an integrated mapping-temporal partitioning framework is proposed to guarantee that the generated custom instructions can be mapped on the RFU (mappable custom instructions). Experimental results show that multi-exit custom instructions enhance the performance and energy efficiency by an average of 32% and 3% compared to custom instructions limited to one basic block, respectively. A maximum speedup of 4.9, compared to a single-issue embedded processor, and an average speedup of 1.9 was achieved on MiBench benchmark suite. The maximum and average energy saving are 56% and 22%, respectively. These performance and energy efficiency are obtained at the cost of 30% area overhead.

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

custom instruction
reconfigurable functional unit
conditional execution

high-performance low-power embedded processors


an interactive debugger for a concurrent language This work deals with issues of interactive debugging for the concurrent language ECSP. The debugger matches a formal specification of the expected behavior of a program against its actual behaviour. This specification can be given at different levels of abstraction. Control is returned to the user when an error is detected. The user can then modify the flow of the computation and/or dynamically change the specification of the expected behavior. The debugger implementation is based on program transformation techniques.

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

abstraction
language
behavior
computation
implementation
flow
program transformation
control
user
debugging
change
formal specification


Numerical prediction of interfacial instabilities: Sharp interface method (SIM) We introduce a sharp interface method (SIM) for the direct numerical simulation of unstable fluidfluid interfaces. The method is based on the level set approach and the structured adaptive mesh refinement technology, endowed with a corridor of irregular, cut-cell grids that resolve the interfacial region to third-order spatial accuracy. Key in that regard are avoidance of numerical mixing, and a least-squares interpolation method that is supported by irregular datasets distinctly on each side of the interface. Results on test problems show our method to be free of the spurious current problem of the continuous surface force method and to converge, on grid refinement, at near-theoretical rates. Simulations of unstable RayleighTaylor and viscous KelvinHelmholtz flows are found to converge at near-theoretical rates to the exact results over a wide range of conditions. Further, we show predictions of neutral-stability maps of the viscous KelvinHelmholtz flows (Yih instability), as well as self-selection of the most unstable wave-number in multimode simulations of RayleighTaylor instability. All these results were obtained with a simple seeding of random infinitesimal disturbances of interface-shape, as opposed to seeding by a complete eigenmode. For other than elementary flows the latter would normally not be available, and extremely difficult to obtain if at all. Sample comparisons with our code adapted to mimic typical diffuse interface treatments were not satisfactory for shear-dominated flows. On the other hand the sharp dynamics of our method would appear to be compatible and possibly advantageous to any interfacial flow algorithm in which the interface is represented as a discrete Heaviside function.

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

yih instability
rayleightaylor instability

instability-seeding in numerical simulations


Hyperpolygons generated by the invertible Minkowski sum of polygons The paper gives a new formulation of the Minkowski sum of polygons. In the conventional Minkowski sum, the inverse operation is not well defined unless the polygons are restricted to be convex. In the proposed formulation, on the other hand, the set of polygons is extended to the set of hyperpolygons, in which the Minkowski sum forms a commutative group. Consequently, every polygon has its unique inverse, and the sum and the inverse operations can be taken freely. A relation between hyperpolygons and physical reality is also discussed.

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

boundary representation
angle-parametrized polygonal curve


Combining pixel-level and patch-level information for segmentation The image patch has been widely used in many applications, such as image denoising and segmentation, in which the patch-level information is utilized by comparing the similarities between pairwise patches. Nevertheless, the similarities between patches are not accurate enough for irregular shaped objects, which may lead to over-smoothness for the details around image boundary regions. Most graph cut based methods introduce the patch-level information into the boundary term of the energy function, which, however, would dramatically increase the time complexity due to the similarity computations of all pairwise patches. To overcome above issues and effectively utilize the patch information in graph cut model, in this paper, we first utilize the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to construct the structural features of patches. Therefore, the patch-level information can be effectively obtained based on the learning of GMM. Then we combine the pixel-level information and patch-level information together to further improve the segmentation accuracy for the details around boundary regions. Finally, the combination information is introduced into the region energy term of the graph cut framework. Experimental results on various images from the Berkeley and MSRC data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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


Automatic pronunciation scoring of words and sentences independent from the non-natives first language This paper describes an approach for automatic scoring of pronunciation quality for non-native speech. It is applicable regardless of the foreign language students mother tongue. Sentences and words are considered as scoring units. Additionally, mispronunciation and phoneme confusion statistics for the target language phoneme set are derived from human annotations and word level scoring results using a Markov chain model of mispronunciation detection. The proposed methods can be employed for building a part of the scoring module of a system for computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT). Methods from pattern and speech recognition are applied to develop appropriate feature sets for sentence and word level scoring. Besides features well-known from and approved in previous research, e.g. phoneme accuracy, posterior score, duration score and recognition accuracy, new features such as high-level phoneme confidence measures are identified. The proposed method is evaluated with native English speech, non-native English speech from German, French, Japanese, Indonesian and Chinese adults and non-native speech from German school children. The speech data are annotated with tags for mispronounced words and sentence level ratings by native English teachers. Experimental results show, that the reliability of automatic sentence level scoring by the system is almost as high as the average human evaluator. Furthermore, a good performance for detecting mispronounced words is achieved. In a validation experiment, it could also be verified, that the system gives the highest pronunciation quality scores to 90% of native speakers utterances. Automatic error diagnosis based on a automatically derived phoneme mispronunciation statistic showed reasonable results for five non-native speaker groups. The statistics can be exploited in order to provide the non-native feedback on mispronounced phonemes.

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

mispronunciation detection
phoneme mispronunciation statistic

non-native speech
pronunciation assessment
sentence scoring
word scoring


Kinetic Collision Detection for Convex Fat Objects We design compact and responsive kinetic data structures for detecting collisions between n convex fat objects in 3-dimensional space that can have arbitrary sizes. Our main results are: (i) If the objects are 3-dimensional balls that roll on a plane, then we can detect collisions with a KDS of size O(n log n) that can handle events in O(log(2) n) time. This structure processes O(n(2)) events in the worst case, assuming that the objects follow constant-degree algebraic trajectories. (ii) If the objects are convex fat 3-dimensional objects of constant complexity that are free-flying in R(3), then we can detect collisions with a KDS of O(n log(6) n) size that can handle events in O(log(7) n) time. This structure processes O(n(2)) events in the worst case, assuming that the objects follow constant-degree algebraic trajectories. If the objects have similar sizes then the size of the KDS becomes O(n) and events can be handled in O(log n) time.

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

kinetic data structures
collision detection
fat objects


DSMC method consistent with the Pauli exclusion principle and comparison with deterministic solutions for charge transport in graphene A new algorithm for Monte Carlo simulations of charge transport in semiconductors is devised in order to properly deal with Pauli's exclusion principle in the degenerate case. Applications are presented in the case of monolayer graphene and comparisons with solutions of the Boltzmann equation obtained by using a discontinuous Galerkin method furnish a cross-validation of the proposed approach.

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 B I I O O O O O O O

monte carlo method
pauli's exclusion principle


An empirically-developed framework for Agile transition and adoption: A Grounded Theory approach We show how a large-scale empirical study using Grounded Theory has been used to study Agile transition and adoption process. An empirically-developed transition framework to facilitate Agile transformation is proposed. We describe the key structural characteristics and activities of the transition framework. We report how the inductively developed framework can be a good replacement for the previous one. We report empirical evaluation of the findings and theoretical and practical implications of them.

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

agile software development
agile transformation process
agile adoption


A review of computer assisted detection/diagnosis (CAD) in breast thermography for breast cancer detection Breast cancer is the leading type of cancer diagnosed in women. For years human limitations in interpreting the thermograms possessed a considerable challenge, but with the introduction of computer assisted detection/diagnosis (CAD), this problem has been addressed. This review paper compares different approaches based on neural networks and fuzzy systems which have been implemented in different CAD designs. The greatest improvement in CAD systems was achieved with a combination of fuzzy logic and artificial neural networks in the form of FALCON-AART complementary learning fuzzy neural network (CLFNN). With a CAD design based on FALCON-AART, it was possible to achieve an overall accuracy of near 90%. This confirms that CAD systems are indeed a valuable addition to the efforts for the diagnosis of breast cancer. Lower cost and high performance of new infrared systems combined with accurate CAD designs can promote the use of thermography in many breast cancer centres worldwide.

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

thermography
breast cancer
fuzzy logic
neural networks


Current-mode multiphase sinusoidal oscillator based on current differencing units This paper describes the design and experimental verification of a current-mode multiphase sinusoidal oscillator (MSO) employing current differencing units. The oscillator, composed of n 1st-order all-pass sections, generates harmonic current signals with 2n equidistant phase shifts, where n a parts per thousand yen 2. Compared with conventional MSOs, this circuit is characterized by an extremely simple circuitry and a minimum number of passive and active components. The oscillation condition and the frequency of oscillation are orthogonally controlled. The proposed circuit is suitable for IC fabrication. Experimental verification on an erlier manufactured chip together with a detailed analysis of real influences are included in 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 O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

multiphase oscillator
current differencing unit
current-mode
all-pass filter


Moral equivalents of greed The author considers James (1910) essay The Moral Equivalent of War and applies some of its ideas to another pressing problem of our times, which for short is called greed, but can be described more precisely as the working out of the possessive market society under the conditions of neoliberalism and great technological power. James considered that pacifists had the best arguments, but failed to persuade mainstream society. The same can be said today of the critics of neoliberalism. There is need for radical change away from an unjust and dysfunctional economic system, but mainstream society is unwilling to try new ideas. The present author adapts James idea and considers benign and malign forms of greed. What we all desire, more than huge monetary assets, is self-respect and social respect. There are already many rewards that are not primarily monetary. In a radically different culture, which rejected the principles of unlimited accumulation and almost unlimited convertibility, benign rewards would motivate constructive activity. The moral equivalents of greed briefly discussed here areHonours and prizes for merit (administered justly); Celebrity (important in society); Luck (gambling, with certain constraints, could be benign); Power (rewarding in itself, so large monetary gain need not go with it); Services (people making important contributions to society could concentrate their commitment); Temporary custody of public treasures (a privilege prized by some). The essay ends by linking James idea, the Faustian bargain myth, and the necessity of hope.

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


H.264 error resilience coding based on multi-hypothesis motion-compensated prediction In this paper, we propose efficient schemes for enhancing the error robustness of multi-hypothesis motion-compensate predictive (MHMCP) coder without sacrificing the coding efficiency significantly. The proposed schemes utilize the concept of reference picture interleaving and data partitioning to make the MHMCP-coded video more resilient to channel errors, especially for burst channel error. Besides, we also propose a scheme of integrating adaptive intra-refresh into the proposed MHMCP coder to further improve the error recovery speed. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed methods can effectively and quickly mitigate the error propagation and the penalty on coding efficiency for clean channels due to the inserted error resilience features is rather minor.

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

multi-hypothesis prediction
video streaming
wireless video
h.264 video coding


Design and performance analysis of the practical fat tree network using a butterfly network The Practical Fat Tree Network (PFN) is proposed as an efficient interconnection structure for parallel processing computers using a butterfly network, It satisfies the concept of Volume universality from Leiserson's theoretical fat tree network [1]. In the fat tree network, the locality of input traffic is a very important factor because it has significant effects on performance. The proposed performance model effectively highlights this locality factor, Performance is analyzed according to varing input traffic loads and buffer sizes, The accuracy of the model is confirmed by comparing its results with those from simulation, The proposed model is found to be very accurate, Although the PFN is a dynamic connection network, it shows low delay and high throughput for the applications that have locality.

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 B I I O O O B I I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 modeling and evaluation
interconnection networks


On the use of Somigliana's formulae and series of surface spherical harmonics for elasticity problems with spherical boundaries This paper discusses applications of Somiglina's identities to the solutions of elasticity problems with spherical boundaries. The components of the boundary displacements and tractions involved in the identities are represented as truncated series of surface spherical harmonics, and all of the integrals involved in the formulae are evaluated analytically. The classical problems of a solid sphere, a spherical cavity, and a perfectly bonded spherical inhomogeneity (an inclusion with the elastic properties different from those of the surrounding material) are solved with the use of Somiglina's identities. Extensions of the new solutions to more complicated three-dimensional problems with spherical boundaries are discussed.

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

spherical boundaries
spherical inhomogeneity


Peonidin Inhibits Phorbol-EsterInduced COX-2 Expression and Transformation in JB6 P+ Cells by Blocking Phosphorylation of ERK-1 and -2 Abnormal upregulation of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) has been frequently observed in various types of transformed and cancerous cells. Numerous anti-inflammatory agents have been shown to exert chemopreventive effects by targeting COX-2, a rate-limiting enzyme involved in the inflammatory process. Anthocyanins are naturally occurring polyphenolic compounds that endow various fruits, vegetables, and plants with intense colors. Peonidin is another representative anthocyanidin, but its chemopreventive potential has not been fully described. This article investigated the effect of peonidin on 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol-13-acetate (TPA)-induced COX-2 expression and transformation in JB6 P+ mouse epidermal cells (JB6 P+ cells). Treatment of JB6 P+ cells with peonidin inhibited TPA-induced COX-2 expression, and also decreased TPA-induced neoplastic transformation and blocked TPA-induced phosphorylation of extracellular signal-regulated kinases (ERKs) in the cells. The inhibition of the signaling mechanism regulating the activation of ERKs strongly suggests that peonidin exhibits chemopreventive as well as anti-inflammatory activities

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

extracellular signal-regulated protein kinases


layer assignment echniques for low energy in multi-layered memory organisations Nearly all platforms use a multi-layer memory hierarchy to bridge the enormous latency gap between the large off-chip memories and local register files. However, most of previous work on HW or SW controlled techniques for layer assignment have been mainly focussed on performance. As a result, the intermediate layers have been assigned too large sizes leading to energy inefficiency. In this paper we present a technique that takes advantage of both the temporal locality and limited lifetime of the arrays of the application for minimum energy consumption under layer size constraints. A prototype tool has been developed and tested using two real-life applications of industrial relevance. Following this approach we have been able to half the energy consumed by the memory hierarchy for each of our drivers.

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

lifetime
applications
use
latency
energy consumption
industrial
prototype
size
performance
assignment
energy
tool
layer
temporal
relevance
paper
locality

platform
memorialized
register file
low energy
constraint
memory hierarchies


A multifractal approach for extracting relevant textural areas in satellite meteorological images In the latest years, the use of computer vision tools for automatically analyzing the large amount of data acquired by remote sensing has grown in importance and number of different applications, ranging from basic research to industry. However, images displaying natural phenomena, and especially turbulence, develop following complicated patterns which are difficult to segment and to analyze with those tools. In this paper, we discuss on the use of new image processing methods to describe complicated flow and flow-like quantities, in applications such as meteorology. Using infrared satellite images as an example, we show that we are naturally led to gain insight in the physical and geometrical properties of the observed complex structures. We analyze different processing techniques (multiscale texture classification and multifractal decomposition and reconstruction) issued from the so-called multiscale methodology. The efficiency of multiscale methodology lies on its ability of reproducing known, experimental physical properties of the systems in study (such as scale invariance or multiscaling exponents) in the analysis scheme of images. We show that this methodology can be further exploited in order to derive information about a dynamical property from still infrared images. Namely, the main goal of our study is to detect and characterize textural areas at which typical convective movements take place. For that purpose, we compare the actual graylevel distribution in images, providing information about the temperature distribution, and a synthetic graylevel distribution induced by the multifractal formalism, also reinterpreted by its connection with thermodynamics. The conclusions of our work can be generalized to any analogous physical system.

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

classification
multiscale texture
multifractal

infrared image
convective clouds
rainfall systems
wavelet


Differential equations involving causal operators with nonlinear periodic boundary conditions The notion of causal operators is extended to periodic boundary value problems with nonlinear boundary conditions in this paper. By utilizing the monotone iterative technique and the method of lower and upper solutions (resp. weakly coupled lower and upper solutions), we establish the existence of the extremal solutions (resp. weakly coupled extremal quasi-solutions) for nonlinear periodic boundary value problems with causal operators. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

lower and upper solutions
causal operators
nonlinear periodic boundary conditions


Performance study of receiver diversity techniques in 802.11a WLANs Our analysis is performed in the context of a study of adaptive radio techniques, in the attempt to improve link availability and transmission quality of broadband wireless systems, and especially to achieve an efficient use of radio resources. We have established our focus on spatial diversity techniques, and this paper presents a performance analysis of receiver combining techniques for indoor multipath scenarios, in the particular case of an 802.11a PHY. Even if a performance hierarchy of these techniques is established - based on diversity gain improvement - we wanted to see which combining technique is better for a particular scenario. The detailed observations will enable us to set the premises for new adaptive techniques or adaptive combinations.

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

space diversity
multipath propagation
802.11a phy


Time dependent Schrodinger equation on arbitrary structured grids: Application to photoionization A systematic technique for conservatively discretizing the time dependent Schrodinger equation on an arbitrary structured grid is given. Spatial differencing is carried out by finite volumes, and temporal differencing is carried out semi-implicitly. It is shown that the resulting algorithm conserves probability to within a round-off error regardless of the grid geometry. The algorithm is efficient for both serial and parallel computation. The conservative nature of the algorithm, and its phase accuracy, are demonstrated for a bound state, and for a free state in an electromagnetic field. The ionization rate for a hydrogen atom in a strong electromagnetic field is computed, and compared with the rate from tunneling theory. The regime of validity of tunneling theory is clarified. Published by Elsevier Inc.

O O B I O O O O O O B 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


A fast malware detection algorithm based on objective-oriented association mining Objective-oriented association (OOA) mininghas been successfully applied in malware detection. One problem of OOA mining is that the number of association rules is very large, and many of the rules are redundant and have little capacity to distinguish malware from benign files. This circumstance seriously affects the running speed of OOA for malware detection. In this paper, an API (Application Programming Interface)-based association mining method is proposed for detecting malware. To increase the detection speed of the OOA, different strategies are presented: to improve the rule quality, criteria for API selection are proposed to remove APIs that cannot become frequent items; to find association rules that have strong discrimination power, we define the rule utility to evaluate the association rules; and to improve the detection accuracy, a classification method based on multiple association rules is adopted. The experiments show that the proposed strategies can significantly improve the running speed of OOA. In our experiments the time cost for data mining is reduced by thirty-two percent, and the time cost for classification is reduced by fifty percent.

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

objective-oriented associate mining
security
machine learning


RNGSSELIB:

Program

library

for

random

number

generation,

realization

The

library

RNGSSELIB

for

random

number

generators

(RNGs)

based

upon

the

command

set

is

presented.

The

library

contains

realization

of

a

number

of

modern

and

most

reliable

generators.

Usage

of

command

set

allows

to

substantially

improve

performance

of

the

generators.

Three

new

RNG

realizations

are

also

constructed.

We

present

detailed

analysis

of

the

speed

depending

on

compiler

usage

and

associated

optimization

level,

as

well

as

results

of

extensive

statistical

testing

for

all

generators

using

available

test

packages.

Fast

SSE

implementations

produce

exactly

the

same

output

sequence

as

the

original

algorithms.

Program

summary

Program

title:

RNGSSELIB

Catalogue

identifier:

Program

summary

URL:

Program

obtainable

from:

CPC

Program

Library,

Queen's

University,

Belfast,

N.

Ireland

Licensing

provisions:

Standard

CPC

licence,

No.

of

lines

in

distributed

program,

including

test

data,

etc.:

No.

of

bytes

in

distributed

program.

including

test

data,

etc.:

Distribution

format:

tar.gz

Programming

language:

C.

Computer:

PC.

Operating

system:

UNIX,

Windows.

RAM:

Mbytes

Classification:

Nature

of

problem:

Any

calculation

requiring

uniform

pseudorandom

number

generator,

in

particular,

Monte

Carlo

calculations.

Solution

method:

The

library

contains

realization

of

a

number

of

modern

and

reliable

generators:

and

Also

new

realizations

for

the

method

based

on

parallel

evolution

of

an

ensemble

of

dynamical

systems

are

constructed:

and

The

library

contains

both

usual

realizations

and

realizations

based

on

SSE

command

set.

Usage

of

SSE

commands

allows

the

performance

of

all

generators

to

be

substantially

improved.

Restrictions:

For

SSE

realizations

of

the

generators.

Intel

or

AMD

CPU

supporting

command

set

is

required.

In

order

to

use

the

realization

CPU

must

support

command

set.

Running

time:

Running

time

is

of

the

order

of

sec

for

generating

pseudorandom

numbers

with

a

PC

based

on

Intel

Core

CPU.

Running

time

is

analysed

in

detail

in

Section

of

the

paper.

(C)

Elsevier

B.V.

All

rights

reserved.

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

monte carlo
pseudorandom numbers
random number generation

statistical methods
random numbers
streaming simd extensions


Covalent complexes of proteasome model with peptide aldehyde inhibitors MG132 and MG101: docking and molecular dynamics study 20S proteasome plays a critical role in the regulation of several important cellular processes and has drawn extensive interest in the field of anti-tumor research. Peptide aldehydes can inhibit the 20S proteasome activity by covalently binding to the active site of the beta subunits. In this work, covalent docking in conjunction with molecular dynamics (MD) simulation was used to explore the binding mode of MG132. Two conformations with the lowest docking energy were selected as the representative binding modes. One of the conformations was confirmed as a more reasonable binding mode by molecular dynamics simulations. The binding mode analysis revealed that a space demanding aromatic group with a short linker at the P4 site of the peptide aldehyde inhibitor would form favorable hydrophobic contacts with the neighboring subunit. A bulky substituent at the P2 position would also increase the binding stability by reducing water accessibility of the covalent bond. This study contributed to our understanding of the mechanism and structure-activity relationship of the peptide aldehyde inhibitors and may provide useful information for rational drug design.

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

covalent docking
molecular dynamics
peptide aldehydes
proteasome


An introduction to the joint principles for data citation EDITOR'S SUMMARY

data sets
data curation
access to resources
source materials
citation analysis


Iterative solutions of coupled discrete Markovian jump Lyapunov equations In this paper, two iterative methods are given to solve Coupled discrete Markovian jump Lyapunov equations arising from the stability analysis of discrete-time Markovian jump systems. When such equations have unique positive definite solutions, a sufficient condition for the convergence of iterates for one iterative method is derived. When such equations only have unique solutions, but not necessarily positive definite, the above iterative method may fail and an alterative iterative method is provided by using the solutions of discrete-time Lyapunov equations as its intermediate steps. A Sufficient condition is also presented for the convergence of the iterates. (c) 2007 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 B I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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


Continuous bottleneck tree partitioning problems We study continuous partitioning problems on tree network spaces whose edges and nodes are points in Euclidean spaces. A continuous partition of this space into p connected components is a collection of p subtrees, such that no pair of them intersect at more than one point, and their union is the tree space. An edge-partition is a continuous partition defined by selecting p?1 cut points along the edges of the underlying tree, which is assumed to have n nodes. These cut points induce a partition into p subtrees (connected components). The objective is to minimize (maximize) the maximum (minimum) size of the components (the minmax (maxmin) problem). When the size is the length of a subtree, the minmax and the maxmin partitioning problems are NP-hard. We present algorithms for the edge-partitioning versions of the problem. When the size is the diameter, the minmax problems coincide with the continuous p-center problem. We describe and algorithms for the maxmin partitioning and edge-partitioning problems, respectively, where the size is the diameter of a component.

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

continuous p-center problems
bottleneck problems
parametric search


A note on the relationship between market efficiency and adaptability New evidence from artificial stock markets Greater genetic diversity characterised by Hurst exponent of 0.5. The presence of more traders is related to a short-memory process. The standard deviation is higher in markets with fewer traders. There is no presence of ARCH effect in the most efficient markets. Market adaptability in line with the null hypothesis of BDS and Kaplan tests.

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

efficient market hypothesis
adaptive market hypothesis
agent-based modelling
genetic programming


Socio-Cultural Imbalances in AIED Research: Investigations, Implications and Opportunities This paper investigates international representations in the Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) research field. Its methodological and theoretical groundings are inspired by Arnett (2008) and Henrich et al. (2010a) who addressed the same issue in psychology, and respectively a) discovered massive imbalances in representation in top-tier psychology journals, and b) clarified risks of this situation. Data on research production collected on 2 top-tiers AIED conferences indicate that relatively similar imbalances exist in AIED. Potential threats and challenges induced by that situation are discussed as well as additionally identified phenomena related to the culture of the AIED community.

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

culture
artificial intelligence in education

international representation in research


Learning topic of dynamic scene using belief propagation and weighted visual words approach In this paper, we are tackling the problem of distinguishing scenes, including static and dynamic scenes. We propose a framework of scene recognition, based on bag of visual words and topic model. We achieve the task using the topic model by belief propagation (TMBP), which belongs to the family of the latent Dirichlet allocation model. We also extend the TMBP model, called as the knowledge TMBP model, by introducing the prior information of visual words and scenes. Experimental results on the static and dynamic scenes demonstrated that our proposed framework is effective and efficient. The scene semantics can be obtained from two levels of visual words and topics in our framework. Our result significantly outperforms the others using low-level visual features, such as spatial, temporal and spatiotemporal features.

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

scene recognition
topic model
bag of visual words

topic model by belief propagation (tmbp)


Strong qualitative independence The subsets A,B of the n-element X are said to be s-strongly separating if the two sets divide X into four sets of size at least s. The maximum number h(n,s) of pairwise s-strongly separating subsets was asymptotically determined by Frankl (Ars Combin. 1 (1976) 53) for fixed s and large n. A new proof is given. Also, estimates for h(n,cn) are found where c is a small constant.

O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 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 bibliometric study of the worlds research activity in sustainable development and its sub-areas using scientific literature This paper presents a bibliometric study of the worlds research activity in Sustainable Development using scientific literature. The study was conducted using data from the Scopus database over the time period of 20002010. We investigated the research landscape in Sustainable Development at country level and at institute level. Sustainable Development and its sub-areas are defined by keywords vetted by the domain experts, allowing publications to be identified independent of the journals and conferences in which they are published. The results indicate that institutes strong in Sustainable Development overall may not be strong in all sub-areas and that institutes not strong in Sustainable Development overall may have significant niche strengths in a given sub-area. It is also noted that China appears strong in terms of publication output in Sustainable Development and its sub-areas but it does not appear strong in terms of citation counts. The information produced in this study can be useful for government research agencies in terms of understanding how to more effectively knit together the various niche strengths in the country; and for the institutes to find strategic partners that can coordinate in niche areas of Sustainable Development and complement their strengths. In order to conduct bibliometric analysis in an interdisciplinary research area, the keyword collection approach appears to be very useful. This approach is flexible and can be used to conduct such analysis for interdisciplinary research fields.

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

sustainable development
interdisciplinary research fields


Pervasive Flexibility in Living Technologies through Degeneracy-Based Design The capacity to adapt can greatly influence the success of systems that need to compensate for damaged parts, learn how to achieve robust performance in new environments, or exploit novel opportunities that originate from new technological interfaces or emerging markets. Many of the conditions in which technology is required to adapt cannot be anticipated during its design stage, thus creating a challenge for the designer. Inspired by the study of a range of biological systems, we propose that degeneracy-the realization of multiple, functionally versatile components with contextually overlapping functional redundancy-will support adaptation in technologies, because it effects pervasive flexibility, evolutionary innovation, and homeostatic robustness. We provide examples of degeneracy in a number of rudimentary living technologies, from military sociotechnical systems to swarm robotics, and we present design principles-including shared protocols, loose regulatory coupling, and functional versatility-that allow degeneracy to arise in both biological and man-made systems.

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

pervasive flexibility
adaptation
degeneracy
living technologies


Fully scalable fault-tolerant simulations for BSP and CGM In this paper we consider general simulations of algorithms designed for fully operational BSP and CGM machines on machines with faulty processors. The BSP (or CGM) machine is a parallel multicomputer consisting of p processors for which a memory of n words is evenly distributed and each processor can send and receive at most h messages in a superstep. The faults are deterministic (i.e., worst-case distributions of faults are considered) and static (i.e., they do not change in the course of computation). We assume that a constant fraction of processors are faulty. We present two fault-tolerant simulation techniques for BSP and CGM: 1. A deterministic simulation that achieves O(1) slowdown for local computations and O((log(h) p)(2)) slowdown for communications per superstep, provided that a preprocessing is done that requires O((log(h) p)(2)) supersteps and linear (in h) computation per processor in each superstep. 2. A randomized simulation that achieves O(1) slowdown for local computations and O(log(h) p) slowdown for communications per superstep with high probability, after the same (deterministic) preprocessing as above. Our results are fully scalable over all values of p from Theta (1) to Theta (n). Furthermore, our results imply that if p less than or equal to n(epsilon) for O ((n/p)(delta)) for 0 less than or equal to 1 (which hold in almost all practical BSP and CGM computations), algorithms can be made resilient to a constant fraction of processor faults without any asymptotic slowdown. (C) 2000 Academic Press.

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

fault-tolerance
generalized butterfly
distance tree


example-based image color and tone style enhancement Color and tone adjustments are among the most frequent image enhancement operations. We define a color and tone style as a set of explicit or implicit rules governing color and tone adjustments. Our goal in this paper is to learn implicit color and tone adjustment rules from examples. That is, given a set of examples, each of which is a pair of corresponding images before and after adjustments, we would like to discover the underlying mathematical relationships optimally connecting the color and tone of corresponding pixels in all image pairs. We formally define tone and color adjustment rules as mappings, and propose to approximate complicated spatially varying nonlinear mappings in a piecewise manner. The reason behind this is that a very complicated mapping can still be locally approximated with a low-order polynomial model. Parameters within such low-order models are trained using data extracted from example image pairs. We successfully apply our framework in two scenarios, low-quality photo enhancement by transferring the style of a high-end camera, and photo enhancement using styles learned from photographers and designers.

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

gradient mapping
picture style
color mapping
tone optimization


a survey of icon taxonomy used in the interface design Many icon taxonomy systems have been developed by researchers that organise icons based on their graphic elements. Most of these taxonomies classify icons according to how abstract or concrete they are. Categories however overlap and different researchers use different terminology, sometimes to describe what in essence is the same thing. This paper describes nine taxonomies and compares the terminologies they use. Aware of the lack of icon taxonomy systems in the field of icon design, the authors provide an overview of icon taxonomy and develop an icon taxonomy system that could bring practical benefits to the performance of computer related tasks.

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

abstract icon
concrete icon
combination icon


Properties of nonfreeness: An entropy measure of electron correlation The "nonfreeness" of a many-fermion state omega is the entropy of omega relative to the free state that has the same 1-particle statistics as omega. The nonfreeness of a pure state is the same as its "particle-hole symmetric correlation entropy", a variant of an established measure of electron correlation. However, nonfreeness is also defined for mixed states, and this allows one to compare the nonfreeness of subsystems to the nonfreeness of the whole. Nonfreeness of a part does not exceed that in the whole; nonfreeness is additive over independent subsystems; and nonfreeness is superadditive over subsystems that are independent on the 1-particle level.

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

fermion correlation
relative entropy
fermion fock space
density operator
quasifree entropy


A New Measure of Classifier Performance for Gene Expression Data One of the major aims of many microarray experiments is to build discriminatory diagnosis and prognosis models. A large number of supervised methods have been proposed in literature for microarray-based classification for this purpose. Model evaluation and comparison is a critical issue and, the most of the time, is based on the classification cost. This classification cost is based on the costs of false positives and false negative, that are generally unknown in diagnostics problems. This uncertainty may highly impact the evaluation and comparison of the classifiers. We propose a new measure of classifier performance that takes account of the uncertainty of the error. We represent the available knowledge about the costs by a distribution function defined on the ratio of the costs. The performance of a classifier is therefore computed over the set of all possible costs weighted by their probability distribution. Our method is tested on both artificial and real microarray data sets. We show that the performance of classifiers is very depending of the ratio of the classification costs. In many cases, the best classifier can be identified by our new measure whereas the classic error measures fail.

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

supervised classification
microarray analysis


New robust QCA D flip flop and memory structures Quantum dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is one of the candidate technologies to be replaced with CMOS. Using this technology, extra low power, extremely dense and very high speed structure is achieved. Since flip flops and memory cells are fundamental building blocks of digital circuits, constructing an efficient, dense, and simple QCA memory structure is of great importance. In this paper, using a robust 2:1 multiplexer, efficient level triggered and edge triggered QCA D flip flops and a memory cell with set/reset ability will be introduced. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed desgins have efficient structures in terms of area, delay and complexity. Also, it is worth mentioning that these designs in contrast to the previous structures do not need any crossover wire. QCA designer, a common QCA layout design and a verification tool is employed to verify and simulate the proposed circuits.

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

quantum-dot cellular automata
set/reset ability
robustness


Index design and query processing for graph conductance search Graph conductance queries, also known as personalized PageRank and related to random walks with restarts, were originally proposed to assign a hyperlink-based prestige score to Web pages. More general forms of such queries are also very useful for ranking in entity-relation (ER) graphs used to represent relational, XML and hypertext data. Evaluation of PageRank usually involves a global eigen computation. If the graph is even moderately large, interactive response times may not be possible. Recently, the need for interactive PageRank evaluation has increased. The graph may be fully known only when the query is submitted. Browsing actions of the user may change some inputs to the PageRank computation dynamically. In this paper, we describe a system that analyzes query workloads and the ER graph, invests in limited offline indexing, and exploits those indices to achieve essentially constant-time query processing, even as the graph size scales. Our techniques-data and query statistics collection, index selection and materialization, and query-time index exploitation-have parallels in the extensive relational query optimization literature, but is applied to supporting novel graph data repositories. We report on experiments with five temporal snapshots of the CITESEER ER graph having 74-702 thousand entity nodes, 0.17-1.16 million word nodes, 0.29-3.26 million edges between entities, and 3.29-32.8 million edges between words and entities. We also used two million actual queries from CITESEER's logs. Queries run 3-4 orders of magnitude faster than whole-graph PageRank, the gap growing with graph size. Index size is smaller than a text index. Ranking accuracy is 94-98% with reference to whole-graph PageRank.

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


Satisfying End User Constraints in Service Composition by Applying Stochastic Search Methods Semantic web service compositions must be aligned with requirements from the target users in terms of quality requirements. Given a set of quality requirements, one can choose to either find the optimal composition or a "good enough" composition, which satisfies these requirements. Since optimizing compositions of semantic services under quality constraints is known to be NP-hard, it is unsuitable for realistic problems within large search spaces. The authors address the issue by using the "good enough" approach, selecting the first composition that passes their quality threshold. Firstly, this paper defines quality constraints within an innovative and extensible model designed to balance semantic fit (or functional quality) with quality of service (QoS) metrics. The semantic fit criterion evaluates the quality of semantic links between the semantic descriptions of Web services parameters, while QoS focuses on non-functional criteria of services. User quality requirements are met by selecting a valid composition. To allow the use of this model with a large number of candidate services as foreseen by the strategic EC-funded project SOA4All the authors formulate the selection problem as a Constraint Satisfaction Problem and test the use of a stochastic search method.

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

description logics
ontology
quality of service/composition
web service


Seeded Tree Alignment The optimal transformation of one tree into another by means of elementary edit operations is an important algorithmic problem that has several interesting applications to computational biology. Here, we introduce a constrained form of this problem in which a partial mapping of a set of nodes (the "seeds") in one tree to a corresponding set of nodes in the other tree is given, and present efficient algorithms for both ordered and unordered trees. Whereas ordered tree matching based on seeded nodes has applications in pattern matching of RNA structures, unordered tree matching based on seeded nodes has applications in cospeciation and phylogeny reconciliation. The latter involves the solution of the planar tanglegram layout problem, for which a polynomial-time algorithm is given here.

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

rna structure alignment
comparative phylogenetics


Strategy for dynamic routing and grooming of data flows into lightpaths in new generation network based on the GMPLS paradigm This paper reports on a novel strategy and related algorithm for realizing dynamic routing and grooming into wavelengths of data flows (label switched paths, LSPs) in new generation optical networks based on generalized MPLS (GMPLS). The method allows arbitrary granularities of LSPs. The new generation network is modeled as a multi-layer network consisting of an IP/MPLS layer and an optical layer. In particular, the proposed solution adopts a dynamic routing algorithm based on the Dijkstra algorithm, that makes use of a weight system, integrated with a suitable method for grooming LSPs into wavelengths based on the packing criterion, thus harmonizing the features of MPLS packet flows whose bandwidth vary in a continuous range of values, with the optical world, where the wavelength bandwidth ranges according to discrete values. The weight system is based on the concepts of least resistance routing that allows to evenly distribute the traffic at the MPLS layer, while packing improves the use of optical resources by favoring more filled wavelengths with respect to the emptier ones. To assess the validity of the proposed solution a simulation model has been realized. The results obtained by simulation show that the packing criterion allows reducing the refused bandwidth from two down to about four times, for a network load of 70% and 55%, respectively, when compared with the alternative method named spreading. The dependence of the proposed solution on bandwidth granularity has been also investigated. Moreover, in order to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed routing solution, a comparison between the proposed strategy with relevant solutions known in the literature, based on either a single or multi-layer approach, is also reported. In order to perform the comparison, all the reference routing solutions that have been considered adopt the packing method for LSP grooming into the lightpaths. The results show that our solution outperforms the others in terms of amount of traffic that can be on-line accommodated. For instance, assuming a blocking probability of 10(-3), the proposed solution is able to further reduce the refused bandwidth of the best routing algorithm considered in the analysis by a factor of three times, thanks to the knowledge of optical resource availability.

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


Comparing variance reduction to managing system variance in a job shop Variance within the manufacturing system leads to uneven shop loads, long manufacturing lead times, and unreliable customer service. This study compares techniques that reduce system variance to techniques that manage system variance. The study is placed in a dual resource constrained job shop. Results indicate that reducing system variance improves flow time and customer service performance measures, such as mean tardiness and percent tardy jobs more than techniques that react to system variance. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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 B I 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 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

system variance
variance reduction
customer service


De-facto standardization through allianceslessons from Bluetooth This paper discusses standardization of information and communications technologies. Standardization has become a domain of firm strategizing with information and communication technology standards being increasingly created through semi-open alliances. The paper analyzes the strategic logic of such standardization alliances based on an in-depth case study of the Bluetooth initiative. Similar to other successful standards described in the standardization literature, Bluetooth has been rapidly adopted by a large number of companies. The author argues that at least part of the success is due to the structure and design of the standardization alliance that promoted Bluetooth.

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


Simphony Supply Chain Simulator: a simulation toolkit to model the supply chain of construction projects The supply chain management (SCM) field of research has developed a valuable set of concepts and strategies to incorporate the core competencies of suppliers into industrial systems, a trend followed by the construction industry. Research into quantifying the benefits of implementing SCM in construction has been very limited; the literature for the construction industry generally discusses how SCM concepts can be adopted, or what problems and challenges inhibit such adoption, without analyzing and quantifying the effects of these techniques on an actual construction project. No analytical approach or special-purpose simulation tool has yet been developed to facilitate such quantitative analysis for construction projects. This paper presents a construction supply chain simulation toolkit that is capable of modeling different supply chain problems and is compatible with other construction simulation tools. A detailed simulation model of the effects of supply chain issues on the productivity of a real-life construction project, constructed using this toolkit, is also presented.

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

productivity analysis
project management
simulation models
systems management
tunnel construction


Ensuring termination by typability A term terminates if all its reduction sequences are of finite length. We show four type systems that ensure termination of well-typed pi-calculus processes. The systems are obtained by successive refinements of the types of the simply typed pi-calculus. For all (but one of) the type systems we also present upper bounds to the number of steps well-typed processes take to terminate. The termination proofs use techniques from term rewriting systems. We show the usefulness of the type systems on some non-trivial examples: the encodings of primitive recursive functions, the protocol for encoding separate choice in terms of parallel composition, a symbol table implemented as a dynamic chain of cells. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

the pi-calculus
term rewriting techniques


Hy-SN: Hyper-graph based semantic network Knowledge representation is a critical basis for knowledge management. With considering a balance between machine- and human-understandable, we propose a new knowledge representation model by combining the semantic network and the hyper-graph. We refer to this model as hyper-graph based semantic network (Hy-SN), which can represent more complex semantic relationships and have a more efficient data structure for storing knowledge in repositories. This paper also investigates the reasoning mechanisms of Hy-SN, which includes: the logical, analogical, and inductive reasoning. Implicit semantic relationships can be derived on the basis of these reasoning mechanisms. Three application cases based on Hy-SN are illustrated to validate its rationality and practicability.

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

knowledge representation
semantic network
reasoning
knowledge management