Realizing Live Sequence Charts in SystemVerilog
The design of an embedded control system starts with an investigation of properties and behaviors of the process evolving within its environment, and an analysis of the requirement for its safety performance. In early stages, system requirements are often specified as scenarios of behavior using sequence charts for different use cases. This specification must be precise, intuitive and expressive enough to capture different aspects of embedded control systems. As a rather rich and useful extension to the classical message sequence charts, live sequence charts (LSC), which provide a rich collection of constructs for specifying both possible and mandatory behaviors, are very suitable for designing an embedded control system. However, it is not a trivial task to realize a high-level design model in executable program codes effectively and correctly. This paper tackles the challenging task by providing a mapping algorithm to automatically synthesize SystemVerilog programs from given LSC specifications.

title: A Z Approach in Validating ORA-SS Data Models
abstract: The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in more data being accessed over the Internet. In turn there is an increase in the use of semistructured data, which plays a crucial role in many web applications particularly with the introduction of XML and its related technologies. This increase in use makes the design of good semistructured data structures essential. The Object Relationship Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS) is a graphical notation for designing and representing semistructured data. In this paper, we demonstrate an approach to formally validate the ORA-SS data models in order to enhance the correctness of semistructured data design. A mathematical semantics for the ORA-SS notation is defined using the Z formal language, and further validation processes are carried out to check the correctness of the semistructured data models at both the schema and instance levels.

title: XML-Based Static Type Checking and Dynamic Visualization for TCOZ
abstract: Timed Communicating Object Z(TCOZ) combines Object-Z's strengths in modelling complex data and state with TCSP's strengths in modeling real-time concurrency. Based on our previous work on the XML environment for TCOZ, this paper firstly demonstrates the development of a type checker for detecting static semantic errors of the TCOZ specification, then illustrates a transformation tool to automatically project TCOZ models into UML statechart diagrams for visualising the dynamic system behaviour.

title: A tools environment for developing and reasoning about ontologies
abstract: Started in the beginning of 2001, the semantic Web is regarded by many as the next generation of the Web. Ontology languages are the building blocks of semantic Web as they provide basic vocabularies for data markups: the ontologies. The correctness of shared ontologies is crucial to the proper functioning of agents. Hence ensuring the consistency of ontologies is a central issue in both the design and deployment phases of any semantic Web-aware application. Our experiences show that semantic Web is a novel and fruitful application domain for formal languages and their mature reasoning tool support. In order to ease the application of formal methods and tools to the semantic Web, we developed an integrated tools environment to support systematic development of OWL ontologies and then transformation, reasoning assistance and querying of them.

title: Validating Semistructured Data Using OWL
abstract: Semistructured data has become prevalent in both web applications and database systems. This rapid growth in use makes the design of good semistructured data essential. Formal semantics and automated reasoning tools enable us to reveal the inconsistencies in a semistructured data model and its instances. The Object Relationship Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS) is a graphical notation for designing and representing semistructured data. This paper presents a methodology of encoding the semantics of ORA-SS in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and automatically validating the semistructured data design using the OWL reasoning tool – RACER. Our methodology provides automated consistency checking of an ORA-SS data model at both the schema and instance levels.

title: Object-Z web environment and projections to UML
abstract: This paper presents the XML/XSL approach to the development of a web environment for the formal speci cation language Object-Z. The projection techniques and tools from Object-Z (in XML) to UML (in XMI) are developed using XSL Transformations (XSLT). Furthermore, Object-Z (itself) is used to specify and design the essential functionalities of the web environment and the projection tools to UML. In a sense, the paper also demonstrates a formal approach to modeling web applications.

title: A Data Mining Based Intrusion Detection Model
abstract: Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) have become a critical part of security systems. The goal of an intrusion detection system is to block intrusion effectively and accurately. However, the performance of IDS is not satisfying. In this paper, we study the issue of building a data mining based intrusion detection model to raise the detection performance. The key ideas are to use data mining techniques to discover consistent and useful patterns for intrusion and use the set of patterns to recognize intrusion. By applying statistics inference theory to this model, the patterns mined from a set of test data are effective to detect the attacks in the same category, and therefore can detect most novel attacks that are variants of known attacks.

title: Synchronization protocols in distributed real-time systems
abstract: In many distributed real-time systems, the workload can be modeled as a set of periodic tasks, each of which consists of a chain of subtasks executing on different processors. Synchronization protocols are used to govern the release of subtasks so that the precedence constraints among subtasks are satisfied and the schedulability of the resultant system is analyzable. Tasks have different worst-case and average end-to-end response times when different protocols are used. In this paper, we consider distributed real-time systems with independent, periodic tasks and fixed-priority scheduling algorithms. We propose three synchronization protocols and conduct simulation to compare their performance with respect to the two timing aspects.

title: Image completion with structure propagation
abstract: In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to image completion, which we call structure propagation. In our system, the user manually specifies important missing structure information by extending a few curves or line segments from the known to the unknown regions. Our approach synthesizes image patches along these user-specified curves in the unknown region using patches selected around the curves in the known region. Structure propagation is formulated as a global optimization problem by enforcing structure and consistency constraints. If only a single curve is specified, structure propagation is solved using Dynamic Programming. When multiple intersecting curves are specified, we adopt the Belief Propagation algorithm to find the optimal patches. After completing structure propagation, we fill in the remaining unknown regions using patch-based texture synthesis. We show that our approach works well on a number of examples that are challenging to state-of-the-art techniques.

title: Terrain Synthesis from Digital Elevation Models
abstract: In this paper, we present an example-based system for terrain synthesis. In our approach, patches from a sample terrain (represented by a height field) are used to generate a new terrain. The synthesis is guided by a user-sketched feature map that specifies where terrain features occur in the resulting synthetic terrain. Our system emphasizes large-scale curvilinear features (ridges and valleys) because such features are the dominant visual elements in most terrains. Both the example height field and user's sketch map are analyzed using a technique from the field of geomorphology. The system finds patches from the example data that match the features found in the user's sketch. Patches are joined together using graph cuts and Poisson editing. The order in which patches are placed in the synthesized terrain is determined by breadth-first traversal of a feature tree and this generates improved results over standard raster-scan placement orders. Our technique supports user-controlled terrain synthesis in a wide variety of styles, based upon the visual richness of real-world terrain data.

title: PRISMATICA: toward ambient intelligence in public transport environments
abstract: On-line surveillance to improve safety and security is a major requirement for the management of public transport networks and other public places. The surveillance task is a complex one involving people, management procedures, and technology. This work describes an architecture that takes into account the distributed nature of the detection processes and the need to allow for different types of devices and actuators. This was part of a major European initiative on intelligent transport systems. Because of the dominant nature of closed circuit television in surveillance, This work describes in detail a computer-vision module used in the system and its particular ability to detect situations of interest in busy conditions. The system components have been implemented, integrated, and tested in real metropolitan railway environments and are considered to be the first step toward providing ambient intelligence in such complex scenarios. Results are presented that not only deal with detection performance, but also on the perception of people who used the system on its effectiveness and potential impact.