An Efficient Dynamic Integration Middleware for Cyber-Physical Systems in Mobile Environments Advances in information technologies have brought a wide variety of computing environments. In recent years, integrations of computational, networking, and physical elements in different environments tend to increase, so interoperability between heterogeneous computing elements has become a key area of research. A cyber-physical system (CPS) that has gained a lot of attention lately is a tight integration of the systems computational and physical elements. The CPS technology builds on the older discipline of embedded systems, and CPS applications can be found in diverse industry sectors, such as smart home, health care, and transportation. There is a high possibility that a global CPS network that integrates different CPS networks appears in the near future. This paper proposes a CPS middleware framework that ensures interoperability and communication between heterogeneous components in a global CPS network. Through local and global communications, the proposed middleware makes mobile devices in different networks interoperable. It employs Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and performs protocol conversion to communicate with devices using different protocols.

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

cyber physical system
heterogeneous device


Two-machine flowshop scheduling with truncated learning to minimize the total completion time Scheduling with learning effects has received a lot of research attention lately. However, the flowshop setting is relatively unexplored. On the other hand, the actual processing time of a job under an uncontrolled learning effect will drop to zero precipitously as the number of jobs increases. This is rather absurd in reality. Motivated by these observations, we consider a two-machine flowshop scheduling problem in which the actual processing time of a job in a schedule is a function of the job's position in the schedule and a control parameter of the learning function. The objective is to minimize the total completion time. We develop a branch-and-bound and three simulated annealing algorithms to solve the problem. Computational results show that the proposed algorithms are efficient in producing near-optimal solutions. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

two-machine flowshop
truncated learning function


Extreme marginalization: addiction and other mental health disorders, stigma, and imprisonment Major well-defined medical problems that are, in part, the unfortunate outcome of a negative social environment may include specific addictive diseases and other mental health disorders, in particular the affective disorders of anxiety, depression, social phobia, and posttraumatic stress syndrome. This overview touches on the topic of extreme marginalization associated with addiction and other mental health disorders, along with arrest, imprisonment, and parole. All of these are characterized by a lasting stigma that hauntingly continues to affect each person suffering from any of these problems.

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

addiction
mental health disorders
stigma
imprisonment


Surfaces with Pythagorean normals along rational curves An algebraic analysis of components of offsets to irreducible surfaces along rational curves is provided. A simple criterion for deciding if the curve on the surface is (proper/non-proper) PSN is formulated. Surfaces with PSN pencils such that a generic fiber is a proper/non-proper PSN curve are investigated. It is shown that all developable surfaces are PSN pencils (but not necessarily PN surfaces). For non-developable surfaces a method for generating all real parameterizations respecting PSN pencils is designed.

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

offset surfaces
pythagorean surface normals
double planes
psn curves
numerical-control machining


Induction of ordinal classification rules from decision tables with unknown monotonicity We propose the dominance and fuzzy preference inconsistency rates. These indices can be used to discover global monotonicity in decision tables. Sometimes, the transformation of cloning all ordinal attributes is overcomplex. We propose a refined transformation method to avoid the issue of over-fitting.

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

rough sets
multiple criteria decision aiding
dominance relations


The prediction of promoter sequences based on the chemical features A novel strategy to the prediction of promoter sequences, which was based on the analysis of chemical features, was developed for the first time. A string of nucleotides was translated into numerical sequences by means of the chemical parameters that represented the chemical properties and molecular structures of nucleotides, and then genetic algorithm was employed to select effective chemical features so as to establish the proper predictive model of support vector machine (SVM). The accuracies of the final SVM model for the leave-one-out cross-validation on the training set were 100%, and the sensitivity and specificity reached to 1. The accuracy for testing set was also up to 100%. Moreover, several functional sites and chemical parameters selected by SVM model were discussed. The satisfactory results indicated that the study of chemical features in sequences was effective, and the proposed approach was reliable. (C) 2010 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 O O O O O O O O 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 I O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O

support vector machine
genetic algorithm


Intellectual property rights and standardization: the case of GSM This paper investigates the role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in the process of standardization in the telecommunications industry. We take the global system for mobile communications (GSM) case as a highly relevant example, being part of a high-tech industry in which standards play a large role. In the process of designing the GSM standard, a lot of attention has been given to IPRs, mainly to avoid a situation in which a single IPR holder could hamper or even totally block the development of the standard. Nevertheless, the ultimate GSM standard contains a large amount of so-called essential IPRs, i.e., IPRs without which the implementation of GSM products is impossible. The paper provides a general discussion of the development of GSM and presents a database on the essential IPRs in the GSM standard. This database has been compiled on the basis of international patent statistics, and the data that manufacturers have supplied to European Telecommunications Standards Institute, the European standardization body responsible for defining the GSM standard. We use this database to assess the dynamic IPR position of firms in the original GSM standard and its subsequent development. We use the GSM case to underline the importance of a general European policy with regard to IPRs and standardization, and derive several concrete recommendations for such a policy.

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

innovation strategies
patents
essential ipr


Using agent-based software for scientific computing in the NetSolve system Agent-based computing is increasingly regarded as an elegant and efficient way of providing access to computational resources. Several metacomputing research projects are using intelligent agents to manage a resource space and to map user computation to these resources in an optimal fashion. Such a project is NetSolve, developed at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. NetSolve provides the user with a variety of interfaces that afford direct access to preinstalled, freely available numerical libraries. These libraries are embedded in computational servers. New numerical functionalities can be integrated easily into the servers by a specific framework. The NetSolve agent manages the coherency of the computational servers. It also uses predictions about the network and processor performances to assign user requests to the most suitable servers. This article reviews some of the basic concepts in agent-based design, discusses the NetSolve project and how its agent enhances flexibility and performance, and provides examples of other research efforts. Also discussed are future directions in agent-based computing in general and in NetSolve in particular.

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

agent
metacomputing
scientific computing
computational servers

client-server
networking
load balancing
fault tolerance


Moving from social networks to social internetworking scenarios: The crawling perspective ? In new generation social networks, we expect that the paradigm of Social Internetworking Systems (SISs) will become progressively more important. Indeed, the possibility of interconnecting users and resources of different social networks enables a lot of strategic applications whose main strength is the integration of different communities that nevertheless preserves their diversity and autonomy. In this new scenario, the role of Social Network Analysis is crucial in studying the evolution of structures, individuals, interactions, and so on, and in extracting powerful knowledge from them. But the preliminary step to do is designing a good way to crawl the underlying graph. Although this aspect has been deeply investigated in the field of social networks, it is an open issue when moving towards SISs. Indeed, we cannot expect that a crawling strategy, specifically designed for social networks, is still valid in a Social Internetworking Scenario, due to its specific topological features. In this paper, we confirm the above claim, giving a strong motivation for our second contribution, which is the definition of a new crawling strategy. This strategy, specifically conceived for SISs, is shown to fully overcome the drawbacks of the state-of-the-art crawling strategies.

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

social networks
crawling strategies
social internetworking systems


Modeling the dynamic sandwich system with hysteresis using NARMAX model A systematic design procedure for the identification of dynamic sandwich system with hysteresis (DSSH) is proposed. The nonlinear auto-regressive and moving average model with exogenous input (NARMAX) is utilized to describe the behavior of DSSH based on the input space expansion. Since the input output characteristic of DSSH is usually a distorted dynamic hysteresis, a hysteretic operator is developed to act as a coordinate to specify the change tendency of the distorted dynamic hysteresis so as to transform its multi-valued mapping into a one-to-one mapping without dependence on the gradient of the output of DSSH with respect to its input, as the non-differentiable feature of the distorted dynamic hysteresis can not ensure the gradients of the extrema to be obtained. Both the modified akaike's information criterion (MAIC) and the recursive least squares (RLS) algorithm are employed to estimate appropriate structure and parameters of the model in the range of the assumed model structure. The simulations and experiment on X-Y ultra-precision micro-moving stage (UPMMS) are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed modeling approach. (C) 2013 IMACS. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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

sandwich system
hysteresis
modeling
operator
narmax


A Generic and Synchronous Ontology-based Architecture for Collaborative Design Today's complex design projects require teams of designers to come together to facilitate the sharing of their respective expertise in order to produce effective design solutions. Due to the increasing need for exchanging knowledge, modern design projects are even more structured to work with virtual distributed teams that collaborate over computer networks to achieve global optima in design. This article presents an architecture where collaborative design is synchronously and generically achieved. That is, where particular representation models are transformed into ontology instances and merged together in order to accomplish the final product design. It is a synchronous approach because the merging process is undertaken at the same time that interaction among designers takes place. As supporting technologies, Web Ontology Language and Web Services are used to implement such an architecture.

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

ontologies synchronicity reasoning harmonization


Gaussian weak classifiers based on co-occurring Haar-like features for face detection Recently, in the context of appearance-based face detection, it has been shown by Mita etal. that weak classifiers based on co-occurring, or multiple, Haar-like features provide better speed-accuracy trade-off than the widely used Viola and Joness weak classifiers, which use only a single Haar-like feature. In this paper, we extend Mita etal.s work by proposing Gaussian weak classifiers that fuse information obtained from the co-occurring features at the feature level, and are potentially more discriminative. Experimental results, on the standard MIT+CMU test images, show that the face detectors built using Gaussian weak classifiers achieve up to 38% more accuracy in terms of false positives and 42% decrease in testing time when compared to the detectors built using Mita etal.s weak classifiers.

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

haar-like features
object detection
cascade classifiers


Pavement Life-Cycle Sustainability Assessment and Interpretation Using a Novel Qualitative Decision Procedure A novel approach to life-cycle sustainability (impact) assessment and interpretation procedure on the basis of multiple criteria is developed in this paper for the comparison and evaluation of alternative road pavement designs. A case study reported in the literature, which compared pavement structures with virgin materials as well as industrial by-products such as coal ash, crushed concrete waste, and granulated blast-furnace slag, was examined in the context of multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) using the proposed approach. The environmental loadings assessed during the life cycle of the pavement structures included natural raw materials and secondary products, energy and fuel consumption, emissions of carbon dioxide (), nitrogen oxides (), sulphur dioxide (), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), carbon monoxide (CO) and particles, dust emissions, compounds leaching into the soil, and noise. The proposed qualitative decision approach to life cycle-based environmental impact assessment, similar to lexicographic methods in MCDA, relies purely on the qualitative relative importance preferences specified by the decision maker and logical inference. The decision procedure employs dominance testing using the aggregated relative importance preferences to identify which pavement design alternatives dominate the others. (C) 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.

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

pavements
decision making
sustainable development
energy consumption
life cycles


Extraktion, Mapping und Verlinkung von Daten im Web In diesem Artikel geben wir einen berblick ber verschiedene Herausforderungen des Managements von Linked Data im Web. Mit der DBpedia Wissensextraktion aus Wikipedia, dem skalierbaren Linking von Wissensbasen und dem Mapping relationaler Daten nach RDF stellen wir drei Anstze vor, die zentrale Phasen des Lebenszyklus von Daten im Web ausmachen.

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


rule-based video classification system for basketball video indexing Current information and communication technologies provide the infrastructure to send bits anywhere, but do not presume to handle information at the semantic level. This paper investigates the use of video content analysis and feature extraction and clustering techniques for further video semantic classifications and a supervised rule based video classification system is proposed. This system can be applied to the applications such as on-line video indexing, filtering and video summaries, etc. As an experiment, basketball video structure will be examined and categorized into different classes according to distinct visual and motional characteristics features by rule-based classifier. The semantics classes, the visual/motional feature descriptors and their statistical relationship are then studied in detail and experiment results based on basketball video will be provided and analyzed.

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

communication
applications
video
use
feature extraction
infrastructure
paper
filtering
classification
structure
technologies
semantic
feature

statistics
video indexing
video classification
experience
internet video access
informal
knowledge-based systems
rule-based reasoning
relationships
visualization
systems
video content analysis
decision tree
classifiation
class
cluster


Arbitrary Code Injection through Self-propagating Worms in Von Neumann Architecture Devices Malicious code (or malware) is defined as a software designed to execute attacks on software systems and fulfill the harmful intents of an attacker. As lightweight embedded devices become more ubiquitous and increasingly networked, they present a new and very disturbing target for malware developers. In this paper, we demonstrate how to execute malware on wireless sensor nodes that are based on the Von Neumann architecture. We achieve this by exploiting a buffer overflow vulnerability to smash the call stack and intrude a remote node over the radio channel. By breaking the malware into multiple packets, the attacker can inject arbitrarily long malicious code to the node and completely take control of it. Then we proceed to show how the malware can be crafted to become a self-replicating worm that broadcasts itself and infects the network in a hop-by-hop manner. To our knowledge, this is the first instance of a self-propagating worm that provides a detailed analysis along with instructions in order to execute arbitrary malicious code. We also provide a complete implementation of our attack, measure its effectiveness in terms of time taken for the worm to propagate to the entire sensor network and, finally, suggest possible countermeasures.

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

von neumann architectures
wireless sensor networks
arbitrary code injection attacks
multi-stage buffer overflow
sensor worm


Role of NKCC1 and KCC2 in the development of chronic neuropathic pain following spinal cord injury Neuropathic pain is a common problem following spinal cord injury (SCI). Effective analgesic therapy has been hampered by the lack of knowledge about the mechanisms underlying post-SCI neuropathic pain. Current evidence suggests GABAergic spinal nociceptive processing is a critical functional node in this complex phenotype, representing a potential target for therapeutic intervention. Normal GABA neurotransmission is dependent on precise regulation of the level of intracellular chloride, which is determined by the coordinated activities of two cation/chloride cotransporters (CCCs) in the SLC12 family: the inwardly directed Na+-K+-Cl? cotransporter isoform 1 (NKCC1) and outwardly directed K+-Cl? cotransporter isoform 2 (KCC2). Inhibition of NKCC1 with its potent antagonist bumetanide reduces pain behavior in rats following SCI. Moreover, the injured spinal cord tissues exhibit a significant transient upregulation of NKCC1 protein and a concurrent downregulation of KCC2 protein. Thus, imbalanced function of NKCC1 and KCC2 may contribute to the induction and maintenance of the chronic neuropathic pain following SCI.

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


The National Transport Code Collaboration Module Library ? This paper reports on the progress in developing a library of code modules under the auspices of the National Transport Code Collaboration (NTCC). Code modules are high quality, fully documented software packages with a clearly defined interface. The modules provide a variety of functions, such as implementing numerical physics models; performing ancillary functions such as I/O or graphics; or providing tools for dealing with common issues in scientific programming such as portability of Fortran codes. Researchers in the plasma community submit code modules, and a review procedure is followed to insure adherence to programming and documentation standards. The review process is designed to provide added confidence with regard to the use of the modules and to allow users and independent reviews to validate the claims of the modules' authors. All modules include source code; clear instructions for compilation of binaries on a variety of target architectures; and test cases with well-documented input and output. All the NTCC modules and ancillary information, such as current standards and documentation, are available from the NTCC Module Library Website http://w3.pppl.gov/NTCC. The goal of the project is to develop a resource of value to builders of integrated modeling codes and to plasma physics researchers generally. Currently, there are more than 40 modules in the module library.

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


Isogeometric analysis of mechanically coupled CahnHilliard phase segregation in hyperelastic electrodes of Li-ion batteries In this work, a CahnHilliard phase-field model coupled with mechanics is proposed and implemented with the isogeometric finite element method in 3D. Thereby, phase-dependent elastic properties are taken into account. The model is derived from the variational theorem in the line of the original CahnHilliard model and is in agreement with that derived using a microforce balance. Isogeometric analysis is employed to treat the fourth-order CahnHilliard equation and the third-order drifting term in a straightforward fashion. The additional boundary condition ? c ? n = 0 , arising from the CahnHilliard equation, is enforced weakly using a Lagrange multiplier. The calculated phase segregation behavior in a bar is validated by analytical results. In particular, the influence of the phase-dependent elastic properties on phase segregation and the thickness of the phase interface is demonstrated. Finally, the phase segregation and the mechanical stress state in particles with different geometries are studied.

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


CICADA: a novel scheme for improving TCP performance over wireless links In this paper, by making slight modifications in protocol stack of wireless access points, the proposed CICADA scheme aims at isolating problems related to wireless section of a transmission control protocol (TCP) connection from its wired portion, using IP spoofing and virtual protocol stack scheme. As the simulation results for an 802.11 based system show, the proposed scheme improves the overall network throughput for both DCF and PCF scenarios, while reducing the mean and variance of end-to-end delay for voice and video flows due to smarter bandwidth allocation to elastic and real-time traffic. In addition, the proposed scheme uses a centralized network address translation (NAT) structure that prevents undesired disconnections during handovers and achieves a smaller handoff delay compared with other schemes. CICADA also improves the privacy of wireless sections by constructing virtual protocol stacks corresponding to mobile stations and using hierarchical two-level NAT structure in infrastructure networks in order to protect the distribution system against outside attacks. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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

virtual protocol stack
ip spoofing
handoff

cicada daemon
wireless access point
nat server


Factors that affect the accuracy of text-based language identification ? The classification accuracy of text-based language identification depends on several factors, including the size of the text fragment to be identified, the amount of training data available, the classification features and algorithm employed, and the similarity of the languages to be identified. To date, no systematic study of these factors and their interactions has been published. We therefore investigate the effects of each of these factors and their relations on the performance of text-based language identification. Our study uses n-gram statistics as features for classification. In particular, we compare support vector machines, Nave Bayesian and difference-in-frequency classifiers on different amounts of input text and various values of n for different amounts of training data. For a fixed value of n the support vector machines generally outperform the other classifiers, but the simpler classifiers are able to handle larger values of n. The additional computational complexity of training the support vector machine classifier may not be justified in light of importance of using a large value of n, except possibly for small sizes of the input window when limited training data is available. Our training and testing corpora consisted of text from the 11 official languages of South Africa. Within these languages distinct language families can be found. We find that it is much more difficult to discriminate languages within languages families than languages in different families. The overall accuracy on short input strings is low for this reason, but for input strings of 100 characters or more there is only a slight confusion within families and accuracies as high as 99.4% are achieved. For the smallest input strings studied here, which consist of 15 characters, the best accuracy achieved is only 83%, but when languages in different families are grouped together, this corresponds to a usable 95.1% accuracy. The relationship between the amount of training data and the accuracy achieved is found to depend on the window size: for the largest window (300 characters) about 400000 characters are sufficient to achieve close-to-optimal accuracy, whereas improvements in accuracy are found even beyond 1.6 million characters of training data for smaller windows. Our study concludes that the correlation between the factors studied significantly affect classification accuracy; therefore, to assure credible and comparable results, these factors need to be controlled in any text-based language identification task.

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

text-based language identification
n-gram statistics
nave bayesian classification
difference-in-frequency classification


Possible implications of aging for interface designers The populations of the developed countries are becoming older while computer use is affecting increasingly wide aspects of life. Thus it is increasingly important that interface designs make software accessible to colder adults. However there is almost no research on what makes an interface usable for older adults. As a stopgap measure this paper reviews the findings on the effects of age on relevant abilities and uses this information to provide suggestions to consider when designing interfaces for older users. The paper concludes with indications of the needed research in the area of interface design for older users. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

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


A Better Method than Tail-fitting Algorithm for Jitter Separation Based on Gaussian Mixture Model Jitter is roughly defined as the timing shaking of the square waveforms output from phase locked loops. It consists of two parts: deterministic jitter and random jitter. Separating and identifying each jitter component are important in understanding the root cause of jitter and further in improving on phase locked loop design. A popular method for jitter separation is so-called Tail-fitting Algorithm. A better method than Tail-fitting Algorithm for separating deterministic jitter (DJ) and random jitter (RJ) from total jitter (TJ) is presented in this Letter. The new method targets directly on the original total jitter series, instead of the histogram. Histogram is dependent on bin number and is uncertain, but is inappropriately selected as the starting point of Tail-Fitting algorithm. Our method is based on Gaussian mixture model (GMM). The mathematical relationship between this model and the quantities of DJ and RJ is established. The concept of kurtosis is used to determine the order of GMM, thereby rendering our method fully automatic, highly efficient. Our method circumvents the most cumbersome difficulty in tail identification of Tail-Fitting Algorithm, because tails and peaks of the histogram, even after being filtered, are fundamentally ambiguously defined, both theoretically and practically. Our method also bypasses the problem of initial value selection.

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

gaussian mixture model (gmm)
probability density function (pdf)
signal estimation


High-Performance Architecture for Concurrent Error Detection for AES Processors This paper proposes an efficient scheme for concurrent error detection for hardware implementations of the block cipher AES. In the proposed scheme, the circuit component for the round function is divided into two stages, which are used alternately for encryption (or decryption) and error checking in a pipeline. The proposed scheme has a limited overhead with respect to size and speed for the following reasons. Firstly, the need for a double number of clock cycles is eliminated by virtue of the reduced critical path. Secondly, the scheme only requires minimal additional circuitry for error detection since the detection is performed by the remaining encryption (or decryption) components within the pipeline. AES hardware with the proposed scheme was designed and synthesized by using 90-nm CMOS standard cell library with various constraints. As a result, the proposed circuit achieved 1.66 Gbps @ 12.9 Kgates for the compact version and 4.22 Gbps @ 30.7 Kgates for the high-speed version. These performance characteristics are comparable to those of a basic AES circuit without error detection, where the overhead of the proposed scheme is estimated to be 14.5% at maximum. The proposed circuit was fabricated in the form of a chip, and its error detection performance was evaluated through experiments. The chip was tested with respect to fault injection by using clock glitch, and the proposed scheme successfully detected and reacted to all introduced errors.

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

dependable architectures
fault injection attacks
tamper resistance


FO(FD): Extending classical logic with rule-based fixpoint definitions We introduce fixpoint definitions, a rule-based reformulation of fixpoint constructs. The logic FO(FD), an extension of classical logic with fixpoint definitions, is defined. We illustrate the relation between FO(FD) and FO(ID), which is developed as an integration of two knowledge representation paradigms. The satisfiability problem for FO(FD) is investigated by first reducing FO(FD) to difference logic and then using solvers for difference logic. These reductions are evaluated in the computation of models for FO(FD) theories representing fairness conditions and we provide potential applications of FO(FD).

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

fixpoint constructs
fixpoint definitions


A hierarchical duration model for speech recognition based on the ANGIE framework1 This paper presents a hierarchical duration model applied to enhance speech recognition. The model is based on the novel ANGIE framework which is a flexible unified sublexical representation designed for speech applications. This duration model captures duration phenomena operating at the phonological, phonemic, syllabic and morphological levels. At the core of the modelling scheme is a hierarchical normalization procedure performed on the ANGIE parse structure. From this, we derive a robust measure for the rate of speech. The model uses two sets of statistical models a first set based on relative duration between sublexical units and a second set based on absolute duration that has been normalized with respect to the speaking rate. We have used this paradigm to explore some speech timing phenomena such as the secondary effects on relative duration due to variations in speaking rate, the characteristics of anomalously slow words, and prepausal lengthening effects. Finally, we successfully demonstrate the utility of durational information for recognition applications. In phonetic recognition, we achieve a relative improvement of up to 7.7% by incorporating our model over and above a standard phone duration model, and similarly, in a word spotting task, an improvement from 89.3 to 91.6 (FOM) has resulted.

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


Branch points in one-dimensional Gaussian scale space Scale space analysis combines global and local analysis in a single methodology by simplifying a signal. The simplification is indexed using a continuously varying parameter denoted scale. Different analyses can then be performed at their proper scale. We consider evolution of a polynomial by the parabolic partial differential heat equation. We first study a basis for the solution space, the heat polynomials, and subsequently the local geometry around a branch point in scale space. By a branch point of a polynomium we mean a scale and a location where two zeros of the polynomial merge. We prove that the number of branch points for a solution is [n/2] for an initial polynomial of degree it. Then we prove that the branch points uniquely determine a polynomial up to a constant factor. Algorithms are presented for conversion between the polynomial's coefficients and its branch points.

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

reconstruction
representation
real algebra
heat polynomial


HouSI: Heuristic for delimitation of housing submarkets and price homogeneous areas This paper seeks to address the problem of the empirical identification of housing market segmentation, once we assume that submarkets exist. The typical difficulty in identifying housing submarkets when dealing with many locations is the vast number of potential solutions and, in such cases, the use of the Chow test for hedonic functions is not a practical solution. Here, we solve this problem by undertaking an identification process with a heuristic for spatially constrained clustering, the Housing Submarket Identifier (HouSI). The solution is applied to the housing market in the city of Barcelona (Spain), where we estimate a hedonic model for fifty thousand dwellings aggregated into ten groups. In order to determine the utility of the procedure we seek to verify whether the final solution provided by the heuristic is comparable with the division of the city into ten administrative districts.

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

housing submarket segmentation
hedonic prices
spatial clustering


Hands on a virtually elastic object This paper reports on the development of a system for manipulating a virtually elastic object by integrating various techniques. A sensor glove is used for interacting with the virtual object, and a virtual hand is used for visualizing the interaction between the hand and the object. Motion of the virtual hand is controlled with the sensor glove. By using a simplified hand model and a virtual object with a hierarchical representation based on a sphere-tree, collision between the fingers and the object is detected. Contact points between the virtual hand and the object are used for establishing constraints for the estimation of deformation based on the finite-element method. Experiments show that the critical process for attaining interactive response is the inversion of the stiffness matrix in finite-element analysis. The method of condensation is adopted for reducing the sizes of the matrices to be inverted. Parallel processing is used for speeding up the matrix inversion process. Test results show that an interactive response can be attained for objects with a matrix to be inverted being composed of less than 300 nodes, and the response time of the system is inversely proportional to the number of processors.

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

deformable object
glovebased input
virtual reality


An evaluation of physiological demands and comfort between the use of conventional and lightweight self-contained breathing apparatus The additional physiological strain associated with the use of self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) is mostly linked to the additional weight. Lightweight and conventional SCBA were assessed in a submaximal step test performed in full firekit (total weights 15 and 27kg, respectively). Factors assessed were: comparative energy expenditure of the two sets, relationship between comparative energy expenditure and aerobic fitness and subjective discomfort. Measured variables were: oxygen consumption, heart rate, estimated VO2max and subjective discomfort (body part discomfort scale). The lightweight SCBA displayed a significant oxygen consumption benefit, which was independent of dynamic workrate and valued at 0.256lmin?1. Mean heart rate responses were significantly lower with the light set. No relationship was found between comparative energy expenditure and aerobic fitness. The light set was rated as significantly more comfortable than the heavy. Further research is required to assess the extent of the energy consumption benefit in realistic fire suppression protocols and the contribution of ergonomic factors to the energy and comfort benefits.

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


Solutions for biomedical grid computingCase studies from the D-Grid project Services@MediGRID The project Services@MediGRID consortium established a tool set of grid-based biomedical services since 2008. The services are related to genetic analysis, genome data visualization, and pharmacokinetic modeling. Furthermore, business concepts for these services have been examined which are supported by an accounting and billing service. While the tools cover a whole service chain for biomedicine, the business concepts are rather heterogeneous. However, the overall addressed target market areas show promising potential. In addition, a structured coaching process reduces friction in the technology transfer from grid computing to biomedicine. This should be considered for similar future endeavors.

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

services@medigrid
medigrid
healthgrids
grid-based tool set for genetics
grid business concepts


Automatic maintenance of association invariants Many approaches to software specification and design make use of invariants: constraints whose truth is preserved under operations on a system or component. Object modelling involves the definition of association invariants: constraints upon the sets of links corresponding to particular associations, most often concerning type, multiplicity, or symmetry. This paper shows how the definitions of operations may be extended to take account of association invariants, so that they may be properly considered when the operations are implemented. It introduces a formal, object-based modelling notation in which the process of extension and implementation, and thus the maintenance of association invariants, can be automated, making it easier to produce correct implementations of an object-oriented design.

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


Pairwise optimization of modulation constellations for non-uniform sources The design of two-dimensional signal constellations for the transmission of binary non-uniform memoryless sources over additive white Gaussian noise channels is investigated. The main application of this problem is the implementation of improved constellations where transmitted data is highly non-uniform. A simple algorithm, which optimizes a constellation by re-arranging its points in a pairwise fashion (i.e., two points are modified at a time, with all other points remaining fixed), is presented. In general, the optimized constellations depend on both the source statistics and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the channel. We show that constellations designed with source statistics considered can yield symbol error rate (SER) performance that is substantially better than rectangular quadrature amplitude modulation signal sets used with either Gray mapping or more recently developed maps. SER gains as high as 5 dB in E(b)/N(o) SNR are obtained for highly non-uniform sources. Symbol mappings are also developed for the new constellations using a similar pairwise optimization method whereby we assign and compare a weighted score for each pair. These maps, when compared to the mappings used in conjunction with the standard rectangular QAM constellation, again achieve considerable performance gains in terms of bit error rate (BER). Gains as high as 4 dB were achieved over rectangular QAM with Gray mapping, or more than I dB better than previously improved mappings. Finally, the uncoded pairwise optimized system is compared to a standard tandem (separate) source and channel coding system. Although neither system is universally better, the uncoded system with optimized constellations outperforms the tandem coding system for low-to-mid SNRs. Performance/complexity trade-offs between the two systems are also discussed.

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

joint source-channel coding
non-uniform sources
signal mapping


Modelling and simulation of complex manufacturing systems using statechart-based actors ? This paper describes a multi-agent architecture based on the actors computational model, for the distributed simulation of discrete event systems whose entities have a complex dynamic behaviour. Complexity is dealt with by exploiting statechart-based actors which constitute the basic building blocks of a model. Actors are lightweight reactive autonomous agents that communicate to one another by asynchronous message passing. The thread-less character of actors saves memory space and fosters efficient execution. The behaviour of actors is specified through distilled statecharts that enable hierarchical and modular specifications. Distributed simulation is achieved by partitioning a system model among a set of logical processes (theatres). Timing management and inter-theatre communications rest in a case on the High Level Architecture services. The paper illustrates the practical application of the proposed modelling and simulation methodology by specifying and analysing a complex manufacturing system.

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

actors
statecharts
modelling and simulation
distributed simulation


Random Walks, Bisections and Gossiping in Circulant Graphs Circulant graphs are regular graphs based on Cayley graphs defined on the Abelian group \(\mathbb{Z}_{n}\). They are popular network topologies that arise in distributed computing.

B I O O B 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


bitmap indexing method for complex similarity queries with relevance feedback The similarity indexing and searching is well known to be a difficult one for high-dimensional applications such as multimedia databases. Especially, it becomes more difficult when multiple features have to be indexed together. Moreover, few indexing methods are currently available to effectively support disjunctive queries for relevance feedback.In this paper, we propose a novel indexing method that is designed to efficiently handle complex similarity queries as well as relevance feedback in high-dimensional image and video databases. In order to provide the indexing method with the flexibility in control multiple features and multiple query objects, our method treats every dimension independently. The efficiency of our method is realized by a specialized bitmap indexing that represents all objects in a database as a set of bitmaps. The percentage of data accessed in our indexing method is inversely proportional to the overall dimensionality, and thus the performance deterioration with the increasing dimensionality does not occur.Our main contributions are three-fold: (1) We provide a novel way to index high-dimensional data; (2) Our method efficiently handles complex similarity queries; and (3) Disjunctive queries driven by relevance feedback are efficiently treated. Our empirical results demonstrate that our indexing method achieves speedups of 10 to 15 over the linear scan.

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

content-based image retrieval
high-dimensional index
bitmap index
similarity search


The effect of lead time variation on the performance of disassembly release mechanisms A recoverable product environment, which includes strategies to extend product life, is an increasingly important method of waste prevention. A major part of this environment is the recoverable manufacturing system designed to remanufacture products. The recoverable manufacturing system has three distinct subsystems: disassembly, remanufacturing and reassembly. A key characteristic of this environment is the high degree of variability inherent in it. The impact of this variability as represented by highly variable lead times is examined for its effect on the control of parts release from the disassembly area to the remanufacturing area. Various disassembly release mechanisms for releasing the parts are examined. The choice is shown to be more critical for serial number specific parts. Lead time variation is shown to have a significant affect on the choice of disassembly release mechanism. Successful mechanisms for controlling the release of materials from the disassembly area are discussed and recommendations are made. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

recoverable manufacturing systems
production planning and control
simulation


middleware solutions for integrated simulation environments This paper outlines the expected research contribution of my PhD work. RAISE is a research project aimed at building a framework and platform that supports the integration of multiple existing models, simulations, and data. One of the limitations of the simulators is that they are developed by domain experts who have an in-depth understanding of the phenomena being modelled and typically designed to be executed and evaluated independently. Therefore the grand challenge is to facilitate the process of pulling all of independently created models together into an interoperating system of systems model where decision makers can explore different alternatives and conduct low cost experiments in an interactive environment. The key research question is whether such integration of independently created, deep domain models can be made feasible, practical, flexible, cost-effective, attractive, and usable.

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

metamodel
structural reflection
simulation integration
reflective middleware


decomposing data machines This paper describes a new FSM decomposition algorithm which extracts a data register from a given FSM. The algorithm is a generalization of the standard minimization algorithm--it selects output values which, when stored in a separate data register, will make additional states in the control machine equivalent. Experimental results show that the algorithm is both effective and fast.

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

decomposition data algorithm paper values control

standardization general experimentation effect extraction minimal


searching geographic resources through metadata-based queries for expert user communities Many systems have been implemented to allow users to benefit from available data on the Internet. In this paper we present a retrieval method which takes into account specific properties of geographic data and discriminates among them on the basis of a core set of metadata elements. Along this line, four different typologies of queries have been proposed, which combine two levels of data searching with two kinds of matching. The query language and the data management are accomplished by following an XML approach based on XML.

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


Numerical analysis of thermal and composite stresses in prestressed concrete pavements One of the major benefits of the pre-stressed concrete pavements is the omission of tension in concrete that results in a reduction of cracks in the concrete slabs. Therefore, the life of the pavement is increased as the thickness of the slabs is reduced. One of the most important issues in dealing with the prestressed concrete pavement is determination of the magnitude of the pre-stress. Three dimensional finite element analyses are conducted in this research to study the pre-stress under various load (Boeing 777) and thermal gradient combinations. The model was also analyzed under temperature gradients without the presence of traffic loading and the induced stresses were compared with those from theoretical relationships. It was seen that the theoretical relationships result in conservative values for the stress.

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

thermal stress
pre stressed concrete pavement


Cross-Sector Competition in Telecommunications Cross-sector competition in the information and communications technology sectors (ICT sectors) constitutes a key strategic challenge for telecommunications companies. Due to increasing convergence, value creation is resulting in a greater degree of interaction. The diversification potential of telecommunications businesses is therefore changing with respect to associated ICT sectors, such as hardware, software and media. The article analyses cross-sector competition in the telecommunications industry on the basis of the diversification activities of ICT companies. A concentration of competitive interdependence in the ICT sectors is demonstrated using a cluster analysis of 34,142 companies. The cross-sector activities of telecommunications companies are investigated using contingency and dependency analyses, and the diversification-related competition in the telecommunications sector is also analysed. With regard to the telecommunications sector, particularly high level cross-sector competition with the media industry is identified, as well as strong diversification activities in the software sector. The results are used to derive the potentials and risks that have a significant bearing on the structure of the cross-sector competitive environment of telecommunications companies.

O O O 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 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

cross-sector competition
vertical diversification
horizontal diversification


Classification of Electromyographic Signals: Comparing Evolvable Hardware to Conventional Classifiers Evolvable hardware (EHW) has shown itself to be a promising approach for prosthetic hand controllers. Besides competitive classification performance, EHW classifiers offer self-adaptation, fast training, and a compact implementation. However, EHW classifiers have not yet been sufficiently compared to state-of-the-art conventional classifiers. In this paper, we compare two EHW approaches to four conventional classification techniques: k-nearest-neighbor, decision trees, artificial neural networks, and support vector machines. We provide all classifiers with features extracted from electromyographic signals taken from forearm muscle contractions, and let the algorithms recognize eight to eleven different kinds of hand movements. We investigate classification accuracy on a fixed data set and stability of classification error rates when new data is introduced. For this purpose, we have recorded a short-term data set from three individuals over three consecutive days and a long-term data set from a single individual over three weeks. Experimental results demonstrate that EHW approaches are indeed able to compete with state-of-the-art classifiers in terms of classification performance.

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

classification of electromyographic signals

embedded cartesian genetic programming
functional unit row architecture
prosthetic hand control


On measuring the inefficiency with the inner-product norm in data envelopment analysis A technique for assessing the sensitivity of efficiency classifications in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is presented. It extends the technique proposed by Charnes et al. (A. Charnes, J.J. Rousseau, J.H. Semple, Journal of Productivity Analysis 7 (1996) 518). An organization's inputoutput vector serves as the center for a cell within which the organization's classification remains unchanged under perturbations of the data. The maximal radius among such cells can be interpreted as a stability measure of the classification. Our approach adopts the inner-product norm for the radius, while the previous work does the polyhedral norms. For an efficient organization, the maximal-radius problem is a convex program. On the other hand, for an inefficient organization, it is reduced to a nonconvex program whose feasible region is the complement of a convex polyhedral set. We show that the latter nonconvex problem can be transformed into a linear reverse convex program. Our formulations and algorithms are valid not only in the CCR model but in its variants.

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

data envelopment analysis
linear reverse convex program

sensitivity analysis
global optimization


A Fast Model for Evaluating the Detection of Selfish Nodes Using a Collaborative Approach in MANETs Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) rely on network cooperation schemes to work properly. Nevertheless, if nodes have a selfish behaviour and are unwilling to cooperate, the overall network performance could be seriously affected. The use of watchdogs is a well-known mechanism to detect selfish nodes. In this paper we propose a collaborative watchdog approach, which is based on the fast diffusion of selfish nodes awareness. Then, we introduce an analytical model to evaluate the time of detection and the overhead (number of messages) of our collaborative watchdog approach for detecting one selfish node. This model is extended for the case of several selfish nodes, including a meanmax approximation for a feasible computation when the number of selfish nodes is high. The results show that a collaborative watchdog is a very efficient approach since the detection time of selfish nodes is reduced, and the overall overhead is very low.

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

wireless networks
performance evaluation


Complexity of spatiotemporal activity of a neural network model which depends on the degree of synchronization Spatiotemporal activity of a hippocampal CA3 model and its dynamic features were investigated. The CA3 model consists of 256 pyramidal cells and 25 inhibitory interneurons. Each pyramidal cell is a single-compartment model which was reduced from the 19-compartment cable model of the CA3 pyramidal cell developed by Traub et al. (1991). Each interneuron is a model which causes tonic responses to constant depolarizing currents. The hippocampal model spontaneously causes four kinds of rhythms, AD, which depend on the degree of synchronization of neuronal activity. The rhythm A (about 2Hz) which occurs in a range of strong mutual excitation is spatially coherent, though epileptiform bursts of pyramidal cells propagate from one end of the network to the other in a short period of time. The rhythm B (about 3Hz) occurs in an intermediate range of the strength of mutual excitation; synchronization of bursts is incomplete and the spatiotemporal pattern is complex. When the mutual excitation is relatively weak, the rhythm C (about 6Hz) occurs. Burst propagation is not uniform in direction, and the spatiotemporal activity is irregular. The rhythm D (1035Hz) occurs in a range of weak mutual excitation when the recurrent inhibition is relatively strong. In this parameter region, pyramidal cells do not cause bursting discharges but irregular beating discharges. The hippocampal model causes phase-lockings and irregular responses to periodic synaptic stimulation depending on its own rhythmic activity and stimulus parameters. Bursting discharges of pyramidal cells are well synchronized in phase-locked responses. Several irregular responses of the rhythms A and B are evidently chaotic; each one-dimensional strobomap of chaotic responses is a non-invertible function with an unstable fixed point. Attractors reconstructed from chaotic responses demonstrate the stretching and folding mechanism.

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

hippocampal ca3
network model
spatiotemporal activity
synchronization

pyramidal cell model
chaos
phase-locking
one-dimensional strobomap
poincar cross-section


on optimality of single-path routes in massively dense wireless multi-hop networks We consider the load balancing problem in large wireless multi-hop networks, often referred to as massively dense wireless multi-hop networks. A network is considered to be massively dense if there are nodes practically everywhere and a typical distance between two nodes is much larger than the transmission range necessitating communication over a large number of hops. The task is to choose the routes in such a way that the maximum relayed traffic load in the network is minimized. In fixed networks the multi-path routes generally yield a lower congestion and thus allow higher throughput. In contrast, we show that in the case of massively dense wireless multi-hop networks the optimal load balancing can be achieved by single-path routing. In particular, we show how any given multi-path routing can be transformed to a single-path routing with at least the same level of performance. The concepts are illustrated by numerical examples where the network nodes are assumed to reside inside a unit disk with uniform traffic demands. The shortest path routes, corresponding to straight line segments, yield a maximum traffic load of 0.637, whereas the single-path routes obtained by numerical optimization yield 0.343, corresponding to 46\% reduction in the traffic load.

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

wireless multi-hop network
multi-path
single-path


Twisted Fano spaces and their classification, linear completions of systems of triangle perspectives Twisted Fano spaces i.e. linear spaces with the parameters of PG(3, 2) which contain a pencil of Fano subplanes are completely classified and characterized. In particular, it is proved that twisted Fano spaces are exactly all the linear completions of systems of triangle perspectives with point degree 4.

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

veblen configuration
multi-veblen configuration
system of triangle perspectives
twisted fano space
fano projective plane
partial steiner triple system


Simulation and analysis of an admission control mechanism for MPLS DS-TE Providing quality of service (QoS) is one of the main challenges in the internet that has recently gained the interest of many researchers. The internet architecture was originally designed to provide IP based "best effort" services to all its applications. The best effort service could be acceptable for traditional applications such as email and web browsing, however, it is inadequate for new classes of emerging applications with real time data such as audio and video streaming. These new applications demand good quality of service from the network due to their inherent high data throughput (bandwidth) and low-latency requirements. Three main architectures were proposed by IETF in an effort to make the IP QoS a reality. They are integrated services (Intserv), differentiated services (DiffServ) and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS). Sometimes perceived as competitor, DiffServ and MPLS are in fact complementary developments that approach the QoS challenge from two different network perspectives. Thus these two approaches can be used together in order to combine their merits. This paper discusses an improved admission control which is aimed at enabling MPLS-TE tunnels differentiations (DS-TE tunnels). It presents a simulation based study which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme where DiffServ EF traffic is mapped to MPLS tunnel to ensure stable performance for the traffic in the MPLS Domain. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

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


The Concept of Umwelt Overlap and its Application to Cooperative Action in Multi-Agent Systems The present paper stems from the biosemiotic modelling of individual artificial cognition proposed by Ferreira and Caldas (2012) but goes further by introducing the concept of Umwelt Overlap. The introduction of this concept is of fundamental importance making the present model closer to natural cognition. In fact cognition can only be viewed as a purely individual phenomenon for analytical purposes. In nature it always involves the crisscrossing of the spheres of action of those sharing the same environmental bubble. Plus, the incorporation of that concept is vital to understand the complex semiosis that sustains collective tissues, societies, regulating collective cognition and consequently cooperative action. The concept of Umwelt Overlap broadens the range of applicability of the previous model to several distinct domains allowing for example for its application to multi-agent cooperative autonomous systems. In this paper a Middle Size League RoboCup soccer team is used as an example of a possible application.

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

cognitive architectures
semiosis of cognition
innenwelt
umwelt overlap
multi-agent systems


Cooperative multicast with moving window network coding in wireless networks ? Cooperative multicast is an effective solution to address the bottleneck problem of single-hop broadcast in wireless networks. By incorporating with the random linear network coding technique, the existing schemes can reduce the retransmission overhead significantly. However, the receivers may incur large decoding delay and complexity due to the batch decoding scheme. In addition, the dependency on the explicit feedback leads to scalability problem in larger networks. In this paper, a cooperative multicast protocol named MWNCast is proposed based on a novel moving window network coding technique. We develop analytical models and show three properties of the proposed scheme. Firstly, without explicit feedback, the packet recovery loss probability of the receivers drops almost exponentially with the increase of window size. Secondly, the average decoding delay of a receiver is upper bounded by O 1 ( 1 - ? ) 2 asymptomatically with respect to its traffic intensity ? . Thirdly, given the target throughput, the decoding complexity of MWNCast scales as O(W) O ( W ) as the window size W increases. Simulation results show that MWNCast outperforms the existing schemes by achieving better tradeoff between the throughput and decoding delay, meanwhile keeping the packet recovery loss probability and decoding complexity at a very low level without explicit feedback.

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

wireless networks
cooperative multicast
network coding


Classical and quantum function reconstruction via character evaluation We consider two natural instances of the problem of determining a function f : G --> G defined on a group G by making repeated queries to the oracle O(x) = chi(f (x)), where chi is a known character of the group G. In particular, we consider the problem of recovering a hidden monic polynomial f (X) of degree d greater than or equal to 1 over a finite field F(p) of p elements given a black box which, for any x is an element of F(p), evaluates the quadratic character of f(x). We design a classical algorithm of complexity O(d(2)p(d+epsilon)) and also show that the quantum query complexity of this problem is O(d). Some of our results extend those of Wim van Dam, Sean Hallgren and Lawrence Ip obtained in the case of a linear polynomial f(X) = X + s (with unknown s); some are new even in this case. We then consider the related problem of determining an element s of a finite group G given the oracle O(x) = chi(sx), where chi is the character of a (known) faithful irreducible representation rho of G. We show that if d is the dimension of rho, then O(d(2) log\G\) classical queries suffice to determine s. The proof involves development of a new "uncertainty principle" for the Fourier transform over finite non-Abelian groups. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Inc.

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

character sums
polynomial reconstruction
quantum algorithms


A bio-basis function neural network for protein peptide cleavage activity characterisation This paper presents a novel neural learning algorithm for analysing protein peptides which comprise amino acids as non-numerical attributes. The algorithm is derived from the radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) and is referred to as a bio-basis function neural network (BBFNN). The basic principle is to replace the radial basis function used by RBFNNs with a bio-basis function. Each basis in BBFNN is supported by a peptide. The bases collectively form a feature space, in which each basis represents a feature dimension. A linear classifier is constructed in the feature space for characterising a protein peptide in terms of functional status. The theoretical basis of BBFNN is that peptides, which perform the same function will have similar compositions of amino acids. Because of this, the similarity between peptides can have statistical significance for modelling while the proposed bio-basis function can well code this information from data. The application to two real cases shows that BBFNN outperformed multi-layer perceptrons and support vector machines.

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

protease cleavage site prediction and characterisation


A modularized contact-rule reasoning approach to the assembly sequence generation for product design Concurrent engineering design is widely used to shorten the time needed to introduce a new product and to enhance the quality of the design of the product. However, designers seldom consider the difficulty of assembling a product's components and modules in the concurrent development process. In fact, the concept of design for assembly is not new. Planning the execution of assembly operations and selecting the assembly sequence during product development will provide designers with interrelated information of design and manufacture that help reduce manufacturing problems. The designer should realize that a reasonable assembly sequence for a product has a significant effect on the efficiency of the entire assembly process. This research focuses on the enhancement of the contact relation matrix approach to the generation of assembly sequences in a product design procedure. A systematic and efficient assembly sequence assistance procedure is proposed to generate feasible assembly sequences and to find an optimal sequence to assemble the product. Compared to the complexity of other methods, this research proposes a modularized contact-rule reasoning approach to generating assembly sequences. The general approach of this research is to (a) develop a modular method for assembly sequence planning, (b) use matrix operations to facilitate the generation of assembly sequences, and (c) generate the assembly sequence of the designed product by searching for subassembly extraction rules. The assembly sequences are then created in the form of a hierarchical structure. The results will assist designers to consider and reduce some manufacture problems in advance that might occur in the process of generation of the recommended design alternative.

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

product design
assembly sequence
contact relation matrix
concurrent engineering


mtcmos hierarchical sizing based on mutual exclusive discharge patterns Multi-threshold CMOS is a popular circuit style that will provide high performance and low power operation. Optimally sizing the gating sleep transistor to provide adequate performance is difficult because the overall delay characteristics are strongly dependent on the discharge patterns of internal gates. This paper proposes a methodology for sizing the sleep transistor for a large module based on mutual exclusive discharge patterns of internal blocks. This algorithm can be applied at all levels of a circuit hierarchy, where the internal blocks can represent transistors, cells within an array, or entire modules. This methodology will give an upper bound for the sleep transistor size required to meet any performance constraint.

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

performance
delay
paper
constraint
methodology
size
module
algorithm
low power

flip-flops
codec
intern
high-performance
level converters
arrays
hierarchies
pattern
design automatian
hierarchic
threshold
dependencies
placement
voltage scaling
synthesis
mpeg4
circuits


Polygonal representation of digital planar curves through dominant point detection - a nonparametric algorithm We describe a new algorithm that detects a set of feature points on the boundary of an 8-connected shape that constitute the vertices of a polygonal approximation of the shape itself. The set of feature points (nodes) is a ranked subset of the original shape points whose connected left and right arm extents cover the entire shape. Nodes are ranked based on their strength (in terms of their importance to other boundary points), length of support region, and distance from the centroid. The polygon obtained by linking the detected nodes approximates the contour in an intuitive way. The proposed algorithm does not require an input parameter and works well for shapes with features of multiple sizes. (C) 2004 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by 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 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

curvature
digital curve
dominant points
shape representation


Group subset selection for linear regression Two fast group subset selection (GSS) algorithms for the linear regression model are proposed in this paper. GSS finds the best combinations of groups up to a specified size minimising the residual sum of squares. This imposes an l0 constraint on the regression coefficients in a group context. It is a combinatorial optimisation problem with NP complexity. To make the exhaustive search very efficient, the GSS algorithms are built on QR decomposition and branch-and-bound techniques. They are suitable for middle scale problems where finding the most accurate solution is essential. In the application motivating this research, it is natural to require that the coefficients of some of the variables within groups satisfy some constraints (e.g.non-negativity). Therefore the GSS algorithms (optionally) calculate the model coefficient estimates during the exhaustive search in order to screen combinations that do not meet the constraints. The faster of the two GSS algorithms is compared to an extension to the original group Lasso, called the constrained group Lasso (CGL), which is proposed to handle convex constraints and to remove orthogonality requirements on the variables within each group. CGL is a convex relaxation of the GSS problem and hence more straightforward to solve. Although CGL is inferior to GSS in terms of group selection accuracy, it is a fast approximation to GSS if the optimal regularisation parameter can be determined efficiently and, in some cases, it may serve as a screening procedure to reduce the number of groups.

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

subset selection
group lasso
linear regression
screening


Optimizing the Throughput of Data-Driven Peer-to-Peer Streaming During recent years, the Internet has witnessed a rapid growth in deployment of data-driven (or swarming based) peer-to-peer (P2P) media streaming. In these applications, each node independently selects some other nodes as its neighbors (i.e., gossip-style overlay construction) and exchanges streaming data with the neighbors (i.e., data scheduling). To improve the performance of such protocol, many existing works focus on the gossip-style overlay construction issue. However, few of them concentrate on optimizing the streaming data scheduling to maximize the throughput of a constructed overlay. In this paper, we analytically study the scheduling problem in data-driven streaming system and model it as a classical min-cost network flow problem. We then propose both the global optimal scheduling scheme and distributed heuristic algorithm to optimize the system throughput. Furthermore, we introduce layered video coding into data-driven protocol and extend our algorithm to deal with the end-host heterogeneity. The results of simulation with the real-world traces indicate that our distributed algorithm significantly outperforms conventional ad hoc scheduling strategies especially in stringent buffer and bandwidth constraints.

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

peer-to-peer
data driven
block scheduling
min cost flow
delivery ratio


Tight stretch factors for L1 L 1 - and L? L ? -Delaunay triangulations In this paper we determine the exact stretch factor of L? L ? -Delaunay triangulations of points in the plane. We do this not only when the distance between the points is defined by the usual L2 L 2 -metric but also when it is defined by the Lp L p -metric, for any p?[1,?] p ? [ 1 , ? ] . We then apply this result to compute the exact stretch factor of L1 L 1 -Delaunay triangulations when the distance between the points is defined by the L1 L 1 -, L? L ? -, or L2 L 2 -metric. In the important case of the L2 L 2 -metric, we obtain that the stretch factor of L1 L 1 -Delaunay and L? L ? -Delaunay triangulations is exactly 4 + 2 2 ? 2.61 . This is the first time that the stretch factor of an Lp L p -Delaunay triangulation, for any p?[1,?] p ? [ 1 , ? ] , is determined exactly. We show, in particular, how to construct between any two points a and b of an L1 L 1 -Delaunay or L? L ? -Delaunay triangulation a path whose length is no more than 4 + 2 2 times the Euclidean distance between a and b . This improves the bound of 10 by Chew (SoCG '86) [5]. We also describe families of point sets whose L1 L 1 -Delaunay or L? L ? -Delaunay triangulation has a stretch factor that can be made arbitrarily close to 4 + 2 2 .

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

lp l p -metric lp l p lp l p l p
geometric spanner


Is learner self-assessment reliable and valid in a Web-based portfolio environment for high school students? This study explored the reliability and validity of Web-based portfolio self-assessment. Participants were 72 senior high school students enrolled in a computer application course. The students created learning portfolios, viewed peers' work, and performed self-assessment on the Web-based portfolio assessment system. The results indicated: 1) there was a high consistency level between students' two assessment results; 2) the self-assessment results and teacher-assessment results were highly consistent without significant differences; 3) the results of self-assessment and end-of-course examination were highly consistent, implying that Web-based portfolio self-assessment can faithfully reflect learning achievements, i.e. it is a reliable and valid assessment method. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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

self-assessment
web-based portfolio
portfolio assessment


Benchmarking

and

implementation

of

probability-based

simulations

on

programmable

graphics

cards

The

latest

graphics

processing

units

(GPUs)

are

reported

to

reach

up

to

billion

floating

point

operations

per

second

(Spode's

Abode,

GeForce

FX

Preview

Spode,

November

Internet

address

(accessed

on

and

to

have

price

performance

of

cents

per

Mflop.

These

facts

raise

great

interest

in

the

plausibility

of

extending

the

GPUs

use

to

non-graphics

applications,

in

particular

numerical

simulations

on

structured

grids

(lattice).

In

this

paper

we

review

previous

works

on

using

GPUs

for

non-graphics

applications,

implement

probability-based

simulations

on

the

GPU,

namely

the

Ising

and

percolation

models,

implement

vector

operation

benchmarks

for

the

GPU,

and

finally

compare

the

CPU's

and

GPU's

performance.

Original

contribution

of

this

work

is

implementing

Monte

Carlo

type

simulations

on

the

GPU.

Such

simulations

have

a

wide

area

of

applications.

They

are

computationally

intensive

and,

as

we

show

in

the

paper,

lend

themselves

naturally

to

implementation

on

GPUs,

therefore

allowing

us

to

better

use

the

GPU's

computational

power

and

speed

up

the

computation.

A

general

conclusion

from

the

results

obtained

is

that

moving

computations

from

the

CPU

to

the

GPU

is

feasible,

yielding

good

time

and

price

performance,

for

certain

lattice

computations.

Preliminary

results

also

show

that

it

is

feasible

to

use

them

in

parallel.

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

hardware architecture (graphics processors)


A real-time pressure estimation algorithm for closed-loop combustion control The cylinder pressure is arguably the most important variable characterizing the combustion process in internal combustion engines. In light of the recent advances in combustion technologies and in engine control, the use of cylinder pressure is now frequently considered as a feedback signal for closed-loop combustion control algorithms. In order to generate an accurate pressure trace for real-time combustion control and diagnostics, the output of the in-cylinder pressure transducer must be conditioned with signal processing methods to mitigate the well-known issues of offset and noise. While several techniques have been proposed for processing the cylinder pressure signal with limited computational burden, most of the available methods still require one to apply low-pass filters or moving average windows in order to mitigate the noise. This ultimately limits the opportunity of exploiting the in-cylinder pressure feedback for a cycle-by-cycle control of the combustion process. To this extent, this paper presents an estimation algorithm that extracts the pressure signal from the in-cylinder sensor in real-time, allowing for estimating the 50% burn rate location and IMEP on a cycle-by-cycle basis. The proposed approach relies on a model-based estimation algorithm whose starting point is a crank-angle based engine combustion model that predicts the in-cylinder pressure from the definition of a burn rate function. Linear parameter varying (LPV) techniques are then used to expand the region of estimation to cover the engine operating map, as well as allowing for real-time cylinder estimation during transients. The estimator is tested on the experimental data collected on an engine dynamometer as well as on a high-fidelity engine simulator. The results obtained show the effectiveness of the estimator in reconstructing the cylinder pressure on a crank-angle basis and in rejecting measurement noise and modeling errors, with considerably low computation effort.

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

extended kalman filter
linear parameter varying systems
genetic algorithms