Query: Grid-based mapping and tracking in dynamic environments using a uniform evidential environment representation

Relevant passages:
FastSLAM: A Factored Solution to the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Problem <=SEP=> The ability to simultaneously localize a robot and accurately map its surroundings is considered by many to be a key prerequisite of truly autonomous robots. However, few approaches to this problem scale up to handle the very large number of landmarks present in real environments. Kalman filter-based algorithms, for example, require time quadratic in the number of landmarks to incorporate each sensor observation. This paper presents FastSLAM, an algorithm that recursively estimates the full posterior distribution over robot pose and landmark locations, yet scales logarithmically with the number of landmarks in the map. This algorithm is based on an exact factorization of the posterior into a product of conditional landmark distributions and a distribution over robot paths. The algorithm has been run successfully on as many as 50,000 landmarks, environments far beyond the reach of previous approaches. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages and limitations of the FastSLAM algorithm on both simulated and real-world data.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with Detection and Tracking of Moving Objects <=SEP=> Both simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and detection and tracking of moving objects (DTMO) play key roles in robotics and automation. For certain constrained environments, SLAM and DTMO are becoming solved problems. But for robots working outdoors, and at high speeds, SLAM and DTMO are still incomplete. In earlier works, SLAM and DTMO are treated as two separate problems. In fact, they can be complementary to one another. In this paper, we present a new method to integrate SLAM and DTMO to solve both problems simultaneously for both indoor and outdoor applications. The results of experiments carried out with CMU Navlab8 and Navlab11 vehicles with the maximum speed of 45 mph in crowded urban and suburban areas verify the described work.

Credibilist occupancy grids for vehicle perception in dynamic environments <=SEP=> In urban environments, moving obstacles detection and free space determination are key issues for driving assistance systems and autonomous vehicles. When using lidar sensors scanning in front of the vehicle, uncertainty arises from ignorance and errors. Ignorance is due to the perception of new areas and errors come from imprecise pose estimation and noisy measurements. Complexity is also increased when the lidar provides multi-echo and multi-layer information. This paper presents an occupancy grid framework that has been designed to manage these different sources of uncertainty. A way to address this problem is to use grids projected onto the road surface in global and local frames. The global one generates the mapping and the local one is used to deal with moving objects. A credibilist approach is used to model the sensor information and to do a global fusion with the world-fixed map. Outdoor experimental results carried out with a precise positioning system show that such a perception strategy increases significantly the performance compared to a standard approach.

Efficient occupancy grid computation on the GPU with lidar and radar for road boundary detection <=SEP=> Accurate maps of the static environment are essential for many advanced driver-assistance systems. A new method for the fast computation of occupancy grid maps with laser range-finders and radar sensors is proposed. The approach utilizes the Graphics Processing Unit to overcome the limitations of classical occupancy grid computation in automotive environments. It is possible to generate highly accurate grid maps in just a few milliseconds without the loss of sensor precision. Moreover, in the case of a lower resolution radar sensor it is shown that it is suitable to apply super-resolution algorithms to achieve the accuracy of a higher resolution laser-scanner. Finally, a novel histogram based approach for road boundary detection with lidar and radar sensors is presented.

An evidential approach to map-building for autonomous vehicles <=SEP=> In this work, we examine the problem of constructing and maintaining a map of an autonomous vehicle’s environment for the purpose of navigation, using evidential reasoning. The inherent uncertainty in the origin of measurements of sensors demands a probabilistic approach to processing, or fusing, the new sensory information to build an accurate map. In this paper, the map is based on a two-dimensional (2-D) occupancy grid. The sensor readings are “fused” into the map using the Dempster–Shafer inference rule. This evidential approach with its multivalued hypotheses allows quantitative analysis of the quality of the data. The map building system is experimentally evaluated using sonar data from real environments.

Toward Abstractive Summarization Using Semantic Representations <=SEP=> We present a novel abstractive summarization framework that draws on the recent development of a treebank for the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). In this framework, the source text is parsed to a set of AMR graphs, the graphs are transformed into a summary graph, and then text is generated from the summary graph. We focus on the graph-tograph transformation that reduces the source semantic graph into a summary graph, making use of an existing AMR parser and assuming the eventual availability of an AMR-totext generator. The framework is data-driven, trainable, and not specifically designed for a particular domain. Experiments on goldstandard AMR annotations and system parses show promising results. Code is available at: https://github.com/summarization

MANAGING HEALTH CARE SUPPLY CHAIN : TRENDS , ISSUES , AND SOLUTIONS FROM A LOGISTICS PERSPECTIVE <=SEP=> The U.S. healthcare industry is a large enterprise accounting for over 14.1% of the national economic output in 2001. It has been under pressure for cost containment and providing quality health care services to consumers. Its record of investing heavily on development of sophisticated drugs and diagnostic systems does not match that of technologies to manage its day-to-day operations. In order to achieve improved performance, healthcare supply chain must be efficient and integrated. The driver for this integration is logistics and supply chain management. This paper describes trends, issues and some solutions for logistics management for Health Care Supply Chain with concepts drawn from Industrial Engineering, and Operations Research disciplines applied to specific domains. A healthcare supply chain template utilizing Ecommerce strategy is presented. Use of simulation, optimization, and information sharing techniques are demonstrated to optimize purchasing and inventory policies. (

Entity resolution using inferred relationships and behavior <=SEP=> We present a method for entity resolution that infers relationships between observed identities and uses those relationships to aid in mapping identities to underlying entities. We also introduce the idea of using graphlets for entity resolution. Graphlets are collections of small graphs that can be used to characterize the “role” of a node in a graph. The idea is that graphlets can provide a richer set of features to characterize identities. We validate our method on standard author datasets, and we further evaluate our method using data collected from Twitter. We find that inferred relationships and graphlets are useful for entity resolution.

A study on peer startup process and initial offset placement in P2P live streaming systems <=SEP=> In this paper, we measure and study the peer startup process in PPLive, a popular commercial P2P streaming system, and focus on a fundamental issue in this aspect: how a peer initializes its buffer when it joins a channel, i.e., initial offset placement of peers' buffers in the startup stage. We build a general model of peer startup process in chunk-based P2P streaming systems and present an initial offset placement scheme we inferred from the measurement results, i.e., proportional placement (PP) scheme. With FP scheme, the initial buffer offset is set to the offset of the reference neighbor peer plus an advance proportional to the reference neighbor peer's offset lag or buffer width. We evaluate the performance of PP scheme and find it is stable when the placement is based on offset lag, but will be unstable when it is based on buffer width if the chunk fetching strategy and neighbor peer selection mechanism are not properly designed. We finally report our detailed measurement results of the peer startup process and initial offset placement algorithms used in PPLive. Our models and measurement results could be useful for guiding the analysis and design of buffering protocols for a real P2P live streaming system.

Rectal mucosal dissection commencing directly on the anorectal line versus commencing above the dentate line in laparoscopy-assisted transanal pull-through for Hirschsprung's disease: Prospective medium-term follow-up. <=SEP=> BACKGROUND
In 2007, we began using the anorectal line (ARL) as the landmark for commencing rectal mucosal dissection (RMD) instead of the dentate line (DL) during laparoscopy-assisted transanal pull-through (L-TAPT) for Hirschsprung's disease (HD). We conducted a medium-term prospective comparison of postoperative fecal continence (POFC) between DL and ARL cases to follow our short-term study.


METHODS
POFC is assessed by scoring frequency of motions, severity of staining, severity of perianal erosions, anal shape, requirement for medications, sensation of rectal fullness, and ability to distinguish flatus from stool on a scale of 0 to 2 (maximum: 14).


RESULTS
Patient demographics were similar for ARL (2007-2014: n=33) and DL (1997-2006: n=41). There were no intraoperative complications and 2 cases of postoperative colitis in both ARL (6.1%) and DL (4.9%). Mean annual medium-term POFC scores for the 4-7 term of this study were consistently better in ARL: 9.7±1.4*, 10.1±1.6*, 10.6±1.6, and 11.3±1.4* in ARL and 8.6±1.5, 9.1±1.6, 9.8±1.9, 10.0±1.6 in DL (*: p<0.05).


CONCLUSIONS
Medium-term POFC is better when the ARL is used as the landmark for RMD during L-TAPT for HD.

Xpander: Towards Optimal-Performance Datacenters <=SEP=> Despite extensive efforts to meet ever-growing demands, today's datacenters often exhibit far-from-optimal performance in terms of network utilization, resiliency to failures, cost efficiency, incremental expandability, and more. Consequently, many novel architectures for high-performance datacenters have been proposed. We show that the benefits of state-of-the-art proposals are, in fact, derived from the fact that they are (implicitly) utilizing "expander graphs" (aka expanders) as their network topologies, thus unveiling a unifying theme of these proposals. We observe, however, that these proposals are not optimal with respect to performance, do not scale, or suffer from seemingly insurmountable deployment challenges. We leverage these insights to present Xpander, a novel datacenter architecture that achieves near-optimal performance and provides a tangible alternative to existing datacenter designs. Xpander's design turns ideas from the rich graph-theoretic literature on constructing optimal expanders into an operational reality. We evaluate Xpander via theoretical analyses, extensive simulations, experiments with a network emulator, and an implementation on an SDN-capable network testbed. Our results demonstrate that Xpander significantly outperforms both traditional and proposed datacenter designs. We discuss challenges to real-world deployment and explain how these can be resolved.

CRED: A Deep Residual Network of Convolutional and Recurrent Units for Earthquake Signal Detection <=SEP=> Earthquake signal detection is at the core of observational seismology. A good detection algorithm should be sensitive to small and weak events with a variety of waveform shapes, robust to background noise and non-earthquake signals, and efficient for processing large data volumes. Here, we introduce the CnnRnn Earthquake Detector (CRED), a detector based on deep neural networks. The network uses a combination of convolutional layers and bi-directional long-short-term memory units in a residual structure. It learns the timefrequency characteristics of the dominant phases in an earthquake signal from three component data recorded on a single station. We train the network using 500,000 seismograms (250k associated with tectonic earthquakes and 250k identified as noise) recorded in Northern California and tested it with a F-score of 99.95. The robustness of the trained model with respect to the noise level and non-earthquake signals is shown by applying it to a set of semi-synthetic signals. The model is applied to one month of continuous data recorded at Central Arkansas to demonstrate its efficiency, generalization, and sensitivity. Our model is able to detect more than 700 microearthquakes as small as -1.3 ML induced during hydraulic fracturing far away than the training region. The performance of the model is compared with STA/LTA, template matching, and FAST algorithms. Our results indicate an efficient and reliable performance of CRED. This framework holds great promise in lowering the detection threshold while minimizing false positive detection rates.

Neighborhood-Level LGBT Hate Crimes and Bullying Among Sexual Minority Youths: A Geospatial Analysis. <=SEP=> The goal of this study was to evaluate a novel measure of environmental risk factors for bullying among sexual minority youths. Data on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) assault hate crimes were obtained from police records, geocoded, and then linked to individual-level data on bullying and sexual orientation from the 2008 Boston Youth Survey Geospatial Dataset (N = 1,292; 108 sexual minorities). Results indicated that sexual minority youths who reported relational and electronic bullying were more likely to reside in neighborhoods with higher LGBT assault hate crime rates. There was no asso- ciation between LGBT assault hate crimes and bullying among heterosexual youths, pro- viding evidence for specificity to sexual minority youth. Moreover, no relationships were observed between sexual minority bullying and neighborhood-level violent and property crimes, indicating that the results were specific to LGBT assault hate crimes.

Disease and pest prediction IoT system in orchard: A preliminary study <=SEP=> Each species of diseases and pests is considered to be harmful to plants and has a great adverse effect on agriculture. In addition to decreasing crop productivity and quality, pesticides or fungicides which cause environmental pollution are needed to kill diseases and pests. Therefore, the IoT system is designed to reduce the frequent use of insecticides and fungicides and to predict when the pests appear in order to lower the appearance of pests. Therefore, weather stations near the orchard have been installed and used to analyze the correlation between pests and weather data that had a large effect on pests. The prediction models have been created utilizing correlation information. In other words, we proposed a system that provides disease and pest prediction information so that farmers can quickly control them.

Mendeley: Recommendations for Researchers <=SEP=> For a researcher, keeping up with what is going on in their research field can be a difficult and time-consuming task. For example, a fresh PhD student may want to know what are the relevant papers matching their research interests. An assistant professor may like to be up-to-date with what their colleagues are publishing. A professor might want to be notified about funding opportunities relevant to the work done in their research group. Since the volume of published research and research activity is constantly growing, it is becoming increasingly more difficult for researchers to be able to manage and filter through the research information flow. In this challenging context, Mendeley's mission is to become the world's "research operating system". We do this not only by providing our well-know reference management system, but also by providing discovery capabilities for researchers on different kinds of entities, such as articles and profiles. In our talk, we will share Mendeley's experiences with building our article and profile recommendation systems, the challenges that we have faced and the solutions that we have put in place. We will discuss how we address different users' needs with our data and algorithm infrastructure to achieve good user experience.

RF power amplifiers for wireless communications <=SEP=> A wide variety of semiconductor devices are used in wireless power amplifiers. The RF performance and other attributes of cellphone RF power amplifiers using Si and GaAs based technologies are reviewed and compared.

Robust Image Registration Using Log-Polar Transform <=SEP=> This paper describes a hierarchical image registration algorithm for affine motion recovery. The algorithm estimates the affine transformation parameters necessary to register any two digital images misaligned due to rotation, scale, shear, and translation. The parameters are computed iteratively in a coarse-to-fine hierarchical framework using a variation of the Levenberg-Marquadt nonlinear least squares optimization method. This approach yields a robust solution that precisely registers images with subpixel accuracy. A log-polar registration module is introduced to accommodate arbitrary rotation angles and a wide range of scale changes. This serves to furnish a good initial estimate for the optimization-based affine registration stage. We demonstrate the hybrid algorithm on pairs of digital images subjected to large affine motion.

Singer Traits Identification using Deep Neural Network <=SEP=> The author investigates automatic recognition of singers’ gender and age through audio features using deep neural network (DNN). Features of each singing voice, fundamental frequency and Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) are extracted for neural network training. 10,000 singing voice from Smule’s Sing! Karaoke app is used for training and evaluation, and the DNN-based method achieves an average recall of 91% for gender classification and 36% for age identification.

Comparing Prediction Market Structures, With an Application to Market Making <=SEP=> Ensuring sufficient liquidity is one of the key challenges for designers of prediction markets. Various market making algorithms have been proposed in the literature and deployed in practice, but there has been little effort to evaluate their benefits and disadvantages in a systematic manner. We introduce a novel experimental design for comparing market structures in live trading that ensures fair comparison between two different microstructures with the same trading population. Participants trade on outcomes related to a two-dimensional random walk that they observe on their computer screens. They can simultaneously trade in two markets, corresponding to the independent horizontal and vertical random walks. We use this experimental design to compare the popular inventory-based logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR) market maker and a new information based Bayesian market maker (BMM). Our experiments reveal that BMM can offer significant benefits in terms of price stability and expected loss when controlling for liquidity; the caveat is that, unlike LMSR, BMM does not guarantee bounded loss. Our investigation also elucidates some general properties of market makers in prediction markets. In particular, there is an inherent tradeoff between adaptability to market shocks and convergence during market equilibrium.

Design and analysis of a hybrid energy harvester for self-powered sensor <=SEP=> This paper presents a slightly different concept of energy harvesting method as compared to the conventional energy harvesters. The new energy harvester of interest is known as Hybrid Energy Harvester (HEH). It comprises of the Piezoelectric and Magnetostrictive/Electromagnetic transducers integrated into a system. Theoretically, the hybrid energy harvester device developed is targeted to expand the vibration bandwidth as compared to the standalone energy harvesters, hence higher output power will be generated. To develop the hybrid energy harvester, mathematical models of each respective transducers are formulated, then simulations are carried out using the MATLAB/Simulink analysis tool. Next, a macro-scale prototype device is designed, fabricated and validated. From the experimental characterizations, it is unveiled that the maximum open circuit output voltage produced by the hybrid energy harvester is 6.23 V at a resonant frequency of 59.6 Hz.

Tracking port scanners on the IP backbone <=SEP=> Port scanning is the usual precursor to malicious attacks on today's Internet. Although many algorithms have been proposed for different aspects of the scan detection problem, their focused designed space is enterprise gateway level Intrusion Detection. Furthermore, we find few studies that track scanner behaviors over an extended period of time. Operating from a unique vantage point, the IP backbone, we put all the pieces together in designing and implementing a fast and accurate online port scan detection and tracking system. We introduce our flexible architecture, discuss trade-offs and design choices. Specifically, we go in depth to two design choices: the distinct counter data structure and the buffer size tuning. Our choice of a probabilistic counter is proved to have a low average error of 3.5%. The buffer size is derived using Lyapunov drift techniques on an equivalent queuing model. Our initial scanner tracking results show that the scanners' timing behavior follows a 90-10 curve. That is, 90% of scanners are active for a short time, with low scanning rates, while 10% are long term and fast scanners, with a few super-scanners lasting the entire duration of monitoring.

Evaluating enterprise resource planning ( ERP ) post-implementation problems in Egypt <=SEP=> The aim of the research is to identify and evaluate the main problems experienced in the ERP postimplementation stage of multinational, privately-owned Egyptian and governmental organizations in Egypt. Data gathering was achieved by means of a set of interviews and online questionnaire conducted to 50 companies implementing ERP in Egypt. The paper presents a descriptive analysis of the difficulties and problems encountered by organizations in Egypt following ERP implementation and how these have contributed to unsuccessful implementation overall.

Prediction of Indian election using sentiment analysis on Hindi Twitter <=SEP=> Sentiment analysis is considered to be a category of machine learning and natural language processing. It is used to extricate, recognize, or portray opinions from different content structures, including news, audits and articles and categorizes them as positive, neutral and negative. It is difficult to predict election results from tweets in different Indian languages. We used Twitter Archiver tool to get tweets in Hindi language. We performed data (text) mining on 42,235 tweets collected over a period of a month that referenced five national political parties in India, during the campaigning period for general state elections in 2016. We made use of both supervised and unsupervised approaches. We utilized Dictionary Based, Naive Bayes and SVM algorithm to build our classifier and classified the test data as positive, negative and neutral. We identified the sentiment of Twitter users towards each of the considered Indian political parties. The results of the analysis for Naive Bayes was the BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party), for SVM it was the BJP (Bhartiya Janta Party) and for the Dictionary Approach it was the Indian Nathional Congress. SVM predicted a 78.4% chance that the BJP would win more elections in the general election due to the positive sentiment they received in tweets. As it turned out, BJP won 60 out of 126 constituencies in the 2016 general election, far more than any other political party as the next party (the Indian National Congress) only won 26 out of 126 constituencies.

Information security behavior: Recognizing the influencers <=SEP=> With the wide spread use of Internet, comes an increase in Information Security threats. To protect against these threats, technology alone have been found not enough as it can be misused by users and become vulnerable to various threats, thus, losing its usefulness. This is evident as users tend to use weak passwords, open email attachments without checking and do not set correct security settings. However, especially with the continuously evolving threat landscape, one cannot assume that users are always motivated to learn about Information Security and practice it. Actually, there are situations of an aware user who knows how to protect himself but, simply, chooses not to, because they do not care, usability problems or because they do not consider themselves as targets. Thus, understanding human security behavior is vital for ensuring an efficient Information Security environment that cannot depend on technology only. Although a number of psychological theories and models, such as Protection Motivation Theory and Technology Acceptance Model, were used in the literature to interpret these behaviors, they tend to assess users' intensions rather than actual behavior. The aim of this paper is to understand and assess these behaviors from a holistic view by finding the significant factors that influence them and how to best assist users to protect themselves. To accomplish this, a systematic literature review was conducted where relevant literature was sought in a number of academic digital databases. As a result, several key behavioral influencers were identified to be essential to consider when educating and directing users' security behavior. Further to that, a number of Information Security awareness approaches were proposed that may transform the user from being ill-informed into a security-minded user who is able to make an informed decision.

Attention-Based Convolutional Neural Network for Semantic Relation Extraction <=SEP=> Nowadays, neural networks play an important role in the task of relation classification. In this paper, we propose a novel attention-based convolutional neural network architecture for this task. Our model makes full use of word embedding, part-of-speech tag embedding and position embedding information. Word level attention mechanism is able to better determine which parts of the sentence are most influential with respect to the two entities of interest. This architecture enables learning some important features from task-specific labeled data, forgoing the need for external knowledge such as explicit dependency structures. Experiments on the SemEval-2010 Task 8 benchmark dataset show that our model achieves better performances than several stateof-the-art neural network models and can achieve a competitive performance just with minimal feature engineering.

The double-edged sword of leader charisma: Understanding the curvilinear relationship between charismatic personality and leader effectiveness. <=SEP=> This study advanced knowledge on charisma by (a) introducing a new personality-based model to conceptualize and assess charisma and by (b) investigating curvilinear relationships between charismatic personality and leader effectiveness. Moreover, we delved deeper into this curvilinear association by (c) examining moderation by the leader's level of adjustment and by (d) testing a process model through which the effects of charismatic personality on effectiveness are explained with a consideration of specific leader behaviors. Study 1 validated HDS charisma (Hogan Development Survey) as a useful trait-based measure of charisma. In Study 2 a sample of leaders (N = 306) were assessed in the context of a 360-degree development center. In line with the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect, an inverted U-shaped relationship between charismatic personality and observer-rated leader effectiveness was found, indicating that moderate levels are better than low or high levels of charisma. Study 3 (N = 287) replicated this curvilinear relationship and further illustrated the moderating role of leader adjustment, in such a way that the inflection point after which the effects of charisma turn negative occurs at higher levels of charisma when adjustment is high. Nonlinear mediation modeling further confirmed that strategic and operational leader behaviors fully mediate the curvilinear relationship. Leaders low on charisma are less effective because they lack strategic behavior; highly charismatic leaders are less effective because they lack operational behavior. In sum, this work provides insight into the dispositional nature of charisma and uncovers the processes through which and conditions under which leader charisma translates into (in)effectiveness. (PsycINFO Database Record

Assessment of Factors Associated with Malnutrition among Under Five Years Age Children at Machakel Woreda, Northwest Ethiopia: A CaseControl Study <=SEP=> Introduction; malnutrition continues to be a significant public health and development concern not only in developing country but also in the world. It is a serious problem because it is causing the deaths of 3.5 million children under 5 years old peryear. Its magnitude is still highest in Ethiopia as well as in Amhara Region that remains a major public health problem. Objective: The main aim of this study is to assess associated factors of malnutrition on under five years children in Machakel Woreda. Methods: Unmatched Case control study was conducted. Cases were children of aged 6-59 months who have malnutrition (weight for height <2sd, weight for age ≤ 2Sd, height for age ≤ 2Sd, Mid-Upper Arm Circumstance (MUAC) <12 cm, if there is edema) and controls were 6-59 months of children those who have not malnutrition (weight for height ≥ 2sd, weight for age ≥ 2Sd, height for age ≥ 2sd, MUAC>12 cm, there is no edema). A consecutive sampling technique was employ to select study subjects for this study. Logistic regression was used to analyze data by using backward variable selection technique. Result: A total of 102 cases and 201 controls were included in the study with overall response rate of 94.4%. Sixty five (63.20%) of cases and 49 (24.40%) controls had fathers that cannot read and write. Thirty nine (38.23%) of cases and 44(21.89%) of controls had history of diarrheal episode. Those children whose family use drinking water from unprotected source were 3 times more likely to have malnutrition as compared to those children whose family use drinking water from protected source with [AOR=3.04, 95%CI (1.01, 9.17)]. Conclusion: The fining of this study revealed that inappropriate child carrying and feeding practice were strongly associated with under five malnutrition. Therefore, the responsible body should implement on nutritional intervention activities at all level of the community.

Enhancing the trust-based recommendation process with explicit distrust <=SEP=> When a Web application with a built-in recommender offers a social networking component which enables its users to form a trust network, it can generate more personalized recommendations by combining user ratings with information from the trust network. These are the so-called trust-enhanced recommendation systems. While research on the incorporation of trust for recommendations is thriving, the potential of explicitly stated distrust remains almost unexplored. In this article, we introduce a distrust-enhanced recommendation algorithm which has its roots in Golbeck's trust-based weighted mean. Through experiments on a set of reviews from Epinions.com, we show that our new algorithm outperforms its standard trust-only counterpart with respect to accuracy, thereby demonstrating the positive effect that explicit distrust can have on trust-based recommendations.

Trust mechanisms for cloud computing <=SEP=> Trust is a critical factor in cloud computing; in present practice it depends largely on perception of reputation, and self assessment by providers of cloud services. We begin this paper with a survey of existing mechanisms for establishing trust, and comment on their limitations. We then address those limitations by proposing more rigorous mechanisms based on evidence, attribute certification, and validation, and conclude by suggesting a framework for integrating various trust mechanisms together to reveal chains of trust in the cloud.

A new generation of microwave bandpass filters using multilayer ring resonators <=SEP=> A new generation of compact microwave bandpass filters (BPF) is proposed. The filters are based on multilayer ring resonators (MRR) technique which is applicable to both narrow band and ultra-wideband (UWB) bandpass filters. This class of filters has very compact circuit size and simple structure for fabrication. Multiple attenuation poles exist and can be simply placed to the left or right of the passband. The dimensions of the filters can be designed to around 2 mm × 2 mm × 1 mm. Out of the five filters presented, two of them are fabricated and measured. Good agreement between the simulation and measurements confirmed the design approach.