Designing Neural Networks Using Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization
Evolving artificial neural network is an important issue in both evolutionary computation (EC) and neural networks (NN) fields. In this paper, a hybrid particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed by incorporating differential evolution (DE) and chaos into the classic PSO. By combining DE operation with PSO, the exploration and exploitation abilities can be well balanced, and the diversity of swarms can be reasonably maintained. Moreover, by hybridizing chaotic local search (CLS), DE operator and PSO operator, searching behavior can be enriched and the ability to avoid being trapped in local optima can be well enhanced. Then, the proposed hybrid PSO (named CPSODE) is applied to design multi-layer feed-forward neural network. Simulation results and comparisons demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed hybrid PSO.

title: DE and NLP Based QPLS Algorithm
abstract: As a novel evolutionary computing technique, Differential Evolution (DE) has been considered to be an effective optimization method for complex optimization problems, and achieved many successful applications in engineering. In this paper, a new algorithm of Quadratic Partial Least Squares (QPLS) based on Nonlinear Programming (NLP) is presented. And DE is used to solve the NLP so as to calculate the optimal input weights and the parameters of inner relationship. The simulation results based on the soft measurement of diesel oil solidifying point on a real crude distillation unit demonstrate that the superiority of the proposed algorithm to linear PLS and QPLS which is based on Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) in terms of fitting accuracy and computational costs.

title: A New Performance Evaluation Model and AHP-Based Analysis Method in Service-Oriented Workflow
abstract: In service-oriented architecture, services and workflows are closely related so that the research on service-oriented workflow attracts the attention of academia. Because of the loosely-coupled, autonomic and dynamic nature of service, the operation and performance evaluation of workflow meet some challenges, such as how to judge the quality of service (QoS) and what is the relation between QoS and workflow performance. In this paper we are going to address these challenges. First the definition of service is proposed, and the characteristics and operation mechanism of service-oriented workflow are presented. Then a service-oriented workflow performance evaluation model is described which combines the performance of the business system and IT system. The key performance indicators (KPI) are also depicted with their formal representation. Finally the improved Analytic Hierarchy Process is brought forward to analyze the correlation between different KPIs and select services.

title: Constrained Nonlinear State Estimation - A Differential Evolution Based Moving Horizon Approach
abstract: A solution is proposed to estimate the states in the nonlinear discrete time system. Moving Horizon Estimation (MHE) is used to obtain the approximated states by minimizing a criterion that is the Euclidean form of the difference between the estimated outputs and the measured ones over a finite time horizon. The differential evolution (DE) algorithm is incorporated into the implementation of MHE in order to solve the optimization problem which is presented as a nonlinear programming problem due to the constraints. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated in simulated systems that have appeared in the moving horizon estimation literature.

title: Manufacturing Grid: Needs, Concept, and Architecture
abstract: As a new approach, grid technology is rapidly used in scientific computing, large-scale data management, and collaborative work. But in the field of manufacturing, the application of grid is just at the beginning. The paper proposes the concept of manufacturing. The needs, definition and architecture of manufacturing gird are discussed, which explains why needs manufacturing grid, what is manufacturing grid and how to construct a manufacturing grid system.

title: An Effective PSO-Based Memetic Algorithm for Flow Shop Scheduling
abstract: This paper proposes an effective particle swarm optimization (PSO)-based memetic algorithm (MA) for the permutation flow shop scheduling problem (PFSSP) with the objective to minimize the maximum completion time, which is a typical non-deterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard combinatorial optimization problem. In the proposed PSO-based MA (PSOMA), both PSO-based searching operators and some special local searching operators are designed to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities. In particular, the PSOMA applies the evolutionary searching mechanism of PSO, which is characterized by individual improvement, population cooperation, and competition to effectively perform exploration. On the other hand, the PSOMA utilizes several adaptive local searches to perform exploitation. First, to make PSO suitable for solving PFSSP, a ranked-order value rule based on random key representation is presented to convert the continuous position values of particles to job permutations. Second, to generate an initial swarm with certain quality and diversity, the famous Nawaz-Enscore-Ham (NEH) heuristic is incorporated into the initialization of population. Third, to balance the exploration and exploitation abilities, after the standard PSO-based searching operation, a new local search technique named NEH_1 insertion is probabilistically applied to some good particles selected by using a roulette wheel mechanism with a specified probability. Fourth, to enrich the searching behaviors and to avoid premature convergence, a simulated annealing (SA)-based local search with multiple different neighborhoods is designed and incorporated into the PSOMA. Meanwhile, an effective adaptive meta-Lamarckian learning strategy is employed to decide which neighborhood to be used in SA-based local search. Finally, to further enhance the exploitation ability, a pairwise-based local search is applied after the SA-based search. Simulation results based on benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the PSOMA. Additionally, the effects of some parameters on optimization performances are also discussed

title: Hybrid Ant Colony Algorithm and Its Application on Function Optimization
abstract: A new hybrid ant colony algorithm was proposed. Firstly, weight factor was introduced to the binary ant colony algorithm, and then we obtained a new probability by combining probability model of Population based incremental learning (PBIL) with transfer probability of ants pheromone . The new population are produced by probability model of PBIL, transfer probability of ants pheromone and the probability of proposed algorithm so that population polymorphism is ensured and the optimal convergence rate and the ability of breaking away from the local minima are improved. Optimization simulation results based on the benchmark test functions show that the hybrid algorithm has higher convergence rate and stability than binary ant colony algorithm (BACA) and Population based incremental learning (PBIL).

title: A Neural Network Approach To Shape From Shading
abstract: In this paper, we propose a method of recovering shape from shading that solves directly for the surface height using neural networks. The main motivation of this paper is to provide an answer to the open problem proposed by Zhou and Chellappa [11]. We first formulate the shape from shading problem by combining a triangular element surface model with a linearized reflectance map. Then, we use a linear feed-forward network architecture with six layers to compute the surface height with a singular value decomposition. The weights in the model initialized using eigenvectors and eigen-values of the stiffness matrix of objective functional. Experimental results show that our solution is very effective.

title: Twi-Map Support Vector Machine for Multi-classification Problems
abstract: In this paper, a novel method called Twi-Map Support Vector Machines (TMSVM) for multi-classification problems is presented. Our ideas are as follows: Firstly, the training data set is mapped into a high-dimensional feature space. Secondly, we calculate the distances between the training data points and hyperplanes. Thirdly, we view the new vector consisting of the distances as new training data point. Finally, we map the new training data points into another high-dimensional feature space with the same kernel function and construct the optimal hyperplanes. In order to examine the training accuracy and the generalization performance of the proposed algorithm, One-against-One algorithm, Fuzzy Least Square Support Vector Machine (FLS-SVM) and the proposed algorithm are applied to five UCI data sets. Comparison results obtained by using three algorithms are given. The results show that the training accuracy and the testing one of the proposed algorithm are higher than those of One-against-One and FLS-SVM.

title: Multithreaded Optimizing Technique for Dynamic Binary Translator CrossBit
abstract: Dynamic binary translator (DBT) systems enable the architectural incompatible platforms to execute binaries of other architectures transparently. And binary translation and optimization are always deemed as the key techniques to constructing high performance DBT systems. Many previous optimization including fragment chaining, trace/superblock formation, translated code optimization, has been applied to improve performance. However, seldom any effort is made to optimize under multi-core processor environment. Therefore, this paper describes the new multiple threads execution engine (MTEE) of the dynamic binary translator CrossBit, which is a both resourceable and retargetable infrastructure for cross binary translation. The multithreaded technique decomposes the common binary translation working routine into dynamic translation and translated code execution phases, and then multi-threads enable parallelized translation of host binaries. As a result, the multithreaded optimizing technique accelerates the translation of binaries.We evaluated our binary translation system across the SPEC CPU2000 and found that the system under MTEE has reached a performance level equal to that of the conventional CrossBit engine which was executed on the IA32 multi-cores processor environment. And several SPEC benchmark programs even show that the MTEE have speed up the execution of CrossBit about 30% at best. And we are still looking forward to a higher performance improvement through this new software pipelined method.

title: WISE-2005 Tutorial: Web Content Mining
abstract: Web mining aims to develop a new generation of techniques to effectively mine useful information or knowledge from the Web. It consists of Web usage mining, Web structure mining, and Web content mining. Web usage mining refers to the discovery of user access patterns from Web usage logs. Web structure mining tries to discover useful knowledge from the structure of Web hyperlinks. Web content mining aims to extract and mine useful information or knowledge from Web page contents. This tutorial focuses on Web Content Mining. In the past few years, there was a rapid expansion of activities in this area. In this tutorial, I will introduce the main web content mining tasks and problems and state-of-the-art techniques for dealing with them. All parts of the tutorial have a mix of research and industry flavor, addressing seminal research concepts and looking at the technology from an industry angle.