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The research reported in this paper concerns the ongoing development of a Knowledge Intensive Sketching (KiS) framework through which designers are supported in foreseeing directly from their paper-based sketches the relevant life-cycle consequences of their ‘component form’ solution concepts. The goal of the KiS framework is to retain the important characteristics of freehand sketching, i.e. pencil and paper, whilst at the same time exploit the benefits of Knowledge Intensive CAD technology for proactively guiding designers in generating life-oriented solutions as from early design.

This is a very nice and interesting paper which reviews and sets out the rationales for investing in emerging markets, the experiences with investing in emerging market equities over the last few years, and draws some lessons from the experience in December 1994 in Mexico. The issues raised by the authors are indeed the important ones, for investors as well as policy makers in emerging markets. At the same time, this is a difficult paper to comment on: one is more likely to disagree with the tone of its conclusions than with any of the issues raised or the analysis done.

The notion of computational model is central to the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing. It defines an abstract model for distributed computations and characterizes at the same time the functionality of a supporting distributed virtual machine. Most current distributed systems, including e.g. the CORBA platforms, have converged on a subset of this computational model. In this paper, we review the model, providing a formal characterization for it, and we discuss various directions for extensions, considering in particular different trends in distributed systems construction.

A search was made on the CAB ABSTRACTS database for all scientific papers by the 16 speakers at this Symposium (Intercellular Signalling in the Mammary Gland, Hannah Research Institute, Ayr, UK, 13–15 April 1994) published since 1984. A total of 475 records was retrieved from the database.

This paper presents a schema that attempts to embrace all graphic language. The essence of the schema is shown in a matrix which presents a number of theoretical possibilities in terms of approaches to graphic language. One axis of the matrix describes the methods of configuration of graphic language, using such terms as pure linear, linear interrupted, list, linear branching, matrix, non-linear directed, non-linear open. The other axis describes the modes of symbolization of graphic language, using four somewhat crude categories: verbal/numerical, pictorial and verbal/numerical, pictorial, schematic. Numerous, examples are shown to clarify terms and the underlying concepts they describe. It is emphasized that the matrix is a device for directing thinking, rather than a means of defining graphic language. The paper is written from the standpoint of a practising graphic designer. The matrix is used to illustrate the wide range of approaches open to us in graphic language and the effect this is assumed to have on reading/viewing strategies and cognitive processes. It is mggested that the matrix is useful in focusing attention on two fundamental questions that ought always to be asked when deciding how a graphic message should be communicated: What should be the mode of symbolization and what should be the method of configuration? Legibility and related research is briefly reviewed in order to establish what light it throws on these questions; with a few notable exceptions it is found wanting. It is suggested that there is a need for more research that crosses the boundaries of the cells of the matrix. This paper is not the culmination of a sustained programme of research and brings no firm evidence to bear on any aspect of graphic language. It is the contribution of a graphic designer who has had the opportunity of associating with research workers concerned with the evaluation of graphic language, and is written as a tutorial paper to stimulate thought and discussion. It is an attempt to define the scope of graphic language and to show relationships between different approaches to it that have been, and can be, used. Throughout the paper, the totality of graphic language and its specifically graphic variables are emphasized. Though the approach may appear to be somewhat theoretical, it is intended that it should have practical implications.

This chapter offers a critical survey of evidence for functionally separable mechanisms in word recognition, and a theoretical framework for interpreting the contributions of linguistic, especially lexical, knowledge in both pre-attentive processing and conscious perception of written words. Section 1 reviews evidence for independent parallel systems responsible for graphemic access to semantic and conceptual knowledge, and for conversion of alphabetic script into a phonological representation. The role of phonological coding in silent reading is discussed, including its role in interpreting certain syntactic components of text. Section 2 discusses the effects of orthographic regularity and lexicality in the identification of words and letter strings. Evidence is summarized favouring an intermediate, tacit stage of letter identification. Contrasts between the recognition of words and of pictures are explored. Section 3 introduces a procedural model for the mental lexicon, illustrated by means of the MARGIE system, in relation to both referential and syntagmatic word-meanings. It emphasizes the role in reading of pre-attentive expectations (contextual facilitation effects) generated by parallel, production-like mechanisms. Evidence of preattentive lexical access is surveyed. In Section 4 theoretical issues concerning perceptual integration and its central place in the mechanism of word perception are raised. Some models of the integration process are also reviewed. Some of the best camouflaged conceptual traps for psychologists lie in the way ordinary language is used to perform a quasi-technical role in the description of behaviour. “Word recognition” is full of such traps. “Recognition,” like “perception,” appears to refer both to the “discriminative uptake” of information from the senses and (in the adult human) to the ability to report or comment upon it, in answer to the question “What did you perceive?” Yet there are many illustrations of the dissociation between these two abilities. One striking example is the phenomenon that Weiskrantz and colleagues have termed “blindsight” (Weiskrantz, Warrington, Sanders, & Marshall, 1974). Although subjectively blind in one quadrant of the visual field after surgical removal of a major portion of the calcarine visual cortex, one patient could reach with great accuracy to small visual objects and make crude shape-discriminations in the “blind” region. Throughout testing the patient remained convinced that he was guessing, and denied any awareness of “seeing” the stimuli.

A technological display is the interface between the human and technological systems. This tutorial is concerned with computer-based systems and displays that enable humans to interact with computers, and most of the examples are taken from real-time systems. It is with these systems that display design becomes most critical, since the human must respond accurately under speed stress. The displays must help the human comprehend complex and rapidly changing system events. Due to limitations in display size, the data are often highly coded and difficult to interpret. The learn- ability and memorability of displays are therefore important aspects of display design. The field of technological displays can be described in terms of certain broad categories. From a presentation point of view, displays can be classified as either alphanumeric or graphic. Within the field of alphanumeric CRT displays, a further distinction occurs between the conversational mode, where input is limited to a specific CRT location, and the formatted display that allows entry at pre-specified locations anywhere on a fixed mask. These types of displays are illustrated with examples from real-time telephone traffic management systems. The fundamental display design process consists of eight major steps that carry the designer from the initial analysis of the operating system to the detailed formatting of each display. At each stage the designer makes decisions based on adequate knowledge of human needs and limitations. Specific areas for additional psychological research are pointed out. In its broadest sense, the technological display is any presentation of data associated with an engineering or scientific discipline. To narrow things somewhat, it is necessary to distinguish between real-time displays and non-real-time displays. The distinction has more to do with the intended mode of use by the human than with the data or their method of generation. A display is an aid to the performance of some task. The user of the real-time display is involved in tasks that force him to decode and encode information within a rapidly changing environment. The speedometer in a car is an example. It is updated frequently and the driver needs to obtain information in a brief glance. If the display lags behind the speed of the auto or if it is difficult to determine quickly the current reading, the display is poorly designed. Thus, in general, real-time displays have the advantage that they can be objectively evaluated by the criteria of speed and accuracy of use.

Non-wood fibers were the first material ever used by mankind for paper production and had played a dominant role until about one hundred years ago. Today, non-wood fibers such as bagasse and straw remain an important pulping raw material in certain developing countries with limited forest resources. In addition, non-wood fibers such as abaca, sisal, flax, jute, and hemp are used to produce specialty papers in several countries.

In the last few years bureaucratic procedures didn't show a significant reduction in the volume of paper documents created. In order to reduce the huge amount of space for archiving and preserving documents and to speed up the secarh process, a semantic-based dematerialization process should be performed. In this paper we describe a novel system that manages several kind of bureaucratic documents in the e-gov domain, automatically extracts several interesting information and produces a suitable semantic representation that may be considered as the first step towards a full automated document management system. © 2008 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

The handling of insider attacks is a significant technical challenge as little assurance theory and design practice exists to guide the design of effective, credible countermeasures for large systems and applications. Much of the relevant theory has focused on insider attacks on individual security protocols and smallscale applications. In this position paper, we suggest that confidence in a system’s resilience to insider attacks can emerge by the application of well-accepted survivability principles and design methods. We caution, however, that different tradeoffs emerge in applying these principles to practical designs, thereby requiring a careful balance among the costs of countering insider attacks, recovery from attack, and attack deterrence, and between the fine granularity of access permissions and ability to administer these permissions is a safe manner. In view of the dearth of practical solutions for surviving insider attacks in any significant-size system, we suggest that experiments in applying well-accepted principles and design methods to critical subsystems (e.g., user authentication, DNS) are necessary to provide effective and quantifiable assurances.

“Forsoksgymnaset in Oslo” was an experiment in School Democracy that started classes in automatic data processing in the fall of 1968 as a part of school mathematics in the 11th year. We started simple programming in FORTRAN on punched cards, off line. Later we had a teletype terminal with paper tape, changed to the BASIC language, and ran programs online by telephone to a distant computer. We also designed the logic simulator “Benjamin”, with four “And”, “Or”, and “Not” elements, battery and lamps, which could be connected in logical networks to be studied. In 1970, we arranged two two-day seminars for teachers during the Christmas and the summer holidays and presented the whole course. We did this eight times and helped to qualify many teachers. The first Examen Artium in Data was organised in June 1970.

The origin of the word “soap” is traced to sacrificial Mount Sapo of ancient Roman legend. The mixture of fat and wood ashes that reacted to form soap was carried by rain to the banks of the Tiber River and was found as a clay deposit useful for cleaning clothes [1]. The chemistry (reactions, raw materials, and functional properties) of bar soaps as well as the manufacturing technology (processes and equipment) are reviewed. In addition, synthetic detergents (raw materials, types of surfactants, additives, production processes, consumption, and detergent trending) are examined.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the electronic exchange of standard business documents in a structured and computer-processable form. The purpose of EDI is to enable a quick way to process business documents. EDI also facilitates paperless trading and it is a new way to conduct business. EDI solves some problems in the traditional paper document flow, including: Process delay caused by physical delivery of documents, and the reentering of data by the trading partners; Low accuracy of data that have been re-entered by the trading partners; High labor cost for re-entering data; Unexpected document loss; Uncertainty of payment source.

Plants, such as flax, cotton, hemp, jute, sisal, kenaf, coir, pineapple, ramie, bamboo, banana, as well as wood, are a source of lignocellulosic fibers. Their availability, renewability, low density and price as well as satisfactory mechanical properties make them attractive reinforcing fibers in the manufacture of composites. The natural fiber containing composites are used in transportation (automobiles, railway coaches, aero-space), military applications, building and construction industries (ceiling paneling, partition boards), packaging, and consumer products.

Due to growing interest in using natural language interfaces, it is appropriate to begin discussing their evaluation. This position paper presents the point of view that natural language interfaces offer special problems for evaluation, compared to problems encountered with other computer software. If ignored, such problems will make evaluation ineffectual. First, the paper describes the purposes and dimensions of problems in such an evaluation; differing purposes dictate differing approaches to evaluating natural language interfaces. Then, the paper points out some issues that turn out to be red herrings, and suggests a modest proposal that covers much of the broad spectrum of difficult issues involved. Since some of the issues and problems are common to both expert systems and natural language interfaces, comparisons of issues in evaluation of expert systems is also provided.

Although wool finishing is as old as clothmaking itself, it is only comparatively recently that the subject has been treated in a scientific manner. Cloth as it is received from the loom or the knitting machine is generally unacceptable to the consumer, as it is often greasy and dirty and is aesthetically unattractive. The object of finishing is to convert the “gray” cloth into a more desirable state. Until comparatively recently this was done by a sequence of operations which involved such processes as inspection of gray material, setting (crabbing or blowing), scouring, milling, hydroextracting, drying, raising, brushing, cutting, dry blowing (semidecating), and pressing. The precise details of these operations vary according to the type of cloth and differ from factory to factory. Examples of the routine adopted in finishing several of the more common wool fabrics are described in the literature(1) and form the basis of all wool finishing.

Funder: University of Cambridge, In this paper we study a class of fast geometric image inpainting methods based on the idea of filling the inpainting domain in successive shells from its boundary inwards. Image pixels are filled by assigning them a color equal to a weighted average of their already filled neighbors. However, there is flexibility in terms of the order in which pixels are filled, the weights used for averaging, and the neighborhood that is averaged over. Varying these degrees of freedom leads to different algorithms, and indeed the literature contains several methods falling into this general class. All of them are very fast, but at the same time all of them leave undesirable artifacts such as “kinking” (bending) or blurring of extrapolated isophotes. Our objective in this paper is to build a theoretical model in order to understand why these artifacts occur and what, if anything, can be done about them. Our model is based on two distinct limits: a continuum limit in which the pixel width h→0 and an asymptotic limit in which h>0 but h≪1. The former will allow us to explain “kinking” artifacts (and what to do about them) while the latter will allow us to understand blur. Both limits are derived based on a connection between the class of algorithms under consideration and stopped random walks. At the same time, we consider a semi-implicit extension in which pixels in a given shell are solved for simultaneously by solving a linear system. We prove (within the continuum limit) that this extension is able to completely eliminate kinking artifacts, which we also prove must always be present in the direct method. Finally, we show that although our results are derived in the context of inpainting, they are in fact abstract results that apply more generally. As an example, we show how our theory can also be applied to a problem in numerical linear algebra.

The paper analyses the problem of class generalisation from the non-traditional point of view—class life cycles. Model of class life cycle represents a process-oriented view on the class which is not usual in the field of conceptual modelling. This paper focuses on the problem of modelling life cycles of generic classes when there is a need to model several life cycles, valid at the same time. The paper shows that this problem is rooted in the natural contradiction of object- and process-oriented approach to modelling following from the fact that these two basic approaches are based on mutually contradicting primary types of hierarchical abstraction. The paper also shows that this problem is closely connected with the “problem of conflicting identities” in generalisation trees discussed on the border of the conceptual modelling and ontology engineering fields.

In the past few years, the world has witnessed severe fires in nightclubs, which have caused many human losses. This paper promotes a methodology which uses evacuation modeling analysis for improving the fire safety strategies (FSS) in nightclubs. The methodology is presented through a study case which represents a nightclub scenario. The results have shown that the use of evacuation modeling analysis can help immensely fire protection engineers to develop their FSS reports, incorporating the human behavior factor; rather than only considering the standard safety factors, such as travel distance. The same methodology can be also applied for fire safety management, which is another key-issue to be properly addressed for fire safety purposes in nightclubs. It is expected that this paper can bring some additional light to the way emergency evacuations are planned and addressed is in nightclubs.

This paper presents research on the semantics of topographic data for triples and ontologies to blend the capabilities of the Semantic Web and The National Map of the U.S. Geological Survey. Automated conversion of relational topographic data of several geographic sample areas to the triple data model standard resulted in relatively poor semantic associations. Further research employed vocabularies of feature type and spatial relation terms. A user interface was designed to model the capture of non-standard terms relevant to public users and to map those terms to existing data models of The National Map through the use of ontology. Server access for the study area triple stores was made publicly available, illustrating how the development of linked data may transform institutional policies to open government data resources to the public. This paper presents these data conversion and research techniques that were tested as open linked data concepts leveraged through a user-centered interface and open USGS server access to the public.

This paper identifies five grand challenges in the multidisciplinary field of pedestrian and evacuation dynamics (PED). In order to maximize the effectiveness of limited resources, the PED community would benefit greatly from a prioritized, consensus-based research agenda. The five proposed research initiatives include (1) a general human behavior model with a theoretical foundation and numerical validity, (2) a database archiving actual building emergency evacuations, (3) methods to embrace the stochastic nature of inputs and outcomes in building evacuation, (4) a validated method to integrate distributions of egress calculations with fire hazard calculations, and (5) adoption of technology for people movement, data collection, and within modeling constructs. The list proffered in this paper may reflect the building evacuation perspective of the author and is intended merely as a spark for discussion amongst the greater PED community; a true consensus research agenda requires deliberation by leaders in the community.

The Semantic Web has been a very important development in how knowledge is disseminated and manipulated on the Web, but it has been of particular importance to the flow of scientific knowledge, and will continue to shape how data is stored and accessed in a broad range of disciplines, including life sciences, earth science, materials science, and the social sciences. Many books and papers have been published on the semantic web (particularly by Springer), but nothing to date has specifically illustrated how applications can be used to acquire, integrate, and deliver knowledge in so many scientific disciplines as this proposed volume. After first presenting papers on the foundations of semantic e-science, including papers on scientific knowledge acquisition, data integration, and workflow, this volume looks at the state of the art in each of the above-mentioned disciplines, presenting research on semantic web applications in the life, earth, materials, and social sciences. Drawing papers from three semantic web workshops, as well as papers from several invited contributors, this volume illustrates how far semantic web applications have come in helping to manage scientific information flow.

This paper addresses the problem of building a grid file system for applications that need to manipulate huge data, distributed and concurrently accessed at a very large scale. In this paper we explore how this goal could be reached through a cooperation between the Gfarm grid file system and BlobSeer, a distributed object management system specifically designed for huge data management under heavy concurrency. The resulting BLOB-based grid file system exhibits scalable file access performance in scenarios where huge files are subject to massive, concurrent, fine-grain accesses. This is demonstrated through preliminary experiments of our prototype, conducted on the Grid’5000 testbed.

In this paper, we discuss the problems of arbitrage detection, which is known as change point detection in statistics. There are some classical methods for change point detection, such as the cumulative sum (CUSUM) procedure. However, when utilizing CUSUM, we must be sure about the model of the data before detecting. We introduce a new method to detect the change points by using Hilbert–Huang transformation (HHT) to devise a new algorithm. This new method (called the HHT test in this paper) has the advantage in that no model assumptions are required. Moreover, in some cases, the HHT test performs better than the CUSUM test, and has better simulation results. In the end, an empirical study of the volatility change based on the S&P 500 is also given for illustration.

This paper presents elements of a data research infrastructure for Arts and Humanities. This paper wants to offer an answer on how Humanities research data sets can be integrated into new hybrid knowledge networks. These type of objects are particularly challenging, as it is often not clear how deep links between them could look like. The paper will suggest to look at a particular set of data grid technologies to establish such deep links between Humanities data sets. As we do not think that such a task can be addressed independently from the knowledge embedded in particular communities, we look at the data integration challenges in one such community, in classics.

Virtual digital mock-up (v-DMU) refers to all of the activities in the design, analysis, and visualization of the product in a 3D virtual environment that lead to a lower cost and a higher quality. In the early days, designers exchanged CAD files directly in collaborations. Recently, DMU systems have been used for relatively effective designs that generally support distributed and collaborative design capability by sharing the design data via the Internet. However, a range of problems can arise in such a case. In the case of large-scale products such as aircrafts or ships, the data size can be on a scale so large that it requires large amount of space on the workstation and requires considerable time for exchanges. Moreover, security problems often occur in the process of data exchanges. For a company and a nation, this can be crucial. The immersive visualization of product design data is becoming more important in collaborative design. As a solution to these issues, this paper proposes a new approach using the technology of the remote visualization of CAD data. This involves the streaming of rendered graphics using COVISE and SAGE. This paper also introduces the implementation of v-DMU based on e-Science by remote visualization.

The Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web represent different forms of evolution of the first-generation Web, and both of them enrich Web resources with semantic annotations. Recommendation and personalization of Web resources is another trend that becomes more and more important with the growth of information, and both the Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web are deeply connected to it. The objective of this paper is to analyze the contribution of recommendation and adaptation techniques to these paradigms and to investigate if these techniques can be used as a bridge for their integration. More specifically, the paper will focus on the contribution of adaptation and recommendation techniques to improve the quality of annotations in the Web 2.0, Semantic Web, and mixed approaches and the relevance of annotated resources that are retrieved or filtered to users.

This paper describes a novel classroom based project that looked at methods for sharing the contributions of students during activities in undergraduate classes. Initially intended for HCI students, the CRaSh product has wide applicability for creative use of class time and for inspiring students in their design work. The method employed was a prototype interface that allowed the sharing of digitally ink based content by uploading this content to a secure website. Encouraging shared learning, the project focuses on the creation, completion and management of worksheets for students. This paper describes the design of the prototype and explores the ethical and legal discussions associated with this sort of product.

The lack of formal semantics in the existing formalisms describing multi-agents models, combined with the complexity of multi-agents systems, are sources of several problems during their development process. The formal methods are known to bring rigorous and precise descriptions. They offer the possibility of checking the correction of specifications. In this framework and in previous papers (Ferber J, Gutknecht O (2002) MadKit user’s guide. Version 3.1) [23], we have proposed a formal and generic framework called DIMA-Maude, allowing formal description and validation of the DIMA model [15] with the Maude language [22]. This language, based on rewriting logic [21], offers a rich notation supporting formal specification, implementation, validation through simulation, and verification through accessibility analysis and model checking of concurrent systems (Koning JL (1999) Algorithms for translating interaction protocols into a formal description. In: IEEE Int Conf Syst Man Cybernet Conf, Tokyo, Japan). In this paper, we propose a rewriting logic-based tool for creating a DIMA model. This tool allows the edition and the simulation of a DIMA system. It allows the user to draw a DIMA system graphically and translates the graphical representation of the drawn DIMA model to a Maude specification. Then the Maude system is used to perform the simulation of the resulting Maude specification. This tool allows preserving the graphic notations offered by the DIMA model for clarity and getting a formal specification in Maude for analysis.

In the paper phase correlation algorithm based on Fourier transform is applied to the traceability barcode identification, which is a widely used method of image registration. And there is the rotation-invariant phase correlation algorithm which combines polar coordinate transform with phase correlation, that they can recognize the barcode with partly destroyed and rotated. The paper provides the analysis and simulation for the algorithm using Matlab, the results show that the algorithm has the advantages of good real-time and high performance. And it improves the matching precision and reduces the calculation by optimizing the rotation-invariant phase correlation.

In this paper, we propose a preference framework for information retrieval in which the user and the system administrator are enabled to express preference annotations on search keywords and document elements, respectively. Our framework is flexible and allows expressing preferences such as “A is infinitely more preferred than B,” which we capture by using hyperreal numbers. Due to the widespread of XML as a standard for representing documents, we consider XML documents in this paper and propose a consistent preferential weighting scheme for nested document elements. We show how to naturally incorporate preferences on search keywords and document elements into an IR ranking process using the well-known TF-IDF ranking measure.

Based on the rapid development of Chinese agricultures, many English users are interesting on the Chinese agricultural information, and many Chinese users are interesting on English agricultural information too. This paper is a schema to design an agricultural cross languages engine, the core technology is the mapping between Chinese and English agricultural thesauri. The paper introduces the all rules of thesauri mapping, and give exact examples for these rules. With the mapping information, authors design a cross languages engine. English users can get Chinese agricultural information from web data by English descriptors; Chinese users can get English agricultural information from web data by Chinese descriptors

According to educational psychologists, the efficiency and effectiveness of the instruction process are influenced by the learning style of the student. This paper introduces an approach which integrates the most relevant characteristics from several learning style models proposed in the literature. The paper’s focus is on the data requirements for the dynamic learner modeling method, i.e., the learner’s observable behavior in an educational hypermedia system; based on the interpretation of these observables, the system can identify various learning preferences.

Data quality improvement has become a critical issue for many companies and organizations because poor data quality degrades organizational performance whereas improved data quality results in cost saving and customer satisfaction. Activities such as identify and removing "duplicate" database records from a single database, and correlating records from different databases that identify the same real world "entity" are used routinely to improve data quality. Due to huge databases having several hundred millions to several billions records, and continuously growing, efficient techniques and algorithms are needed. One way to speed up the processing is to adopt a two-step approach, where potential candidate records are grouped together in step one. After that each group is further processed and analyzed in step two. The so called "transitive closure problem" is a formal formulation of what needs to be done in step one. This paper introduces a record grouping problem called transitive closure, and proposes algorithms to solve the transitive closure problem. The paper also reports on the empirical study of the proposed algorithms and comments on their implementations.

The paper addresses the issue of development of a technology for operational decision support in a pervasive environment. The technology is built around the idea of using Web-services for self-organization of heterogeneous resources of the environment for decision support purposes. The approach focuses on three types of resources to be organized: information, problem-solving, and acting. The final purpose of the resource self-organization is to form an ad-hoc collaborative environment, members of which cooperate with the aim to serve the current needs according to the decision situation. The hybrid technology proposed in the paper integrates technologies of ontology management, context management, constraint satisfaction, Web-services, and intelligent agents. The application of the technology is illustrated by response to a traffic accident.

Computer-based chess machines have been built based on tree searches and parallel computing. Several papers have discussed the computer implementations of different types of chess games such as chess (western), Chinese chess (Xiangqi), Japanese chess (Shogi), and Hex. This paper focuses on the implementation of a triangle chess machine. We first make a brief explanation on the popular chess games and their related studies. We then describe the rules for playing a triangle chess. Basically, the triangle chess machine proposed in this paper considers all possible configurations of chess patterns and then makes moves based on these patterns. We present the software modules of the machine and discuss the computation issues related to this study. Conclusions and the directions for future studies are also given at the end of this paper.

Since the spatial pattern of forest pest occurrence is determined by biological characteristics and habitat conditions, this paper introduced construction of a cellular automaton model combined with Markov model to predicate the forest pest occurrence. Rules of the model includes the cell states rules, neighborhood rules and transition rules which are defined according to the factors from stand conditions, stand structures, climate and the influence of the factors on the state conversion. Coding for the model is also part of the implementations of the model. The participants were designed including attributes and operations of participants expressed with a UML diagram. Finally, the scale issues on forest pest occurrence prediction, of which the core are the prediction of element size and time interval, are partly discussed in this paper.

Access to knowledge about user goals represents a critical component for realizing the vision of intelligent agents acting upon user intent on the web. Yet, the manual acquisition of knowledge about user goals is costly and often infeasible. In a departure from existing approaches, this paper proposes Goal Mining as a novel perspective for knowledge acquisition. The research presented in this chapter makes the following contributions: (a) it presents Goal Mining as an emerging field of research and a corresponding automatic method for the acquisition of user goals from web corpora, in the case of this paper search query logs (b) it provides insights into the nature and some characteristics of these goals and (c) it shows that the goals acquired from query logs exhibit traits of a long tail distribution, thereby providing access to a broad range of user goals. Our results suggest that search query logs represent a viable, yet largely untapped resource for acquiring knowledge about explicit user goals.

The Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) defines a framework within which support of distribution, interoperability and portability can be integrated. However other ODP standards have to be defined. We treat in this paper the need for formal notation for concepts in the computational language. Indeed, the ODP viewpoint languages are abstract in the sense that they define what concepts should be supported not how these concepts should be represented. Using the denotational semantics in the context of UML we define in this paper syntax and semantics for core ODP structural concepts defined in the RM-ODP foundations part and in the computational language namely object action, computational object, and computational interface. These specification concepts are suitable for describing and constraining ODP computational viewpoint specifications.

Alcohol use and abuse contributes to both acute and chronic negative health outcomes and represents a major source of mortality and morbidity in the world as a whole (Ezzati et al., 2002) and in the developed world, such as the United States, where alcohol consumption is one of the primary risk factors for the burden of disease. It ranks as a leading risk factor after tobacco for all disease and premature mortality in the United States (Rehm et al., 2003; Said and Wegman, 2007). In a companion piece to this paper, Wegman and Said (2009) outline a graph-theoretic agent based simulation tool that accommodates the temporal and geospatial dimensions of acute outcomes. In order to complement that modeling paper, this paper focuses on methods to exploit temporal and spatial data with the idea of calibrating the model to include these effects. The model developed inWegman and Said (2009) incorporates a social network component. The overall goal of the model is not just to simulate known data, but to provide a policy tool that would allow decision makers to examine the feasibility of alcohol-related interventions. Such interventions are designed to reduce one or more acute outcomes such as assault, murder, suicide, sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, and DWI-related injuries and deaths. By adjusting conditional probabilities, the effect of interventions can be explored without actually introducing major societal policy actions.

Text pattern matching is one of the main and most computation intensive parts of systems such as Network Intrusion Detection Systems and DNA Sequencing Matching. Software solutions to this are available but often they do not satisfy the requirements in terms of performance. This paper presents a new hardware approach for regular expression matching: ReCPU. The proposed solution is a parallel and pipelined architecture able to deal with the common regular expression semantics. This implementation based on several parallel units achieves a throughput of more than one character per clock cycle (maximum performance of state of the art solutions) requiring just O(n) memory locations (where n is the length of the regular expression). Performance has been evaluated synthesizing the VHDL description. Area and time constraints have been analyzed. Experimental results are obtained simulating the architecture.

In this paper, we focus on metadata for self-created movies like those found on YouTube and Google Video, the duration of which are increasing in line with falling upload restrictions. While simple tags may have been sufficient for most purposes for traditionally very short video footage that contains a relatively small amount of semantic content, this is not the case for movies of longer duration which embody more intricate semantics. Creating metadata is a time-consuming process that takes a great deal of individual effort; however, this effort can be greatly reduced by harnessing the power of Web 2.0 communities to create, update and maintain it. Consequently, we consider the annotation of movies within Web 2.0 environments, such that users create and share that metadata collaboratively and propose an architecture for collaborative movie annotation. This architecture arises from the results of an empirical experiment where metadata creation tools, YouTube and an MPEG-7 modelling tool, were used by users to create movie metadata. The next section discusses related work in the areas of collaborative retrieval and tagging. Then, we describe the experiments that were undertaken on a sample of 50 users. Next, the results are presented which provide some insight into how users interact with existing tools and systems for annotating movies. Based on these results, the paper then develops an architecture for collaborative movie annotation.

According to the research status of regional agriculture industry structure adjustment information system and the current development of information technology, this paper takes web-based regional agriculture industry structure optimization tool as research target. This paper introduces Ajax technology and related application frameworks to build an auxiliary toolkit of decision support system for agricultural policy maker and economy researcher. The toolkit includes a “one page” style component of regional agriculture industry structure optimization which provides agile arguments setting method that enables applying sensitivity analysis and usage of data and comparative advantage analysis result, and a component that can solve the linear programming model and its dual problem by simplex method.

Network convergence across different access technologies holds a promise of enabling ubiquitous service availability but faces several technical challenges. With anticipated proliferation of multimode IP devices, the optimal selection of a service delivery network among multiple IP based wireless access alternatives is one of the important issues that is actively studied and discussed in several standardization forums. Use of multi attribute decision making (MADM) algorithms has been proposed in the past for network selection decisions in a heterogeneous wireless network environment. A direct comparison of these algorithms is difficult as this would require the use of another MADM algorithm. A better approach instead is to ascertain the appropriateness of the algorithm to the problem space. This paper provides the basis for evaluating the appropriateness of MADM algorithms for network selection. It analyzes the use of MADM algorithms such as TOPSIS, ELECTRE and GRA for network selection and argues that GRA provides the best approach in scenarios where the utilities of some of the attributes are non-monotonic. The paper proposes a novel stepwise approach for GRA that uses multiple reference networks and explains its working with network selection scenarios.

With the rapid growth of software size and complexity, how to understand and maintain a software system has become a great challenge in its life-cycle, especially from the global perspective. The paper mainly focuses on the comprehension problem of database-based software systems. A framework for visualizing and analyzing table dependency structure of a DB-based application is proposed, and its corresponding prototype tool named DBViewer is implemented. It mainly includes two main functions, i.e., table dependency visualization in database and structure feature metrics. The key methods of building this tool are proposed and some characters of table dependency relations in database are also found via metrics in this paper. Some experiments are performed on five DB-based software systems, and some preliminary rules have been found: (1) the degree distribution of table dependency graph roughly conforms to power law, (2) the average path length of the max connected subgraph is small, and (3) the clustering effect is not so evident and the coefficients are all less than 0.05 in the max connected sub-graph of all table dependency relations.

The functional programming system SFP under development at the Institute of Informatics Systems in Novosibirsk is aimed at supporting development of parallel computing applications that still offer high performance and portability. The paper describes equivalent transformations of the Sisal 3.2 programming language (based on Sisal 90) structures. These transformations are to decompose the complex language structures into more simple ones that can be directly expressed by the internal representation IR1, which is based on the intermediate form language IF1. Currently some description of similar transformations can be found in few works about Sisal 90 in the form of examples. These transformations are performed by the front-end compiler from Sisal 3.2 into IR1 and help to better understand its translation strategy. The paper also briefly describes IR1 languages.

Bayesian network is a powerful tool to represent and deal with uncertain knowledge. There exists much uncertainty in crop or animal disease. The construction of Bayesian network need much data and knowledge. But when data is scarce, some methods should be adopted to construct an effective Bayesian network. This paper introduces a disease diagnosis model based on Bayesian network, which is two-layered and obeys noisy-or assumption. Based on the two-layered structure, the relationship between nodes is obtained by domain knowledge. Based on the noisy-model, the conditional probability table is elicited by three methods, which are parameter learning, domain expert and the existing certainty factor model. In order to implement this model, a Bayesian network tool is developed. Finally, an example about cow disease diagnosis was implemented, which proved that the model discussed in this paper is an effective tool for some simple disease diagnosis in crop or animal field.

The Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) defines a framework within which support of distribution, interoperability, and portability can be integrated. However, other ODP standards have to be defined. We treat in this paper the need for formal notation for community related structural concepts in the enterprise language. Indeed, the ODP viewpoint languages are abstract in the sense that they define what concepts should be supported, not how these concepts should be represented. One approach to define the formal semantics of a language is denotational elaborating of the instance denoted by a sentence of the language in a particular context. Using the denotational semantics in the context of UML/OCL, we define in this paper semantics for the community related concepts defined in the RM-ODP foundations part and in the enterprise language. These specification concepts are suitable for describing and constraining ODP enterprise viewpoint specifications.

In this paper we address the challenges that arise due to heterogeneities across independently created and autonomously managed Web service requesters and Web service providers. Previous work in this area either involved significant human effort or in cases of the efforts seeking to provide largely automated approaches, overlooked the problem of data heterogeneities, resulting in partial solutions that would not support executable workflow for real-world problems. In this paper, we present a planning-based approach to solve both the process heterogeneity and data heterogeneity problems. We adopt a declarative approach to capture the partner specifications external to the process and demonstrate the usefulness of this approach in adding more dynamism to Web processes. Our system successfully outputs a BPEL file which correctly solves a non-trivial real-world problem in the SWS Challenge.