Architecture Design for Globally Distributed Projects
This paper talks through the practices and infrastructure that was used on the experimental Global Studio Project (GSP). While the architecture activities are highlighted, related practices such as project management, requirements engineering and integration and test in a distributed environment will also be discussed as lessons learned.

title: Risk Mitigation Tactics for Planning and Monitoring Global Software Development Projects
abstract: This tutorial describes a structured approach for determining the GSD related risks specific to a given project, selecting appropriate tactics for addressing these risks, and suggesting ways in which the level of risk can be monitored during the execution of the project.

title: A Scalable Testing Framework for Location-Based Services
abstract: A novel testing framework for location based services is introduced. In particular, the paper showcases a novel architecture for such a framework. The implementation of the framework illustrates both the functionality and the feasibility of the framework proposed and the utility of the architecture. The new framework is evaluated through comparison to several other methodologies currently available for the testing of location-based applications. A case study is presented in which the testing framework was applied to a typical mobile service tracking system. It is concluded that the proposed testing framework achieves the best coverage of the entire location based service testing problem of the currently available methodologies; being equipped to test the widest array of application attributes and allowing for the automation of testing activities.

title: Combining spatial and scale-space techniques for edge detection to provide a spatially adaptive wavelet-based noise filtering algorithm
abstract: New methods for detecting edges in an image using spatial and scale-space domains are proposed. A priori knowledge about geometrical characteristics of edges is used to assign a probability factor to the chance of any pixel being on an edge. An improved double thresholding technique is introduced for spatial domain filtering. Probabilities that pixels belong to a given edge are assigned based on pixel similarity across gradient amplitudes, gradient phases and edge connectivity. The scale-space approach uses dynamic range compression to allow wavelet correlation over a wider range of scales. A probabilistic formulation is used to combine the results obtained from filtering in each domain to provide a final edge probability image which has the advantages of both spatial and scale-space domain methods. Decomposing this edge probability image with the same wavelet as the original image permits the generation of adaptive filters that can recognize the characteristics of the edges in all wavelet detail and approximation images regardless of scale. These matched filters permit significant reduction in image noise without contributing to edge distortion. The spatially adaptive wavelet noise-filtering algorithm is qualitatively and quantitatively compared to a frequency domain and two wavelet based noise suppression algorithms using both natural and computer generated noisy images.

title: Owlgres: A Scalable OWL Reasoner
abstract: We present Owlgres, a DL-Lite reasoner implementation written for PostgreSQL, a mature open source database. Owlgres is an OWL reasoner that provides consistency checking and conjunctive query services, supports DL-LiteR as well as the OWL sameAs construct, and is not limited to PostgreSQL. We discuss the implementation with special focus on sameAs and the supported subset of the SPARQL language. Emphasis is given to the implemented optimization techniques which resulted in significant performance improvement. Based on a confidential NASA dataset and part of the DBpedia dataset, we show a typical use case for Owlgres, i.e. given a terminology and a dataset, Owlgres provides querying on a persistent knowledge base with reasoning at query time in the expressivity of DL-LiteR.

title: PickPocket: A computer billiards shark
abstract: Billiards is a game of both strategy and physical skill. To succeed, a player must be able to select strong shots, and then execute them accurately and consistently on the table. Several robotic billiards players have recently been developed. These systems address the task of executing shots on a physical table, but so far have incorporated little strategic reasoning. They require artificial intelligence to select the 'best' shot taking into account the accuracy of the robot, the noise inherent in the domain, the continuous nature of the search space, the difficulty of the shot, and the goal of maximizing the chances of winning. This article describes the program PickPocket, the winner of the simulated 8-ball tournaments at the 10th and 11th Computer Olympiad competitions. PickPocket is based on the traditional search framework, familiar from games such as chess, adapted to the continuous stochastic domain of billiards. Experimental results are presented exploring the properties of two search algorithms, Monte-Carlo search and Probabilistic search.

title: Managing Change: An Ontology Version Control System
abstract: In this paper we present the basic requirements and initial design of a system which manages and facilitates changes to an OWL ontology in a multi-editor environment. This system uses a centralized client-server architecture in which the server maintains the current state and full history of all managed ontologies. Clients can access the current ontology version, all historical revisions, and differences between arbitrary revisions, as well as metadata associated with revisions. This system will be used by many other ontology based services, such as incremental reasoning, collaborative ontology development, advanced ontology search, and ontology module extraction. Taken holistically, this network of services will provide a rich environment for the development and management of ontology based information systems. 1 Motivation and Requirements We need for a system that manages access to a changing ontology. This requirement is experienced by a variety applications with different stakeholders. An illustrative use case is presented below. A large distributed organization requires integration and alignment of many heterogeneous data sources and information artifacts. They facilitate such integration by employing one or more expressive OWL ontologies that exist in defined relations to data sources, information artifacts, and an enterprise conceptual model. These ontologies, as a critical infrastructure components, have stakeholders throughout the organization and outside its boundaries. Further, they are developed and maintained concurrently by many parties. Individual stakeholders participate in the ontology engineering process in different ways. Some are primarily consumers, but may make detailed edits to areas of the ontologies critical to them. Others are charged with maintaining high-level ontology coherence and use an integrated ontology development environment, such as Protege-OWL, to collaborate with similar editors in realtime, leveraging tools to maintain a dynamic view of the ontology. All stakeholders rely on the ontologies being available and consistent across the organization. This use case illustrates a set of requirements: Client Performance The network is a potential bottleneck of any distributed or client-server system, but the critical work of ontology development is