implementing random indexing on gpu Vector space models have received a significant attention in recent years. They have been applied in a wide spectrum of areas including information filtering, information retrieval, document indexing and relevancy ranking. Random indexing is one of the methods employing distributional statistics of term co-occurrences to generate vector space models from a set of documents. If the size of the document collection is large, a significant computational power is required to compute the results. This paper presents an efficient implementation of the random indexing method on GPU which allows efficient training on large datasets. It is only limited by the amount of memory available on the GPU. Various ways to overcome the dependence on the GPU memory are discussed. Speedups in magnitude of tens are achieved for training from random seed vectors, and even much higher figures for retraining. The implementation scales well with both the term vector dimension and the seed length.

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

gpgpu
term co-occurrence
word space models


A novel O(1) O ( 1 ) time algorithm for 3D block-based medial axis transform by peeling corner shells The block-based medial axis transform (BB_MAT , for short) of a 3D (2D) binary image, denoted 3D_BB_MAT (2D_BB_MAT), is defined as the problem to find a minimal set of upright 1-cubes (1-squares) whose union corresponds exactly to the 1-voxels (1-pixels) in the binary image. Many parallel algorithms have been proposed for computing the 2D_BB_MAT, almost all proposed approaches are unable to extend to a solution of the 3D_BB_MAT problem. In this paper, we first propose a novel O(1) O ( 1 ) time algorithm for solving the 3D_BB_MAT (2D_BB_MAT) problem of a binary image of size NNN N N N (NN N N ) on a linear array with a reconfigurable pipelined bus system (LARPBS, for short) by peeling the 3D (2D) corner shell of each 1-voxel (1-pixel) of the image and revealing some properties of the 3D_BB_MAT (2D_BB_MAT). The 3D (2D) chessboard distance transform problem, denoted 3D_CDT (2D_CDT), is the problem for each 0-voxel (0-pixel) of a 3D (2D) binary image to find its nearest 1-voxel (1-pixel) in the binary image based on chessboard distance metric. In this paper, we also solve the 3D_CDT (2D_CDT) based on the computed 3D_BB_MAT (2D_BB_MAT). All the proposed algorithms are very innovative although they look like straightforward. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed 2D_BB_MAT (2D_CDT) algorithm is the first algorithm that can extend to a solution of the 3D_BB_MAT (3D_CDT) problem in parallel, and the 3D_BB_MAT (3D_CDT) algorithm is the first parallel algorithm proposed for solving the 3D_BB_MAT (3D_CDT) problem.

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

medial axis transform
chessboard distance transform
parallel algorithm
larpbs


Directed extended dependency Extended dependency analysis for data mining Extended dependency analysis (EDA) is a heuristic search technique for finding significant relationships between nominal variables in large data sets. The directed version of EDA searches for maximally predictive sets of independent variables with respect to a target dependent variable. The original implementation of EDA was an extension of reconstructability analysis. Our new implementation adds a variety of statistical significance tests at each decision point that allow the user to tailor the algorithm to a particular objective. It also utilizes data structures appropriate for the sparse data sets customary in contemporary data mining problems. Two examples that illustrate different approaches to assessing model quality tests are given in this 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 O O O O O

cybernetics
programming and algorithm theory
searching


Feature selection on movement imagery discrimination and attention detection Noninvasive braincomputer interfaces (BCI) translate subjects electroencephalogram (EEG) features into device commands. Large feature sets should be down-selected for efficient feature translation. This work proposes two different feature down-selection algorithms for BCI: (a) a sequential forward selection; and (b) an across-group variance. Power rar ratios (PRs) were extracted from the EEG data for movement imagery discrimination. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were employed in the discrimination of cue-evoked responses. While center-out arrows, commonly used in calibration sessions, cued the subjects in the first experiment (for both PR and ERP analyses), less stimulating arrows that were centered in the visual field were employed in the second experiment (for ERP analysis). The proposed algorithms outperformed other three popular feature selection algorithms in movement imagery discrimination. In the first experiment, both algorithms achieved classification errors as low as 12.5% reducing the feature set dimensionality by more than 90%. The classification accuracy of ERPs dropped in the second experiment since centered cues reduced the amplitude of cue-evoked ERPs. The two proposed algorithms effectively reduced feature dimensionality while increasing movement imagery discrimination and detected cue-evoked ERPs that reflect subject attention.

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

braincomputer interface
event-related potentials


CAD drawing watermarking scheme A CAD (computer-aided design) drawing based on vector data is very important art work in industrial fields. It is considered to be content for which copyright protection is urgently required. This paper presents a watermarking scheme based on k-means++ k-means + + for CAD drawings. A CAD drawing consists of several layers, and each layer consists of various geometric objects such as LINE, POLYLINE, CIRCLE, ARC, 3DFACE, and POLYGON. POLYLINE along with LINE, 3DFACE, and ARC objects are the most commonly used fundamental objects in a CAD drawing. The proposed scheme embeds the watermark into the geometric distribution of POLYLINE, 3DFACE, and ARC objects in the main layers. Hence, in the proposed scheme, we select the target object with a high distribution among POLYLINE, 3DFACE, and ARC objects in a CAD drawing and then select layers that include the maximum number of instances of the target object. Then, we cluster the target objects in the selected layers by using k-means++ k-means + + and embed the watermark into the geometric distribution of each group. The geometric distribution is the normalized length distribution in a POLYLINE object, the normalized area distribution in a 3DFACE object, and the angle distribution in an ARC object. Experimental results have verified that the proposed scheme is robust against file format conversion, layer attacks, and various types of geometric editing carried out using the CAD editing tools.

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

cad drawing
watermarking
polyline
3dface
arc

k-means++ k-means + + k-means++ k-means + + k-means++ k-means + + k-means + +


The equivalence of support vector machine and regularization neural networks We show in this brief paper the equivalence of the support vector machine and regularization neural networks. We prove both implication sides of the equivalence in a generally applicable way. The novelty lies in the effective construction of the regularization operator corresponding to a given support vector machine formulation. We give also a short introductory description of both neural network approximation frameworks.

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

approximation
regularization
support vector machine


Impromptu Service Discovery and Delivery in Mobile Environments Wireless hotspots and broadband coverage are permeating the globe, giving rise to interesting spontaneous networking scenarios. The discovery and delivery of the most relevant and suitable services in a spontaneous network is a problem of great importance. In this paper we present an architecture that can support context-aware service discovery and delivery for resource-constrained mobile devices. At the heart of the architecture is the mu Jini proxy which mediates the discovery and delivery processes. Its discovery subsystem exploits relevant context information for the highest quality instance discovery. Its delivery subsystem provides thin-client based adaptation for fat service delivery not supported by thin client devices. To demonstrate its effectiveness, we developed a proof-of-concept prototype for Java mobile service environments.

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

dynamic service discovery
java mobile services
context-awareness
resource-constrained devices
thin-client based service delivery
proxy system architecture


Cone Fields and Topological Sampling in Manifolds with Bounded Curvature A standard reconstruction problem is how to discover a compact set from a noisy point cloud that approximates it. Afinite point cloud is a compact set. This paper proves a reconstruction theorem which gives a sufficient condition, as a bound on the Hausdorff distance between two compact sets, for when certain offsets of these two sets are homotopic in terms of the absence of ?-critical points in an annular region. We reduce the problem of reconstructing a subset from a point cloud to the existence of a deformation retraction from the offset of the subset to the subset itself. The ambient space can be any Riemannian manifold but we focus on ambient manifolds which have nowhere negative curvature (this includes Euclidean space). We get an improvement on previous bounds for the case where the ambient space is Euclidean whenever ??0.945 (??(0,1) by definition). In the process, we prove stability theorems for ?-critical points when the ambient space is a manifold.

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


Neural network Reinforcement Learning for visual control of robot manipulators It is known that most of the key problems in visual servo control of robots are related to the performance analysis of the system considering measurement and modeling errors. In this paper, the development and performance evaluation of a novel intelligent visual servo controller for a robot manipulator using neural network Reinforcement Learning is presented. By implementing machine learning techniques into the vision based control scheme, the robot is enabled to improve its performance online and to adapt to the changing conditions in the environment. Two different temporal difference algorithms (Q-learning and SARSA) coupled with neural networks are developed and tested through different visual control scenarios. A database of representative learning samples is employed so as to speed up the convergence of the neural network and real-time learning of robot behavior. Moreover, the visual servoing task is divided into two steps in order to ensure the visibility of the features: in the first step centering behavior of the robot is conducted using neural network Reinforcement Learning controller, while the second step involves switching control between the traditional Image Based Visual Servoing and the neural network Reinforcement Learning for enabling approaching behavior of the manipulator. The correction in robot motion is achieved with the definition of the areas of interest for the image features independently in both control steps. Various simulations are developed in order to present the robustness of the developed system regarding calibration error, modeling error, and image noise. In addition, a comparison with the traditional Image Based Visual Servoing is presented. Real world experiments on a robot manipulator with the low cost vision system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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

reinforcement learning
neural network
robot manipulator

image based visual servo control
intelligent hybrid control


A multiobjective evolutionary programming framework for graph-based data mining Subgraph mining is the process of identifying concepts describing interesting and repetitive subgraphs within graph-based data. The exponential number of possible subgraphs makes the problem very challenging. Existing methods apply a single-objective subgraph search with the view that interesting subgraphs are those capable of not merely compressing the data, but also enhancing the interpretation of the data considerably. Usually the methods operate by posing simple constraints (or user-defined thresholds) such as returning all subgraphs whose frequency is above a specified threshold. Such search approach may often return either a large number of solutions in the case of a weakly defined objective or very few in the case of a very strictly defined objective. In this paper, we propose a framework based on multiobjective evolutionary programming to mine subgraphs by jointly maximizing two objectives, support and size of the extracted subgraphs. The proposed methodology is able to discover a nondominated set of interesting subgraphs subject to tradeoff between the two objectives, which otherwise would not be achieved by the single-objective search. Besides, it can use different specific multiobjective evolutionary programming methods. Experimental results obtained by three of the latter methods on synthetically generated as well as real-life graph-based datasets validate the utility of the proposed methodology when benchmarked against classical single-objective methods and their previous, nonevolutionary multiobjective extensions.

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


Systematical hybrid state modelling of complex dynamical systems: The quad-I/HS framework A three-phase modelling framework for systematically designing a general class of complex hybrid dynamical systems is proposed. The framework benefits from a recent decomposition principle, called DSM (dependency structure matrix), and results in a new hybrid state model paradigm supporting mathematical analyses. The two leading methods of complexity handling, modular modelling and closing under coupling, are therein combined. Each interaction is modelled as detailed as necessary by aligning the interaction knowledge to determined weighting coefficients. Proportional, functional and qualitative (linguistical) knowledge, which is included through Fuzzy-Logic, is considered. As not much is known about hybrid systems from the viewpoint of non-linear dynamics, the framework's potential is shown by modelling an illustration example, considering attracting regions and a combination of bifurcations and chaos in different dynamical domains for stability analysis.

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


Theoretical study on the post-local buckling of steel plates in concrete-filled box columns This paper presents a theoretical study on the post-local buckling behaviour of steel plates in welded steel box columns filled with concrete, by using the finite element method. The effects of various geometric imperfections, residual stresses and width-to-thickness ratios on the post-local buckling characteristics of steel plates in composite columns are investigated. A novel method is developed for evaluating the initial local buckling loads and post-local buckling reserve strength of steel plates with imperfections associated with a theoretical analysis. Two effective width formulas are proposed for the design of clamped steel plates restrained by concrete and are employed in the ultimate strength calculation of short concrete-filled steel box columns. The proposed design models are compared with existing experimental results with a good agreement.

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

composite columns
concrete
effective width
steel plates

finite element analysis
post-local buckling


On-line load balancing made simple: Greedy strikes back ? We provide a new approach to the on-line load balancing problem in the case of restricted assignment of temporary weighted tasks. The approach is very general and allows us to derive on-line algorithms whose competitive ratio is characterized by some combinatorial properties of the underlying graph G representing the problem: in particular, the approach consists in applying the greedy algorithm to a suitably constructed subgraph of G. In the paper, we prove the NP-hardness of the problem of computing an optimal or even a c -approximate subgraph, for some constant c>1 c > 1 . Nevertheless, we show that, for several interesting problems, we can easily compute a subgraph yielding an optimal on-line algorithm. As an example, the effectiveness of this approach is shown by the hierarchical server model introduced by Bar-Noy et al. (2001). In this case, our method yields simpler algorithms whose competitive ratio is at least as good as the existing ones. Moreover, the algorithm analysis turns out to be simpler. Finally, we give a sufficient condition for obtaining, in the general case, O ( n ) -competitive algorithms with our technique: this condition holds in the case of several problems for which a ? ( n ) lower bound is known.

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

approximation algorithm
computational complexity
on-line algorithm


Efficient QoS partition and routing of unicast and multicast In this paper, we study problems related to supporting unicast and multicast connections with quality of service (QoS) requirements. We investigate the problem of optimal routing and resource allocation in the context of performance dependent costs. In this context, each network element can offer several QoS guarantees, each associated with a different cost. This is a natural extension to the commonly used bi-criteria model, where each link is associated with a single delay and a single cost. This framework is simple yet strong enough to model many practical interesting networking problems. An important problems in this framework is finding a good path for a connection that minimizes the cost while retaining the end-to-end delay requirement. Once such a path (or a tree, in the multicast case) is found, one needs to partition the end-to-end QoS requirements among the links of the path (tree). We consider the case of general integer cost functions (where delays and cost are integers). As the related problem is NP complete, we concentrate on finding efficient e-approximation solutions. We improve on recent previous results by Ergun et al. Lorenz and Orda, and Raz and Shavitt, both in terms of generality as well as in terms of complexity of the solution. In particular, we present novel approximation techniques that yield the best known complexity for the unicast QoS routing problem, and the first approximation algorithm for the QoS partition problem on trees, both for the centralized and distributed cases.

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

approximation
multicast
qos
resource allocation
routing


Selective color transferring via ellipsoid color mixture map Color transfer among images is a natural phenomenon and important research topic in interactive graphics and augmented environments. Most of the conventional methods need complex user interactions and difficult image segmentation. Motivated for the intuitive use of color editing tools, this paper presents a simple but effective ellipsoid color mixture map to realize selective color transfers. Our approach proposes ellipsoid hulls to represent color statistics of the images. Based on the window-click input, the system computes the ellipsoid hulls of the source and target images respectively. The color mixture map is generated to determine the blending weight of pixels in the output image, according to the color and distance information instead of using image segmentation. By mixing the images using the color mixture map, the final results we produce have the source color selected realistically spreading on the structures related to the target window. Our selective color transferring approach is efficient and simple to use, and widely applicable for images and also video sequences without the need of addition interaction. Our experimental results have showed the high-quality visual effects and efficiency of image/video color transfers.

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

image processing
select color transferring
source image
target image
window-click interaction
evaluation metric
video color transferring


Determining the performance of website-based relationship marketing We extend web mining approaches by integrating managerial aspects on website usage. Performance assessment and marketing intelligence are aligned in a framework. Our approach can be used for optimization of relationship marketing effectiveness. Applicability is demonstrated by a real world example using clickstream data.

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

website performance evaluation
online consumer behavior


Automatic blood sampling in dairy cows Loose housing systems for dairy cows are becoming increasingly common, raising new questions in the area of animal health and welfare. Some of these questions can be addressed by studying the variation in blood parameters, such as glucocortistioids. However, the traditional manual blood sampling procedure can in itself affect the responses of the animal. To address this issue we have developed a device for automated collection of multiple blood samples. The device is placed on the back of the animal and allows the animal to be kept in all types of environments, either alone or in social groups. The animal can move freely: no restraints and no handling of the animal are necessary during blood sampling. Three experiments were conducted to study the performance of the system and how the blood sampling procedure affected the cortisol responses in dairy cows. In the first experiment the accuracy of sample size and timing were investigated. In the second experiment, automatic samples were collected from six cows kept in tie-stalls, with samples taken at 3-min intervals for 38min. At 12, 24, 36 and 38min, a manual sample was taken by vein puncture. None of the cows showed a consistently increased cortisol response to automatic sampling, while two cows showed increased cortisol concentration after vein puncture. In the third experiment automatic blood sampling was conducted with 12 cows kept in a loose housing system. In the morning, over a period of 1.5h, 14 blood samples were taken at varying time intervals from each cow. In the afternoon, over a period of 2.5h, a further 14 samples were taken. Cortisol concentrations in the blood samples suggest that the cows were not affected by the blood sampling procedure. On some occasions during these experiments, it was not possible to get a sample. For the manual vein puncture 3 out of 24 samples (12.5%) were not successfully taken within a time limit of 2min. During the automatic blood sampling process, the catheter occasionally became twisted and blocked by the movement of the cow's head. This occurred in 8 out of 84 samples (9.5%). In four of the manual samples, considerable hemolysis had occurred during the sampling procedure. No hemolysis was observed in the automatic blood samples. Automated blood sampling offers the opportunity to collect a series of samples without disturbing the animal. Data suggest that automatic blood sampling is a superior alternative to manual blood sampling, even in a tie barn.

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


evaluation of the real-time java runtime environment for deployment in time-critical systems This paper evaluates the results of benchmarking an implementation of the Real-Time Specification for Java. First, a motivation is given, which describes the need for applications that realize different levels of timing behavior. The difficulties with such applications are described, also. Then tests for memory allocation, communication buffering, and timer accuracy, which are derived from those difficulties, are formulated. The test results are evaluated in the last section.

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

memory management
real-time
rtsj
scheduling
benchmark
initialization time compilation
monitoring
itc


Trip purpose inference using automated fare collection data In this paper, we exploit the extensive smart card transaction data for deriving useful information about transit passenger behavior, namely trip purpose or activity. We show how the automated fare collection data (e.g., smart card) can be used to infer trip purpose and to reveal travel patterns in an urban area. A case study demonstrates the process of trip purpose inference based on smart card data from Metro Transit in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metropolitan area.

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


A new standard of on-line customer service process: Integrating language-action into blogs Blogging, which is a relatively new medium in personal communication and collaboration, can help enterprises overcome some difficulties in conventional customer service management. However, blog functions remain limited. This study proposes a novel standard for managing customer service processes, in which language-action is integrated into blogs to leverage blog characteristics. This standard comprises new specified dialogue patterns for collaboration, suggested customer service processes, and supporting system architecture. Furthermore, a scenario is provided that demonstrates use of this standard.

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

on-line customer service
language-action perspective
dynamic workflow management system


A MATLAB differentiation matrix suite A software suite consisting of 17 MATLAB functions for solving differential equations by the spectral collocation (i.e., pseudospectral) method is presented. It includes functions for computing derivatives of arbitrary order corresponding to Chebyshev, Hermite, Laguerre, Fourier, and sine interpolants. Auxiliary functions are included for incorporating boundary conditions, performing interpolation using barycentric formulas, and computing roots of orthogonal polynomials. It is demonstrated how to use the package for solving eigenvalue, boundary value, and initial value problems arising in the fields of special functions, quantum mechanics, nonlinear waves, and hydrodynamic stability.

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

algorithms
spectral collocation methods
pseudospectral methods
differentiation matrices


Effective Semantic Annotation by Image-to-Concept Distribution Model Image annotation based on visual features has been a difficult problem due to the diverse associations that exist between visual features and human concepts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Annotation by Image-to-Concept Distribution Model (AICDM) for image annotation by discovering the associations between visual features and human concepts from image-to-concept distribution. Through the proposed image-to-concept distribution model, visual features and concepts can be bridged to achieve high-quality image annotation. In this paper, we propose to use "visual features", "models", and "visual genes" which represent analogous functions to the biological chromosome, DNA, and gene. Based on the proposed models using entropy, tf-idf, rules, and SVM, the goal of high-quality image annotation can be achieved effectively. Our empirical evaluation results reveal that the AICDM method can effectively alleviate the problem of visual-to-concept diversity and achieve better annotation results than many existing state-of-the-art approaches in terms of precision and recall.

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


Conjugate gradient on Grassmann manifolds for robust subspace estimation ? Most geometric computer vision problems involve orthogonality constraints. An important subclass of these problems is subspace estimation, which can be equivalently formulated into an optimization problem on Grassmann manifolds. In this paper, we propose to use the conjugate gradient algorithm on Grassmann manifolds for robust subspace estimation in conjunction with the recently introduced generalized projection based M-Estimator (gpbM). The gpbM method is an elemental subset-based robust estimation algorithm that can process heteroscedastic data without any user intervention. We show that by optimizing the orthogonal parameter matrix on Grassmann manifolds, the performance of the gpbM algorithm improves significantly. Results on synthetic and real data are presented.

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

grassmann manifolds
conjugate gradient algorithm

generalized projection based m-estimator


Tuning struggle strategy in genetic algorithms for scheduling in computational grids Job Scheduling in Computational Grids is gaining importance due to the need for efficient large-scale Grid-enabled applications. Among different optimization techniques designed for the problem, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is a popular class of solution methods. As GAs are high level algorithms, specific algorithms can be designed by choosing the genetic operators as well as the evolutionary strategies such as Steady State GAs and Struggle GAs. In this paper we focus on Struggle GAs and their tuning for scheduling of independent jobs in computational grids. Our results showed that a careful hash implementation for computing the similarity of solutions was able to alleviate the computational burden of Struggle GA and perform better than standard similarity measures. This is particularly interesting for the scheduling problem in Grid systems, which due to changeability over time, has demanding time restrictions on the computation of planning the jobs to resources.

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

genetic algorithms
scheduling
struggle strategy
tuning


Guidelines for collaborative supply chain system design and operation Over the past decade, firms have adopted supply chain management as a critical element of their corporate strategies. Despite these efforts, it is our observation that many firms do not realize the anticipated benefits of constructing collaborative operating relationships with supply chain partners. Our purpose in this paper is to establish a set of guiding principles for the effective design and execution of supply chain si,stems. These principles suggest why what, and how collaborative relationships should be constructed. While constructing and operating a competitive supply chain is the primary objective of supply chain management, we have observed several impediments to achieving this goal. First, demand uncertainty is so substantial in most supply chain environments that if it is not adequately addressed, it can severely degrade the anticipated performance of the supply chain Lis measured in terms of unit cost, speed, quality, and responsiveness to changing conditions. Second, supply chains vith poor physical characteristics that operate with long and variable response times cannot take full advantage of collaborative relationships due to their inability to respond to changes in the environment. Third, firms with poor information infrastructures lack the capabilities necessary to acquire, store, manipulate, and transmit data effectively and quickly. Fourth, business. processes are often not designed properly both intra- and inter-organizationally, to adapt to evolving supply chain conditions. Finally, decision support systems and operating policies that guide day-to-day operating decisions may not be adequately designed to cont with supply chain uncertainty. We also suggest that the strategic and tactical modeling paradigms employed in supply chain decision support systems are inadequate in many operational environments because of the manner in which uncertainty is treated. Furthermore, collaborative relationships that focus on reducing the uncertainty in operating environments by employing improved information systems and business processes will result in more efficient allocation of key resources, faster response times to market forces, and more reliable supply chain performance; however, these collaborative arrangements by themselves cannot compensate for fundamentally flawed and operationally ineffective manufacturing and distribution environments.

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

collaborative planning
production planning and control
operations strategic multiechelon
inventory systems
capacitated production


Network in a Box: Facilitating problem-based learning through network emulation Problem-based learning (PBL) is a pedagogical method that challenges students to learn how to learn by working cooperatively in groups to develop solutions to real world problems. Network in a Box (NiB) is a unique, engineering-oriented effort to employ PBL in core computer networks curriculum. Developed as an open-ended exercise in PBL, NiB sets a learning environment in which student teams design and implement a network emulator using off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software. The aims of this article are twofold. The first goal of this article is to catalogue our efforts at San Diego State University in implementing PBL in a computer networks engineering course. The second goal of this article is to introduce the NiB project as a viable example of PBL in the field of computer networks. This project not only arms students with a good understanding of network impairments but also provides the knowledge of low level packet processing, packet creation, packet injection into the network, meeting real time processing requirements of packet processing and packet filtering. By arming students with an understanding of network impairments, a working knowledge of low-level packet processing, packet creation, packet injection, and their processing requirements, NiB serves as a model introduction of PBL into the field of computer networks engineering. In this article we disseminate the product specification and system design as an educational and research utility along with an assessment of this project as perceived by students over several semesters. 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 19: 433446, 2011

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


rationalized three instruction machine The declarative nature of functional programming languages causes many difficulties in their efficient implementation on conventional machines. The problem is much harder when the language has non-strict (lazy) semantics. Abstract machines serve as an intellectual aid in bridging the semantic gap between such languages and the conventional von Neumann architecture. However they become more and more complex with time as efficiency considerations force the instruction set of the machine to grow in size. In this paper we explain the phenomenon in context of the Three Instruction Machine (TIM). We then define a rationalized instruction set for TIM that allows us to view all enhancements to TIM in a uniform way. This instruction set is quite close to RISC instructions and clearly identifies the key operations on closures. Translation of functional programs to our rationalized instruction set opens up scope for various local and global optimizations. We illustrate this by showing how to build control flow graphs and perform optimizations on it. Lazy arguments in functional programs make it hard to predict evaluation order statistically. We define the notion of pseudo-lazy arguments to statically expose the control flow information, wherever possible, for doing better flow analysis.

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

functional programming
abstract machines

compiling and optimizations
control flow analysis


Conjectures and manipulations. Computational modeling and the extra-theoretical dimension of scientific discovery Computational philosophy (CP) aims at investigating many important concepts and problems of the philosophical and epistemological tradition in a new way by taking advantage of information-theoretic, cognitive, and artificial intelligence methodologies. I maintain that the results of computational philosophy meet the classical requirements of some Peircian I pragmatic ambitions'. Indeed, more than a 100 years ago, the American philosopher C.S. Peirce, when working on logical and philosophical problems, suggested the concept of pragmatism ('pragmaticism', in his own words) as a logical criterion to analyze what words and concepts express through their practical meaning. Many words have been spent on creative processes and reasoning, especially in the case of scientific practices. In fact, many philosophers have usually offered a number of ways of construing hypotheses generation, but they aim at demonstrating that the activity of generating hypotheses is paradoxical, obscure, and thus not analyzable. Those descriptions are often so far from Peircian pragmatic prescription and so abstract to result completely unknowable and obscure. To dismiss this tendency and gain interesting insight about the so-called 'logic of scientific discovery' we need to build constructive procedures, which could play a role in moving the problem-solving process forward by implementing them in some actual models. The 'computational turn' gives us a new way to understand creative processes in a strictly pragmatic sense. In fact, by exploiting artificial intelligence and cognitive science tools, computational philosophy allows us to test concepts and ideas previously conceived only in abstract terms. It is in the perspective of these actual computational models that I find the central role of abduction in the explanation of creative reasoning in science. I maintain that the computational philosophy analysis of model-based and manipulative abduction and of external and epistemic mediators is important not only to delineate the actual practice of abduction, but also to further enhance the development of programs computationally adequate in rediscovering, or discovering for the first time, for example, scientific hypotheses or mathematical theorems. The last part of the paper is devoted to illustrating the problem of the extra-theoretical dimension of reasoning and discovery from the perspective of some mathematical cases derived from calculus and geometry.

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

distributed cognition
manipulative abduction
model-based reasoning
rationality


Different Aspects of Clustering The Self-Organizing Maps Self-organizing map (SOM) is an artificial neural network tool that is trained using unsupervised learning to produce a low dimensional representation of the input space, called a map. This map is generally the object of a clustering analysis step which aims to partition the referents vectors (map neurons) into compact and well-separated groups. In this paper, we consider the problem of the clustering SOM using different aspects: partitioning, hierarchical and graph coloring based techniques. Unlike the traditional clustering SOM techniques, which use k-means or hierarchical clustering, the graph-based approaches have the advantage of providing a partitioning of the SOM by simultaneously using dissimilarities and neighborhood relations provided by the map. We present the experimental results of several comparisons between these different ways of clustering.

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


Assessment of the availability of near-real time open weather data provided by networks of surface stations in Spain The aims of this research are: (i) to check availability of weather observations from automated stations in Spain, (ii) to qualitatively and quantitatively describe the networks identified, (iii) to analyze availability of the observations gathered for 3 different networks [two government (GOV): AEMET with national coverage and CASTILLA Y LEN on a regional level; and METEOCLIMATIC, a network of volunteer weather observation (VWO) stations on a national level], and (iv) to undertake a spatial redundancy and lacunarity analysis of them. The results reveal: the existence of heterogeneous VWO networks complementing the GOV, differences within and among networks as far as data acquisition frequency, varying delays in their publication, and semantic differences in the observations made. An inventory was made of 24 networks (16 GOV and 8 VWO) with 3,908 stations deployed in Spain. An analysis of observations from 3 networks reveals that 88% of the stations in the volunteer network record more than two observations per hour. 56% of the AEMET stations report more than 48 observations every day, 31% report between 25 and 48 observations a day. Conversely, the CASTILLA Y LEN network records data every half hour. The redundancy analysis reveals a 3,429-drop in the number of unduplicated stations. Following the lacunarity analysis of spatial distribution, it is possible to conclude that 60.72% of the cells do not contain any stations.

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

weather data
surface stations
lacunarity


a combined feasibility and performance macromodel for analog circuits The need to reuse the performance macromodels of an analog circuit topology challenges existing regression based modeling techniques. A model of good reusability should have a number of independent design parameters and each parameter can vary in a large numeric range. On the other hand, these requirements can cause a large percentage of functionally incorrect designs in the design space and thus results in a sparse feasible design space. They also complicate the mathematical relationship between the performance parameters and the design parameters. In order to tackle these challenges, this paper presents a combined feasibility and performance macromodel based on Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The feasibility model identifies the feasible designs that satisfy the design constraints. The performance macromodel is valid for feasible designs. Feasibility macromodeling is formulated as a classification problem while performance macromeling as a regression problem. An active learning scheme [5] has been applied to improve the accuracy of the feasibility model much faster than only using uniformly distributed designs in the entire design space. Our experiment shows that the performance macromodels in the feasible design space are more accurate and faster to construct and evaluate than performance macromodels in the entire design space without functional or performance constraints considered.

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

feasibility models
performance macromodeling


The effects of amino-acid mutations on specific interactions between urokinase-type plasminogen activator and its receptor: Ab initio molecular orbital calculations During cancer invasion, the binding of urokinase-type plasminogen activator (uPA) to its receptor (uPAR) on the surface of a cancer cell is considered a trigger for invasion. Here, we present a stable structure of the solvated complex formed between uPA and uPAR (uPAuPAR) and investigate the specific interactions between uPA and uPAR by ab initio fragment molecular orbital (FMO) calculations. The result indicates that the electrostatic interactions between the charged amino acid residues existing in both uPA and uPAR make a large contribution to the binding between uPA and uPAR. In particular, Lys23, Lys46, Lys98 and Lys61 of uPA are found to have strong attractive interactions with uPAR. To elucidate the effect of these residues on the interactions between uPA and uPAR, we substituted each of them with the uncharged amino acid Leu and investigated the interactions between the mutated uPA and wild-type uPAR. The interaction energies indicate that Lys46 and Lys98, which bind uPA to the rim of the central ligand-binding cavity of uPAR, make greater contributions to the binding between uPA and uPAR than Lys23, which is positioned at the bottom of the ligand-binding cavity of uPAR. The effect of hydrating water molecules located between uPA and uPAR is also investigated to be significant for the specific interactions between uPA and uPAR. These results are expected to be informative for developing new peptide antagonists that block the binding of uPA to uPAR.

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

cancer metastasis
urokinase-type plasminogen activator
urokinase receptor
molecular mechanics simulation
fragment molecular orbital method
molecular orbital calculation
specific interaction
proteinprotein interaction
antagonist


Velocity and pressure-based partitions of horizontal and vertical trajectories for on-line signature verification In general, shape of an on-line signature is used as a single discriminating feature. Sometimes shape of signature is used alone for verification purposes and sometimes it is used in combination with some other dynamic features such as velocity, pressure and acceleration. The shape of an on-line signature is basically formed due to the wrist and fingers movements where the wrist movement is represented by the horizontal trajectory and the movement of the fingers is represented by vertical trajectory. As the on-line signature is formed due to the combination of two movements that are essentially independent of each other, it will be more effective to use them as two separate discriminating features. Based on this observation, we propose to use these trajectories in isolation by first decomposing the pressure and velocity profiles into two partitions and then extracting the underlying horizontal and vertical trajectories. So the overall process can be thought as the process which exploits the inter-feature dependencies by decomposing signature trajectories depending upon pressure and velocity information and performs verification on each partition separately. As a result, we are able to extract eight discriminating features and among them the most stable discriminating feature is used in verification process. Further Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been proposed to make the signatures rotation invariant. Experimental results demonstrate superiority of our approach in on-line signature verification in comparison with other techniques.

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

signature verification
horizontal and vertical trajectories
partitions
discriminating features


Detecting Trends in Social Bookmarking Systems: A del.icio.us Endeavor The authors present and evaluate an approach to trend detection in social bookmarking systems using a probabilistic generative model in combination with smoothing techniques. Social bookmarking systems are gaining major interest among researchers in the areas of data mining and Web intelligence, since they provide a large amount of user-generated annotations and reflect the interest of millions of people. Based on a vast cot-pus of approximately 150 million bookmarks found at del.icio.us, the authors analyze bookmarking and tagging patterns and discuss evidence that social bookmarking systems are vulnerable to spamming. They present a method to limit the impact Of spam on a trend defector and provide conclusions as well as directions for future research.

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

delicious
social bookmarking
trend detection

collaborative tagging
folksonomies
spam detection


Adaptive mixture methods based on Bregman divergences We investigate adaptive mixture methods that linearly combine outputs of m constituent filters running in parallel to model a desired signal. We use Bregman divergences and obtain certain multiplicative updates to train the linear combination weights under an affine constraint or without any constraints. We use unnormalized relative entropy and relative entropy to define two different Bregman divergences that produce an unnormalized exponentiated gradient update and a normalized exponentiated gradient update on the mixture weights, respectively. We then carry out the mean and the mean-square transient analysis of these adaptive algorithms when they are used to combine outputs of m constituent filters. We illustrate the accuracy of our results and demonstrate the effectiveness of these updates for sparse mixture systems.

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

bregman divergence
affine mixture
multiplicative update


Tracing many users with almost no rate penalty For integers n, r >= 2 and 1 0 such that min ((c1)/(r), (c3)/(k2)) <= log (h(n,r,k))/(n) <= min (c2)/(r), (c4logk)/(k2) In particular, for all k <= root r, log (h(n,r,k))/(n). This improves an estimate of Laczay and Ruszinko.

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

multiple-user tracing codes
probabilistic construction of codes
superimposed codes


On the computation of the eigenvalues of Dirac systems The main purpose of this paper is to compute the eigenvalues of Dirac systems using a regularized sampling method. The operator examined here is the massless Dirac operator on a finite interval. The problem with singular coefficients is not covered in the present analysis. But problems whose coefficients may involve finite jumps of discontinuities are involved. The regularized technique allows us to insert some parameters to the well known sinc method; strengthening the existing sinc technique and to avoid the aliasing error. Examples are presented to demonstrate the credibility of the method with graphs and numerical illustrations.

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


weaving rewrite-based access control policies Access control is a central issue among the overall security goals of information systems. Despite the existence of a vast literature on the subject, it is still very hard to assure the compliance of a large system to a given dynamic access control policy. Based on our previous work on formal islands, we provide in this paper a systematic methodology to weave dynamic, formally specified policies on existing applications using aspect-oriented programming. To that end, access control policies are formalized using term rewriting systems, allowing us to have an agile, modular, and precise way to specify and to ensure their formal properties. These high-level descriptions are then weaved into the existing code, such that the resulting program implements a safe reference monitor for the specified policy. For developers, this provides a systematic process to enforce dynamic policies in a modular and flexible way. Since policies are independently specified and checked to be later weaved into various different applications, the level of reuse is improved. We implemented the approach on test cases with quite encouraging results.

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

strategic rewriting
execution monitoring
aspect-oriented programming


Cell suppression problem: A genetic-based approach Cell suppression is one of the most frequently used techniques to prevent the disclosure of sensitive data in statistical tables. Finding the minimum cost set of nonsensitive entries to suppress, along with the sensitive ones, in order to make a table safe for publication, is a NP-hard problem, denoted the cell suppression problem (CSP). In this paper, we present GenSup, a new heuristic for the CSP, which combines the general features of genetic algorithms with safety conditions derived by several authors. The safety conditions are used to develop fast procedures to generate multiple initial solutions and also to recombine, to perturb and to repair solutions in order to improve their quality. The results obtained for 300 tables, with up to more than 90,000 entries, show that GenSup is very effective at finding low-cost sets of complementary suppressions to protect confidential data in two-dimensional tables.

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


web page clustering enhanced by summarization Traditional Web page clustering algorithms use the full-text in the documents to generate feature vectors. Such methods often produce unsatisfactory results because there is much noisy information, such as decoration, interaction, and advertisement, in Web pages. The varying-length problem of the Web pages is also a significant negative factor affecting the performance. In this paper, we investigate the use of several summarization techniques to tackle these issues when clustering Web pages. Compared with the full-text representation of the Web pages, our experimental results indicate that our proposed approach effectively solves the problems of noisy information and varying-length, and thus significantly boosts the clustering performance.

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


Ontologies for crisis contagion management in financial institutions What makes crisis management in financial institutions fairly unique and particularly complex is the accompanying crisis contagion or systemic risk. The subprime mortgage crisis currently happening in the USA is a typical example. In order to further deepen our understanding of how crisis contagion occurs and enhance information interchange and knowledge sharing among related entities, ontologies for crisis contagion management in financial institutions are proposed in this study. Three categories of ontologies, which include static ontology, dynamic ontology, and social ontology, are developed to deal with different perspectives in this domain. The three types of ontology are then united in the Ontology Web Language ( OWL) and the Semantic Web Rules Languages (SWRL) framework, both of which are machine readable. Finally, the case of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) is offered to demonstrate how the proposed ontologies are used in financial institutions.

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

crisis contagion management
ontology
owl
swrl


A secure remote data integrity checking cloud storage system from threshold encryption The confidentiality and integrity are the most important issues in cloud storage system. We address the privacy issue of decentralized cloud storage system using threshold cryptography. Once the user uploads his data and deletes the local copy, he might lost the full control of the data. The major challenges of designing this cloud storage system are to provide a better privacy guarantee and ensure the integrity of data at untrusted servers in distributed cloud storage system. To achieve this goal, we propose a threshold encryption scheme and integrate it with a secure decentralized erasure code to form a secure cloud storage system, where the user generates a secret parameter participated in system encryption and decryption of plaintext blocks in the combine process. So our systems can prevent cloud storage servers from modifying data by providing remote data check and meets the requirements of data robustness, confidentiality and integrity.

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


Molecular models of protein targets from Mycobacterium tuberculosis Structural characterization of enzymes that belong to microbial metabolic pathways is very important for structure-based drug design since some of these proteins may be present in the bacterial genome, but absent in humans. Thus, metabolic pathways became potential targets for drug design. The motivation of this work is the fact that Mycobacterium tuberculosis is the cause of the deaths of millions of people in the world, so that the structural characterization of protein targets to propose new drugs has become essential. DBMODELING is a relational database, created to highlight the importance of methods of molecular modeling applied to the Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome with the aim of proposing protein-ligand docking analysis. There are currently more than 300 models for proteins from Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome in the database. The database contains a detailed description of the reaction catalyzed by each enzyme and their atomic coordinates. Information about structures, a tool for animated gif image, a table with a specification of the metabolic pathway, modeled protein, inputs used in modeling, and analysis methods used in this project are available in the database for download. The search tool can be used for reseachers to find specific pathways or enzymes.

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


Approximations on Minimum Weight Triangulations and Minimum Weight Pseudo-Triangulations Using Ant Colony Optimization Metaheuristic Globally optimal triangulations and pseudo-triangulations are difficult to be found by deterministic methods as, for most type of criteria, no polynomial algorithm is known. In this work, we consider the Minimum Weight Triangulation (MWT) and Minimum Weight Pseudo-Triangulation (MWPT) problems of a given set of n points in the plane. This paper shows how the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) metaheuristic can be used to find high quality triangulations and pseudo-triangulations of minimum weight. For the experimental study presented here we have created a set of instances for MWT and MWPT problems since no reference to benchmarks for these problems were found in the literature. Through the experimental evaluation, we assess the applicability of the ACO metaheuristic for MWT and MWPT problems considering greedy and Simulated Annealing algorithms.

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

pseudo-triangulation
minimumweight
computational geometry


Unit commitment problem in deregulated environment This paper addresses the self-scheduling problem of generation companies owning thermal power units considering bilateral contracts and day-ahead market. This approach allows precise modelling of variable costs, start-up costs and comprehensive system of constraints. The self-scheduling model is formulated as deterministic optimization problem in which expected profit is maximized by 0/1 mixed-integer linear programming technique. Solution is achieved using the homogeneous and self-dual interior point method for linear programming, with a branch and bound optimizer for integer programming. The effectiveness of the proposed model for optimizing the thermal generation schedule is demonstrated through the case study with detailed discussion.

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

day-ahead market
thermal unit commitment
0/1 mixed-integer linear programming


Novel Adaptive Balloon Active Contour Method based on internal force for image segmentation A systematic evaluation on synthetic and real images A new internal force to optimize the Adaptive Balloon Active Contour Method (AB ACM). Efficiency and effectiveness of segmentation by the AB ACM using synthetic images with different levels of complexity. Performance comparison of the proposed method with other traditional ACM. Application of the optimized algorithm in the segmentation of Industrial and Biomedical images.

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

active contour method
adaptive balloon
image segmentation


Toward the fair anonymous signatures: Deniable ring signatures Ring signature scheme enables a signer to sign a message anonymously. In the ring signature scheme, the signer who wants to sign a document anonymously first chooses some public keys of entities (signers) and then generates a signature which ensures that one of the signer or entities signs the document. In some situations, however, the ring signature scheme allows the signer to shift the blame to victims because of the anonymity. The group signature scheme may be a solution for the problem; however, it needs an electronic big brother, called a group manager, who can violate the signer anonymity by himself, and a complicated key setting. This paper introduces a new notion of a signature scheme with signer anonymity, a deniable ring signature scheme (DRS), in which no group manager exists, and the signer should be involved in opening the signer anonymity. We also propose a concrete scheme proven to be secure under the assumption of the DDH (decision Diffie Hellman) problem in the random oracle model.

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 B O O O O O O B I I


A survey of fault tolerance mechanisms and checkpoint/restart implementations for high performance computing systems In recent years, High Performance Computing (HPC) systems have been shifting from expensive massively parallel architectures to clusters of commodity PCs to take advantage of cost and performance benefits. Fault tolerance in such systems is a growing concern for long-running applications. In this paper, we briefly review the failure rates of HPC systems and also survey the fault tolerance approaches for HPC systems and issues with these approaches. Rollback-recovery techniques which are most often used for long-running applications on HPC clusters are discussed because they are widely used for long-running applications on HPC systems. Specifically, the feature requirements of rollback-recovery are discussed and a taxonomy is developed for over twenty popular checkpoint/restart solutions. The intent of this paper is to aid researchers in the domain as well as to facilitate development of new checkpointing solutions.

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

high performance computing (hpc)
checkpoint/restart
reliability


Hybrid trust and reputation management for sensor networks Wireless sensor networks are characterised by the distributed nature of their operation and the resource constraints on the nodes. Trust management schemes that are targeted at sensor networks need to be lightweight in terms of computational and communication requirements, yet powerful in terms of flexibility in managing trust between nodes of heterogeneous deployments. In this paper, we propose a trust management model that can uniformly support the needs of nodes with highly diverse network roles and capabilities, by exploiting the pre-deployment knowledge on the network topology and the information flows, and by allowing for flexibility in the trust establishment process. The model is hybrid, combining aspects from certificate-based and behaviour-based approaches on trust establishment on common evaluation processes and metrics. It enables controlled trust evolution based on network pre-configuration, and controlled trust revocation through the propagation of behaviour evaluation results made available by supervision networks. The proposed model and trust metrics have been validated through simulation. The results and analysis demonstrate its effectiveness in managing the trust relationships between nodes and clusters, while distributing the computational cost of trust evaluation operations.

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

trust establishment
sensor networks
reputation management


an object oriented library to manage the collection of schittkowski test problems for nonlinear optimization This paper describes a C++ library that allows handling these test problems in an object-oriented manner without replacing the original Fortran code. The class includes wrappers for evaluating the functions defining each problem, in addition to methods that allow the user to query whether certain features are present in a given test problem. This makes it possible to classify and select subsets of the problems according to criteria specific for the code being tested.

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

optimization algorithm testing
optimization test problems
nonlinear programming


Phase matched magneto optical single mode rib waveguides based on geometrical adjustments In this work, we demonstrate via numerical simulation the design rules that must be imposed on the geometry of magneto optical rib waveguides to make them behave as single-mode and phase matched rib waveguides. Using film mode matching method, the results show that operation in both single mode and phase matching is possible under certain circumstances with selected geometries. We simulate the performance of such devices and we determined the waveguide dimensions (height, width, and etching depth) that satisfy single mode and phase matching conditions simultaneously.

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

rib waveguides
single mode
phase matching

integrated optics
magneto-optic waveguides


A Bayesian approach to deformed pattern matching of iris images We describe a general probabilistic framework for matching patterns that experience in-plane nonlinear deformations, such as iris patterns. Given a pair of images, we derive a maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimate of the parameters of the relative deformation between them. Our estimation process accomplishes two things simultaneously: It normalizes for pattern warping and it returns a distortion-tolerant similarity metric which can be used for matching two nonlinearly deformed image patterns. The prior probability of the deformation parameters is specific to the pattern-type and, therefore, should result in more accurate matching than an arbitrary general distribution. We show that the proposed method is very well suited for handling iris biometrics, applying it to two databases of iris images which contain real instances of warped patterns. We demonstrate a significant improvement in matching accuracy using the proposed deformed Bayesian matching methodology. We also show that the additional computation required to estimate the deformation is relatively inexpensive, making it suitable for real-time applications.

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

statistical models for pattern recognition


An Integrated MFFP-tree Algorithm for Mining Global Fuzzy Rules from Distributed Databases In the past, many algorithms have been proposed for mining association rules from binary databases. Transactions with quantitative values are, however, also commonly seen in real-world applications. Each transaction in a quantitative database consists of items with their purchased quantities. The multiple fuzzy frequent pattern tree (MFFP-tree) algorithm was thus designed to handle a quantitative database for efficiently mining complete fuzzy frequent itemsets. It however, only processes a database for mining the desired rules. In this paper, we propose an integrated MFFP (called iMFFP)-tree algorithm for merging several individual MFFP trees into an integrated one. The proposed iMFFP-tree algorithm firstly handles the fuzzy regions for providing linguistic knowledge for human beings. The integration mechanism of the proposed algorithm thus efficiently and completely moves a branch from one sub-tree to the integrated tree. The proposed approach can derive both global and local fuzzy rules from distributed databases, thus allowing managers to make more significant and flexible decisions. Experimental results also showed the performance of the proposed approach.

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

imffp tree
fuzzy data mining
distributed database


Maintenance scheduling in manufacturing systems based on predicted machine degradation In this paper, we propose a new method for scheduling of maintenance operations in a manufacturing system using the continuous assessment and prediction of the level of performance degradation of manufacturing equipment, as well as the complex interaction between the production process and maintenance operations. Effects of any maintenance schedule are evaluated through a discrete-event simulation that utilizes predicted probabilities of machine failures in the manufacturing system, where predicted probabilities of failure are assumed to be available either from historical equipment reliability information or based on the newly available predictive algorithms. A Genetic Algorithm based optimization procedure is used to search for the most cost-effective maintenance schedule, considering both production gains and maintenance expenses. The algorithm is implemented in a simulated environment and benchmarked against several traditional maintenance strategies, such as corrective maintenance, scheduled maintenance and condition-based maintenance. In all cases that were studied, application of the newly proposed maintenance scheduling tool resulted in a noticeable increase in the cost-benefits, which indicates that the use of predictive information about equipment performance through the newly proposed maintenance scheduling method could result in significant gains obtained by optimal maintenance scheduling.

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

genetic algorithm
machine degradation
maintenance scheduling


Point Set Registration Using Havrda-Charvat-Tsallis Entropy Measures We introduce a labeled point set registration algorithm based on a family of novel information-theoretic measures derived as a generalization of the well-known Shannon entropy. This generalization, known as the Havrda-Charvat-Tsallis entropy, permits a fine-tuning between solution types of varying degrees of robustness of the divergence measure between multiple point sets. A variant of the traditional free-form deformation approach, known as directly manipulated free-form deformation, is used to model the transformation of the registration solution. We provide an overview of its open source implementation based on the Insight Toolkit of the National Institutes of Health. Characterization of the proposed framework includes comparison with other state of the art kernel-based methods and demonstration of its utility for lung registration via labeled point set representation of lung anatomy.

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

lung registration
point set registration


A statistical framework for multivariate latent variable regression methods based on maximum likelihood A statistical framework is developed to contrast methods used for parameter estimation for a latent variable multivariate regression (LVMR) model. This model involves two sets of variables, X and Y, both with multiple variables and sharing a common latent structure with additive random errors. The methods contrasted are partial least squares (PLS) regression, principal component regression (PCR), reduced rank regression (RRR) and canonical co-ordinate regression (CCR). The framework is based on a constrained maximum likelihood analysis of the model under assumptions of multivariate normality. The constraint is that the estimates of the latent variables are restricted to be linear functions of the X variables, which is the form of the estimates for the methods being contrasted. The resulting framework is a continuum regression that goes from RRR to PCR depending on the ratio of error variances in the X and Y spaces. PLS does not arise as a member of the continuum; however, the method does offer some insight into why PLS would work well in practice. The constrained maximum likelihood result is also compared with the unconstrained maximum likelihood analysis to investigate the impact of the constraint. The results are illustrated on a simulated example. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

maximum likelihood
multivariate regression
partial least squares
principal component regression
reduced rank regression
continuum regression

latent variable models
canonical co-ordinate regression
simpls


Comparison between Adomian's method and He's homotopy perturbation method In this paper, it is revealed that modified form of He's homotopy perturbation method corresponds to Adomian's decomposition method for certain nonlinear problems. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

he's homotopy perturbation methods
adomian's decomposition method
taylor expansion
bratu-type problems


Cross-layer directional antenna MAC protocol for wireless ad hoc networks In this paper, we propose a directional antenna medium access (DAMA) protocol and its enhanced version called enhanced DAMA (EDAMA), which takes advantage of the benefits offered by directional antennas. Both of these schemes have been inspired by the IEEE 802.11 MAC, with major enhancements including a new neighbor discovery scheme, an optimized circular directional transmission of RTS and CTS to prevent the hidden node problem, reduce collisions and decrease node deafness, and also a multi-buffer management scheme. A pair of communicating nodes using these schemes simultaneously transmits the circular directional RTS and CTS only to those sectors with neighbors, hence reducing overall communication delay and enhancing throughput. The main difference between DAMA and EDAMA lies in the way buffering is provided in the MAC layer. Unlike DAMA, which uses a single MAC buffer for all antenna beams as in IEEE 802.11, EDAMA employs separate buffers for each of the antenna sectors and introduces an integrated network and MAC cross-layer design. This helps in eliminating the 'self-induced blocking' problem prominent in existing directional MAC protocols. We have compared DAMA, EDAMA, IEEE 802.11, and two recently proposed directional MAC protocols, and results show that DAMA and EDAMA perform better than existing MAC protocols in the majority of the scenarios investigated, while EDAMA is observed to perform best. We also point out that the performance usually depends oil the network topology and traffic pattern. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

mac
directional antenna
wireless ad hoc networks


Dynamic identification of Staubli RX-60 robot using PSO and LS methods This paper deals with the dynamic modeling and identification of Staubli RX-60 robot. In the robot identification, a least squares (LS) method and particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique were used to estimate the distinct inertia parameters of Staubli RX-60 robot. Several experiments were conducted to have the physical robot data. In identification experiments, the position, velocity, acceleration and torques of the robot joints were measured from the motor encoders, motion analysis system with three cameras and the load-cell sensor. Using experimental data, the inertial parameters of the robot were successfully estimated. The parameters estimated from these methods were verified with experimental results. These experimental results show that the estimated inertial parameters predict robot dynamics well. Moreover, the identification errors for both PSO based identification technique and LS method were computed and were summarized in a table. According to the identification errors, the performance of PSO on the parameter estimation is better than the performance of IS method. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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


Multimodal Connectedness and Quality of Life: Examining the Influences of Technology Adoption and Interpersonal Communication on Well-Being Across the Life Span This study examined the relationship between the number of communication technologies used for social interactions (i.e., multimodal connectedness) and well-being across the lifespan. Consistent with the assumptions of media multiplexity, multimodal connectedness and frequency of strong-tie communication enhanced well-being, but only for older-age cohorts (3554 and 5570+). For young adults (1834), multimodal connectedness and frequency of weak-tie communication diminished well-being. The findings are framed in terms of differing motives for maintaining social relations across the lifespan, as maintenance of relationships with strong ties become more important and the number of weak ties contract as people age.

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

multimodal connectedness
media multiplexity

new communication technologies
well-being
socioemotional selectivity theory


An application of fractional calculus to a new class of multivalent functions with negative coefficients Motivated by some earlier works of Chen et al. (cf., [1,2]), dealing with various ap plications of the operators of fractional calculus in Analytic Function Theory, the authors introduce and study rather systematically a certain subclass of analytic and p-valent functions with negative coefficients. This subclass is defined by using a familiar fractional derivative operator. Coefficient estimates, growth and distortion theorems, and many other interesting and useful properties and characteristics of this class of analytic and p-valent functions are obtained; some of these properties involve, for example, linear combinations and modified Hadamard products (or convolution) of functions belonging to the class introduced here. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

analytic functions
p-valent functions
inclusion property
hadamard product (or convolution)
integral operator
cauchy-schwarz inequality
close-to-convex functions
starlike functions
convex functions


The Adaptive Recommendation Mechanism for Lane-Changing at Safe Distances in Vehicular Environments This paper proposes a novel eight-direction mechanism that can receive location information about nearby vehicles to perform self-analysis for lane-changing activities. In this work, we assume that each vehicle creates \(3\times 3\) grids called safety-distance fields, and that the central grid is based on the given vehicles location. Also assuming one on board unit in each vehicle, this work uses location information of nearby vehicles as input for a cellular automata (CA) model that calculates whether or not vehicles in nearby lanes are a safe distance from the vehicle for which the calculations are being performed. The current study evaluates this approachs performance by conducting computer simulations. Simulation results reveal the strengths of the proposed CA model in terms of increased safety distance and increased collision-avoidance for urban vehicular environments.

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

eight-direction mechanism
lane-changing
obu


Parallel Nonparametric Binarization for Degraded Document Images Adaptive binarization has been widely used in binarizing degraded document images. Most of the adaptive methods, however, face two challenging problems: expensive computation and sensitivity to introduced parameters. To solve the two challenges, we propose a novel parallel nonparametric method consisting of three steps: (i) achieving a number of binary images using Sauvola's method with different parameters; (ii) recognizing each pixel of these binary images using linear SVMs, and (iii) reconstructing a binary image on the basis of the recognized binary images. Our method therefore is a new concept to binarize an image. Instead of computing appropriate thresholding values, we generate a new binary image in term of numerous recognized binary images. The prerequisite of this idea is big enough data generated, and the modern CUDA-enabled GPUs provide the powerful computation capacity. In our work, we develop a CUDA well-suited parallel algorithm of Sauvola's method and implement it on Kepler GPUs with CUDA 5.0. Overall, our proposed method is highly parallelized as well and easily implemented on distributed systems if higher performance required. Experimental results on four public challenging datasets have shown that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

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

sauvola's method
gpu
degraded document image


A novel scheduler for VBR traffic in IEEE 802.11 HCCA WLANs IEEE 802.11 standard provides a reference scheduler with admission control, which is suitable for CBR traffic because the allocation of Transmission Opportunity (TXOP) duration is only based on the mean data rate. This paper proposes a novel scheduler for Variable Bit Rate (VBR) traffic, where the polling list and TXOP values are dynamically updated according to the current backlog and the measured loss rate of each flow. Moreover, an effective admission method is also provided as well to guarantee the loss rate. According to our simulation results, the number of admitted flows in the proposed scheduler is close to that in the reference scheduler and the loss rate can be well controlled below the threshold.

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