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Today's mobile data applications aspire to deliver services to a user anywhere - anytime while fulfilling his Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. However, the success of the service delivery heavily relies on the QoS offered by the underlying networks. As the services operate in a heterogeneous networking environment, we argue that the generic information about the networks' offered-QoS may enable an anyhow mobile service delivery based on an intelligent (proactive) selection of ‘any' network available in the user's context (location and time). Towards this direction, we develop a QoS-predictions service provider, which includes functionality for the acquisition of generic offered-QoS information and which, via a multidimensional processing and history-based reasoning, will provide predictions of the expected offered-QoS in a reliable and timely manner. We acquire the generic QoS-information from distributed mobile services' components quantitatively (actively and passively) measuring the applicationlevel QoS, while the reasoning is based on statistical data mining and pattern recognition techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research community plays a very important role in helping researchers undertake new research topics. The authors propose a community mining system that helps to find communities of researchers by using bibliography data. The basic concept of this system is to provide interactive visualization of communities both local and global communities. We implemented this concept using actual bibliography data and present a case study using the proposed system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capturing and understanding mathematics from print form is an important task in translating written mathematical knowledge into electronic form. While the problem of syntactically recognising mathematical formulas from scanned images has received attention, very little work has been done on semantic validation and correction of recognised formulas. We present a first step towards such an integrated system by combining the Infty system with a semantic analyser for matrix expressions. We applied the combined system in experiments on the semantic analysis of matrix images scanned from textbooks. While the first results are encouraging, they also demonstrate many ambiguities one has to deal with when analysing matrix expressions in different contexts. We give a detailed overview of the problems we encountered that motivate further research into semantic validation of mathematical formula recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic evaluation of visual print quality is addressed in this study. Due to many complex factors of perceived visual quality its evaluation is divided to separate parts which can be individually evaluated using standardized assessments. Most of the assessments however require active evaluation by trained experts. In this paper one quality assessment, missing dot detection from printed dot patterns, is addressed by defining sufficient hardware for image acquisition and method for detecting and counting missing dots from a test strip. The experimental results are evidence how the human assessment can be automated with the help of machine vision, thus making the test more repeatable and accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distinction between "exploratory" and "confirmatory" work is crucial but is too often blurred in current literature. The term "exploratory" refers to empirical work that has as a goal the discovery of new and unforeseen insight. "Confirmatory" research, on the other hand, normally begins with some type of hypothesis or proposition (that has some type of support in previous literature), the confirmation of which is the aim of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although ontologies as an important component are widely used for different purpose in different communities and a number of approaches have been reported for developing ontologies, few works have been done to clarify the concept of knowledge science as far as we know. This paper presents a novel attempt to create an ontology characterizing a research program "Technology Creation Based on Knowledge Science" from a Knowledge Science perspective. We address a combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches to ontology creation, which is a first time to put forward a perspective of combining explicit knowledge with tacit, intuitive and experiential knowledge for constructing an ontology. An example of application of this ontology, related to a software tool named adaptive hermeneutic agent (AHA), is also given in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today the proliferation of the availability of the information of scientific events on the Web has created the necessity to offer a quickly access to up-to-date information about the quality of these events. This requirement demands for (semi) automatic tools to speedily provide this information. The human-performed activity of the information quality evaluation is extremely time consuming and easily leads to failures. The application OntoQualis here described was motivated to support the quality evaluation of Scientific Conferences, in the Computer Science area, based on the graduated programs evaluation protocol of the Brazilian agency CAPES. The evaluation mechanism is specified in the QUALIS document specifically designed to assess journals and conferences ranking. This paper presents a brief vision of the ongoing process of domain analysis and ontology prototyping aiming to classify Scientific Conferences: the OntoQualis project. Some results of OntoQualis preliminary evaluation have shown a satisfactory classification level in comparison with CAPES-QUALIS ranking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ukiyo-e is one famous traditional woodblock type Japanese drawing. Some pattern printed by special print techniques can only be seen from some special direction. This phenomenon relate to the reflection properties on the surface of Ukiyo-e. In this paper, we propose a method to measure these reflection properties of Ukiyo-e. Fitstly, the normal on the surface and the direction of the fiber in Japanese paper are computed from photos which are taken by a measuring machine named OGM. Then, fit the reflection model to the measured data and the reflection properties of Ukiyo-e can be obtained. Based on these parameters, the the appearance of Ukiyo-e can be rendered on real-time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ranking publications of Online Digital Libraries (ODLs) is useful for (i) providing comparative assessment of publications and (ii) listing relevant ODL search results first in search outputs, enabling users to aggregate pertinent results quickly and easily. Studies show that effective citation-based scoring functions, namely, PageRank, HITS and Citation Count, are highly skewed, and have accuracy problems, possibly due to topic diffusion. In this paper, based on the notion of research pyramids, we propose an a priori technique to assign more effective publication scores. Using the ACM SIGMOD Anthology ODL as a testbed, we show that our approach provides more accurate and less skewed publication scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-world data often involves objects that exhibit multiple relationships; for example, ‘papers' and ‘authors' exhibit both paper-author interactions and paper-paper citation relationships. A typical learning problem requires one to make inferences about a subclass of objects (e.g. ‘papers'), while using the remaining objects and relations to provide relevant information. We present a simple, unified mechanism for incorporating information from multiple object types and relations when learning on a targeted subset. In this scheme, all sources of relevant information are marginalized onto the target subclass via random walks. We show that marginalized random walks can be used as a general technique for combining multiple sources of information in relational data. With this approach, we formulate new algorithms for transduction and ranking in relational data, and quantify the performance of new schemes on real world data—achieving good results in many problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a novel user-centric modeling technology, which can dynamically describe and update a person's expertise profile. In an enterprise environment, the technology can enhance employees' collaboration and productivity by assisting in finding experts, training employees, etc. Instead of using the traditional search methods, such as the keyword match, we propose to use relational and evolutionary graph models, which we call ExpertiseNet, to describe and find experts. These ExpertiseNets are used for mining, retrieval, and visualization. We conduct experiments by building ExpertiseNets for researchers from a research paper collection. The experiments demonstrate that expertise mining and matching are more efficiently achieved based on the proposed relational and evolutionary graph models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on a workshop held at the 7th UML conference. It describes motivation and aims, organisational issues, abstracts of the accepted papers, and questions raised during discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most, if not all, conferences use an online system to handle paper submissions and reviews. Introduction of these systems has significantly facilitated the administration, submission and review process compared to traditional paper-based ones. However, it is crucial that these systems have strong resistance against Web attacks as they involve confidential data and privacy. Some submissions could be leading edge breakthroughs that authors do not wish to leak out and be subtly plagiarized. Also, security of the employed system will attract more submissions to conferences that use it and gives confidence of the quality that the conferences uphold. In this paper, we analyze the security of the Web-Submission-and-Review (WSaR) software - latest version 0.53 beta at the time of writing; developed by Shai Halevi from IBM Research. WSaR is currently in use by top cryptology and security-related conferences including Eurocrypt 2007 & 2008, Crypto 2007, and Asiacrypt 2007, annually sponsored by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). We present detailed analysis on WSaR's security features. In particular, we first discuss the desirable security features that are designed into WSaR and what attacks these features defend against. Then, we discuss how some untreated security issues may lead to problems, and we show how to enhance WSaR security features to take these issues into consideration. Our results are the first known careful analysis of WSaR, or any type of online submission system for that matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a community such as conferences, numerous service providers and service users exist, and people interact using contexts. With the improvements in context-awareness computing and mobile computing technologies, human-computer interactions for exchanging contexts started increasing. In this paper, we introduce some interaction techniques such as tag interaction and service discovery interaction using a mobile device to provide an efficient user interface to exchange contexts in a conference room. We identified typical situations in which these interactions can be used in a paper, poster session, and for providing individual information among the attendees. We analyzed the two interaction techniques to be suitable to improve the interactions for exchanging contexts in a conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a survey and analysis of applications of Agent Based Simulation (ABS). A framework for describing and assessing the applications is presented and systematically applied. A general conclusion from the study is that even if ABS seems a promising approach to many problems involving simulation of complex systems of interacting entities, it seems as the full potential of the agent concept and previous research and development within ABS often is not utilized. We illustrate this by providing some concrete examples. Another conclusion is that important information of the applications, in particular concerning the implementation of the simulator, was missing in many papers. As an attempt to encourage improvements we provide some guidelines for writing ABS application papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge visualization is a creative process, but difficult to formalize. This paper presents a system that is capable of analyzing voluminous citation data and visualizing the result. The system offers visualizations of trends by clustering scientific papers taken from the web (CiteSeer papers). Two methods are implemented: factor analysis and PFNET. An experiment has been carried out with the literature in knowledge management. A deep analysis of current trends in KM is then performed to check the relevance of these results. While the topical content is specific to knowledge engineering, semantic web, and related sub-areas, the approach could be applied to any general topic area in AI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of embedded systems, battery life becomes a critical restriction factor. Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) has been proven to be an effective method for reducing energy consumption of processors. This paper proposes an energy-saving algorithm under a task model (the MSPR model) where a task consists of multiple subtasks with different fixed priorities. This algorithm includes two parts. The first part is a static algorithm, which exploits the relationship among tasks to set the slowdown factors of subtasks. The second part is an algorithm that dynamically reclaims and reuses the slack time of precedent subtasks during the execution of tasks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work for energy-efficient scheduling under the complex periodic real-time task model where a task consists of multiple subtasks with different fixed priorities. Experimental results show this method can reduce energy consumption by 20%-80%, while guaranteeing the real-time requirements of systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The CSDUML 2006 workshop is a continuation of the series regarding development of critical systems using modeling languages. The report summarizes papers presented and discussion at the workshop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book constitutes the refereed research proceeding of the 14th European Software Process Improvement Conference, EuroSPI 2007, held in Potsdam, Germany in September 2007. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 60 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on agile methods, software process improvement studies, improvement methods, engineering and development, and quality and knowledge concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have developed AirTransNote, a student notes sharing system to facilitate collaborative and interactive learning in a regular lecture at conventional classrooms. Our former student system employed ultrasonic digital pens to capture student notes on a usual paper sheet. Although the paper-based approach is intuitive for learners, the ultrasonic pen with a PDA created some difficulties when used by senior high school students. In order to eliminate those difficulties, we have introduced anoto-based pens and a data gathering system called "digital pen gateway." Owing to the improved student system, students could easily submit their answers with handling of multiple paper sheets. The teacher could refer the answers to choose students who need assistance during the lecture. Questionnaire results showed that the simpler student interface is quite acceptable, and the system can realize our augmented classroom concept in a practical way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new classification model for management of resources in an educational repository. To facilitate usability of educational resources, a proper classification model should be provided. If no classification model, it causes several issues such as inefficient management of educational resources, incorrect retrieval, and low usability. To achieve the goal of this paper, the model should support a classification mechanism in multiple viewpoints. The proposed model enables more precise and systematic management of implementation resources, and also increases the ease of usability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to give theoretical and experimental tools for measuring the driving force in evolving complex networks. First a discrete-time stochastic model framework is introduced to state the question of how the dynamics of these networks depend on the properties of the parts of the system. Then a method is presented to determine this dependence in the possession of the required data about the system. This measurement method is applied to the citation network of high energy physics papers to extract the in-degree and age dependence of the dynamics. It is shown that the method yields close to "optimal" results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A programming model for the automatic construction of USN applications based on Nano-Qplus is proposed in this paper. Nano-Qplus is a sensor network platform developed by ETRI. Programs of nodes such as sensors, routers, sinks and actuators in a sensor network are automatically generated through the technique of this paper. Developers can implement USN applications from models of sensor networks. The configuration information of each node is automatically generated from a model. Then, the execution code is automatically generated using the configuration information. Through the technique of this paper, developers can easily implement USN applications even if they do not know the details of low-level information. The development effort of USN applications also will be decreased because execution codes are automatically generated. Furthermore, developers can consistently construct USN applications from USN models using the proposed tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TSP is a problem finding out the shortest distance out of possible courses where one starts a certain city and turns back to a starting city, visiting every city only once among N cities. This paper proposes the new method using both population initialization and sequential transformation method at the same time and then proves the improvement of capability by comparing them with existing methods. Keywords: Genetic Algorithm, GA, TSP, Initialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern information systems interact with a wide variety of users ranging from people with specific roles in business processes to end-users who access information in various ways and in different environments. Therefore, an application has to adhere to a well defined security policy on one hand and be highly adaptable to context on the other. We have extended the OM data model, with its rich support for role modelling, with concepts for modelling interactions between users and applications. In this paper, we show how the resulting interaction model can be used for role-based access control, as well as for modelling interactions in context-aware applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes and adaptations are always necessary after the deployment of a multiagent system (MAS), as well as of any other type of software systems. Some of these changes may be simply perfective and have local impact only. However, adaptive changes to meet changed situations in the operational environment of the MAS may have global impact on the overall design. In this paper, we analyze the issue of continuous design change/adaptation in a MAS organization, and the specific problem of how to properly model/design a MAS so as to make it ready to adaptation. Following, the paper focuses on the Gaia methodology and analyzes - also with the help of an illustrative example - its suitability in supporting and facilitating adaptive changes in MASs organizations, and its advantages and limitations with this regard over a number of different agent-oriented methodologies. Keywords: Agent Oriented Methodologies, Design for Change, Adaptive Organizations, Methodologies Evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays amount of information on Internet is dramatically increasing. The ability of facilitating users to achieve useful information is more and more important for search field. CDSE, a model for the domain-based intelligent search engine is proposed in this paper. The model can help users to retrieve what they need by combining text classification with keywords extraction. Several algorithms that use key technologies are proposed, such as statistics, data mining and agents. Then a new criterion named ranking error is contributed to solve the problem of evaluation ranking inefficiency in traditional performance evaluation methodologies. The experimental results indicate that the proposed model can effectively improve retrieval precision and solve the problem of relevant document ranking behind in current search engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This book constitutes the refereed research proceeding of the 13th European Software Process Improvement Conference, EuroSPI 2006, held in Joensuu, Finland in October 2006. The 18 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on SPI (Software Process Improvement) processes, SPI and risk management, measurement, process modelling, human factors, and implementation of SPI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial structure supporting applications offer an abstract level of what can be found in the real world. However, in many systems, objects are aligned straight, rotation is not possible, they can be resized easily and can hold more text than is visible on the screen. Paper and structures created with paper seem to be more limited: Straight alignment is not possible without spending much time; paper can hardly be resized without damaging it; and piles may fall down if they become too tall. However, a closer look shows that paper structures offer much more attributes and dependencies than any current spatial structure supporting application. In this article, we compare paper structures to a selection of computer applications. We argue that the observed small additions with paper carry information which improves finding and organizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this workshop was to look at issues related to the integration of non-functional property expression, evaluation, and prediction in the context of component-based software engineering. The accepted papers looked at the issue from a very broad range of perspectives, such as development process, modelling for analysis vs for construction, or middleware componentisation. The afternoon session was completely used for discussions: discussion topics ranged from the limits of the research domain and the definition of fundamental terms and concepts to issues of compositionality. The workshop had a very inspiring and productive atmosphere, and we are looking forward to organising future instalments of the series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in recent years, the focus of the ODBASE conference lies in addressing research issues that bridge traditional boundaries between disciplines such as databases, artificial intelligence, networking, data extraction, or mobile computing. There has been an increasing focus on semantic technologies in ODBASE. The work on semantic modeling technologies is being progressively scaled up to handling millions of triples which permit adoption of semantic applications within a few days. The envelope is being progressively pushed out to enable even faster, wider and broader enterprise-wide and Web-scale applications. Also, ODBASE 2007 encouraged the submission of papers that examine the information needs of various applications, including electronic commerce, electronic government, mobile systems, or bioinformatics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Semantic Web conferences such as ESWC and ISWC offer prime opportunities to test and showcase semantic technologies. Conference metadata about people, papers and talks is diverse in nature and neither too small to be uninteresting or too big to be unmanageable. Many metadata-related challenges that may arise in the Semantic Web at large are also present here. Metadata must be generated from sources which are often unstructured and hard to process, and may originate from many different players, therefore suitable workflows must be established. Moreover, the generated metadata must use appropriate formats and vocabularies, and be served in a way that is consistent with the principles of linked data. This paper reports on the metadata efforts from ESWC and ISWC, identifies specific issues and barriers encountered during the projects, and discusses how these were approached. Recommendations are made as to how these may be addressed in the future, and we discuss how these solutions may generalize to metadata production for the Semantic Web at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a literature survey of operational research applications to manufacturing logistics decision-making. A total of 80 applications published in Interfaces were reviewed in order to identify the decisions supported, their horizon, and their system boundary. The references to the papers reporting on these applications are included in the paper. Most OR applications were found in short-term production planning and scheduling, plant location and physical distribution system design, production system design, and master planning. Other areas, such as supplier selection and business process design, had few or no applications. While the survey sample does not allow generalizations, the unequal distribution of applications suggests that there is a rather clearly defined set of decision areas that are regularly supported by operational research. Findings also suggest that not only operational, but also certain strategic decisions, such as plant location, plant capacity and equipment capacity, are supported by OR. Finally, a lack of applications crossing organisational boundaries has been identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the necessity and requirements of switching from service-oriented operations to product-oriented operations in telecom industry, which helps to solve the conflict between more and more homogeneous telecom services and individualized customer demands. Then this paper puts forward a comprehensive definition of telecom product, and presents a structure framework of telecom product consisting of 8 ingredients: telecom service, information content and application, tariff, target market, brand, channel, customer service and supplementary resources. Meanwhile, this paper analyzes the process framework of telecom product lifecycle management and divides it into 4 phases: planning, developing, approving and publishing and improving or withdrawing. The complete concept data model is analyzed and gradually shaped in the UML language in the 4 phases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an indexing technique for fuzzy numerical data which relies on the classical, well-known and well-spread B+tree index data structure. The proposed indexing technique is specifically devised to increase the performance of query processing when a possibility measured flexible condition is involved. The proposal relies on the use of an indexing data structure implemented in virtually every database management system. This feature makes the proposal a good candidate to be used, with very low implementation effort, in a fuzzy database management system created as an extension of a classical one. The paper includes a performance analysis of the proposed indexing technique in contrast with other purpose equivalent techniques in order to evaluate the suitability of the proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes some results of a project that studied how multimedia can help the worker in an assembly task. The test case was a deep-cut assembly of a grid-anode for a cathodic protection system. A multimedia tool was implemented and compared with the conventional support method for the same task. The tool helps the worker by providing training and background information. During the task the tool acts as a guide and a set of well-defined instructions. The comparison of the methods was done by means of a field experiment. The results show that the use of the implemented tool helps to produce a slight increase to the quality of the work. However, the execution time of the work was not better when using the multimedia tool. According to a user questionnaire done in the test situation, the multimedia tool was more useful and easier to use, and gave the users more confidence than the conventional support method. It can be said that the use of multimedia support helps the worker to produce better quality in the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Request Processing Systems should exhibit predictable behavior by guaranteeing Quality-of-Service parameters. One of the important requirements of predictability is that requests should have maximum acceptable response time thresholds, denoted as deadlines in this paper. In order to provide QoS, the system should try to guarantee these deadlines. This way, it is desirable to use a load-balancing algorithm that tries to both maximize the throughput and minimize the missed deadlines. Assuming that all requests durations are known a priori, this paper shows, with the help of a simulator, how the control over the big tasks plays a crucial role in the pursuit of the objective. Finally, this paper presents a derived form of the traditional Least-Work-Remaining algorithm, named Task Assignment by Isolating Big Tasks, that proved to be a better alternative in such scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

UML is being increasing used for the analysis and design of Web Information Systems. At the same time, many XML-based languages are cornerstones in the development of this kind of system. As a consequence of the predominance of these languages, there are many works in the literature devoted to exploring the relationships between UML and XML. In this paper we present a survey of current approaches to the transformation of UML models into XML schemas. The study is focused on the case of transformation of UML class diagrams to XML schemas, since we have not found any proposal regarding other kinds of UML diagrams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sensor networks, queries need to be jointly designed, in order to minimize the power consumption and maximize the lifetime. Data reduction techniques can be employed to decrease the size of data to be transferred in the network, and therefore save energy of sensor nodes. This paper presents a novel method for optimizing multi-query in sensor networks. Our approach is, by using packet combination techniques, to reduce the data size of multiple simultaneous queries, so that the energy for data transmission can be saved to the best extent. A delay item is specified together with the query by the application. Then an optimal query plan can be obtained by studying the best time of sending local data to sink that can lead to the minimum cost. Algorithm is described in detail. Performance analysis is performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel physically-based model for virtual Chinese brush. Compared with previous works, the main advantage of our method lies in the use of physically based modeling methods that describe the behavior of the real brush's deformation in terms of the interaction of the external and internal forces with the virtual writing paper. Instead of simulating the brush using bristles, we use points to simulate the whole brush bundle, which can drastically decrease the complexity inherent in the conventional bristle-level approach. A spring network is derived to calculate the physical deflection of brush according to the force exerted on it. With this model, we can get a more effective simulation of real brush painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Neurovision System can be defined as an artificial tool that sees our physical world. The purpose of this paper is to show a novel tool to design a 3D artificial vision system based on Resilient Neural Networks. Camera Calibration (CC) is a fundamental issue for Computational-Vision. Classical CC methods comprise of taking images of objects with known geometry, extracting the features of the objects from the images, and minimizing their 3D backprojection errors. In this paper, a novel implicit-CC model based on Resilient Neural Networks, CR, has been introduced. The CR is particularly useful for 3D reconstruction of the applications that do not require explicitly computation of physical camera parameters in addition to the expert knowledge. The CR supports intelligent-photogrammetry, photogrammetron. In order to evaluate the success of the proposed implicit-CC model, the 3D reconstruction performance of the CR has been compared with two different well-known implementations of the Direct Linear Transformation (DLT). The proposed method is also robust sufficiently for dealing with different cameras because it is capable of fusion of the image coordinates sourced from different cameras once the neural network has been trained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a "Self-Balancing Production Line", each worker is assigned work dynamically, thus they can keep the balanced production under satisfying the specific conditions. For structure of line, in-tree assembly network line has been analyzed in previous paper. In that paper, line are virtually integrated to one and slowest to fastest sequence can be balanced under the integrated line. However, if an item consists of multiple parts and parallel work is possible, a new approach is applicable under the condition, and performance measure increase comparing to integrated line. In this paper, new integrated approach for both previous self-balancing line and buffer is proposed, and we compare the line that had been proposed in the previous paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a kind of remote rendering method based on awareness model. This method takes the additional cost caused by the movement of the viewpoint into cost calculation and designs a cost prediction algorithm based on the vision field divided by awareness model. The simulation results show that the improved method can not only improve the quality of the remote rendering, but also make full use of the bandwidth of the network, as well as make the remote rendering more fluent when the viewpoint moves fast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several features of today's grid are based on centralized or hierarchical services. However, as the grid size increasing, some of their functions especially resource discovery should be decentralized to avoid performance bottlenecks and guarantee scalability. A novel grid resource discovery method based on adaptive k-Nearest Neighbors clustering is presented in this paper. A class is formed by a collection of nodes with some similarities in their characteristics, each class is managed by a leader and consists of members that serve as workers. Resource requests are ideally forwarded to an appropriate class leader that would then direct it to one of its workers. This method can handle resource requests by searching a small subset out of a large number of nodes by resource clustering which can improve the resource query efficiency; on the other hand, it also achieves well scalability by managing grid resources with adaptive mechanism. It is shown from a series of experiments that the method presented in this paper achieves more scalability and efficient lookup performance than other existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses a distributed approach for monitoring and diagnosing the execution of a plan where concurrent actions are performed by a team of cooperating agents. The paper extends the notion of plan diagnosis(introduced by Roos et al. for the execution of a multi-agent plan) with the notion of agent diagnosis. While plan diagnosis is able to capture the distinction between primary and secondary failures, the agent diagnosis makes apparent the actual health status of the agents. The paper presents a mechanism of failure propagation which captures the interplay between agent diagnosis and plan diagnosis; this mechanism plays a critical role in the understanding at what extent a fault affecting the functionalities of an agent affects the global plan too. A relational formalism is adopted for modeling both the nominal and the abnormal execution of the actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to discover services in business-driven Web service composition conveniently, accurately, and efficiently, this paper proposes a business process-oriented service discovery approach. In order to link business property with services, this paper proposes a business related description model of operations. Based on the business related relation model proposed in this paper, a relation-driven discovering algorithm for business process-oriented service discovery is presented. Compared with other discovering approach, the proposed discovering approach considers the business relation between operations and can solve the problem of discovering services with meaningful business relation. The experimentation shows the better performance of this algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we suggest a postal RFID application model that can be used for real time trace and tracking system implementation of parcel processing and pallet management. This paper also shows the tag recognition performance of parcels by speed and mounting tag material such as thin cans, water bottles, and paper using an implemented postal RFID system to find the best solution for RFID adaptation in postal logistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generally, it is difficult to find constant patterns on identifiers in a container image, since the identifiers are not normalized in color, size, and position, etc. and their shapes are damaged by external environmental factors. This paper distinguishes identifier areas from background noises and removes noises by using an ART2-based quantization method and general morphological information on the identifiers such as color, size, ratio of height to width, and a distance from other identifiers. Individual identifier is extracted by applying the 8-directional contour tracking method to each identifier area. This paper proposes a refined ART2-based RBF network and applies it to the recognition of identifiers. Through experiments with 300 container images, the proposed algorithm showed more improved accuracy of recognizing container identifiers than the others proposed previously, in spite of using shorter training time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digitizing ancient books, especially those related to the humanities, is practiced in many countries. The number of full-text databases in the humanities is increasing. Studies have shown that ancient books are important resources for humanities scholars and researchers. However, comparatively little research has been done concerning the use of those databases. Thirty graduate students majoring in Chinese Literature or History were interviewed in this study. This study attempts to answer the following questions: How do interviewees use the databases? Do they encounter any problems? What do they have to say concerning ancient books in digital or paper form? The results show that humanities graduate students use ancient books databases to locate information concerning their research interests. Most of them are satisfied with the search functions and feel that the databases are convenient to use. However, they comment that the coverage, quality, and search interface could be improved upon. As well, a few graduate students suggest that links to related resources should be added. They state that they do not totally rely upon the databases and continue to use paper sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading and literature exploration are important tasks of scientific research. However, conventional retrieval systems provide limited support for these tasks by concentrating on identifying relevant materials. New generation systems should provide additional support functionality by focusing on analyzing and organizing the retrieved materials. A framework of literature exploration support systems is proposed. Techniques of granular computing are used to construct granular knowledge structures from the contents, structures, and usages of scientific documents. The granular knowledge structures provide a high level understanding of scientific literature and hints regarding what has been done and what needs to be done. As a demonstration, we examine granular knowledge structures obtained from an analysis of papers from two rough sets related conferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]