Optimizing the Java Piped I/O Stream Library for Performance
The overall performance of Java programs has been significantly improved since Java emerged as a mainstream programming language. However, these improvements have revealed a second tier of performance bottlenecks. In this paper, we address one of these issues: the performance of Java piped I/O stream library. We analyze commonly used data transfer patterns in which one reader thread and one writer thread communicate via Java piped I/O streams. We consider data buffering and synchronization between these two threads, as well as the thread scheduling policy used in the Java virtual machine. Based on our observations, we propose several optimization techniques that can significantly improve Java piped I/O stream performance. We use these techniques to modify the Java piped I/O stream library. We present performance results for seven example programs from the literature that use the Java piped I/O stream library. Our methods improve the performance of the programs by over a factor of 4 on average, and by a factor of 27 in the best case.

title: Enabling Safe Dynamic Component-Based Software Adaptation
abstract: Recomposable software enables a system to change its structure and behavior during execution, in response to a dynamic execution environment. This paper proposes an approach to ensure that such adaptations are safe with respect to system consistency. The proposed method takes into consideration dependency analysis for target components, specifically determining viable sequences of adaptive actions and those states in which an adaptive action may be applied safely. We demonstrate that the technique ensures safe adaptation (insertion, removal, and replacement of components) in response to changing external conditions in a wireless multicast video application.

title: Model-based development of dynamically adaptive software
abstract: Increasingly, software should dynamically adapt its behavior at run-time in response to changing conditions in the supporting computing and communication infrastructure, and in the surrounding physical environment. In order for an adaptive program to be trusted, it is important to have mechanisms to ensure that the program functions correctly during and after adaptations. Adaptive programs are generally more difficult to specify, verify, and validate due to their high complexity. Particularly, when involving multi-threaded adaptations, the program behavior is the result of the collaborative behavior of multiple threads and software components. This paper introduces an approach to create formal models for the behavior of adaptive programs. Our approach separates the adaptation behavior and non-adaptive behavior specifications of adaptive programs, making the models easier to specify and more amenable to automated analysis and visual inspection. We introduce a process to construct adaptation models, automatically generate adaptive programs from the models, and verify and validate the models. We illustrate our approach through the development of an adaptive GSM-oriented audio streaming protocol for a mobile computing application.

title: Using temporal logic to specify adaptive program semantics
abstract: Computer software must dynamically adapt to changing conditions. In order to fully realize the benefit of dynamic adaptation, it must be performed correctly. The correctness of adaptation cannot be properly addressed without precisely specifying the requirements for adaptation. This paper introduces an approach to formally specifying adaptation requirements in temporal logic. We introduce A-LTL, an adaptation-based extension to linear temporal logic, and use this logic to specify three commonly used adaptation semantics. Composition techniques are developed and applied to A-LTL to construct the specification of an adaptive program. We introduce adaptation semantics graphs to visually represent the adaptation semantics, which can also be used to automatically generate specification for adaptive programs.

title: Towards Re-engineering Legacy Systems for Assured Dynamic Adaptation
abstract: Increasingly, software must adapt its behavior in response to changes in the supporting computing, communication infrastructure, and in the surrounding physical environment. Since most existing software was not designed to adapt, research on technique to make legacy software dynamically adaptive has gained increasing interest. Assurance is crucial for adaptive software to fulfill its intended purpose. Correctness is even more critical if it is to be applied in high assurance systems. This paper proposes a model-driven approach to introduce dynamic adaptation to non-adaptive legacy systems while maintaining assurance properties. An aspect-oriented technique is applied to achieve separation of concerns in the implementation.

title: Modular verification of dynamically adaptive systems
abstract: Cyber-physical systems increasingly rely on dynamically adaptive programs to respond to changes in their physical environment; examples include ecosystem monitoring and disaster relief systems. These systems are considered high-assurance since errors during execution could result in injury, loss of life, environmental impact, and/or financial loss. In order to facilitate the development and verification of dynamically adaptive systems, we separate functional concerns from adaptive concerns. Specifically, we model a dynamically adaptive program as a collection of (non-adaptive) steady-state programs and a set of adaptations that realize transitions among steady state programs in response to environmental changes. We use Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) to specify properties of the non-adaptive portions of the system, and we use A-LTL (an adapt-operator extension toLTL) to concisely specify properties that hold during the adaptation process. Model checking offers an attractive approach to automatically analyzing models for adherence to formal properties and thus providing assurance. However, currently, model checkers are unable to verify properties specified using A-LTL. Moreover, as the number of steady-state programs and adaptations increase, the verification costs (in terms of space and time) potentially become unwieldy. To address these issues, we propose a modular model checking approach to verifying that a formal model of an adaptive program satisfies its requirements specified in LTL and A-LTL, respectively.

title: Dynamic Terrain LOD with Region Preservation in 3D Game Engine
abstract: In the outdoor 3D game, the terrain can be modified because of interaction. This brings two new complexities to render terrain in 3D game. The first lies in the real-time visualization of dynamic terrain, and the second is that the modified terrain surface need to be preserved. We present an algorithm for dynamic terrain LOD(DT LOD) with preserving region in 3D game engine. The algorithm uses a DAG to represent dependency relationship of vertices which split triangles, and employs an active vertices set to update triangles in two consecutive frames for improving rendering performance. The region LOD can be constructed according to the view direction and the distance between the viewpoint and regions. The results of experiments show that our algorithm has a effective performance during rendering terrain.

title: Building XML Data Warehouse Based on Frequent Patterns in User Queries
abstract: With the proliferation of XML-based data sources available across the Internet, it is increasingly important to provide users with a data warehouse of XML data sources to facilitate decision-making processes. Due to the extremely large amount of XML data available on web, unguided warehousing of XML data turns out to be highly costly and usually cannot well accommodate the users needs in XML data acquirement. In this paper, we propose an approach to materialize XML data warehouses based on frequent query patterns discovered from historical queries issued by users. The schemas of integrated XML documents in the warehouse are built using these frequent query patterns represented as Frequent Query Pattern Trees (FreqQPTs). Using hierarchical clustering technique, the integration approach in the data warehouse is flexible with respect to obtaining and maintaining XML documents. Experiments show that the overall processing of the same queries issued against the global schema become much efficient by using the XML data warehouse built than by directly searching the multiple data sources.

title: Improved Blind Decodings of STBC with Unknown and Known Channel Correlation to Transmitter
abstract: The subspace algorithm can be utilized for the blind detection of space-time block codes (STBC) without knowledge of channel state information (CSI) both at the transmitter and receiver. However, its performance degrades when the channels are correlated. In this letter, we analyze the impact of channel correlation from the orthogonality loss between the transmit signal subspace (TSS) and the statistical noise subspace (SNS). Based on the decoding property of the subspace algorithm, we propose a revised detection in favor of the channel correlation matrix (CCM) only known to the receiver. Then, a joint transmit-receive preprocessing scheme is derived to obtain a further performance improvement when the CCM is available both at the transmitter and receiver. Analysis and simulation results indicate that the proposed methods can significantly improve the blind detection performance of STBC over the correlated channels.

title: Name Disambiguation Using Atomic Clusters
abstract: Name ambiguity is a critical problem in many applications, in particular in the online bibliography systems, such as DBLP and CiteSeer. Previously, several clustering based methods have been proposed although, the problem still presents to be a big challenge for both research and industry communities. In this paper, we present a complementary study to the problem from another point of view. We propose an approach of finding atomic clusters to improve the performance of existing clustering-based methods. We conducted experiments on a dataset from a real-world system: Arnetminer.org. Experiments results show that significant improvements can be obtained by using the proposed atomic clusters finding approach (about +8% and +27% improvements depending on different clustering methods).

title: Image Computing: Fractional Spectra and Circular Moments via FrFT
abstract: In image computing, feature extraction plays a key part for image pattern classification. In this article we adopt discrete Fractional Fourier Transform (FrFT) for fractional feature extraction. Firstly, a criterion is proposed to determine the FrFT order for an image class so that it may be optimally discriminated from other classes in the FrFT domain, and the transformed features are called fractional spectra. Secondly, four types of fractional moments respectively called circular center, circular range, circular skewness, and circular kurtosis are defined and computed from the FrFT results of an image with different FrFT orders. The extracted image features are then classified with a previously proposed nonlinear classifier called Kernel-based Nonlinear Representor (KNR). And face recognition experiments are taken for illustrative examples.