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H.264/AVC is the newest international video coding standard. This paper presents a novel hardware design for CABAC decoding in H.264/AVC. CABAC is the key innovative technology, but it brings huge challenge for high throughput implementation. The current bin decoding depends on the previous bin, which results in the long latency and limits the system performance. In this paper, the data hazards are analyzed and resolved using the algorithmic features. We present a new pipeline-based architecture using the standard look-ahead technique where the arithmetic decoding engine works in parallel with the context maintainer. An efficient finite state machine is developed to match the requirement of the pipeline controlling and the critical path is optimized for the timing. The proposed implementation can generate one bin per clock cycle at the 160-MHz working frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic product code (EPC) sensor network is a collection of objects for sensing data. It is crucial to ubiquitous society. It can provide an application service based on situation dependency with its properties. The situation dependency is an emerging concept which can collect location-based and personalized information. With the situation dependency, many industries can serve ubiquitous service for independent users. u-Healthcare is one of ubiquitous service to provide seamless medical treatment. The concept of situation dependency is applied in u-Healthcare with EPC sensor network technology. Due to specialized four properties of EPC sensor network which are driven from this paper, the situation dependency is well-established in u-Healthcare service. In this paper, we defined value and architecture of u-Healthcare service and we analyzed application areas of u-Healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the limiting factors for building a virtual Telematics center which integrates ITS (Intelligent Transportation Systems) information collected by the system of each of the three government agencies. It also provides some details into how some of the obstacles and barriers can be solved such as data standardization, system mechanisms and regulations. There are very few papers and case studies regarding real problems and solutions for integrating systems of different organizations in general, and Telematics, in particular. The processes and outcomes of implementing systems in this study can be useful to develop other ITS and Telematics systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the problem of the unsupervised classification of text-centric XML documents. In the context of the INEX mining track 2006, we present methods to exploit the inherent structural information of XML documents in the document clustering process. Using the k-means algorithm, we have experimented with a couple of feature sets, to discover that a promising direction is to use structural information as a preliminary means to detect and put aside structural outliers. The improvement of the semantic-wise quality of clustering is significantly higher through this approach than through a combination of the structural and textual feature sets. The paper also discusses the problem of the evaluation of XML clustering. Currently, in the INEX mining track, XML clustering techniques are evaluated against semantic categories. We believe there is a mismatch between the task (to exploit the document structure) and the evaluation, which disregards structural aspects. An illustration of this fact is that, over all the clustering track submissions, our text-based runs obtained the 1st rank (Wikipedia collection, out of 7) and 2nd rank (IEEE collection, out of 13). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how the interaction of quantification and dependent anaphora may be analysed in a dynamic semantics. It discusses a simple theory of the creation and accessibility of dependencies based on a dynamic semantics for distributivity and some basic assumptions on number agreement in discourse. This theory forms a partial defence of the line of semantics set out by van den Berg 1996. I argue, however, that it is essential to quantified anaphora to contextualise the labelling of antecedents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes complex collective behaviors of a multiagent system, which consists of interacting agents with evolutionary learning capabilities. The interaction and learning of the agents are modeled by the concept of Connected Replicator Dynamics expanded from evolutionary Game Theory.The dynamic learning system we analyze shows various behavioral and decision changes including bifurcation of chaos in the sense of physical sciences.The main contributions of the paper are summarized as follows: (1) In amultiagent system, the emergence of chaotic behaviors is general and essential, even if each agent does not have chaotic properties; and (2) However,asimple controlling agent with the Keep-It-Simple-Stupid (KISS) principle, or a sheep-dog agent, is able to domesticate or tame the complex behaviors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to propose a decision making model for the Taiwanese shipping logistics company in China to select the best container distribution center location. The representation of multiplication operation on fuzzy numbers is useful for the decision makers to solve the fuzzy multiple criteria decision making problems of container distribution center location selection. In the past, few papers discussed the representation of multiplication operation on multiple fuzzy numbers. Thus this paper first compute and obtain the representation of multiplication operation on multiple fuzzy numbers. Based on this representation, the decision maker can rank quickly the ordering of each alternative location and then select easily the best one. Finally, the representation of multiplication operation on multiple fuzzy numbers is applied to solve the fuzzy multiple criteria decision making problem of container distribution center location selection in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes new method for object reference which enables a person to find surrounding objects and develops a navigation system named CoCo. CoCo employs an ultrasonic directional speaker with a rotating base. Ultrasonic wave transmitted by an ultrasonic directional speaker is converted to audible sound when it reflects on floor, wall, or object. Based on this property, CoCo can emit audible sound from arbitrary place using a rotating base. When CoCo navigates a person to an object, CoCo transmits ultrasonic wave so as to hear audible sound continuously from the line between the ultrasonic directional speaker and the object. We designed and implemented an object management system as an application using 3D position sensors and a navigation system CoCo. This paper shows how CoCo navigates a person to an object using position data from an object management system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is amble evidence that supports true interactivity, both in the interface and in the presentation methodology, will further enhance learning and knowledge retention among students. The real challenge is how to implement it, measure and evaluate this outcome. This paper presents findings that look into the efficacy of the combination of virtual environments and interactive teaching techniques in enhancing learning and increasing the knowledge retention level of students.It is now widely accepted that the conventional way of lecturing students has certain limitations. E-learning and the use of ICT, interactive tools in the education field has proven to be effective in assisting the teaching and learning experience. It has been observed that the one way communication method of lecturing with limited or no opportunity for feedback from students and audiences in general has a major impact on their attention span and the retention level. There are issues related to the establishment and implementation of interactive learning tools as an aid for teaching and especially in continuous evaluation of students' achievements. We point out that it is not only the 'teaching' tasks that are impacted by the use of ICT but also current methods of evaluation including written examinations which have proven to be time consuming and inaccurate reflection of students' achievements. The introduction of interactive learning and evaluation has several advantages and this paper will give a convincing support to the fact that the advantages are more than the fact that it makesthe teaching and evaluation process easy, simple and rapid. Educators should not fail to adapt and respond to the needs of 21st century bust and multi-tasking students for innovative learning methods, i.e. interactive learning. The role of education institutions and educators in the future will become demand-driven; to satisfy technically sophisticated student clients. The paper recommends that we should not ignore the use of interactive technology used as it should be, as a tool, to enhance sound pedagogical methods, however, we should also be able to measure its contribution in enhancing teaching and learning. It is pertinent to synthesize a framework that encompasses ways to compliment existing methods of teaching with interactive learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As extensive amount information is required within a R&D environment, an automated information system could save a considerable amount of time and efforts. There are currently many researches to overcome the information overload phenomenon, including information systems, recommender systems and adaptive hypermedia, and this paper presents an adaptive information providing system utilising some characteristics of these technologies to support R&D and collaborative meeting environments. The system described in this paper aims to present the potential synergy between recommender systems and adaptive hypermedia systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a load balancing method using ring network in the Grid database is proposed. Past research proposed to solve unbalanced load problem. But, past techniques can not be applied as the Grid database has a number of systems and user's request always changes dynamically. The proposed method connects each node having the same replicated data through ring network. If workload overflows in some node, user's request is transferred to a linked node which has the target data. And, this node stops another request from processing until the workload has significantly decreased. Then, to stop request forwarding from a previous node, it changes the link structure by sending a message to the previous node. Through performance evaluation, this paper shows that the proposed method has increased performance and is more suitable to the Grid database than the existing methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clustering a peer-to-peer (P2P) network into distinct semantic clusters can efficiently improve the search efficiency and enhance scalability of the network. This paper considers P2P systems in which peers employ taxonomy hierarchy to describe the contents of their objects, and presents a taxonomy-based approach for constructing semantics-based super-peer networks. By dynamically clustering peers in taxonomy-based semantic space based on the semantics of their data and organizing the clusters into semantic routing overlays, an efficient query-routing algorithm can be used among these clusters. Preliminary evaluation indicates that our approach achieves a competitive trade-off between search latencies and overheads, and load-balancing among super-peers is well maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite numerous studies have applied various forecasting models to tourism demand analysis, data mining techniques have been largely overlooked by academic researchers in tourism forecasting prior to 1999. Based on our review of published articles in tourism journals that applied data mining techniques to tourism demand forecasting, we find that the application of data mining techniques are still at their infancy. This paper concludes with practical implications and future research areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Support vector regression (SVR) is a new technique for pattern classification , function approximation and so on. In this paper we propose an new constructing approach of classification rules based on support vector regression and its derivative characteristics for the classification task of data mining. a new measure for determining the importance level of the attributes based on the trained SVR is proposed. Based on this new measure, a new approach for clas-sification rule construction using trained SVR is proposed. The performance of the new approach is demonstrated by several computing cases. The experimen-tal results prove that the approach proposed can improve the validity of the ex-tracted classification rules remarkably compared with other constructing rule approaches, especially for the complicated classification problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Optical Burst Switching (OBS) technology emerged as an alternative switching paradigm for the optical transport layer. Its biggest disadvantage (high data losses) has been the focus of numerous research papers. This paper proposes a data loss reduction technique, which relies on the combination of global network coordination between network nodes and local contention resolution. Via full-scale network simulation it is demonstrated that the proposed scheme has improved performance in terms of data losses and resource utilization, compared to its constituent mechanisms alone. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the mechanism has proven to be less sensitive to load variations in the medium and high load ranges. Additionally, its complexity and deployment cost are low, due to the absence of immature optical components in the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we discuss the use of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as part of the control plane of an application aware Optical Burst Switching (OBS) network, able to support Grid computing applications. The paper presents the possible alternatives for the architecture of such control plane and reports of an experiment in an existing OBS test-bed where this approach was successfully tested in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automatic story unit segmentation is an essential technique for content based video retrieval and summarization. A good video story unit has complete content and natural boundary in visual and acoustic perception, respectively. In this paper, a method of acoustic perception friendly story unit segmentation for broadcast soccer video is proposed. The approach combines replay detection, view pattern and non-speech detection to segment story units. Firstly, a replay detection method is implemented to find the highlight events in soccer video. Secondly, based on positions of replay clips, an FSM (Fine State Machine) is used to obtain rough starting points of story units. Finally, audio boundary alignment is employed to locate natural audio boundaries for acoustic perception. The algorithm is tested on several broadcast soccer videos. The story units segmented by algorithms with and without audio alignment are compared in acoustic perception. The experimental results indicate the performance of the proposed algorithm is encouraging and effective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supporting multimedia search has emerged as an important research topic. There are three paradigms on the research spectrum that ranges from the least automatic to the most automatic. On the far left end, there is the pure manual labeling paradigm that labels multimedia content, e.g., images and video clips, manually with text labels and then use text search to search multimedia content indirectly. On the far right end, there is the content-based search paradigm that can be fully automatic by using low-level features from multimedia analysis. In recent years, a third paradigm emerged which is in the middle: the annotation paradigm. Once the concept models are trained, this paradigm can automatically detect/annotate concepts in unseen multimedia content. This paper looks into this annotation paradigm. Specifically, this paper argues that within the annotation paradigm, the relationship-based annotation approach outperforms other existing annotation approaches, because individual concepts are considered jointly instead of independently. We use two examples to illustrate the argument. The first example is on image annotation and the second one is on video annotation. Experiments indeed show that relationship-based annotation approaches render superior performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a Data Integration System based on an ontology as Global Representation. The paper briefly introduces the motivations and the benefits that the use of an ontology brings to a Data Integration System, which is also formally defined. The paper, in particular, focuses on the limitation of the proposed system to handle the different relations that can exist between concepts of an ontology. We divide the relations that can be defined in an ontology in two different sets: Mapped relations, which we consider atomic relations and Derived relations, which can be generated by combining mapped relations using SWRL rules. Some examples of the different kind of relations are reported to clarify the concepts and a new definition of Mapping in the Data Integration System is proposed, in order to define the atomic relations. The paper ends with considerations about the problems that still need to be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two major problems in constructing data federations (for example, data warehouses and database federations) concern achieving and maintaining consistency and a uniform representation of the data on the global level of the federation. The first step in creating uniform representations of data is known as data extraction, whereas data reconciliation is concerned with resolving data inconsistencies. Our approach to constructing a global conceptual schema as the result of integrating a collection of (semantically) heterogeneous component schemas is based on the concept of exact views. We show that a global schema constructed in terms of exact views integrates component schemas in such a way that the global schema is populated by exactly those instances allowed by the local schemas (and in special cases, also the other way around). In this sense, the global schema is equivalent to the set of component schemas from which the global schema is derived. This paper describes a modeling framework for data federations based on the Object-Role Modeling (ORM) approach. In particular, we show that we can represent exact views within ORM, providing the means to resolve in a combined setting data extraction and reconciliation problems on the global level of the federation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is common for literature on context-awareness to focus on specific application domains or on the development of models and frameworks to facilitate context-awareness. In this study, however, we take a step back from such work in order to investigate how regular people may already be employing, or trying to employ, context-awareness in their everyday lives using existing mobile tools (such as mobile phones, paper notepads, etc.). We believe that an understanding of these existing real-world uses and needs of context-awareness will help to better inform and direct research efforts in this domain. Towards this aim we present the findings of a user study in which twelve randomly selected individuals recorded a diary on their use of mobile tools over the period of two days. The findings clearly demonstrate that people do indeed currently employ a wide variety of contexts and context-aware behaviours, albeit in a manner that is often imperfect and at a sub-conscious level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security is becoming one of the major concerns for web applications and other Internet based services, which are becoming pervasive in all kinds of business models and organizations. Web applications must therefore include, in addition to the expected value offered to their users, reliable mechanisms to ensure their security. In this paper, we focus on the specific problem of preventing cross-site scripting attacks against web applications. We present a study of this kind of attacks, and survey current approaches for their prevention. The advantages and limitations of each proposal are discussed, and an alternative solution is introduced. Our proposition is based on the use of X.509 certificates, and XACML for the expression of authorization policies. By using our solution, developers and/or administrators of a given web application can specifically express its security requirements from the server side, and require the proper enforcement of such requirements on a compliant client. This strategy is seamlessly integrated in generic web applications by relaying in the SSL and secure redirect calls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Group communication significantly influences the performance of data parallel applications. It is required often in two situations: one is array redistribution from phase to phase; the other is array remapping after loop partition. Nevertheless, the important factor that influences the efficiency of group communication is often neglected: a larger communication idle time may occur when there is node contention and difference among message lengths during one particular communication step. This paper is devoted to develop an efficient scheduling strategy using the compiling information provided by array subscripts, array distribution pattern and array access period. Our strategy not only avoids inter-processor contention, but it also minimizes real communication cost in each communication step. Our experimental results show that our strategy has better performance than the traditional implement of MPI_Alltoallv, alltoall based scheduling, and greedy scheduling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to discuss the possibility of understanding human social interaction in web communities by analogy with a disease propagation model from epidemiology. When an article is submitted by an individual to a social web service, it is potentially influenced by other participants. The submission sometimes starts a long and argumentative chain of articles, but often does not. This complex behavior makes management of server resources difficult and a more theoretical methodology is required. This paper tries to express these complex human dynamics by analogy with infection by a virus. In this first report, by fitting an epidemiological model to Bulletin Board System (BBS) logs in terms of a numerical triple, we show that the analogy is reasonable and beneficial because the analogy can estimate the community size despite the submitter's information alone being observable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the non-stationarity of EEG signals, online training and adaptation is essential to EEG based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Asynchronous BCI offers more natural human-machine interaction, but it is a great challenge to train and adapt an asynchronous BCI online because the user's control intention and timing are usually unknown. This paper proposes a novel motor imagery based asynchronous BCI for controlling a simulated robot in a specifically designed environment which is able to provide user's control intention and timing during online experiments, so that online training and adaptation of motor imagery based asynchronous BCI can be effectively investigated. This paper also proposes an online training method, attempting to automate the process of finding the optimal parameter values of the BCI system to deal with non-stationary EEG signals. Experimental results have shown that the proposed methodfor online training of asynchronous BCI significantly improves the performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, collaborative tagging has become popular in the web2.0 world. Tags can be helpful if used for the recommendation since they reflect characteristic content features of the resources. However, there are few researches which introduce tags into the recommendation. This paper proposes a tag-based recommendation framework for scientific literatures which models the user interests with tags and literature keywords. A hybrid recommendation algorithm is then applied which is similar to the user-user collaborative filtering algorithm except that the user similarity is measured based on the vector model of user keywords other than the rating matrix, and that the rating is not from the user but represented as user-item similarity computed with the dot-product-based similarity instead of the cosine-based similarity. Experiments show that our tag-based algorithm is better than the baseline algorithm and the extension of user model and dot-product-based similarity computation are also helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a follow-up to our ICADL 2006 paper, reporting on our progress over the past year in developing a digital library curriculum. It presents and describes the current curriculum framework, which now includes ten modules and 41 sub-modules. It provides an overview of the curriculum development lifecycle, and our progress through that lifecycle. In particular, it reports on our evaluation of the modules that have been drafted. It concludes with a description of two new technologies - Superimposed Information (SI) to help resource presentation in a module and Visual User model Data Mining (VUDM) to help long-term module upgrade by visualizing the user community and its trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present a system, DoLSuD, for the automatic discovery of relevant substructures in a document layout. DoLSuD, Document Layout Substructure Discovery, extracts, analyzes and describes the visual content of structured documents, such as catalogs, in order to discover repeating and distinctive substructures in the document layout and to establish relations between textual and image content. The paper presents the system along with experimental results and the web based service which utilizes the analysis results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sub-block-based image retrieval method utilizes global and local image features to retrieve trademarks through separating individual an images into some blocks. This paper proposes a sub-block-based trademark image retrieval algorithm under the polar coordinate system. Experiment results show that our algorithm can keep excellent invariance in image translation, scaling and rotation and the retrieved results can satisfy human visual perception very well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online keyword auctions, in which marketers bid for advertising slots along the search engine results, have become a new channel of advertisement. To better manage the advertisement campaign, a key challenge for advertisers is to predict each keyword's bidding price and effectiveness (e.g. click through rate), which are not priorly known to the individual advertiser. This paper identifies those relevant variables affecting auction strategy and models them in causal connections using history data in order to simulate the bidding behavior. We verified the effective necessaries of these predictions using empirical auction data, and our result indicated that the prediction with Bayesian Network produce close-to-reality results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

User models are important tools for personalization, especially in ecommerce applications. But capturing dynamically changing user needs is a challenge. One of the reasons for such difficulty is that the purchasing behavior of an individual is based on a number of different aspects. In this paper we identify these aspects as a combination of demographics, domain based expectations and transactions. Since each individual can demonstrate a unique combination of these aspects, to achieve finer personalization, such individuality will have to be captured in user models. In this paper we propose such a user model architecture, which also has the ability to self-improve adapting to changes of individual behavior and long term modeling possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new persistent storage to efficiently manage OWL Web ontologies. The Semantic Web is recognized as a next direction for progress of the current Web. To realize the Semantic Web, various technologies have been developed. Especially, OWL (Web Ontology Language) is the most important and state-of-the-art technology toward the ideal Semantic Web. However, most of research is being focused on designing and building OWL documents (OWL Ontology). One of the most important issues is how to efficiently and persistently store a very large OWL data into database management systems. In this paper, we propose a persistent storage system to achieve the purpose. This paper describes the performance evaluation result on the load time. The experiment result explicitly shows that our proposal provides more enhanced performance comparing with the existing systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a middleware based on SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) for context-awareness in a home network with ubiquitous computing. The context-awareness middleware addresses design issues such as heterogeneity, dynamicity, and extensibility issues of ubiquitous computing environment. We also suggest a context model supporting semantic level interoperability of context. In this paper, first we model context metadata ontology as well as context information ontology for the context-awareness middleware. Then we explain a service-oriented context-awareness middleware based on the context model which is introduced in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the particulars to be considered for effective servicing of wireless Internet to mobile terminal is the information of terminal environment. It is because time cost is required in producing mobile contents to suit environment of the connected terminal. In other words, in order to provide mobile web service by considering terminal characteristics, methods to minimize response time and server capacity in accordance with transcoding time in server are required. In this paper, response time to occur in the course of mobile web contents servicing was analyzed and, as a solution for this, Pre-Service method was introduced. Also, this paper suggests two methods in Pre-Service process for selecting optimize content in Cache. One is Device Profile Aware Selection using mobile device information. The other is Content Aware Selection using component information of requested content. Performance level of each method proposed was compared through experiment and the result of analysis was described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Now, the study of UWB signal's propagation attenuation model concentrates mainly on residential indoor environment. In this paper, the monitor of the personnel and equipments in tunnel of coal mine is regarded as application background, the environment in coal mine is looked as a kind of special indoor environment. On the basis of residential indoor UWB propagation model, the tunnel of coal mine is divided into near-field region and far-field region according to Fresnel theory. The propagation mode of UWB signal is mainly multimode in near-field region and mainly waveguide in far-field region. Considering the additional ullage factors that caused by the factors of tunnel, such as personnel and coal transports and slicers etc at the same time, this paper puts forward the UWB signal propagation attenuation model in coal mine. Aiming at the parameter of symbol BER, comparison and analysis that based on the existing residential indoor propagation attenuation model and the model of this paper is done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a speech emotion recognition agent for mobile communication service is proposed. The proposed system can recognize five emotional states - neutral, happiness, sadness, anger, and annoyance from the speech captured by a cellular phone in real time and then it calculates the degree of affection such as love, truthfulness, weariness, trick, friendship of the person who you are interesting to know through the mobile phone. In general, a speech acquired by a cellular phone contains noise due to the mobile network and environmental noise. Thus it can causes serious performance degradation due to the distortion in emotional features of the query speech. In order to alleviate the effect of these noises, we adopt a MA (Moving Average) filter which has relatively simple structure and low computational complexity. Then a feature optimization method is implemented to further improve and stabilize the system performance. For a practical application, we create an agent that can measure the degree of affection from the person who you want to know on the mobile phone. Two pattern classification methods, k-NN and SVM with probability estimates, are compared for estimating the degree of affection. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides very stable and successful emotional classification performance as 72.5% over five emotional states and it shows the feasibility of the agent for mobile communication services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to make a summary of current models used to evaluate the performance of IEEE 802.11 DCF and develops a new modeling to analyze the packet delay. The main contribution of this paper is that we found the backoff process of DCF can be considered as a Bernoulli Trials process. The new modeling based on the Bernoulli Trials can be a standard to analyze and validate other analytical methods. It can avoid confusion and conflicting produced by different simulation and calculating methods. In contrast to traditional work in the literature, we use our modeling to calculate the average backoff windows and average packet delay. At the same time, verify the analytical results by Monte Carlo and OPNET. The conclusion shows that the new modeling and analysis are comprehensible, simple and accurate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Voice conversion is a process which modifies speech produced by one speaker so that it sounds as if it is uttered by another speaker. In this paper a new voice conversion system is presented. The system requires parallel training data. By using linear prediction analysis, speech is described with line spectral frequencies and the corresponding residua. LSFs are converted together with instantaneous F0 by joint probabilistic function. The residua are transformed by employing residual prediction. In this paper, a new modification of residual prediction is introduced which uses information on the desired target F0 to determine a proper residuum and it also allows an efficient control of F0 in resulting speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper brings together the development of the first Text-to- Speech (TTS) system for Sinhala using the Festival framework and practical applications of it. Construction of a diphone database and implementation of the natural language processing modules are described. The paper also presents the development methodology of direct Sinhala Unicode text input by rewriting letter-to-sound rules in Festival's context sensitive rule format and the implementation of Sinhala syllabification algorithm. A Modified Rhyme Test (MRT) was conducted to evaluate the intelligibility of the synthesized speech and yielded a score of 71.5% for the TTS system described. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rhetorical structuring is field approached mostly by research in natural language (pragmatic) interpretation. However, in natural language generation (NLG) the rhetorical structure plays an important part, in monologues and dialogues as well. Hence, several approaches in this direction exist. In most of these, the rhetorical structure is calculated and built in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), or Centering Theory [7], [5]. In language interpretation, a more recent formal account of rhetorical structuring has emerged, namely Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT), which alleviates some of the issues and weaknesses inherent in previous theories [1]. Research has been initiated in rhetorical structuring for NLG using SDRT, mostly concerning monologues [3]. Most of the approaches in using and / or approximating SDRT in computer implementations lean on dynamic semantics, derived from Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) in order to compute rhetorical relations [9]. Some efforts exist in approximating SDRT using less expressive (and expensive) logics, such as First Order Logic (FOL) or Dynamic Predicate Logic (DPL), but these efforts concern language interpretation [10]. This paper describes a rhetorical structuring component of a natural language generator for human-computer dialogue, using SDRT, approximated via the usage of FOL, doubled by a domain-independent discourse ontology. Thus, the paper is structured as follows: the first section situates the research in context and motivates the approach; the second section describes the discourse ontology; the third section describes the approximations done on vanilla SDRT, in order for it to be used for language generation purposes; the fourth section describes an algorithm for updating the discourse structure for a current dialogue; the fifth section provides a detailed example of rhetorical relation computation. The sixth section concludes the paper and gives pointers to future research and improvements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a metamodeling strategy of Service Level Agreements for Digital Video Broadcasting services based on Service Level Agreement Language(SLAng). The purpose of the paper is to provide a detailed analysis of SLAs in this domain and provide a motivation for modeling and automating their management. We also discuss why precise and machine readable SLAs can improve the levels of automation in SLA Management thereby reducing potential violations. The meta-modeling approach based on the Model Driven Architecture(MDA) described in this paper also simplifies the integration of a SLA Management systems with other infrastructure that delivers the service to the client. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate in the paper that user movement has great influences on the system performance of mobile cellular networks. We also develop a system model to study to what extent the influences will be, with focusing on the user movement simulation. We concern the parameters that determine the system performance of mobile cellular networks. We show partially in this paper that these parameters vary while user movement changes, but the effects are interactive. Since handoff calls are given a higher priority over new calls and GC mechanism is employed, our analysis shows that a mature mobile cellular network should make use of user movement characteristics and dynamically adjust its reservation threshold of the handoff call requests. Extensive simulation results validate our analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, information communication market is reorganized focused on the digital convergence service used for integrating the communication, broadcasting and internet media by connecting the communication equipment, broadcasting equipment and computer via a network. The mobility support protocol enabling the effective handover between heterogeneous networks is emerged as the hot issue in relation with these next generation communication networks. In this paper, we are to suggest the MIH Vertical handover procedure required for the implementation of MIH over MIPv4 Low-Latency vertical handover by analyzing the handover performance in the overlap area between wireless networks using the vertical handover function of MIPv4 Mobile IP Technology of IETF and considering the expected problems. Also, we are to suggest the MIH L2-Trigger generation algorithm required for deciding the optimal handoff. We evaluate the vertical handover performance of MIPv4 low-latency in the overlap area between wireless networks by using the NS-2 and applying the IEEE 802.21 MIH (Media Independent Handover) based on the suggested technique and algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architecting service-oriented systems is a complex design activity. It involves making trade-offs among a number of interdependent design decisions, which are drawn from a range of concerns by various software stakeholders. In order to achieve effective and efficient SOC design we believe a careful study of architectural styles that can form the reference architecture is important. Hence, this paper provides a study of architectural styles for the reference architecture of SOC-based software systems. We propose a classification scheme for the architecture styles. These architectural styles are extracted from existing research projects and industry practices based on our classification scheme. For all those identified styles, we present an evolution trend driven by engineering principles for Internet-scale systems. As a result, this paper moves the first step towards creating a Reference Architecture that can be utilised to provide sensible guidance on the design of Web services application architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Location Fingerprinting (LF) is a promising location technique for many awareness applications in pervasive computing. However, as research on LF systems goes beyond basic methods there is an increasing need for better comparison of proposed LF systems. Developers of LF systems are also lacking good frameworks for understanding different options when building LF systems. This paper proposes a taxonomy to address both of these problems. The proposed taxonomy has been constructed from a literature study of 51 papers and articles about LF. For researchers the taxonomy can also be used as an aid when scoping out future research in the area of LF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss a robot vision in order to perceive humans and the environment around a mobile robot. We developed a tele-operated mobile robot with a pan-tilt mechanism composed of a camera and a laser range finder (LRF). The output from the camera is color information, and the output of LRF is distance information to objects from the robot. In this paper, we propose a method of sensor fusion to extract a human from the measured data by integrating these outputs based on the concept of synthesis. Finally, we show experimental results of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an improved statistical learning algorithm for feature generation in pattern recognition and signal processing. It is approximately derived from geometrical interpretation of the Fisher linear discriminant analysis (FLDA). The principal component analysis (PCA) is popular for data compression and feature extraction. Furthermore, iterative learning algorithms for obtaining eigenvectors in PCA have been presented in such fields. Their effectiveness has been demonstrated in many applications. However, recently FLDA has been often used in many fields, especially face image recognition. The drawback of FLDA is a long computational time based on a large-sized covariance matrix and the issue that the within-class covariance matrix is usually singular. Generally, in FLDA, the inverse matrix of the within-class covariance matrix cannot be obtained, since data dimension is generally higher than the number of data and then it includes many zero eigenvalues. In order to overcome this difficulty, a new iterative feature generation method, the simple-FLDA was proposed by authors. In this paper, further improvement is introduced into the simple-FLDA and its effectiveness is demonstrated for preliminary personal identification problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an efficient method of obstacle recognition system and HRI (human robot interaction) system specialized for biped walking robot. This method transmits the information regarding obstacle conditions to a biped walking robot. In the present paper, we describe a cascade of boosted classifier using adaboost algorithm as a obstacle region extracting module from input images. Besides, PCA is applied as a feature extracting module from the obstacle region and a hierarchical support vector machine is applied as an obstacle recognizing module. The data from vision system is combined with information from other sensors and the walking assist commands transmit to the biped walking robot. From the results of experiments, the proposed method can be applied to biped walking robot effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building a collection of electronic documents, e.g. corpus, is a cornerstone for the research in information retrieval, text mining and knowledge management. In literature, very few papers have discussed the necessary concerns for building a corpus and explained the building process systematically. In this paper, we explain our work of building an enterprise corpus called manufacturing corpus version 1 (MCV1) for corporate knowledge management purpose. Relevant issues, e.g. input texts, category labels and policies, as well as its parallel coding process and quality measurements are discussed. The real-world automated text classification experiments based on MCV1 show the soundness of its coding process. Finally, suggestions are made on how the proposed approach can be implemented in a more economical manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Timed Coloured Petri net (TCPN) has been utilized as a visual formalism for the modeling of complex systems. A module of basic traffic system of TCPN model is successfully constructed in this paper. Especially, a supervisor of an urban traffic light system, which consists of five intersections with multiple phases, is implemented by the new methodology. And all the traffic operations are ruled by the control logic of TCPN. In addition, a new design tool is proposed and it is efficiently to state and solve the problem of traffic signal timing plans. Finally, a supervisor of the traffic light system is completed whose operation flow is modeled by the TCPN models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]