High-order Compact Schemes for Nonlinear Dispersive Waves
High-order compact finite difference schemes coupled with high-order low-pass filter and the classical fourth-order Runge–Kutta scheme are applied to simulate nonlinear dispersive wave propagation problems described the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV)-like equations, which involve a third derivative term. Several examples such as KdV equation, and KdV-Burgers equation are presented and the solutions obtained are compared with some other numerical methods. Computational results demonstrate that high-order compact schemes work very well for problems involving a third derivative term.

title: Finite element analysis for a nonlinear diffusion model in image processing
abstract: The optimal error estimate O ( h k +1 ) for a popular nonlinear diffusion model widely used in image processing is proved for the standard k th -order ( k ≥ 1) conforming tensor-product finite elements in the L 2 -norm. The optimal L 2 -estimate is obtained by the integral identity technique [1–3] without using the classic Nitsche duality argument [4].

title: The Application of Bayesian Optimization and Classifier Systems in Nurse Scheduling
abstract: Two ideas taken from Bayesian optimization and classifier systems are presented for personnel scheduling based on choosing a suitable scheduling rule from a set for each person’s assignment. Unlike our previous work of using genetic algorithms whose learning is implicit, the learning in both approaches is explicit, i.e. we are able to identify building blocks directly. To achieve this target, the Bayesian optimization algorithm builds a Bayesian network of the joint probability distribution of the rules used to construct solutions, while the adapted classifier system assigns each rule a strength value that is constantly updated according to its usefulness in the current situation. Computational results from 52 real data instances of nurse scheduling demonstrate the success of both approaches. It is also suggested that the learning mechanism in the proposed approaches might be suitable for other scheduling problems.

title: Simulation and analysis on the resiliency and efficiency of malnets
abstract: Future network intruders will probably use an organized army of malicious nodes (here called "malnodes", or collectively a "malnet") to deliver many different attacks, rather than recruiting a disorganized set of compromised nodes per attack. However, partly due to the lack of understanding of the resiliency and efficiency a malnet can have, countering malnets has been ineffective. This paper begins to address this deficiency. Through calculation and simulation for three representative malnets-random, small-world, and Gnutella-like-we show that extremely resilient malnets can be formed to deliver attack code quickly. In particular, we show that disconnecting malnets is possible, but extremely naive approaches such as randomly disinfecting malnodes will not suffice, and effective defenses must either happen very quickly during a second-wave attack, or take effect prior to it.

title: The Story Picturing Engine---a system for automatic text illustration
abstract: We present an unsupervised approach to automated story picturing. Semantic keywords are extracted from the story, an annotated image database is searched. Thereafter, a novel image ranking scheme automatically determines the importance of each image. Both lexical annotations and visual content play a role in determining the ranks. Annotations are processed using the Wordnet. A mutual reinforcement-based rank is calculated for each image. We have implemented the methods in our Story Picturing Engine (SPE) system. Experiments on large-scale image databases are reported. A user study has been performed and statistical analysis of the results has been presented.

title: Probabilistic models for discovering e-communities
abstract: The increasing amount of communication between individuals in e-formats (e.g. email, Instant messaging and the Web) has motivated computational research in social network analysis (SNA). Previous work in SNA has emphasized the social network (SN) topology measured by communication frequencies while ignoring the semantic information in SNs. In this paper, we propose two generative Bayesian models for semantic community discovery in SNs, combining probabilistic modeling with community detection in SNs. To simulate the generative models, an EnF-Gibbs sampling algorithm is proposed to address the efficiency and performance problems of traditional methods. Experimental studies on Enron email corpus show that our approach successfully detects the communities of individuals and in addition provides semantic topic descriptions of these communities.

title: Construct robust rule sets for classification
abstract: We study the problem of computing classification rule sets from relational databases so that accurate predictions can be made on test data with missing attribute values. Traditional classifiers perform badly when test data are not as complete as the training data because they tailor a training database too much. We introduce the concept of one rule set being more robust than another, that is, able to make more accurate predictions on test data with missing attribute values. We show that the optimal class association rule set is as robust as the complete class association rule set. We then introduce the k-optimal rule set, which provides predictions exactly the same as the optimal class association rule set on test data with up to k missing attribute values. This leads to a hierarchy of k-optimal rule sets in which decreasing size corresponds to decreasing robustness, and they all more robust than a traditional classification rule set. We introduce two methods to find k-optimal rule sets, i.e. an optimal association rule mining approach and a heuristic approximate approach. We show experimentally that a k-optimal rule set generated by the optimal association rule mining approach performs better than that by the heuristic approximate approach and both rule sets perform significantly better than a typical classification rule set (C4.5Rules) on incomplete test data.