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Access to research papers has changed in the last decades: from printed to digital sources, from close to open access. Despite these changes and broader access to research results, there are still accessibility barriers. A very few number of conferences and journals state an accessibility policy of their publications in their websites. The production of accessible documents is not a common practice in conferences devoted to accessibility. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the case study of DSAI 2016 (Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Infoexclusion) conference, wherein we were in charge of making accessible its proceedings. Methods: We discuss the methods and technical procedures we carried out to turn the original articles in MS Word and Latex formats into accessible PDFs and the steps necessary in authoring, conversion and validation. Results: the papers of DSAI 2016 were published in accessible format after much effort, best tools and procedure were using MS Word plus PDF Axes plus PDF Accessibility checker. Conclusion: We state the need to include a new role in the organizing committee of conferences for dealing with accessible publishing.

Much has been written and many discussions have taken place on the causes and cures of IT projects. This introspection is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on as long as industrial size IT systems became into being. The continuing reliance of businesses, government and society on such systems coupled to the realisation that only a little progress has been made in the last 20–30 years in delivering effective and efficient systems are sufficient motivations for continuing this debate. This paper is the product of such a public debate by the authors during the 2004 International Conference on Enterprise Information System. The paper focuses on four topics: ecological complexity, product complexity, project management and education.

Independent living technologies are fast gaining interest within both academia and industry, amid the realization that the world's population is ageing. Technology can increase the quality of life of older people, allowing them to age-in-place and helping them to remain physically, cognitively and socially engaged with their environment. However, little research in this area is applied. The paper argues for the necessity of moving such technology out of the research laboratory and into the home, where its real impact on the lives of older adults can be assessed. Moreover, a series of recommendations are outlined, encompassing the life cycle of independent living technologies, from ethnographic assessment, through to design, deployment and evaluation. This work is based on lessons learned in deploying such technologies to older people in over 200 homes. This paper can act as a guide for other researchers interested in developing technologies with older people.

Unless strong assumptions are made, identification of principal causal effects in causal studies can only be partial and bounds (or sets) for the causal effects are established. In the presence of a secondary outcome, recent results exist to sharpen the bounds that exploit conditional independence assumptions (Mealli and Pacini, J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 108:1120–1131, 2013). More general results, though not embedded in a causal framework, can be found on concentration graphs with a latent variable (Stanghellini and Vantaggi, Bernoulli 19:1920–1937, 2013). The aim of this paper is to establish a link between the two settings and to show that adapting results contained in the latter paper can help achieving identification of principal casual effects in studies with more than one secondary outcome. An empirical illustrative example is also provided, using data from a real social job training experiment.

The exchange of design models in the design and construction industry is evolving away from 2-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) and paper towards semantically-rich 3-dimensional digital models. This approach, known as Building Information Modelling (BIM), is anticipated to become the primary means of information exchange between the various parties involved in construction projects. From a technical perspective, the domain represents an interesting study in model-based interoperability, since the models are large and complex, and the industry is one in which collaboration is a vital part of business. In this paper, we present our experiences with issues of model-based interoperability in exchanging building information models between various tools, and in implementing tools which consume BIM models, particularly using the industry standard IFC data modelling format. We report on the successes and challenges in these endeavours, as the industry endeavours to move further towards fully digitised information exchange.

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the following road sign parameters: height, dimensions, visibility distance and partial occlusions. This work belongs to a framework whose main applications involve road sign maintenance, driver assistance, and inventory systems. From this paper we suggest a multisensory system composed from two cameras, a GPS receiver, and a distance measurement device,all of them installed in a car. The process consists of several steps which include road sign detection, recognition and tracking , and road signs parameters estimation. From some trigonometric properties, and a camera model, the information provided by the tracking subsystem and the distance measurement sensors, we estimate the road signs parameters.Results show that the described calculation methodology offers a correct estimation for all types of traffic signs.

Random variables may be compared with respect to their location by comparing certain functionals ad hoc, such as the mean or median, or by means of stochastic ordering based directly on the properties of the corresponding distribution functions. These alternative approaches are brought together in this paper. We focus on the class of L-functionals discussed by Bickel and Lehmann (1975) and characterize the comparison of random variables in terms of these measures by means of several stochastic orders based on iterated integrals, including the increasing convex order.

Combining expressiveness and plainness in the design of web documents is a difficult task. Validation languages are very powerful and designers are tempted to over-design specifications. This paper discusses an offbeat approach: describing any structured content of any document by only using a very small set of patterns, regardless of the format and layout of that document. The paper sketches out a formal analysis of some patterns, based on grammars and language theory. The study has been performed on XML languages and DTDs and has a twofold goal: coding empirical patterns in a formal representation, and discussing their completeness.

This paper presents a formal system based on the notion of objects and asynchronous communication. Built on Milner's work on π-calculus, the communication primitive of the formal system is purely based on asynchronous communication, which makes it unique among various concurrency formalisms. Computationally this results in a consistent reduction of Milner's calculus, while retaining the same expressive power. Seen semantically asynchronous communication induces a surprisingly different framework where bisimulation is strictly more general than its synchronous counterpart. This paper shows basic construction of the formal system along with several illustrative examples.

This paper introduces a generalization of weak model-theoretic forcing of [Rob71] and [Kei73]. This generalized forcing preserves classic properties of weak model-theoretic forcing, e.g. Generic Set Theorem (Thm. 3.23), Generic Model Theorem (Thm. 3.24, Thm. 4.8), and Henrard's Theorem (Thm. 5.8). It is applied in this paper to investigate a deductive model for updating a deductive data base with incomplete information, whose possible variations are restricted to certain finite sets of atomic or negated atomic first-order sentences. Moreover, the paper introduces the notion of pragmatic truth pertinent to those models, and characterizes it in terms of generalized forcing (Thm. 5.11).

In this work a homogenization method presented by Bandeira et al [2,3,4] is enhanced in order to obtain by numerical simulation the interface law for the normal contact pressure based on statistical surface models. For this purpose elasticplastic behavior of the asperities is considered. Statistical evaluations of numerical simulations lead to a constitutive law for the contact pressure. The resulting law compared with other laws stemming from analytical investigations, like those presented by Greenwood Williamson [11] and Yovanovich [19, 32]. The non-penetration condition and the interface model for contact that takes into account the surface microstructure are investigated in detail. This paper can be regarded as a complementary study to that presented by Bandeira et al [2]. Here the plasticity of the asperities is taken into account by assuming a constitutive equation based on an associated von Mises yield function formulated in principal axes, as shown by Pimenta [22]. The basic aim of this paper is to derive constitutive contact laws for a rough surface by using the finite element method. For this purpose one has to model and discretize the rough surface and then, by homogenization procedures develop an interface law for contact. The interface law is obtained from numerical simulation using a model that consists of two deformable bodies in contact. The contact surfaces of both bodies are rough. The law obtained by numerical simulations and statistical evaluation of the numerical results is compared with analytically derived laws that regard plasticity. An augmented Lagrangian method is applied to solve the contact problem, see Bertsekas [5,6], Fletcher [10], Luenberger [18], Laursen, Maker [15], Laursen, Simo [16, 17], Wriggers [27], Wriggers, Simo [28], Wriggers et al. [29], Wriggers, Zavarise [31] and Heegaard, Curnier [12]. The technique used to solve threedimensional contact problems with friction, see Curnier [7] and Tabor [26], in finite deformations was 314 A.A. Bandeira, P.M. Pimenta, and P. Wriggers already developed and described in Bandeira et al [2,3,4], Simo, Laursen [24], Wriggers [27, 28, 29, 30, 31], Alart, Curnier [1] and Oden, Pires [20]. Numerical examples are selected to show the ability of the algorithm to represent interface law for rough surfaces considering elastoplastic behaviour of the asperities.

There are two approaches to the description of impact phase in impact mechanics, namely, mathematical and physical [1]. Both approaches give the same restitution law if external control is absent. However, the situation changes dramatically if one can apply an impulsive control during the phase of contact. Indeed, a real interaction force acts when a contact takes place only. The difference in these two models is as follows. In the case of visco-elastic media the mathematical approach implies an existence of interaction force acting during a whole period of an existence of body-obstacle deformation, which leads to appearance of a drawing force pulling the body into obstacle. In reality (in the physical model) the interaction force vanishes when a contact is lost, even if the deformation still presents. In this paper a control problem based on the physical model (which is more realistic) is considered. In considering model it is supposed that a rigid body interacts with a viscoelastic Kelvin-Voigt media parameterized by its rigidity where both a control force acting on the body in a contact phase and a total impulse of this force are bounded during the impact period. Two different problems corresponding to maximum and minimum of post-impact velocity of the body are investigated. It is shown that in contrasted to the case of control force absence (in this case a body-obstacle contact deceases when a kinetic energy of the body achieves the first local maximum after beginning of the impact phase) in a controllable case the situation changes and a loss of contact is described by special terminal condition. In the paper the optimal control is obtained for both types of criteria: maximization and minimization of post-impact velocity of the body. The corresponding restitution laws are derived when the obstacle rigidity tends to infinity. 1 Problem statement and main results Let a perfect rigid body (a material point of a mass m) with initial velocity v collides with an obstacle arranged at y ≥ 0. It is assumed that the obstacle possesses viscoelastic properties such as Kelvin-Voigt media. A force acting on the body is caused by 386 A.A. Galyaev, B.M. Miller, and E.Y. Rubinovich both deformation of the obstacle and velocity of this deformation and parameterized by its rigidity Fel = −2k √ μẏ(t)− aμy(t). Here k and a are the coefficients characterizing visco and elastic properties respectively, μ is a rigidity, y is a deformation, ẏ is a velocity of the obstacle deformation. It is also supposed that a controlled force Fcnt, applying to the surface of the obstacle, is parameterized by its rigidity, namely, Fcnt = m √ μu(t √ μ), where m is a mass of the body, u is the control effect itself. Let |u(t√μ)| ≤ u0, i.e. the control action is restricted. Suppose that a contact begins at a zero moment and continues until the acceleration of the body is less or equal to zero. A motion equation of the body has the form : my(t) = Fel + Fcnt. (1) Eqn.(1) takes place if only there is the body-obstacle contact, i.e., when coordinates of the body and the obstacle surface coincide. Remark 1 There are two cases when the body-obstacle contact takes place. 1. The force, acting from the obstacle on the body differs from zero, i.e., Fel + Fcnt < 0. Under this condition the body moves with the acceleration y < 0. 2. Fel + Fcnt = 0, but the deformation recovery rate coincides with the body’s velocity. Our aim is to find an admissible control effect that minimizes an absolute value of the body’s velocity after the impact. Since this velocity is negative or equal to zero after the impact we need to minimize −ẏ(τ). Here τ = sup{t ≥ 0 : y(t) < 0} is an instant of the body-obstacle separation. Physically, it means that after τ an external action ”resource” is not enough to keep the body-obstacle contact. It should be emphasize that after τ the body-obstacle contact desists and the body begins to move with constant and negative (or zero) velocity. To derive an optimal control law the space-time transformation technic [2] and Pontrjagin’s maximum principle are used. If we tend the rigidity to the infinity then the total impulse imparted to the body during the impact will be limited. So, it was ascertained that for kinetic energy minimization of a colliding body with immobile obstacle obtained visco-elastic properties the control force must acts oppositely to the body’s velocity up to the moment when the velocity becomes equal to zero. After that moment the controlled force direction must be changed. On the contrary, to maximize the body’s kinetic energy a direction of the controlled force must coincides with the body’s velocity until the velocity becomes equal to zero and then the direction of the controlled force must be changed as well.

The various available scenarios for the galaxy origin predict different types of galactic angular momenta distributions within galactic superclusters. The random distribution of galaxy rotation axes is expected to occur within the hierarchical clustering picture (Dekel 1985), whereas some alignment is expected to arise in the fragmentation scenario. Within the latter model the perpendicular to the supercluster main plane orientation of galactic rotation axes conforms to the predictions of the turbulence model (Efstathiou & Silk 1983), while the alignment of galactic axes with that plane supports rather the adiabatic galaxy origin model (Shandarin 1974). The recently proposed “hedgehog model” predicts that the the galaxy planes should tend to be oriented perpendicular to direction oriented toward the superclus ter centre. Most of the papers published to date analyze the Local Superclus ter (e.g. Hawley & Peebles 1975; Kapranidis & Sullivan 1983; MacGillivray & Dood 1985) to conclude that galactic rotation axes are oriented in a random manner or, when some alignment was found, the rotation axes were preferably oriented perpendicularly to the supergalactic plane. In those papers however, the samples considered were selected according to magnitude limits so they could be contaminated by background objects. Moreover, using the equatorial coordinate system made the discussion of results very difficult. In this paper a method originally proposed by Jaaniste & Saar (1977) for investigating galactic angular momentum in the Local Supercluster (LSC) is applied to a sample of 2227 galaxies chosen according radial velocities from the UGC and ESO catalogues. We (Flip & Godlowski 1986; Godlowski 1993) introduced the important modifications and corrected for its inconsistencies and use sophisticated statistical method which had not been used in solv ing this problem before using supergalactic coordinate system. The method takes into account both the galactic image position angle and the inclination of the normal to the galaxy to the line-of sight. Another independent sample of galaxies taken from Tully's Nearby Galaxy Catalogue is also used. In the present paper, we find the distribution of galactic planes throughout LSC anisotropic. The planes tend to be oriented perpendicular to the Local Supercluster plane. The projection of galactic rotation axes on the LSC plane shows a tendency to point toward the Virgo Cluster centre. Differences between spiral and non-spiral galaxies are observed, with a weaker alignment for spirals. When we check our computation using independent sample taken from Tully's catalogue we obtain very similar results. Our results support the so called “pancake” galaxy formation scenario, but the “hedgehog model” is not excluded either because of differences distribution of edge-on galaxies.

The paper describes an agent-based approach and its application to intelligent support of disaster response and evacuation operations. The approach is based on the idea of knowledge logistics which stands for integration and transfer of the right knowledge from distributed sources to the right person within the right context at the right time to the right purpose. The problem in the approach is represented as configuring a network of knowledge sources and approach is called “KSNet-approach”. The paper concentrates on such aspects as multiagent architecture, knowledge representation formalism and presents an application of the approach via a case study.

In extensive form noncooperative game theory, at each instant t, each agent i sets its state x i independently of the other agents, by sampling an associated distribution, q i(x i). The coupling between the agents arises in the joint evolution of those distributions. Distributed control problems can be cast the same way. In those problems the system designer sets aspects of the joint evolution of the distributions to try to optimize the goal for the overall system. Now information theory tells us what the separate q i of the agents are most likely to be if the system were to have a particular expected value of the objective function G(x 1, x 2, ...). So one can view the job of the system designer as speeding an iterative process. Each step of that process starts with a specified value of E(G), and the convergence of the q i to the most likely set of distributions consistent with that value. After this the target value for E q(G) is lowered, and then the process repeats. Previous work has elaborated many schemes for implementing this process when the underlying variables x i all have a finite number of possible values and G does not extend to multiple instants in time. That work also is based on a fixed mapping from agents to control devices, so that the the statistical independence of the agents’ moves means independence of the device states. This paper also extends that work to relax all of these restrictions. This extends the applicability of that work to include continuous spaces and Reinforcement Learning. This paper also elaborates how some of that earlier work can be viewed as a first-principles justification of evolution-based search algorithms.

The paper is divided into three parts: In section 29.1 of the paper, Generalized Game Theory (GGT) is outlined, and its applications in formalizing key social science concepts such as institutions, social relationships, roles, judgment, and games are presented. Institutions operate as a type of social algorithm, organizing and regulating agents playing different roles as they engage in deliberation and judgment activities and make and implement collective decisions. Section 29.2 of the paper will present simple multi-agent simulation models and selected results of the simulation. Section 29.3 will briefly outline an agenda for societal research based on the application of GGT to explaining and managing problems of insecurity and social disorder in multi-agent systems. In the GGT perspective, the problem of security can be formulated in terms of regulating a system and its agents, and dealing with social disorder and crisis.

The paper considers one of the topmost security related problems that is situation assessment. Specific classification and data mining issues associated with this task and methods of their solution are the subjects of the paper. In particular, the paper discusses situation assessment data model specifying situation, approach to learning of situation assessment, generic architecture of multi-agent situation assessment systems and software engineering issues. Detection of abnormal use of computer network is a case study used for demonstration of the main research results.

The aim of this paper is the comparison of the document classification method based on distance analysis (cluster analysis) and based on coefficients of similarity (Salton's method). We are interested if the received groups of documents are identical (similar) and if new cases are similarly classificated. Getting the positive results will give us the basis to use the method based on coefficients of similarity to classify the set of rules. Classification based on the coefficient of similarity is used to create documentation structural based and retrieval in search engines. The cluster analysis is used to facts and rules classification in knowledge base. It seems that using the mechanism based on the coefficient of similarity can be very comfortable to inference's process. Our paper includes the first issue, it means the comparison of the rules's process classification based on the cluster analysis method and Salton's method.

Feature selection is the process of identifying relevant features in the dataset and discarding everything else as irrelevant and redundant. Since feature selection reduces the dimensionality of the data, it enables the learning algorithms to operate more effectively and rapidly. In some cases, classification performance can be improved; in other instances, the obtained classifier is more compact and can be easily interpreted. There is much work done on feature selection methods for creating ensemble of classifiers. Thus, these works examine how feature selection can help ensemble of classifiers to gain diversity. This paper examines a different direction, i.e. whether ensemble methodology can be used for improving feature selection performance. In this paper we present a general framework for creating several feature subsets and then combine them into a single subset. Theoretical and empirical results presented in this paper validate the hypothesis that this approach can help finding a better feature subset.

The curse of dimensionality is a well known but not entirely well-understood phenomena. Too much data, in terms of the number of input variables, is not always a good thing. This is especially true when the problem involves unsupervised learning or supervised learning with unbalanced data (many negative observations but minimal positive observations). This paper addresses two issues involving high dimensional data: The first issue explores the behavior of kernels in high dimensional data. It is shown that variance, especially when contributed by meaningless noisy variables, confounds learning methods. The second part of this paper illustrates methods to overcome dimensionality problems with unsupervised learning utilizing subspace models. The modeling approach involves novelty detection with the one-class SVM.

The Full Spectrum Inversion (FSI) method was developed in the beginning of 2002 in an effort to solve the multipath problem in radio occultation measurements. The physical ideas, which lead to the method, were that the occultation path could be considered as a synthetic aperture and the radio occultation Doppler frequency in a single path was a monotonic function of time. In star occultations, at optical wavelengths, the multipath problem is easily solved by having a lens in front of an array detector separating the beams in space. The lens is performing a spatial Fourier transform i.e., a plane wave is focused into a point displaced from the optical axis an amount given by the direction (the spatial frequency) of the plane wave. The analogy to this space processing method in time, is to have a “time lens”, which can separate multiple temporal frequencies occurring at the same time: Obviously this is what a temporal Fourier transform does. These ideas were implemented in 2001 and tested successfully on simulations of radio occultation signals, which had circular satellite orbits. However, for non-circular orbits the plain Fourier method turned out to give a not fully correct result and the work on the FSI emerged realizing that some preprocessing steps were necessary in order to eliminate the impact of non-radial orbits. This involves pre-calculation of phases, which, multiplied on the occultation signal, reduces the impact of the non-circular orbits on the resulting Fourier transform of the preprocessed signal. In 2003 the phasematching method was developed, where the impact of the non-circular orbits was totally solved, but with the cost that the processing could not be implemented with a fast Fourier transform. Both the FSI and the phasematching methods will be discussed in detail in this paper. The present development on the FSI method includes its practical implementation and making the method robust for mass processing of radio occultation signals. Filtering of signals in the FSI method is important and different filtering methods will be discussed in this paper.

The use of ontology in order to provide a mechanism to enable machine reasoning has continuously increased during the last few years.This paper suggests an automated method for document classification using an ontology, which expresses terminology information and vocabulary contained in Web documents by way of a hierarchical structure. Ontology-based document classification involves determining document features that represent the Web documents most accurately, and classifying them into the most appropriate categories after analyzing their contents by using at least two pre-defined categories per given document features. In this paper, Web documents are classified in real time not with experimental data or a learning process, but by similar calculations between the terminology information extracted from Web texts and ontology categories. This results in a more accurate document classification since the meanings and relationships unique to each document are determined.

The purpose of this paper is to supply web contents for PC to various multi platform device as PDA or portable device. The conventional studies could not consider these devices, so it created mobile contents beforehand, and then transmitted to the limited mobile device. In this point, the critical problem is to generate mobile contents which are suitable for all kinds of mobile device from PC Web content. This paper propose a service system for transmitting wire web content to various portable device by using MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework. It does not create mobile contents for each device. It just uses DIDL of MEPG-21 as intermediate language to express the structure, resource and description of mobile contents. In DIDL, the multimedia resource is transcoded in off-line previously. The description part is converted in real time as soon as service is requested by end-user. Mobile contents integrate adapted resource with appropriate description and then are transmitted. In addition, this paper proposes the Multi-level caching for reusing mobile contents and describes the result in experiment system.

This paper presents the development of an Internet server controller based intelligent maintenance system for products. It also discusses on how to develop products and manufacturing systems using Internet-based intelligent technologies and how to ensure the product quality, coordinate the activities, reduce costs and change maintenance practice from breakdown reaction to breakdown prevention. In the paper, an integrated approach using hardware and software agents (watchdog agent) is proposed to develop the Internet server controller based integrated intelligent maintenance system. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified by developing a real system for the washing machine.

The paper describes the organizational basis for computer simulation of complex physical processes at one of the most important Russian “weapon” computational institutions. The team passed a way of 50 years long from manual calculations to numerical simulation of various physical phenomena and processes in real, i.e. 2d and 3D, geometries. The paper presents the basic research fields and challenges, describes the generation and development steps of some new scientific approaches in simulation of solid mechanics, energy transfer and radiation transport, numerical studies of hydrodynamic instability etc. The paper addresses also the creation of high performance computers, organizational measures allowing the mathematicians to access the centralized computer kernel in a multiuser network.

FABMAS is a hierarchically organized multiagent system for production control of semiconductor wafer fabrication facilities (wafer fabs). The production control of wafer fabs is challenging from a complexity and coordination point of view. Semiconductor manufacturing involves one of the most complex manufacturing processes ever used. In this paper, we describe the application domain and major design decisions that lead to the FABMAS system prototype. A detailed discussion of the suggested software architecture of the agent-based system is included. Furthermore, we present the results of computational experiments that show that FABMAS outperforms dispatching based production control schemes that are currently in use. The paper also discusses some limitations and drawbacks of the suggested approach and identifies areas of future research.

Automatic parallelization of code written in a sequential language such as FORTRAN is of great importance. One natural approach to loop parallelization is to assign separate invocations of a loop to different processors. However, it is often necessary to delay the starting times of loops to avoid violating data dependences. In this paper we study a scheduling problem, called the Delay Problem, that models an aspect of the loop parallelization problem. We show that the Delay Problem is NP-Complete when the precedence constraints are a set of arbitrary trees. Our major result of the paper is a polynomial time algorithm for the case where the precedence constraints are a forest of in-trees or a forest of out-trees. This covers an important practical case for the Delay Problem.

This paper studies the problem of sorting N items on a P processor parallel machine, where N≥P. The central result of the paper is a new algorithm, called cubesort, that sorts N=P1+1/k items in O(k P1/k log P) time using a P processor shuffle-exchange. Thus for any positive constant k, cubesort provides an asymptotically optimal speed-up over sequential sorting. Cubesort also sorts N = P log P items using a P processor shuffle-exchange in O(log3 P/loglog P) time. Both of these results are faster than any previously published algorithms for the given problems. Cubesort also provides asymptotically optimal sorting algorithms for a wide range of parallel computers, including the cube-connected cycles and the hypercube. An important extension of the central result is an algorithm that simulates a single step of a Priority-CRCW PRAM with N processors and N words of memory on a P processor shuffle-exchange machine in O(k P1/k log P) time, where N=P1+1/k.

This paper highlights how artefacts can be used as an effective tool to understand users and encourage dialogue. The paper will reflect on how the role of the designer is evolving, some limitations of user-centred design and how a more holistic ‘human-centred’ design approach may be more productive. The nature and applications of artefacts in understanding users will be considered. Finally three case studies will illustrate how artefacts have been used to enable human-centred design.

This paper introduces the work of the COGAIN “communication by gaze interaction” European Network of Excellence that is working toward giving people with profound disabilities the opportunity to communicate and control their environment by eye gaze control. It shows the need for developing eye gaze based communication systems, and illustrates the effectiveness of newly developed COGAIN eye gaze control systems with a series of case studies, each showing differing aspects of the benefits offered by gaze control. Finally, the paper puts forward a strong case for users, professionals and researchers to collaborate towards developing gaze based communication systems to enable and empower people with disabilities.

In a recent series of papers [FL1, FL2, FL3], we have proven the existence of decision algorithms with low-degree polynomial running times for a number of well-studied VLSI layout, placement and routing problems. These results make use of the powerful Robertson-Seymour theorems on the well-partial-ordering of graphs under both the minor and immersion orders. In the present paper, we study the complexity of construction versions of these problems, focusing on efficient self-reduction strategies. We introduce a notion of fast self-reduction in this setting and develop a general technique, which we term scaffolding, that is useful in the design of fast self-reduction algorithms.

Future demands for very low emissions from diesel engines, without compromising fuel economy or driveability, require Engine Management Systems (EMS) capable of compensating for emissions dispersion caused by production tolerances and component ageing. This paper describes a collaborative project between Ricardo and General Motors (GM), aimed at reducing engine-out emissions dispersion and enabling alternative combustion modes, such as Ricardo’s Highly Premixed Cool Combustion (HPCC), in real-world scenarios. Cylinder pressure based control is a key technology enabler for achieving the necessary high-level coordination of fuel, air and EGR in order to meet the conflicting performance requirements of current and future diesel engines. The paper describes the background to the project, the development toolchain using production intent sensors, control strategies developed for both testbed and vehicle application and preliminary results obtained.

In this paper, the controlled synchronisation problem for identical continuous piecewise affine (PWA) systems is addressed. Due to the switching nature of these systems, strategies common for controlled synchronisation can not be used. In this paper, an observer-based output-feedback control design solving the master-slave synchronisation problem for two PWA systems is proposed. The design of these dynamic controllers is based on the idea of, on the one hand, rendering the slave system convergent by means of feedback (which makes all its solutions converge to each other) and, on the other hand, guaranteeing that the closed-loop slave system has a bounded solution corresponding to zero synchronisation error. This implies that all solutions of the closed-loop slave system converge to this bounded solution with zero synchronisation error. The results are illustrated by application to a master-slave synchronisation problem of two mechanical systems with one-sided restoring characteristics.

An initial design for a fault tolerant, distributed version of UNIX was presented in an earlier paper [2]. That design left a number of open questions in two particular areas: Fault tolerance for server processes through which peripherals are accessed; recovery after a crash including the re-backup of processes. Since then, the fundamental design involving three-way message transmission has remained unchanged. However, server fault tolerance has been redesigned and is now more consistent with the fault tolerance of normal user processes. Recovery and re-backup have been completed in a more efficient manner than previously envisioned. In addition, important changes in the implementation have occurred. In this paper, we review the original design, borrowing heavily from the earlier paper in sections 1–3, and explain additions and modifications in later sections.

The paper addresses the problem of making a set of vehicles follow a a set of given spatial paths at required speeds, while ensuring that they reach and maintain a desired formation pattern. Problems of this kind arise in a number of practical applications involving ground and underwater robots. The paper summarizes and brings together in a unified framework previous results obtained by the authors for wheeled robots and fully actuated underwater vehicles. The decentralized solution proposed does not require the concept of a leader and. applies to a very general class of paths. Furthermore, it addresses explicitly the dynamics of the vehicles and the constraints imposed by the inter-vehicle bi-directional communications network. The theoretical machinery used brings together Lyapunov-based techniques and graph theory. With the set-up proposed, path following (in space) and inter-vehicle coordination (in time) can be viewed as essentially decoupled. Path following for each vehicle is formulated in terms of driving a conveniently defined generalized error vector to zero; vehicle coordination is achieved by adjusting the speed of each vehicle along its particular path, based on information on the position and speed of a number of neighboring vehicles, as determined by the communications topology adopted. The paper presents the problem formulation and summarizes its solution. Simulations with dynamics models of a wheeled robot and an underwater vehicle illustrate the efficacy of the solution proposed.

In statistical physics, the Monte-Carlo method is used in order to obtain reference equations of state to be able to evaluate the validity of theoretical methods such as perturbation theories or integral equations for molecular fluids. With the classical Metropolis algorithm, we determine the equation of state of two-center Lennard-Jones systems (l * = 0.3292 ; 0.63 ; 0.793) for four isotherms (T* = 5, 20, 100 et 300). The various convergence problems appearing in such calculations are pointed out. We compare these Monte-Carlo results with the isotherms obtained by the median potential treated with a Weeks-Chandler-Andersen type perturbation theory. N.B. This paper is a summary of the original paper destined to this meeting. The reader interested by much more details may ask the author for it.

Presented here is an overview of some principles for control of locomotion that are seen in all animals and which offer ideas for robotic design and control. The intention of the overview is to suggest new ways to think about and to perhaps design legged machines taking inspiration and guidance from biology. Some additional potential features of motor control seen in mammalian species are also presented as further examples of concepts that might prove useful for robotic design. The discussion in this paper will focus on universal principles present in virtually all animals studied, vertebrate and invertebrate. We can have some confidence that the principles that cut across such a wide variety of animals have most likely been heavily selected over evolutionary time to help in that survival, and that the principles are important and highly adaptive control strategies. Two less universal principles are also described for potential robotic design, with some discussion of how they are implemented in the biological system and what they might contribute to artificial systems. Examples of how one might implement the control strategies will be presented from robots of colleagues, H. Kimura, University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, and A. Lewis, Iguana Robotics. The paper will provide further explanation of the principles as well as pointing to additional material including references, and pedagogical lectures made available in PDF format.

The amphibian and reptile fossil record in Mexico is scarce. There have been reported 255 unique taxon/locality/age records from 85 localities. Most fossils are fragmentary and their taxonomic status is difficult to assess; however, some are beautifully preserved, permitting even good cladistic and biogeographical analysis. Among amphibians there are records of caudates and anuras, restricted to the Neogene and Quaternary. Reptiles include turtles (which are the most abundant), crocodiles, ichthyosaurs, sauropterygians, a basal lepidosauromorph, sphenodontians, a basal squamate, true squamate lizards, and snakes, from the Late Triassic to the Holocene. Localities are distributed in 21 Mexican states from which Sonora bears most records. Nineteen species based on Mexican fossils have been erected. Three have been considered invalid, one has changed taxonomic status, and at least two more are questioned. Most of the type specimens designated are housed in Mexican institutions. There have been 99 main non-redundant published documents that mention, list, or describe fossil amphibians and reptiles, including scientific papers, books and book chapters of international and national circulation, meeting abstracts, guidebooks and newsletters. Of all papers published, only 51 are formal publications in either national or international press and 40 were published in international journals or editorials. Mexicans have published only 10 international papers. However, Mexican paleoherpetology has significantly increased in the last two decades, although most information is hidden in gray literature of difficult access to the international community. It is imperative that Mexican workers document their discoveries in formal publications.

This paper provides an updated review of the Mesozoic fossil Osteichthyan record of Mexico. This catalogue includes multiple entries of papers, theses, and diverse scientific meeting reports regarding Cretaceous Osteichthyan fishes of Mexico that reflect the present state of knowledge. In addition, it provides a review of the Mexican paleoichthyology history, including the most recent fossil Osteichthyan discoveries. Within this framework some systematic and paleobiogeographical implications generated from the enrichment of the Mexican Mesozoic Osteichthyan record are briefly discussed providing future perspectives to this young field of Mexican science.

This paper deals with the logic program transformation using the fold-unfold technique. The major problem in the strategies using fold-unfold transformation is to find a sequence of unfolding that permits the folding. In this paper we propose a technique that solves this problem for a particular class of logic programs. This technique consists in studying the possibility of folding for some simple or basic programs and then to apply these results for some more general logic programs. This technique permits to compute the sequence of unfolding to achieve a folding or to detect the impossibility of a folding, in the latter case the technique permits the invention of new predicates.

Internet accessibility for the visually impaired community is still an open issue. Guidelines have been issued by the W3C consortium to help web designers to improve web site accessibility. However several studies show that a significant percentage of web page creators are still ignoring the proposed guidelines. Several tools are now available, general purpose, or web specific, to help visually impaired readers. But is reading a web page enough? Regular sighted users are able to scan a web page for a particular piece of information at high speeds. Shouldn't visually impaired readers have the same chance? This paper discusses some features already implemented to improve accessibility and presents a user feedback report regarding the AudioBrowser, a talking browser. Based on the user feedback the paper also suggests some avenues for future work in order to make talking browsers and screen readers compatible., The research reported in here was supported by SNRIP (The Portuguese National Secretariat of Rehabilitation and Integration for the Disabled) under program CITE 2001, and also FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) and POSI/2001 (Operational Program for the Information Society) with funds partly awarded by FEDER.

Ramsey’s posthumously published Theories has become one of the classics of the twentieth century philosophy of science. The paper was written in 1929 and was first published in 1931, in a collection of Ramsey’s papers edited by Richard Braithwaite. Theories was mostly ignored until the 1950s, though Ramsey’s reputation was growing fast, especially in relation to his work in the foundations of mathematics. Braithwaite made some use of it in his Scientific Explanation, which appeared in 1953. It was Hempel’s The Theoretician’s Dilemma, published in 1958, which paid Ramsey’s paper its philosophical dues. Hempel coined the now famous expression ‘Ramsey-sentence’.

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is an XML based language; the BPEL standard defines the structure, tags and attributes of an XML document that corresponds to a valid BPEL specification. In addition, the standard defines a number of natural language constraints of which some can be ambiguous and are complex. This paper uses the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Object Constraint Language to provide a model of the XML based BPEL language. Based on this model the paper shows how OCL can be used to give a precise version of the natural language constraints defined in the BPEL standard. We then use this precise specification to generate a Validation tool automatically that can check that a BPEL document is well-formed.

The lack of interoperability between ICT systems is becoming more and more a bottleneck in the collaboration and co-operation of enterprises. Co-operating parties have to exchange business information and have to have the same understanding of the meaning of the exchanged information and to trust both the communication itself and the validity of its contents. The paper reviews two ISO standards, which are aiming on the interoperability issue comparing the different aspects of these standards and introduces a new work item in standardisation, which expects support from two current European initiatives on interoperability and others. The paper is intended to guide further standard developments by identifying current solutions and their relation with one another.

In this paper we describe the conformance testing model of the open interfaces developed and applied in the PlugIT project in Finland during 2003–2004. Conformance testing is needed to integrate different software products without a vast amount of extra adaptation work, and to improve software inter-operability. The model has been developed and evaluated with co-operation of several healthcare software companies and hospital districts. The clinical context management interface specification is used as an example in this paper.

ftp://cui.unige.ch/iesa/I03-2--.pdf; Nowadays, Enterprise Integration (EI) constitutes a real and growing need for most of enterprises, especially for large and dynamic ones. It constitutes the main approach to deal with heterogeneity, and particularly to deal with semantic heterogeneity, which it forms the crucial problem of EI. This last problem is not correctly addressed by today's EI solutions that focus mainly on the technical and syntactical integration. Addressing the semantic aspect will promote EI by providing it more consistency and flexibility. Some efforts are suggested to solve the semantic problem at different level, but they are still not mature. Here, solutions based on service-oriented architectures and semantic web are promoted as nirvana of the integration problem, and they are being actively researched. The paper will outline the potential role that semantic web technologies can offer in solving some key challenges such as semantic mediation. In particular, the paper will propose a flexible approach called ODSOI (Ontology-Driven Service-Oriented Integration) that aims to extend the state-of-the-art in EI, especially in EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), in order to address the semantic problem.

Due to the heterogeneous nature of web services, interoperability is a crucial aspect, and this interoperability has not only a data aspect (ontologies) but also a process aspect. To ensure correctness of e-business processes, some kind of transaction support (e.g. WS-TXM) is necessary but not sufficient. In this paper, we define correctness in terms of contract compliance. Being contract-guided, e-business processes require a contract-dependent transaction protocol that can be represented as a set of formally specified agreements and obligations between participants. In current standards and frameworks, contract-based interoperability is only referred to, but not specified in details. This paper contributes to contract-based interoperability in the following aspects: for the first time it classifies characteristics for various degrees (levels) of contract-based interoperability, and it provides formal definitions of basic support operations - check and lock.

In this paper we report on some research activities in the ATLAS team in Nantes and the GOOD OLD AI research group in Belgrade in the domain of model-based engineering. We start from the idea that a convenient organization of various technical spaces in three “metamodeling” layers offers a convenient working environment. The main message of this paper is that it is possible to consider software engineering and ontology engineering as two similarly organized areas, based on different metametamodels (M3-level). Consequently, building bridges between these spaces at the M3-level seems to offer some significant advantages that will be discussed in the paper.

The term soft computing refers to a family of techniques consisting of methods and procedures based on fuzzy logic, evolutionary computing, artificial neural networks, probabilistic reasoning, rough sets, chaotic computing. With the discovery that the Web is structured according to social networks exhibiting the small world property, the idea of using taxonomy principles has appeared as a complementary alternative to traditional keyword searching. One technique which has emerged from this principle was the “web-as-brain” metaphor. It is yielding new, associative, artificial neural networks- (ANN-) based retrieval techniques. The present paper proposes a unified formal framework for three major methods used for Web retrieval tasks: PageRank, HITS, I2R. The paper shows that these three techniques, albeit they stem originally from different paradigms, can be integrated into one unified formal view. The conceptual and notational framework used is given by ANNs and the generic network equation. It is shown that the PageRank, HITS and I2R methods can be formally obtained from the generic equation as different particular cases by making certain assumptions reflecting the corresponding underlying paradigm. The unified formal view sheds a new light upon the understanding of these methods: it may be said that they are only seemingly different from each other, they are particular ANNs stemming from the same equation and differing from one another in whether they are dynamic (a page’s importance varies in time) or static (a page’s importance is constant in time), and in the way they connect the pages to each other. The paper also gives a detailed mathematical analysis of the computational complexity of WTA-based IR techniques using the I2R method for illustration. The importance of this analysis consists in that it shows that (i) intuition may be misleading (contrary to intuition, a WTA-based algorithm yielding circles is not always “hard”), and (ii) this analysis can serve as a model that may be followed in the analysis of other methods.

Recently, efforts have been made to define the role of “context” in the Product Realization Process. This paper treats only a small slice of this problem and applies the notion of context to the automatic merging of geometric models created with the computer graphics language OpenGL. Context can be thought of as a set of properties or environmental variables of some entity that constrains or governs the behavior of that entity. The entity in this case is a three-dimensional geometric model and its context is the set of properties for viewing that model: lighting, viewing parameters, material reflective properties, colour. Now suppose a geometric model is made up of a collection of sub-models, each within its own context. If each context is associated with an integer, then the contexts can be ordered hierarchically. Thus the topmost context in the hierarchy becomes the global context for all the sub-models in the collection. Stated in another way, once a contextual hierarchy is defined, then the structure for combining these sub-models is established independently of when and in what individual contexts the sub-models are created. Consequently, context allows a concurrent generation of models within a formalized structure that automatically deals with conflict resolution — albeit in a limited way in this work. This paper describes a compiler in XML that will merge the OpenGL files automatically.