A mobile negotiation agent embedded hybrid online purchasing system
We propose a mobile negotiation agent embedded hybrid online purchasing system (MineAgeHops in short) with three emphases: agent's mobility, evolvable negotiation model, and hybrid architecture. As in the physical world, a buyer agent can travel to a virtual shop resided in a remote host for obtaining information about a product and directly negotiating on the product with a seller in the virtual shop. Human negotiation is a complex process. The evolvable negotiation model makes effort to reflect different negotiation levels with increasing knowledge and experience as time goes. A hybrid of centralized and decentralized architecture can overcome network bottleneck problem as well as improve purchasing efficiency by enabling agents' mobility and flexibility.

title: A Web-Based Teacher Assisting Agent System
abstract: In the conventional teaching, teaching assistances (TAs) play importance roles in supporting a teacher’s teaching activities. This paper presents a Web-based teacher assisting agent system in which a set of automated programs, so called agents in this context, is developed. It is described that how the agents are generated, where they reside, and how they work independently or collaborate with each other to assist a teacher. It is emphasized that a later developed working agent can be easily incorporated into the system under the developed system framework. It is addressed that both agent persistency and mobility in the system can be achieved by the proposed mechanisms.

title: A P2P Ubiquitous System for Testing Network Programs
abstract: This paper presents design and implementation of a peer-to-peer (P2P) ubiquitous system for assisting a programmer to efficiently test network programs in their development process by using multiple computers simultaneously. This system is implemented using the TOMSCOP (Technology Of Multi-user Synchronous COllaboration Platform). It is a synchronous P2P collaboration platform built atop the JXTA technology. JXTA is a set of protocols for developing P2P shared applications, and enables peers to find each other, form groups and exchange messages across firewalls and NATs. This system has the following three main features. Firstly, it enables the program source files being shared among peers. Secondly, a user is able to simultaneously compile, execute and stop network programs of all peers in a same group by simple operations on the system GUI. Lastly, due to using Java and JXTA technology, the system can run on any platform.

title: A multi-agent system for online course content management
abstract: This paper presents a multiagent system to assist a teacher managing his/her course contents placed on Web servers. In this system there is a set of agents and every agent may work independently from or collaboratively with others. Once generated, an agent can reside in a teacher's daily working computer (called administration host) or a proxy host, and can move between the two hosts. Each agent is devoted to one piece of job and all of them, as a whole, coordinately conduct a sequence of management work during the entire process of teaching a course. A teacher may administrate agents via a specific system shell on his/her administration host, or a usual Web browser on another computer/PDA/mobile phone. The system has been carefully modularized, and thus a new type of agent, if necessary, can be relatively easily developed and quickly incorporated into the system to further enhance or extend its management capability.

title: MFCC and SVM Based Recognition of Chinese Vowels
abstract: The recognition of vowels in Chinese speech is very important for Chinese speech recognition and understanding. However, it is rather difficult and there has been no efficient method to solve it yet. In this paper, we propose a new approach to the recognition of Chinese vowels via the support vector machine (SVM) with the Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) as the vowel’s features. It is shown by the experiments that this method can reach a high recognition accuracy on the given vowels database and outperform the SVM with the Linear Prediction Coding Cepstral (LPCC) coefficients as the vowel’s features.

title: A Hybrid Neural Network of Addressable and Content-Addressable Memory
abstract: We investigate the memory structure and retrieval of the brain and propose a hybrid neural network of addressable and content-addressable memory which is a special database model and can memorize and retrieve any piece of information (a binary pattern) both addressably and content-addressably. The architecture of this hybrid neural network is hierarchical and takes the form of a tree of slabs which consist of binary neurons with the same array. Simplex memory neural networks are considered as the slabs of basic memory units, being distributed on the terminal vertexes of the tree. It is shown by theoretical analysis that the hybrid neural network is able to be constructed with Hebbian and competitive learning rules, and some other important characteristics of its learning and memory behavior are also consistent with those of the brain. Moreover, we demonstrate the hybrid neural network on a set of ten binary numeral patters

title: Simulation Study of AODV Performance over IEEE 802.15.4 MAC in WSN with Mobile Sinks
abstract: Mobility has been incorporated into wireless sensor networks in recent years in order to improve energy efficiency and network coverage. In particular, at the cost of increased message delivery delay, the energy conservation can be achieved by limiting the hop count between the communicating sensor-sink pair. In this paper we allow multihop routing between one sensor and mobile sinks, and consider the delay*energy metric, which is a compound metric to evaluate the performance of diverse data collection schemes. Through extensive simulation experiments of AODV performance over IEEE 802.15.4 MAC with clustered wireless sensor network setting, we investigate the fundamental problems of AODV without information of 802.15.4 MAC, and analyze the influence of incorporating multiple sinks.

title: Macro University
abstract: This paper discusses the technical issues related to the Macro University framework. First we present the characteristics of the Macro University, from which the design principles are derived. Then we describe Macro University's software architecture and networking infrastructure. Since the Macro University is a federation of virtual universities, the format and protocol for open information exchange will be very important. Another often neglected issue is the technical tools to facilitate evaluation and assessment. A third issue is a universal interface for distance learning.

title: Entropy Penalized Automated Model Selection On Gaussian Mixture
abstract: Gaussian mixture modeling is a powerful approach for data analysis and the determination of the number of Gaussians, or clusters, is actually the problem of Gaussian mixture model selection which has been investigated from several respects. This paper proposes a new kind of automated model selection algorithm for Gaussian mixture modeling via an entropy penalized maximum-likelihood estimation. It is demonstrated by the experiments that the proposed algorithm can make model selection automatically during the parameter estimation, with the mixing proportions of the extra Gaussians attenuating to zero. As compared with the BYY automated model selection algorithms, it converges more stably and accurately as the number of samples becomes large.