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Despite significant advances in the development of model checking, it remains a difficult task in the hands of experts to make it scale to the size of industrial systems. A key step in achieving scalability is to "divide-and-conquer", that is, to break up the veri.cation of a system into smaller tasks that involve the verification of its components. Assume-guarantee reasoning [9, 11] is a widespread "divide-and-conquer" approach that uses assumptions when checking individual components of a system. Assumptions essentially encode expectations that each component has from the rest the system in order to operate correctly. Coming up with the right assumptions is typically a non-trivial manual process, which limits the applicability of this type of reasoning in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors introduce a graphical notation for representing general dynamical systems and demonstrate its use in three commonly occurring systems in the biosciences. They also indicate how the notation is used to facilitate the acquisition and transfer by students of skills in constructing equations from a verbal description of a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contents and topologies of inter-document linkages, such as citations and references among scientific literature, have received increasing research interests in recent years. Some technologies have been fully studied and utilized upon this meaningful information to improve the organization, analysis and evaluation of scientific digital libraries. In this paper, we present a CiteSeer-like system to access scientific papers in computer science discipline by reference linking technique. Moreover, implicit semantics behind reference indices are mined and organized to improve accessibility of scientific papers. In order to model scientific literature and their interlinked relationships, we develop a domain-specific ontology to analyze contents and citation anchor context of scientific papers. Compared with abstract of a specific paper written by authors themselves, we introduce an automatic summary generation algorithm to create objective descriptions from other scholars' perspectives based on the ontology. Semantic queries can also be asked to discover interesting patterns in scientific libraries in order to provide a comprehensive and meaningful guidance for users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active Learning in the classroom domain presents an interesting case for integrating physical and digital affordances. Traditional physical handouts and transparencies are giving way to new digital slides and PCs, but the fully digital systems still lag behind the physical artifacts in many aspects such as readability and tangibility. To better understand the interplay between physical and digital affordances in this domain, we developed PaperCP, a paper-based interface for a Tablet PC-based classroom interaction system (Classroom Presenter), and deployed it in an actual university course. This paper reports on an exploratory experiment studying the use of the system in a real-world scenario. The experiment confirms the feasibility of the paper interface in supporting student-instructor communication for Active Learning. We also discuss the challenges associated with creating a physical interface such as print layout, the use of pen gestures, and logistical issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents way of generation color documents from elements extracted from an original document image. This scheme yields synthetic documents of similar visual information to the original one. This method has several advantages as it allows a far more efficient way of storing and transmitting the information. Its rationale is to decompose a color document into paper and ink texture parameters and textual information. The textual information may be either typed or handwritten and is stored as a compressed monochromatic image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This collection of research papers considers extensions of the Rasch model. In Chapter 1, K. C. Cheung explains how measurement and testing in the classroom can be made more meaningful, particularly through the use of Rasch family item response models. In Chapter 2, K. W. Koon and K. C. Cheung apply the Rasch model in constructing a part-whole concept continuum in mathematics. In Chapter 3, using a different conceptual framework, S. K. Cheung and M. L. Choo use the Rasch model to establish a proposed hierarchy of language skills. In Chapter 4, M. L. Choo and K. C. Cheung use Rating Scale Analysis--an extension of the Rasch model--to check on a newly constructed computer programming anxiety instrument normed on a sample of computer science students in junior colleges in Singapore. These papers demonstrate that it is possible to base qualitative interpretation on quantitative measurement. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 show that meaningful measurement is possible in the classroom. Five figures and two tables present supporting data. A 40-item list of references is attached. A multiple-choice test on fractions, and the computer programming anxiety scale are included. (SLD)

In this paper we present our work about personalized search in digital libraries. Unlike other researches which use content-based methods, we focus on citation-based methods for this purpose. We propose a practical approach to estimate the co-citation relatedness between scientific papers using the Google search engine. We conducted some experiments to evaluate performance of different citation-based methods. The experimental results show that our approach is promising and applicable for personalized search in digital libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the advantage that knowledge-intensive activities, such as Scientific Conference Management, can take by the exploitation of expert components in the key tasks. Typically, in this domain the task of scheduling the activities and resources or the assignment of reviewers to papers is performed manually leading therefore to time-consuming procedures with high degree of inconsistency due to many parameters and constraints to be considered. The proposed systems, evaluated on real conference datasets, show good results compared to manual scheduling and assignment, in terms of both accuracy and reduction of runtime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The actual situation is that partners in virtual organisations rely upon a great variety of tools, which are not integrated, difficult to use and often ineffective. High costs are sustained to train the people and acquire tools of different make as required by the OEMs. The objective of the proposed paper is to present a conceptual model of an integrated engineering environment specifically tailored to the needs of the suppliers operating in a design network. The focal point is to show how monitoring and control of projects in virtual organisations can be supported. Therefore a Quality Control Management (QCM) concept will be presented that is able to provide several services in order to trace and control project processes and performance in an effective, integrated, easy to understand and user-friendly way. The approach presented in the proposed paper is basing on the work carried out by the European funded research project E4 (Extended Enterprise management in enlarged Europe — EC Contract No. IST-FP6-027282). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The techniques for organizing and retrieving the artifacts from digital libraries (DLs) semantically are discussed, which include letting the taxonomies and semantic relations work in tandem to index the artifacts in DLs; integrating the techniques used in natural language processing and taxonomies to help users to start their retrieval processes; and ranking scientific papers on similarity in terms of contents or ranking the relevant papers on multi-factors. These techniques are verified through the design and implementation of a prototype of DLs for scientific paper management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Finding the right material on the Web could be a worthwhile result. Users waste too much time to discover the useful information. Recommender system can provide some shortcuts to the user, but if the recommendation is based on people's opinion, one question remains — how relevant is a user's opinion? This paper presents a model to define the user's relevance opinion in a recommender system. This metric aims to help the target user to decide in what recommendation he should focus his attention. Beyond the model, we present a real experiment using an e-government database. Keywords: User modeling, Authority, Recommender System. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, we proudly introduce eight awarded papers, selected from the papers presented in the 20th annual conference of Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI2006). The conference was held at Tower Hall Funabori located in the east part of Tokyo from June 7 until June 9, 2006. 276 papers were presented in about 60 sessions and over 500 people participated in the conference. Sessions vary from the fundamental issues to the state-of-the-art applications. Session for regular papers are as follows; Logic and learning, Reinforcement learning and agent learning, Agent theory, Auction/Game/Economics, Agent learning, Agent planning, Agent simulation and interaction, Genetic algorithm, Image processing, Information extraction and classification, Clustering/self-organization, Classifi- cation learning, Text mining, Graph mining, Mining algorithm, Web mining, Pre- and post-processing for data mining, Practices of data mining, Cognitive modeling, Language processing and dialogue, Robot/sensor network, Web information system, Semantic Web, Knowledge modeling and knowledge sharing, Support of knowledge management, knowledge modeling/ontology,Web service, Human interface and communication support, Education support, Learning support environment, and Musical and auditory information processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the security of dirty paper trellis (DPT) watermarking schemes which use both informed coding and informed embedding. After recalling the principles of message embedding with DPT watermarking, the secret parameters of the scheme are highlighted. The security weaknesses of DPT watermarking are then presented: in the watermarked contents only attack (WOA) setup, the watermarked data-set exhibits clusters corresponding to the different patterns attached to the arcs of the trellis. The K-means clustering algorithm is used to estimate these patterns and a co-occurrence analysis is performed to retrieve the connectivity of the trellis. Experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to accurately estimate the trellis configuration, which enables to perform attacks much more efficient than simple additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Typically, personalized information recommendation services automatically infer the user profile, a structured model of the user interests, from documents that were already deemed relevant by the user. We present an approach based on Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) for the extraction of user profiles from documents. This approach relies on a knowledge-based WSD algorithm, called JIGSAW, for the semantic indexing of documents: JIGSAW exploits the WordNet lexical database to select, among all the possible meanings (senses) of a polysemous word, the correct one. Semantically indexed documents are used to train a naïve Bayes learner that infers "semantic", sense-based user profiles as binary text classifiers (user-likes and user-dislikes). Two empirical evaluations are described in the paper. In the first experimental session, JIGSAW has been evaluated according to the parameters of the Senseval-3 initiative, that provides a forum where the WSD systems are assessed against disambiguated datasets. The goal of the second empirical evaluation has been to measure the accuracy of the user profiles in selecting relevant documents to be recommended. Performance of classical keyword-based profiles has been compared to that of sense-based profiles in the task of recommending scientific papers. The results show that sense-based profiles outperform keyword-based ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports the results of an in-depth study of Bluetooth naming practices which took place in the UK in August 2006. There is a significant culture of giving Bluetooth names to mobile phones in the UK, and this paper's main contribution is to provide an account of those Bluetooth naming practices, putting them in their social, physical and intentional context. The paper also uncovers how users have appropriated the ways in which Bluetooth, with its relatively short range of about 10-100m, operates between their mobile phones as a partially embodied medium, making it a distinctive paradigm of socially and physically embedded communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Papers in HCI play different roles, whether to inspire, solve industrial problems or further the science of HCI. There is a potential conflict between the different views, and a danger that different forms of validity are assumed by author and reader — deliberately or accidentally. This paper reviews some of the issues in this complex area and makes practical recommendations. In particular, the paper introduces the term "cross-validity" to help make explicit the issues, problems and means to tackle them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content preparation is essential for web design [25]. The objective of this paper is to establish a theoretical foundation for the development of methods to evaluate the effectiveness of content preparation in information technology operations. Past studies identify information as the dominant concern of users, and delivery mechanism as a secondary concern [20]. The best presentation of the wrong information results in a design with major usability problems and does not aid the user in accomplishing his task. This paper shifts the focus of existing usability evaluation methods. It attempts to fill the void in usability literaoture by addressing the information aspect of usability evaluation. Combining the strengths of content preparation and usability evaluation yields major implications for a broad range of IT uses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the progress of Internet technology and the increase of distributed information on networks, the present knowledge management has been based more and more on the performance of various experienced users. In addition to the increase of electronic documents, the use of paper documents has not been reduced because of their convenience. This paper describes a method of tracking paper document locations and contents using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology. This research also focused on the expression of a task process and the seamless structuring of related electronic and paper documents as a result of task knowledge formalization using information organizing. A system is proposed here that implements information organization for both Web documents and paper documents with the task model description and RFID technology. Examples of a prototype system are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents some future possibilities for eDemocracy tools and considers how these new technologies might conflict with our basic assumptions about what democracy should be. I hope this paper will contribute to discussion of under what situations different forms of eDemocracy are appropriate. The possibilities and repercussions of user profiling, voting outside of polling booths, longer decision-making periods, changeable election results and weighted voted are considered. Although none are necessarily advisable, this paper suggests they might be interesting to consider. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vertical Search Engines (VSEs), which usually work on specific domains, are designed to answer complex queries of professional users. VSEs usually have large repositories of structured instances. Traditional instance ranking methods do not consider the categories that instances belong to. However, users of different interests usually care only the ranking list in their own communities. In this paper we design a ranking algorithm -ZRank, to rank the classified instances according to their importances in specific categories. To test our idea, we develop a scientific paper search engine-CPaper. By employing instance classifying and ranking algorithms, we discover some helpful facts to users of different interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Health-e-Child project aims to develop an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics. In order to achieve a comprehensive view of children's health, a complex integration of biomedical data, information, and knowledge is necessary. Ontologies will be used to formally define this domain knowledge and will form the basis for the medical knowledge management system. This paper introduces an innovative methodology for the vertical integration of biomedical knowledge. This approach will be largely clinician-centered and will enable the definition of ontology fragments, connections between them (semantic bridges) and enriched ontology fragments (views). The strategy for the specification and capture of fragments, bridges and views is outlined with preliminary examples demonstrated in the collection of biomedical information from hospital databases, biomedical ontologies, and biomedical public databases. Keywords: Vertical Knowledge Integration, Approximate Queries, Ontology Views, Semantic Bridges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The tenth year of the annual International Conference on Research in Computational Biology (RECOMB) provides an opportunity to reflect on its history. RECOMB has been held across the world, including 6 different countries spanning 3 continents (Table 1). Over its 10 year history, RECOMB has published 373 papers and 170 individuals have served on its various committees. While there are many new faces in RECOMB each year, a significant number of researchers have participated over many years forming the core of the RECOMB community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collaborative tagging has grown on the Internet as a new paradigm for web information discovering, filtering and retrieval. In the physical world, we use visual tags: labels readable by smartphones with cameras. While visual tags are usually related to a web site address, collaborative tagging, instead, provides updated, recommended information contributed and shared by users. In this paper we investigate the combination of collaborative tagging systems with visual tags. We present a prototype of a semiautomatic system generating visual tags which gather information from collaborative tagging. The user can interact with a list of relevant tags (built by clustering closely related tags) that can be further encoded in a visual tag, according to user's preferences. The user experience is enriched by retrieving multimedia content linked to the selected tags, present on the web. We finally show a case study illustrating our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper follows up on an earlier study [1] by assessing the nature of 80 papers from EGOV 05 in terms of rigor and relevance criteria. Both studies use the same method and makes comparison between the results. We find that however still focusing overwhelmingly on descriptions and little on theory testing and creation, paper quality appears much better in that references to literature have increased grossly, there are very few dubious claims, philosophical research and theoretical arguments are virtually extinct, and the number of case stories is vastly reduced. However, the number of product descriptions is more than doubled to just over 30 %. The reasons for this are discussed, and as most of these papers are based on EU research funding we propose that an important reason may be the funding mechanism where researchers are employed as helpers in product development rather than critical scrutiny and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The regulation of multiagent systems may be approached from different stand-points. In this paper I will take the perspective of using a certain type of devices, electronic institutions, to regulate agent interactions. Furthermore, in this paper I am concerned with the tasks of design and construction of actual electronic institutions and I will explore some of the empirical aspects that one may encounter in such activities. More specifically, I will focus on those empirical aspects that are characteristic of electronic institutions rather than those that may be typical of multi-agent systems development in general or other types of software engineering. I use three examples of actual electronic institutions that show different and complementary features in order to motivate a number of distinctions that may be used to treat empirical features in a systematic way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bearing in mind the changeable and complicated needs of business environment, in this paper we examine the necessity of evolution in the traditional decision support techniques. Our aim is to intensify the need for integrated performance measurement and management, as a way to ameliorate the existing tools for decision making, which are currently based on historical data. Because of the nature of challenges and trends in the retail industry, it is considered to be an appropriate application scenario. In addition to that, a framework is proposed and a case study is described as a proof of our claim. Keywords: Performance management, business intelligence, retailing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The purpose of this scientific monograph is to show new and creative approaches to different school subjects in primary and secondary level. Methodology: Interdisciplinary and international comparative approaches were used. Now according to the 7th Framework Program, the preferred form of Science Education (www.scientix.eu) is preferred inquiry-based learning. Chapters in the monograph bring a lot of different kinds of motivation for teachers in practise. Results: Results indicate that using constructivist and inquiry-based learning methods bring positive results in motivation and development of key competencies by pupils in primary and secondary level. Conclusions: Results show that pupils who are working in groups and led by teachers as managers of theirs own activities have better results than pupils led in transmissive form. Recommendations: Educators need to increase their knowledge of the effects of constructivist teaching to pupils and need international and interdisciplinary exchange of best practices. Additional data: Monograph was supported by Erasmus Intensive Program. [Contents of this monograph are as follows: (1) Some Interactive Elementary Mathematics Lessons (Edith Debrenti); (2) Origami and Mathematics (Asuman Duatepe Paksu); (3) New Inequalities in Higher Education: Pre-Service Teachers in Partium Region (Agnes Reka Dusa and Edina Kovacs); (4) Instructional Software with Focus on Instructional Games in Mathematics and Chemistry Education (Pavla Hanzalova and Katerina Chroustova); (5) On a Method Solving Some Mathematical Problems Using Quantifier Elimination (Lukas Honzik); (6) Importance of Narration in Primary Education (Zuzana Chanasova); (7) Use of Educational Software for Mathematics and Computer Science (Jan Guncaga, Janka Majherova, and Hedviga Palasthy); (8) Education in Smart Cities (Sevinc Gulsecen, Serra Celik, Sebnem Ozdemir, Tuba Ugras, and Mustafa Ozcan); (9) Education of the Pupil for Life in the Complex Society and the Role of the Teacher in this Process (Giuseppi Mari); (10) Curricula and Values in Teacher Training (Silvia Matusova); (11) Introduction to Computer Animation and Its Possible Educational Applications (Sajid Musa, Rushan Ziatdinov, Carol Griffiths); (12) Pedagogical Training from the Pre-Service Teachers' Point of View at the University of Debrecen--A Pilot Research (Zoltan Nagy, Krisztina Banoczki, Eszter Gerjak, Daniel Karai, Jozsef Katona, Edina Malmos, and Eva Fruzsina Racz; (13) Sprachliche Attituden der Slowaken in Sudostungarn--Einfluss zum Schulwesen (Sandor Janos Toth); and (14) Science Education--Formal versus Informal Education (Zuzana Vaclavikova). [Individual papers contain bibliographies.]

Requirements engineering research has been conducted for over 40 years. It is important to recognize the plethora of results accumulated to date to: (a) improve researchers' understanding of the historical roots of our field in the real-world and the problems that they are trying to solve, (b) expose researchers to the breadth and depth of solutions that have been proposed, (c) provide a synergistic basis for improving those solutions or building new ones to solve real-world problems facing the industry today, and d) increase practitioner awareness of available solutions. A detailed meta-analysis of the requirements engineering literature will provide an objective overview of the advances and current state of the discipline. This paper represents the first step in a planned multi-year analysis. It presents the results of a demographic analysis by date, type, outlet, author, and author affiliation for an existing database of over 4,000 requirements engineering publications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 13th Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ'07) will take place in the beautiful city of Trondheim, Norway on the 11th and 12th June 2007. As with most previous years, REFSQ'07 is affiliated with CAiSE. However, REFSQ'07 is significantly larger than in previous years, both in terms of the number of submissions and the size of the programme. 27 papers will be presented, plus a keynote address by Klaus Pohl, and parallel sessions will be necessary to make the programme possible within two days. However, the essential highly interactive and participatory nature of the REFSQ 'brand' will be retained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the study aimed at giving a new direction to Photographs, keeping in mind the growing needs of the people and enriching day-to-day experience vis-à-vis paper based photograph. A survey was conducted which revealed few startling but interesting facts as to what more the end-user wants than a mere ‘physical paper-based photograph'. This paper talks about the survey, response by the participants, results derived from them, current work and future direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the use of different types of statistical tests for the correlation of anomaly detection alerts. We show that the Granger Causality Test, one of the few proposals that can be extended to the anomaly detection domain, strongly depends on good choices of a parameter which proves to be both sensitive and difficult to estimate. We propose a different approach based on a set of simpler statistical tests, and we prove that our criteria work well on a simplified correlation task, without requiring complex configuration parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the millennium, a quickly increasing number of research papers in the field of "computational trust and reputation" have appeared in the Computer Science literature. However, it remains hard to compare and evaluate the respective merits of proposed systems. We argue that rigorous use of formal probabilistic models enables the clear specification of the assumptions and objectives of systems, which is necessary for comparisons. To exemplify such probabilistic modeling, we present a simple probabilistic trust model in which the system assumptions as well as its objectives are clearly specified. We show how to compute (in this model) the so-called predictive probability: The probability that the next interaction with a specific principal will have a specific outcome. We sketch preliminary ideas and first theorems indicating how the use of probabilistic models could enable us to quantitatively compare proposed systems in various different environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we will propose our ideas for a semantically ready competency model. The model will allow semantic enrichment on different levels, creating truly meaningful competencies. The aim of this model is to provide a flexible approach for (re)use, matching, interpretation, exchange and storage for competencies. Our competency model is based on the DOGMA ontology framework and the proposed IEEE standards RCD and SCRM. We will focus on the model itself and how semantics can be applied to it as these elements form the basis for any kind of processing on them. Keywords: competence, competency, RCD, semantics, DOGMA, e-HRM, HRM, occupation, ontology, Semantic Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transfusion Ontology is a simple task-based ontology developed in the emergency health care domain. Taking the assumption that ontologies are instruments for supporting exchange of information among parties, the principles governing the design of this ontology was mainly based on the identification of the interactions of messages to be exchanged among parties. This paper shows how this simple design principle is able to guide a whole ontology construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reputation systems play an important role in many Internet communities. They allow individuals to estimate other individual's behavior during interactions. However, a more privacy-friendly reputation system is desirable while maintaining its trustworthiness. This paper presents a fair anonymous submission and review system. The review process is reputation-based and provides better anonymity properties than existing reputation systems. Moreover, the system allows for accountability measures. Anonymous credentials are used as basic blocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organic computing is an upcoming research area with strong relationships to the ideas and concepts of agent-based systems. In this paper, we therefore will have a closer look at agent systems, organic computing systems (as well as autonomic computing systems) and state commonalities and divergences between them. We then propose a common view on these technologies and show, how they can benefit from each other with regard to software engineering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a small case study is presented to illustrate our conceptual understanding of a task-based requirements process. We argue that sub-models as known in model-based design (e.g. task models, dialog models) support the reflection about an existing work situation at a conceptual level and allow a formal specification of requirements. However, it is also shown that the integration of complementary analysis approaches facilitates a richer consideration of social as well as technical aspects. An intertwined creation of models differing in their focus and in the degree of abstraction and formality supports a more effective requirements elicitation and elaboration. In addition, the paper discusses some crucial issues in task- and model-based design such as the ‘myth' of generalised task models, the different roles of task and dialog models, or the influence of intentions on models of current situations. We hope to contribute to a further clarification of the problem space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms are increasingly embedded in networks of relationships with other organizations that are of strategic importance. An organization's participation in a network may provide access to information, resources, markets, and technologies, or it may lock it in unproductive relationships from which it may be difficult to extricate. Therefore, it is no longer adequate to analyze firms' conduct and performance by examining firms in isolation from their network partners. Strategy research has investigated inter-organizational alliances for some time. However, the primary focus of this research has been to examine the antecedents of network formation and relatively lesser attention has been paid to the implications of alliances and networks on a firm's performance. Since virtual organizations are conceptualized as strategic networks and alliances among organizations, we examined literature on virtual organizations to understand what has been done in inter-organizational context. We found 34 papers out of a total of 117 papers on virtual organization that examined virtual organizing at inter-organizational level. We classified each of the short-listed papers by virtual organizing type (network membership, network structure, tie modality, and time-frame), performance, and dilemmas of virtual organizing. Our analyses showed that inter-organization virtual organizing strategy varied with the goals of virtual organizing. Across the short-listed papers we found a pattern of organizing that depended on whether organizing was for abstract resources (knowledge, skills, competencies, etc.) or for specific goals (outsourcing key components). Virtual organizing for abstract resources tended to exhibit decentralized network structure and collaborative ties with partners, while virtual organizing for specific goals tended to exhibit centralized network structure and opportunistic ties. We found a lack of empirical literature examining the process of inter-organization virtual organizing strategy and its consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss importance and usefulness of interpersonal network in a community support system. We built a scheduling support system for an academic conference. Our system supports information exchange among participants and information discovery with generating participants' interpersonal network. This system was used in an academic conference called JSAI2003 involving 276 active users. The analysis of the networks reveals that interpersonal networks can promote information exchange among people by indicating existence of people to the others, and that it can also support information discovery by recommendation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a new binning technic for informed data hiding problem. In information theoretical point of view, the blind watermarking problem can be seen as transmitting a secret message M through a noisy channel on top of an interfered host signal S that is available only at the encoder. We propose an embedding scheme based on Low Density Parity Check(LDPC) codes, in order to quantize the host signal in an intelligent manner so that the decoder can extract the hidden message with a high probability. A mixture of erasure and symmetric error channel is realized for the analysis of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A novel method that is able to simulate artistic effects of ink-refusal and stroke-trace-reservation in ink paintings is developed. The main ingredients of ink are water, carbon particles, as well as glue. However, glue is not taken into account in other researches, although it plays an important role in ink diffusion. In our ink-diffusion model, we consider the number of fibers and the quantity of glue as parameters of the structure of paper. We simulate the physical interaction among water, carbon particles, glue, and fiber mesh of paper. The realistic renderings created from our models have demonstrated that our models are successful, and are able to imitate the special artistic effects of ink painting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this chapter, we introduce five awarded papers, selected from the 19th annual conference of JSAI (Japan Society for Artificial Intelligence) 2005. These five papers are truly excellent, for they were selected out of over 290 papers, the rate of which was less than 2%, voted by the total number of approximately seventy reviewers. As has been often mentioned, the research of artificial intelligence branches to many fields; among them, we could observe such tendency that empirical methods were rather prevalent compared with theoretical issues. However, we contend that the following five papers were both sound in theory and practical in feasibility. We show the synopses of the five papers, adding short comments for the award for each. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On behalf of the program committee (PC) of JSAI 2003, I would like to thank all the chair persons, discussants, and attentive audience who contributed to select these awarded papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper [1] we propose a taxonomy for classifying COTS business applications, i.e. products that are used in the daily functioning of all types of organizations worldwide, such as ERP systems and document management tools. We propose the identification of characterization attributes to arrange the domains which these products belong to, and also we group these domains into categories. We define questions and answers as a means for browsing the taxonomy during COTS selection. We show the need of identifying and recording the relationships among the domains and propose the use of actor-oriented models for expressing these relationships as dependencies. Last, we explore the definition of quality models for the domains, to be used in COTS selection, focusing on their reusability and stepwise definition downwards the hierarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the 5th International Workshop on Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS), organized in conjunction with ICCS. The DDDAS concept entails the ability to dynamically incorporate data into an executing application simulation, and in reverse, the ability of applications to dynamically steer measurement processes. Such dynamic data inputs can be acquired in real-time on-line or they can be archival data. DDDAS is leading to new capabilities by improving applications modeling and systems management methods, augmenting the analysis and prediction capabilities of simulations, improving the efficiency of simulations and the effectiveness of measurement systems. The scope of the present workshop provides examples of research and technology advances enabled through DDDAS and driven by DDDAS. The papers presented in this workshop represent ongoing multidisciplinary research efforts by an international set of researchers from academe, industry, national and research laboratories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]