Complete-factors and (g, f)-factors
A factor F of a graph is called a complete-factor if each component of F is complete. Let G be a graph, F be a complete-factor of G with @w(F)>=2 and f,g be two integer-valued functions defined on V(G) with f(x)>=g(x) for all [email protected]?V(G). It is proved that if @w(F)=0(mod2), or f(V(G)) even and f(x)=g(x)(mod2) for all [email protected]?V(G), and if G-V(C) has a (g,f)-factor for each component C of F, then G has a (g,f)-factor. We show that the results in this paper are best possible.

title: A new degree condition for graphs to have [a, b]-factor
abstract: Let t ( ⩾ 3 ) , a and b be integers with 0 ⩽ a b . A graph is called K 1 , t -free if it contains no K 1 , t as an induced subgraph. We prove that every K 1 , t -free G has an [ a , b ] -factor if its minimum degree is at least ( t - 1 ) ( a + 1 ) + b b b + a ( t - 1 ) 2 ( t - 1 ) - t - 1 b b + a ( t - 1 ) 2 ( t - 1 ) 2 - 1 . This degree condition is sharp.

title: On (g, f, n)-Critical Graphs

title: A method to take account of inhomogeneity in mechanical component reliability calculations
abstract: This paper proposes a method by which material inhomogeneity may be taken into account in a reliability calculation. The method employs Monte-Carlo simulation; and introduces a material strength index, and a standard deviation of material strength to model the variation in the strength of a component throughout its volume. The method is compared to conventional load-strength interference theory. The results are identical for the case of homogeneous material, but reliability is shown to reduce for the same load as the component volume increases. The case of a tensile bar is used to explore the variation of reliability with component volume.

title: An Empirical Study on Off-the-Shelf Component Usage in Industrial Projects
abstract: Using OTS (Off-The-Shelf) components in software projects has become increasing popular in the IT industry. After project managers opt for OTS components, they can decide to use COTS (Commercial-Off-The-Shelf) components or OSS (Open Source Software) components instead of building these themselves. This paper describes an empirical study on why project decision-makers use COTS components instead of OSS components, or vice versa. The study was performed in form of an international survey on motivation and risks of using OTS components, conducted in Norway, Italy and Germany. We have currently gathered data on 71 projects using only COTS components and 39 projects using only OSS components, and 5 using both COTS and OSS components. Results show that both COTS and OSS components were used in small, medium and large software houses and IT consulting companies. The overall software system also covers several application domains. Both COTS and OSS were expected to contribute to shorter time-to-market, less development effort and the application of newest technology. However, COTS users believe that COTS component should have good quality, technical support, and will follow the market trend. OSS users care more about the free ownership and openness of the source code. Projects using COTS components had more difficulties in estimating selection effort, following customer requirement changes, and controlling the component's negative effect on system security. On the other hand, OSS user had more difficulties in getting the support reputation of OSS component providers.

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: Independent triangles covering given vertices of a graph
abstract: Let G be a simple graph of order n, k a positive integer with n≥3k and X a set of any k vertices of G. We show that if the minimum degree G)≥(n + k)=2, then G contains k independent triangles covering all vertices of X ; and if the minimum degree (G)≥(n+2k)=2, then G contains k independent triangles such that each triangle contains exactly one vertex of X . The bounds on the minimum degree of G in above results are sharp. Some conjectures about independent triangles covering some given vertices are proposed.

title: An intrinsic evolvable and online adaptive evolvable fuzzy hardware scheme for packet switching network
abstract: Most published works usually focused on extrinsic evolvable hardware (EHW), and in some instances, intrinsic but offline adaptive EHW. In this paper, we describe an intrinsic evolvable and online adaptive EHW to solve packet switching problem. Based on the coding and evolution scheme, we refer to it as evolvable fuzzy hardware (EFH), an extension of our proposed evolvable fuzzy system (EFS) by Li and Lim (2003) and reconfigurable fuzzy inference chip (RFIC) by Cao et. al. EFH is a good framework for intrinsic evolvability and online adaptation.