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Highlights: [•] Granular computing aspects of natural computing. [•] Review of different granular soft computing research. [•] Biological motivation, design principles, application areas, open research problems and challenging issues of these models. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This document is a foreword for a special issue of the journal Microsystem Technologies. The special issue features selected papers from the 11th International Conference on Computing, Communication and Sensor Network (CCSN) held in September 2022 at Utkal University in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India. The conference covered various interdisciplinary areas such as computing, communication, sensor networks, and circuit designs. The papers included in this special issue have undergone a rigorous review process and were selected for publication. The foreword expresses the hope that readers will find the papers informative. [Extracted from the article]

In many applications, top-k query is an important operation to return a set of interesting points in a potentially huge data space. It is analyzed in this paper that the existing algorithms cannot process top- k query on massive data efficiently. This paper proposes a novel table-scan-based T2S algorithm to efficiently compute top-k results on massive data. T2S first constructs the presorted table, whose tuples are arranged in the order of the round-robin retrieval on the sorted lists. T2S maintains only fixed number of tuples to compute results. The early termination checking for T2S is presented in this paper, along with the analysis of scan depth. The selective retrieval is devised to skip the tuples in the presorted table which are not top-k results. The theoretical analysis proves that selective retrieval can reduce the number of the retrieved tuples significantly. The construction and incremental-update/batch-processing methods for the used structures are proposed in this paper. The extensive experimental results, conducted on synthetic and real-life data sets, show that T2S has a significant advantage over the existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solomon Marcus (1925–2016) was one of the founders of the Romanian theoretical computer science. His pioneering contributions to automata and formal language theories, mathematical linguistics and natural computing have been widely recognised internationally. In this paper we briefly present his publications in theoretical computer science and related areas, which consist in almost ninety papers. Finally we present a selection of ten Marcus books in these areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a problem of global optimization in a non-Archimedean fuzzy metric space context without fuzzy P-property. Specifically, it concerns the determination of the fuzzy distance between two subsets of a non-Archimedean fuzzy metric space. Our approach to solving this problem is to find an optimal approximate solution to a fixed point equation. This approach has been well studied within a category of problems called proximity point problems. We explore some new types of (ψ − ϕ) -weak proximal contractions and investigate the existence of the unique best proximity point for such kinds of mappings. Subsequently, some fixed point results for corresponding contractions are proved, and some illustrative examples are presented to support the validity of the main results. Moreover, an interesting application in computer science, particularly in the domain of words has been provided. Our work is a fuzzy generalization of the proximity point problem by means of fuzzy fixed point method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of measuring the complexity of shapes can be seen by the wide range of its application such as computer vision, robotics, cognitive studies, eye tracking, and psychology. However, it is very challenging to define an accurate and precise metric to measure the complexity of the shapes. In this paper, we explore different notions of shape complexity, drawing from established work in mathematics, computer science, and computer vision. We integrate results from user studies with quantitative analyses to identify three measures that capture important axes of shape complexity, out of a list of almost 300 measures previously considered in the literature. We then explore the connection between specific measures and the types of complexity that each one can elucidate. Finally, we contribute a dataset of both abstract and meaningful shapes with designated complexity levels both to support our findings and to share with other researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop two automated authorship attribution schemes, one based on Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA) and the other based on a Support Vector Machine (SVM). The classification features we exploit are based on word frequencies in the text. We adopt an approach of preprocessing each text by stripping it of all characters except a-z and space. This is in order to increase the portability of the software to different types of texts. We test the methodology on a corpus of undisputed English texts, and use leave-one-out cross validation to demonstrate classification accuracies in excess of 90%. We further test our methods on the Federalist Papers, which have a partly disputed authorship and a fair degree of scholarly consensus. And finally, we apply our methodology to the question of the authorship of the Letter to the Hebrews by comparing it against a number of original Greek texts of known authorship. These tests identify where some of the limitations lie, motivating a number of open questions for future work. An open source implementation of our methodology is freely available for use at https://github.com/matthewberryman/author-detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The energy of a graph is the sum of the absolute values of its eigenvalues. It is used in chemistry to approximate the total p-electron energy of molecules. In this paper, the concept of energy of fuzzy graph is extended to the energy of bipolar fuzzy graph. It has many applications in computer science, physics, chemistry, and other sciences. We define adjacency matrix, degree matrix, laplacian matrix, spectrum, and energy of a bipolar fuzzy graph in terms of their adjacency matrix. Also, the lower and upper bounds for the energy of a bipolar fuzzy graph are also derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we obtain the common fuzzy fixed points of fuzzy mappings satisfying Θ-contraction in a metric space. In the process, we generalize several well known recent and classical results. Finally, we provide an example and application to theoretical computer science to show the significance of the investigation of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we "think like a computer scientist," we are able to systematically solve problems in different fields, create software applications that support various needs, and design artefacts that model complex systems. Abstraction is a soft skill embedded in all those endeavours, being a main cornerstone of computational thinking. Our overview of abstraction is intended to be not so much systematic as thought provoking, inviting the reader to (re)think abstraction from different - and perhaps unusual - perspectives. After presenting a range of its characterisations, we will explore abstraction from a cognitive point of view. Then we will discuss the role of abstraction in a range of computer science areas, including whether and how abstraction is taught. Although it is impossible to capture the essence of abstraction in one sentence, one section or a single paper, we hope our insights into abstraction may help computer science educators to better understand, model and even dare to teach abstraction skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affine equivalence of Boolean functions has various applications in computer science and modern cryptography, such as circuit design and S-boxes. Existing methods for detecting affine equivalence of Boolean functions work in some cases but not when the truth table of a Boolean function is sparse. To improve previous methods and overcome this limitation, we propose a method by transforming the Boolean function to a function with the property that its function values at the orthonormal basis are all equal to 1 or 0, which narrows down the search space of affine transformations. Our first algorithm has the advantage of getting a smaller search space than previous methods and is especially useful for sparse functions. Specifically, when the Boolean functions are sparse, the search space can be reduced exponentially in average and experiments show the efficiency of our first algorithm. We then present another algorithm to transform one circuit into its equivalent affine circuit by synthesizing a reversible circuit and inserting it in front of the original circuit. To our knowledge, this is the first work to automatically synthesize an affine equivalent circuit for any given circuit and the first to do this by combining reversible circuit and non-reversible circuit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Search algorithms are integral to numerous applications in computer science. With the prevalence of multi-core processors in contemporary computing devices, the parallelization of search algorithms has surfaced as a viable strategy for achieving significant performance enhancements. This paper offers a detailed examination of the performance improvements garnered through the parallelization of search procedures, with a particular emphasis on the Depth-First Search (DFS) algorithm as it pertains to pathway discovery in binary trees. The primary aim of this study was to contrast the performance of the conventional sequential DFS approach with a novel parallel strategy designed to exploit the computational capabilities of multi-core processors. By capitalizing on the resources available in modern desktop and laptop computers, it was intended to markedly diminish the processing time necessary for examining all possible pathways in both symmetrical and asymmetrical binary trees. A meticulous experimental evaluation was conducted using a varied assortment of binary trees, spanning perfectly balanced to highly skewed structures, to ensure a thorough assessment of the effectiveness of both strategies. The primary metric employed for performance evaluation was the total processing time, a crucial consideration for time-critical applications. The experimental results confirmed the superiority of the parallelized method over the conventional sequential DFS approach. The parallel technique demonstrated significantly lower processing times for pathway discovery in all binary tree scenarios tested. These performance enhancements were particularly noticeable in larger and more complex trees, underscoring the potential of parallelization for managing computationally demanding tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A convex polytope is the convex hull of a finite set of points in the Euclidean space ℝ n . By preserving the adjacency-incidence relation between vertices of a polytope, its structural graph is constructed. A graph is called Hamilton-connected if there exists at least one Hamiltonian path between any of its two vertices. The detour index is defined to be the sum of the lengths of longest distances, i.e., detours between vertices in a graph. Hamiltonian and Hamilton-connected graphs have diverse applications in computer science and electrical engineering, whereas the detour index has important applications in chemistry. Checking whether a graph is Hamilton-connected and computing the detour index of an arbitrary graph are both NP-complete problems. In this paper, we study these problems simultaneously for certain families of convex polytopes. We construct two infinite families of Hamilton-connected convex polytopes. Hamilton-connectivity is shown by constructing Hamiltonian paths between any pair of vertices. We then use the Hamilton-connectivity to compute the detour index of these families. A family of non-Hamilton-connected convex polytopes has also been constructed to show that not all convex polytope families are Hamilton-connected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A connected graph is called Hamilton-connected if there exists a Hamiltonian path between any pair of its vertices. Determining whether a graph is Hamilton-connected is an NP-complete problem. Hamiltonian and Hamilton-connected graphs have diverse applications in computer science and electrical engineering. The detour index of a graph is defined to be the sum of lengths of detours between all the unordered pairs of vertices. The detour index has diverse applications in chemistry. Computing the detour index for a graph is also an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we study the Hamilton-connectivity of convex polytopes. We construct three infinite families of convex polytopes and show that they are Hamilton-connected. An infinite family of non-Hamilton-connected convex polytopes is also constructed, which, in turn, shows that not all convex polytopes are Hamilton-connected. By using Hamilton connectivity of these families of graphs, we compute exact analytical formulas of their detour index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Searching for all occurrences of a pattern in a text is a fundamental problem in computer science with applications in many other fields, like natural language processing, information retrieval and computational biology. Sampled string matching is an efficient approach recently introduced in order to overcome the prohibitive space requirements of an index construction, on the one hand, and drastically reduce searching time for the online solutions, on the other hand. In this paper we present a new algorithm for the sampled string matching problem, based on a characters distance sampling approach. The main idea is to sample the distances between consecutive occurrences of a given pivot character and then to search online the sampled data for any occurrence of the sampled pattern, before verifying the original text. From a theoretical point of view we prove that, under suitable conditions, our solution can achieve both linear worst-case time complexity and optimal average-time complexity. From a practical point of view it turns out that our solution shows a sub-linear behaviour in practice and speeds up online searching by a factor of up to 9, using limited additional space whose amount goes from 11 to 2.8% of the text size, with a gain up to 50% if compared with previous solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a brief survey of the languages for efficient support of access to the databases satisfying the ontological dependencies. The first part of the paper retraces the development of description logics intended for application in the database and information systems context, as well as experimental results of building of the 'ontologically based' data access systems. The main part of the paper is devoted to the survey of the development of relational database languages providing broader and more efficient support of queries over databases with the ontological dependencies compared to the description logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Problems of large keys in the on-lattice ring signature link due to reduce to the lattice, based on the problem of fault-tolerant learning on the ring (RLWE), according to "Homomorphic Commitment→Σ-Protocol→Fiat-Shamir Transformation" reconstructs a linkable ring signature scheme on a lattice. First construct a base “Homomorphic commitment scheme” on polynomial ring of RLWE difficult, and use the Fiat-Shamir transformation method. The method converts the Σ-protocol into a linkable ring signature scheme, and suggests linkable ring signature scheme model. It is resistant to quantum computer attacks. compared with the previous linkable ring signature schemes on lattices, proposed methods with high computational, simple and less time frame because the ring elements in the scheme are taken from small polynomials which represents as case of application in computer science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, dealing with model-based testing, proposes to formalize the concept of IOCO proxy-tester for passively testing the conformance of implementations. This proxy oriented approach is particularly interesting when the implementation environment access is restricted, for security or technical reasons. In this case, a proxy-tester can be installed outside of this environment to interact with the implementation. It represents an intermediary application which receives the client traffic, forwards it to an implementation and vice-versa. While passively observing the implementation reactions, it can also detect its incorrect behaviours. We present, in the paper, a formal IOCO proxy-tester definition that can be used to automatically generate one proxy-tester from a ioSTS specification. The notion of conformance is defined with the ioco test relation. To directly check whether the implementation is IOCO-conforming to its specification by means of a proxy-tester, we rephrase IOCO by defining sets of partial traces extracted from the proxy-tester. We also introduce other possibilities offered by the proxy-tester concept. In particular, we describe an approach which improves the functional quality of the implementation by completing its proxy-tester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ramanujan graphs are graphs whose spectrum is bounded optimally. Such graphs have found numerous applications in combinatorics and computer science. In recent years, a high-dimensional theory has emerged. In this paper, these developments are surveyed. After explaining their connection to the Ramanujan conjecture, we will present some old and new results with an emphasis on random walks on these discrete objects and on the Euclidean spheres. The latter lead to 'golden gates' which are of importance in quantum computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we review the Ramanujan conjecture in classical and modern settings and explain its various applications in computer science, including the explicit constructions of the spectrally extremal combinatorial objects, called Ramanujan graphs and Ramanujan complexes, points uniformly distributed on spheres, and Golden-Gate Sets in quantum computing. The connection between Ramanujan graphs/complexes and their zeta functions satisfying the Riemann hypothesis is also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Theoretical concepts of graphs are highly utilized by computer science applications. Especially in research areas of computer science such as data mining, image segmentation, clustering, image capturing and networking. The intuitionistic fuzzy graphs are more flexible and compatible than fuzzy graphs due to the fact that they have many applications in networks. The main purpose of this paper is to introduce some connectivity concepts in the intuitionistic fuzzy graphs. Analogous to fuzzy cutvertices and fuzzy bridges in fuzzy graphs, intuitionistic fuzzy cutvertices and intuitionistic fuzzy bridges are introduced and characterized. We also proposed the concept of gain and loss for paths and pairs of vertices. Finally, we give an application of intuitionistic fuzzy digraphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Photo-identification is a commonly used non-invasive technique that has been profitably employed in biological studies throughout the years. It starts from the assumption that a single individual can be recognized in multiple photos captured at different times by exploiting its unique representative and visible physical qualities such as marks, notches or any other definite feature. Hence, photo-identification is performed to infer knowledge about wild species' spatial and temporal distributions as well as population dynamics, thus providing valuable information especially when the species being investigated is ranked as data deficient. Furthermore, the technological improvements of the last decades and the large availability of devices with powerful computing capabilities are driving the research towards a common goal of enriching bio-ecological studies with innovative computer science approaches. In this scenario, computer vision plays a fundamental role, as it can successfully assist researchers in the analysis of large amounts of data. The aim of this paper is, in fact, to effectively provide a computer vision approach for the photo-identification of the Risso's dolphin, exploiting specific visual cues with a feature-based approach relying on SIFT and SURF feature detectors. The experiments have been conducted on image data acquired in the Gulf of Taranto from 2013 to 2017, conducting a comparative analysis of the performance of both SIFT and SURF, as well as a comparison with the state-of-the-art software DARWIN, and they proved the effectiveness of the proposed approach and suggested its application would be suitable to large scale studies. In conclusion, this paper shows an innovative computer vision application for the identification of unknown Risso's dolphin individuals that relies on a feature-based automated approach. The results suggest that the proposed approach can efficiently assist researchers during the photo-identification task of large amounts of data collected in such a challenging domain. Highlights • Computer vision is strategic for automatic photo-identification of Risso's dolphin. • SIFT based approach is robust and accurate (90%) for Risso's dolphin photo-ID. • This approach can efficiently assist researchers in large scale studies. • Increased knowledge of Risso's dolphin as data deficient species [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Face as a biometric attribute has been extensively studied over the past few decades. Even though, satisfactory results are already achieved in controlled environments, the practicality of face recognition in realistic scenarios is still limited by several challenges, such as, expression, pose, occlusion, etc. Recently, the research direction is concentrating on the prospects of complementing face recognition systems with facial soft biometric traits. The ease of extracting facial soft biometrics under several varying conditions has mainly resulted in the ability of using the traits to, either improve the performance of traditional face recognition systems, or performing recognition solely based on many facial soft biometrics. This paper presents state-of-the-art techniques in facial soft biometrics research by describing the type of traits, feature extraction methods, and the application domains. It indicates the most recent and valuable results attained, while also highlighting some possible future scientific research directions to be investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complex eScience and other sophisticated applications in the field of HPC imply new demands that queuing based resource management systems cannot meet. To guarantee Quality of Service and co-allocation in the Grid, planning based resource management systems implementing advance reservation are needed. These systems face new challenges as a planning based management system has to keep track of the jobs and reservations in the future. Additionally, during the negotiation process of incoming reservations, a good overview of the remaining, not-yet reserved capacity is needed-not only for the current allocation, but also for the whole book-ahead time. Therefore, the resource management problem becomes a two dimensional problem for advance reservations in this field. In this paper different data structures are investigated and discussed in order to fit to planning based resource management. As a result the benefits of using lists of resource allocation or free blocks are exposed. This general idea widely used to manage continuous resources is extended to cover not only the resource dimension but also the time dimension. The list of blocks approach is evaluated in a Grid level and a local resource management system for a computing cluster. The extensive simulations showed a better runtime and higher reservation success rate compared with the currently favored approach of a slotted time and the more sophisticated approach based on AVL trees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enriching many location-based applications, various new skyline queries are proposed and formulated based on the notion of locational dominance, which extends conventional one by taking objects' nearness to query positions into account additional to objects' nonspatial attributes. To answer a representative class of skyline queries for location-based applications efficiently, this paper presents two index-based approaches, namely, augmented R-tree and dominance diagram. Augmented R-tree extends R-tree by including aggregated nonspatial attributes in index nodes to enable dominance checks during index traversal. Dominance diagram is a solution-based approach, by which each object is associated with a precomputed nondominance scope wherein query points should have the corresponding object not locationally dominated by any other. Dominance diagram enables skyline queries to be evaluated via parallel and independent comparisons between nondominance scopes and query points, providing very high search efficiency. The performance of these two approaches is evaluated via empirical studies, in comparison with other possible approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor expresses honor and privilege to serve as the journal's editor-in-chief, as well as his passion for the International Society for Computers and their Applications.

Threshold graphs have numerous applications in computer science and psychology. The eccentricity matrix ɛ (G) of G is defined as ɛ (G) i j = d (v i , v j) if d (v i , v j) = m i n { e (v i) , e (v j) } , 0 otherwise. In this paper, we give some properties of the eccentricity eigenvalues of threshold graphs and determine threshold graphs with distinct eccentricity eigenvalues in [ − 2 , 0 ]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we introduced Fs-set, Fs-subset etc and we define Fs-complement and prove De Morgan laws of Fs-subsets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the progress of society today Current real applications require flexible approaches to trust negotiations, especially in light of the widespread use of mobile devices. Moreover the ubiquitous nature of online peer-to-peer systems, and the increasing number of moving objects involved in online transactions, negotiators must be allowed to switch roles to guarantee dependability, availability of resources and peers. Existing method mostly focused on the assurance of privacy and confidentiality with the goal of guaranteeing that no actual information about a negotiator's properties is disclosed. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to trust negotiations that offers a general solution to those issues by developing major extensions to previous approaches by presenting a multi session dependable approach to trust negotiations. This proposed framework supports voluntary and unpredicted interruptions, enabling the negotiating parties to complete the negotiation despite temporary unavailability of resources. In our approach the protocols address issues related to validity, temporary loss of data, and extended unavailability negotiators. For increasing robustness and efficiency we showed how our negotiation protocol can withstand in most significant attacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epistemic logic was proposed by Hintikka to model human knowledge and beliefs. Since then, a lot of work has been done to improve epistemic logic for applications to several problems. One of the interesting problems is to relate the concept of ignorance to that of knowledge. In this paper, we introduce an epistemic logic LNI founded on nonignorance by extending the classical propositional logic with the operator Ni. We describe its axiomatization and Kripke semantics. We show some technical results including a completeness and discuss some applications and extensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY A vast number of software fault localization techniques have been proposed recently with the growing realization that manual debugging is time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone, and fault localization is one of the most expensive debugging activities. Although some techniques perform better than others on a large number of data sets, they do not do so on all data sets and therefore, the actual quality of fault localization can vary considerably by using just one technique. This paper proposes the use of a consensus-based strategy that combines the results of multiple fault localization techniques to consistently provide high quality performance, irrespective of data set. Empirical evidence based on case studies conducted on six sets of programs (seven programs of the Siemens suite, and the gzip, grep, make, space, and Ant programs) and three different fault localization techniques (Tarantula, Ochiai, and H3) suggests that the consensus-based strategy holds merit and generally provides close to the best, if not the best, results. Empirically, we show that this is true of both single-fault and multifault programs. Additionally, the consensus-based strategy makes use of techniques that all operate on the same set of input data, minimizing the overhead. It is also simple to include or exclude techniques from consensus, making it an easily extensible or tractable strategy. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Causal ordering is a useful tool for mobile distributed systems (MDS) to reduce the non-determinism induced by three main aspects: host mobility, asynchronous execution, and unpredictable communication delays. Several causal protocols for MDS exist. Most of them, in order to reduce the overhead and the computational cost over wireless channels and mobile hosts (MH), ensure causal ordering at and according to the causal view of the Base Stations. Nevertheless, these protocols introduce certain disadvantage, such as unnecessary inhibition at the delivery of messages. In this paper, we present an efficient causal protocol for groupware that satisfies the MDS's constraints, avoiding unnecessary inhibitions and ensuring the causal delivery based on the view of the MHs. One interesting aspect of our protocol is that it dynamically adapts the causal information attached to each message based on the number of messages with immediate dependency relation, and this is not directly proportional to the number of MHs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Power and performance management problem in large scale computing systems like data centers has attracted a lot of interests from both enterprises and academic researchers as power saving has become more and more important in many fields. Because of the multiple objectives, multiple influential factors and hierarchical structure in the system, the problem is indeed complex and hard. In this paper, the problem will be investigated in a virtualized computing system. Specifically, it is formulated as a power optimization problem with some constraints on performance. Then, the adaptive controller based on least-square self-tuning regulator(LS-STR) is designed to track performance in the first step; and the resource solved by the controller is allocated in order to minimize the power consumption as the second step. Some simulations are designed to test the effectiveness of this method and to compare it with some other controllers. The simulation results show that the adaptive controller is generally effective: it is applicable for different performance metrics, for different workloads, and for single and multiple workloads; it can track the performance requirement effectively and save the power consumption significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet is undergoing a tremendous change towards the globalized computing environment. Due to the open, dynamic and uncontrollable natures of the Internet, software running in the Internet computing environment has some new features, which bring challenges to current software technologies in terms of software model, software operating platform, software engineering approaches and software quality. Researchers in China have proposed the term 'Internetware' to present the emerging software paradigm. Sponsored by the National Basic Research 973 Program, several research practices have been done on the Internetware in the past decade. This paper summarizes the progress and status of the Internetware researches. A technical solution framework for the Internetware paradigm is proposed from four aspects: the Internetware software model defines what the Internetware is to be; the Internetware middleware determines how to run the Internetware applications; the engineering methodology determines how to develop the Internetware applications; the Internetware quality assurance determines how well the Internetware applications can perform. The paper also discusses the ongoing research issues and future trends of Internetware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recognizing the potential contribution that interactive software agents bring to everyday work applications, this paper reports on end-user adoption of animated interface agents in one particular work application environment: Microsoft® Office. The paper develops and empirically tests a theoretical model of the factors affecting an end-user's choice to adopt and utilize such interface agents. From this theoretical model, a survey instrument was adapted and administered to 261 participants, familiar with animated interface agents. Results from a partial least squares (PLS) analysis indicates that a variety of factors are at play, which inhibit or foster a person's choice to utilize and adopt animated interface agents. Of significance is that: (a) both perceived usefulness and perceived enjoyment are important influencing factors; (b) users with high scores in innovativeness toward information technology are less likely to find animated interface agents enjoyable; (c) individuals with high animation predisposition scores perceive animated interface agents to be more enjoyable; and (d) users who perceive animated interface agents to be more enjoyable also perceive them to be more useful. Such insights can be used to leverage the introduction and rollout of animated interface agents in everyday work applications in ways that promote their avid adoption and use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider performance evaluation of a system which shares K servers (or resources) among N heterogeneous classes of workloads, where server allocation and deallocation for class i is dictated by a class specific threshold- based policy with hysteresis control. In particular, the server activation time for class i is noninstantaneous. There are many systems and applications whare a multiclass threshold-based queueing system can be of great use. One important utility of using threshold-based approaches is In situations where applications may incur server usage costs. In these cases, one needs to consider not only the performance aspects but also the resulting cost/performance ratio. The motivation for using hysteresis control is to reduce the unnecessary cost of server setup (or activation) and server removal (or deactivation) whenever there are momentary fluctuations in workload. Moreover, servers in such systems and applications are often needed by multiple classes of workloads and, hence, it is desirable to find good approaches to sharing server resources among the different classes of workloads, preferably without statically partitioning the server pool among these classes. An important and distinguishing characteristic of our work is that we consider the modeling and analysis of a multiclass system with noninstantaneous server activation. The main contributions of this work are 1) in developing an efficient approximation method for solving such models, 2) in verifying the convergence of our iterative method, and 3) in evaluating the resulting accuracy of the technique for computing performance measures of interest, which can subsequently be used in making system design choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid computing has become one of the most important research topics that appeared in the field of computing in the last years. Simultaneously, we have noticed the growing popularity of new Web-based technologies which allow us to create application-oriented Grid middleware services providing capabilities required for dynamic resource and job management, monitoring, security, etc. Consequently, end users are able to get easier access to geographically distributed resources. In this paper we present the results of our experiments with the Grid(Lab) Resource Management System (GRMS), which acts on behalf of end users and controls their computations efficiently using distributed heterogeneous resources. We show how resource matching techniques used within GRMS can be improved by the use of a job migration based rescheduling policy. The main aim of this policy is to shorten job pending times and reduce machine overloads. The influence of this method on application performance and resource utilization is studied in detail and compared with two other simple policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an application for generating a dynamic selection screen in ABAP and the need and advantages of this solution instead of the manual modification of the coding itself for adding one or more parameters in the whole logic of the program. Depending on data found in a customizing table, we would like to generate a program with a selection screen, containing select options based on the criteria specified in the customizing table. The presented solution can be adapted to any dynamically generated ABAP program, according to the desired selection screen elements, and may be used as a template even for other programs. The advantages of the proposed solution are also presented along with the disadvantages, underlining the particularities of the ABAP programming language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some papers from the 1978 computer science conference, COMPSAC 78 Conference, are presented in this issue of the "IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering". Computer science of which software engineering is a very important component, is a multifaceted discipline and the computer applications are providing the major avenues of its growth, just as physical and biological sciences have been the beacon lights of the growth of mathematical sciences. The papers in this issue and those presented at COMPSAC 78 portray this emerging thrust of software application experience.

Machine Learning has received its attention over the past decade in the security and privacy related applications. The information is enormous, and manual working on data could be difficult and makes it more complex to predict the future. Machine Learning has been introduced and applied in a wide range of technical applications in computer science to overcome this problem. Machine Learning is popularly used in real-time decision-making applications, big data processing to build an efficient time calculated and decisive solution. Machine learning model is used for classifying the data with at the most accuracy. Various kinds of machine learning algorithms and techniques are available. However, the latest research studies show that machine learning using data could be vulnerable to security attacks, malware detection, and many more. This paper highlights a survey of machine learning tools, techniques, and applications and systematically analyzes security attacks over the past few years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The technologies, architecures, and methodologies traditionally used to develop distributed applications exhibit a variety of limitations and drawbacks when applied to large scale distributed settlings (e.g., the Internet). In particular, they fail in providing the desired degree of configurability, scalability, and customizability. To address these issues, researchers are investigating a varity of innovative approaches. The most promising and intriguing ones are those based on the ability of moving code across the nodes of a network, expoloiting the notion of mobile code. As an emerging research field, code mobility is generating a growing body of scientific literature and industrial developments. Nevertheless, the field is still characterized by the lack of a sound and comprehensive body of concepts and terms. As a consequence, it is rather difficult to understand, assess, and compare the existing approaches. In turn, this limits our ability to fully exploit them in practice, and to further promote the research work on mobile code. Indeed, a significant symptom of this situation is the lack of a commonly accepted and sound definition of the term "mobile code" itself. This paper presents a conceptual framework for understanding code mobility. The framework is centered around a classification that introduces three dimensions: technologies, design paradigms, and applications. The contribution of the paper is two-fold. First, it provides a set of terms and concepts to understand and compare the approaches based on the notion of mobile code. Second, it introduces criteria and guidelines that support the developer in the identification of the classes of applications that can leverage off of mobile code, in the design of these applications, and finally, in the selection of the most appropriate implemention technlogies. The presentation of the classification is interwined with a review of state-of-the-art in the field. Finally, the use of the classification is exemplified in a case study. Mobile code, mobile agent, distributed application, design paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fog computing is a paradigm that extends Cloud computing and services to the edge of the network. Similar to Cloud, Fog provides data, compute, storage and application services to end users. In this article, we elaborate the motivation and advantages of Fog computing and analyse its applications in a series of real scenarios, such as Smart Grid, smart traffic lights in vehicular networks and software defined networks. We discuss the state of the art of Fog computing and similar work under the same umbrella. Distinguished from other reviewing work of Fog computing, this paper further discloses the security and privacy issues according to current Fog computing paradigm. As an example, we study a typical attack, man-in-the-middle attack, for the discussion of system security in Fog computing. We investigate the stealthy features of this attack by examining its CPU and memory consumption on Fog device. In addition, we discuss the authentication and authorization techniques that can be used in Fog computing. An example of authentication techniques is introduced to address the security scenario where the connection between Fog and Cloud is fragile. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a concise overview of Probabilistic Semantics according to a technology-oriented perspective. Indeed, while the progressive consolidation of Semantic Technology in a wide context and on a large scale is going to be a fact, the non-deterministic character of many problems and environments suggests the rise of additional researches around semantics to integrate the mainstream. Probabilistic extensions and their implications to the current semantic ecosystems are discussed in this paper with an implicit focus on the Web and its evolution. The critical literature review undertaken shows valuable theoretical works, effective applications, evidences of an increasing research interest as the response to real problems, as well as largely unexplored research areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Icon plays a critical role in computer interface design. Studies on icon taxonomy explain the way in which various types of icon represent the objects and provide designers creation rules by which icons are more in line with users’ cognitive psychology. However, along with larger and larger use of icons, the previous classification criterion causes the boundary between categories blur. What’s more, Single classification standard is not able to well illustrate the icons applied in today’s computer applications. The purpose of this paper is to present an objective-oriented icon taxonomy which proposes to categorize icons into action icon and knowledge icon. To assess this proposition, we analyzed a sample of icons that applied in computer interface and suggest precise application domains to both action icon and knowledge icon categories. The results of this practice manifested that action icon and knowledge icon implied a high relation with applied environment and explicated the development trace of computer icons. This work is one of the first to point out the notion of knowledge icon and to highlight the importance of objective of icon application. Findings in this paper could enrich icon use in computer interface design, especially provides possible way to improve online knowledge sharing by visual tool like icon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]