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Mobile application (app) websites such as Google Play and AppStore allow users to review their downloaded apps. Such reviews can be useful for app users, as they may help users make an informed decision; such reviews can also be potentially useful for app developers, if they contain valuable information concerning user needs and requirements. However, in order to unleash the value of app reviews for mobile app development, intelligent mining tools that can help discern relevant reviews from irrelevant ones must be provided. This paper surveys the state of the art in the development of such tools and techniques behind them. To gain insight into the maturity of the current support mining tools, the paper will also find out what app development information these tools have discovered and what challenges they are facing. The results of this survey can inform the development of more effective and intelligent app review mining techniques and tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical path of disease varies due to the changes in external factors, and the key to the changes is the decision-making in symptomatic treatment by medical experts; how to make full use of historical medical data and recommend high quality treatment options to new cases under the current circumstance of data explosion, is the research focus of this paper. This paper first presents the standard for medical path based on cloud platform, going into the construction of workflow-based flow model of medical services; finally, a process mining algorithm based on medical evolution factor is given to realize the evolution of online medical program of a disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Websites have evolved into an excellent medium of information dissemination and visibility. Hence governments and organizations around the world have websites as primary medium for information communication. The universal accessibility of this web medium remains a major challenge for both web developers and accessibility researchers. Conformance of WCAG 2.0 guidelines by web pages is a significant factor in measuring universal accessibility. This paper presents an exploratory study about the accessibility of Indian university website homepages. We have analyzed the homepages of 302 Indian universities under different conformance levels of WCAG 2.0 recommendation using automatic accessibility evaluation tools to find accessibility report of websites and then classified them comparatively into three groups namely low accessible websites called Tier-III, medium accessible websites called Tier-II and high accessible websites called Tier-I. Statistical classification and accessibility report of websites shows that an array of further improvements have to be made in order to make them more accessible and usable in terms of WCAG 2.0. Based on the results of the analysis, this paper proposes the necessary steps which shall be taken to further enhance the accessibility of the websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reports design and development of a PLC-based controller for pneumatic pressing machine, which performs the most critical operation in an engine bearing manufacturing plant. The paper firstly overviews the manufacturing process of engine bearing and then discusses the need of automating the pneumatic press. The proposed automation system involves (a) speed control by replacing the conventional method with a variable frequency drive (VFD), (b) feeder and pusher control using PLC, (c) fault detection and safety measures, (d) and PLC-based sequential control of all the processes carried out on pneumatic press. The control system is based on MicroLogix-1000 PLC from Allen Bradley and the ladder logic program for it has been written on RSlogix-500. For the evaluation of the proposed control system, the PLC program was emulated on RSLogix Emulate-500 and the operations of the pneumatic press were simulated on FluidSIM-P. The results of simulation validate the design of PLC-based controller in general and digital input-output connections of the PLC and PLC program in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traffic congestion is a problem that becomes government concern in many big cities like Surabaya. Some initiatives have been carried out by the government to decrease the intensity of traffic congestion, ranging from various policy like special lane for motorcycle, odd – even license plate, etc. However, it is yet to be successful to decrease the heavy traffic in many big cities in Indonesia. The right solution tends to encourage people to use public transport instead of private cars. Within the framework of Intelligent Transport System, this paper proposes an advanced traveller information system with itinerary optimisation by Angkot, a common public transport mode in Indonesia. The itinerary optimisation is modelled as an orienteering problem and is solved using iterative local search – hill climbing algorithm. The experiment results show that generally the proposed algorithm could solve the problem fast and effectively. In addition to propose the initial algorithm, the main contribution of this paper is a new dataset for orienteering problem that may encourage researcher to come up with more sophisticated algorithm. Eventually, the proposed system could encourage more people to use public transport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motive is an important underlying reason an organization engages in a particular behavior, which includes initiating a particular information systems adoption. Adoption motives, however, are situational, urging motivational studies to be contingent on the context. The purposes of this paper are therefore twofold: (1) reflecting on the case of Indonesian e-voting initiative, to examine the local government’s motives behind e-government adoption; (2) to identify emerging themes that might have influenced the process of e-voting adoption in several Indonesian villages. Qualitative data were collected from five government leaders at both municipal and village levels in a municipality that have previously conducted village e-voting elections. This study found that performance-related rationalities, i.e. cost-savings, reducing service delivery-time, are the main drives for e-voting adoption in this case. Although instances of motives belonging to technological and strategic clusters have also been recorded, none of the leaders responded to operation-related motives. This might be due to the simplistic interpretation of e-voting as merely a replacement for paper-ballots, while its broader implication to democratic values and election best practices have been largely ignored. Moreover, it was evident from the study that the decision to adopt voting technology in this case has been significantly influenced by political interests, where strong cases of leadership further accelerated the adoption process. The strong determination exhibited by higher level leaders has put significant pressures on the lower level authorities to implement e-voting, which might have conflicted with their own organizational strategy, socio-cultural norms, and citizen preparedness. This study is important to identify context-based rationales behind e-voting initiatives in Indonesia and the results are relevant to assist Indonesian government in the development of other e-government strategy in the future. This paper further emphasizes for a broader strategy which takes account of the risks of impairing democratic values and generating conflicts during electoral processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper proposes a new and intuitive model to evaluate the utilitarian e-service quality on textile and fashion B2C websites in Spain. The relevant variables to include into this model have been validated through an in-depth literature review and a reliability study based on an empirical investigation. Among the several methodologies used to develop the model, the paper proves that fuzzy inference systems (FIS) have numerous advantages. The following are particularly relevant: the ease to manage non-linear behaviours and the intuitive way of incorporating knowledge to evaluate B2C websites. This knowledge can stem both: from the expert know-how or from the evaluation of consumer satisfaction on these websites. The knowledge is made explicit through if-then rules which work with linguistic-type concepts −agreed upon by experts, closer to the human reasoning mode. Finally, the usefulness of the proposed model and the defined FIS suitability to evaluate the model are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the possibility of implementing location-based game using the smartphone’s GPS to enhance the player’s experience. With the GPS technology, the player can play in a real world as well as in the virtual game world. We postulate this thus will enhance the player’s experience. To test the hypothesis, a horror game genre with location-based features was developed. The game was evaluated to thirty participants. The results demonstrate the game allowed the participants to explore a new place with fun. In addition, the participants claimed that the game allow them to enjoy a new experience in playing horror game. The participants described that playing the game was giving them more tension compare to playing a conventional horror game. Moreover, the participants claimed that they feel more familiar with the place they’ve explored during the game. Finally, some improvements could be done to improve the experience enhancement to the game. First, more variation in the storyline, quests and the enemy. As the game evaluated in this paper is served only as a prototype, the variation of the storyline, quests and the enemy (i.e. the ghost) is limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to relevance theory ( Sperber and Wilson, 1995 ), information ( a set of assumptions in its terminology) is relevant if it satisfies two conditions; firstly, it should generate a substantial amount of interest ( positive cognitive effects in its terminology); and secondly, its processing should demand as little mental effort as possible. In my opinion, this pair of conditions should be supplemented with the notions of contextual constraint and non-intended non-propositional effect . As will be argued in this paper, this RT extension is particularly appropriate for the analysis of Internet-mediated communication, since nowadays we are witnessing a turn into what has been labeled phatic Internet , massive exchanges of messages with little informational relevance but enormous impact on users’ feelings of connectivity and sociability, among others. The aim of this paper is to apply this proposal of extension to mobile instant messaging (specifically WhatsApp ) and explore some of the constraints and non-propositional effects that play a role in the eventual relevance of WhatsApp interactions, which typically generate relevance from these non-propositional effects and not from the prototypical object of pragmatic research, namely the propositional content of the messages in the shape of explicatures and/or implicatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ACSM (Hayashida et al., 2014) consists of a method of discerning the aliased states in a POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process) which is one of Markov decision process such that an agent observes local information about the environment, and choosing the appropriate action based on the internal memory and the sensory information which an agent obtains from the environment. Though ACSM achieves the highest performance in the existing methods based on classifier systems, it requires a huge number of memories for the internal memories, and spends long time for some large scaled problems. This paper improves a classifier system, ACSM (Anticipatory Classifier System with Memory) focused on the process of learning of ACSM, and the aim of this paper is to make the system more efficient. The improved method is named ACSMr in this paper, and some numerical experiments using 5 kinds of maze problems which are well used as benchmark problems for POMDPs are executed. ACSMr achieves greater experimental result than the existing classifier systems for the maze problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the study of the reliability parameters of traditional communication networks, a set of new communication network evaluation parameters are proposed in this paper, including network reliability parameters, network availability parameters and network completion parameters, to evaluate the transmission of the entire communication network performance. Moreover, the derivation formulas for different parameters are also listed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stand-alone and the combined model of Convolutional Neural networks (CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Deep neural Networks (DNNs) have shown great improvements in a variety of Speech Recognition tasks. In this paper we also combined these networks but in this paper we used them for multilingual speech recognition, for the prediction and correction (PAC) architecture, in order to calculate the state probability. Our proposed model is known as PAC-MCLDNN. In this paper, we present experiment results for multilingual training on AP16-OLR task. Furthermore, cross-lingual model transfer and multitask learning for under resourced languages such as Uyghur and Vietnam are also performed which further improved the recognition results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The wide spread of internet resources has emerged new paradigms of learning and knowledge delivery to facilitate and enhance learning particularly in e-learning systems. The important milestones of these new paradigms are known as digital learning objects (DLO) which are smallest packed bits for learning. The abundance of these DLOs raises an important question on how to select effectively high quality reusable learning objects. There exist many soft computing approaches such as; fuzzy computing, neural networks, evolutionary computing, support vector machines, machine learning and probabilistic reasoning. In this paper, fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making methods in choosing suitable DLOs were reviewed. This paper discusses recent variety of soft computing methods used in selecting and evaluating digital learning objects through multi criteria decision analysis approaches used; for selecting metrics like basic topical, course similarity, internal topical, basic and user similarity personal, and context similarity situational relevance and for evaluation; scalarization method, employing triangular, trapezoidal and distance based similarity (adapted from TOPSIS techniques). As DLOs continue to evolve it is inevitable to utilize multi-criteria techniques for selecting and or improving quality. The abundance of DLOs has increased the need for applying practical soft computing techniques to retrieve high quality, reusable DLOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various kinds of smart devices, including personal video recorders, smart TVs, smart phones, and digital cameras frequently manipulate multimedia files, such as frame trimming or inserting. However, because the standard file system APIs do not provide appropriate operations for multimedia file editing, application developers have to implement editing operations by using the conventional read and write operations. Therefore, editing multimedia files unnecessarily incur a large number of I/O operations, resulting in significant performance drawbacks. This paper proposes the design of two novel file system operations, split () and merge (), to remedy the performance overhead of manipulating multimedia files. Unlike conventional file system operations, these operations are carried out only at the metadata level and are accompanied by no actual data movement, so they take negligible time to finish regardless of file size. In addition to the design proposal, this paper introduces the implementation details of the proposed design for three representative file systems: Ext4, FAT32, and exFAT. The evaluation with a commercial digital camera showed that the movie file trimming took less than 1 s for most cases, which is well over 1000% improvement over the conventional approach. In addition, the number of I/O operations, which significantly affects the lifespan of flash memory storage components, was suppressed to less than 1% of that with the conventional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global software development (GSD) is gaining ever more relevance. Although communication is key in the exchange of information between team members, multi-site software development has introduced additional obstacles (different time-zones and cultures, IT infrastructure, etc.) and delays into the act of communication, which is already problematic. Communication is even more critical in the case of Agile Global Software Development (AGSD) in which communication plays a primary role. This paper reports an exploratory study of the effects of tools supporting communication in AGSD. More precisely, this paper analyses the perception of team members about communication infrastructures in AGSD. The research question to which this study responds concerns how development teams perceive the communication infrastructure while developing products using agile methodologies. Most previous studies have dealt with communication support from a highly technological media tool perspective. In this research work, instead, observations were obtained from three perspectives: communication among team members, communication of the status of the development process, and communication of the status of the progress of the product under development. It has been possible to show that team members perceive advantages to using media tools that make them feel in practice that teams are co-located, such as smartboards supported by efficient video-tools, and combining media tools with centralized repository tools, with information from the process development and product characteristics, that allow distributed teams to effectively share information about the status of the project/process/product during the development process in order to overcome some of the still existing problems in communication in AGSD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The capitalization of activities occurring during collaborative brainstorming sessions is a real challenge. It is still enhanced when two remote teams have to participate in the same work sessions. Activities which have tangible results like digital notes are easier to capitalize. However many other events may happen which can only be captured by videos. We use the mandatory system of video conference between two remote teams to capitalize non-tangible results like agreement or disagreement between participants. We developed a system for supporting remote collaboration. The paper describes the design of two main parts of this system. First it presents the resource channel i.e. the way the teams can exchange, display and synchronize data on large multi-touch devices. Then it presents the video channel i.e. the way people can be aware of the other team. The paper concludes with some observations about the current version of this system alloted to the capitalization of collaborative team activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In production systems, manufacturers face important decisions that affect system profit. In this paper, three of these decisions are modelled simultaneously: due date assignment, production scheduling, and outbound distribution scheduling. These three decisions are made in the sales, production planning and transportation departments. Recently, many researchers have devoted attention to the problem of integrating due date assignment, production scheduling and outbound distribution scheduling. In the present paper, the problems of minimizing costs associated with maximum tardiness, due date assignment and delivery for a single machine are considered. Mixed Integer Non-Linear Programming (MINLP) and a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) are used for the solution. This problem is NP-hard, so two meta-heuristic algorithms, an Adaptive Genetic Algorithm (AGA) and a Parallel Simulated Annealing algorithm (PSA), are used for solution of large-scale instances. The present paper is the first time that crossover and mutation operators in AGA and neighbourhood generation in PSA have been used in the structure of optimal solutions. We used the Taguchi method to set the parameters, design of experiments (DOE) to generate experiments, and analysis of variance, the Friedman, Aligned Friedman, and Quade tests to analyse the results. Also, the robustness of the algorithms was addressed. The computational results showed that AGA performed better than PSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a mixed methodological approach to address cost and schedule delays in large-scale engineering programs (LSEP). Research has identified potential causes or factors for schedule delays, such as: ineffective human resources policies and practices, consolidation of the aerospace industry, too many stakeholders, and lack of knowledge-based acquisition practices. Current methods and tools are ineffective in helping project managers to accurately predict schedule performance during LSEP development. The authors describe research to investigate the feasibility of: (1) deriving quantitative and qualitative causal factors correlating to schedule performance during LSEP development; (2) developing a framework and a tailorable predictive model using the causal factors in a Bayesian Network (BN) model; and (3) using the resultant framework and BN model, with expert knowledge elicited from subject matter experts, to predict schedule performance and inform decision makers on actions needed to manage schedule performance. Finally, this paper discusses a version of a BN model developed by mapping a conceptualization of the framework created using a systemigram with a BN pattern that includes dependencies from causal and control factors to schedule performance. The BN incorporates a direct causal dependence of schedule performance and mitigation actions to the consequences of schedule performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The simplicity of the pen-and-paper game Sprouts hides a surprising combinatorial complexity. We describe an optimisation called boundary matching that accommodates this complexity to allow move generation for Sprouts games of arbitrary size at interactive speeds. This extended version of the paper also describes methods for plotting and visualising Sprouts moves, using a conforming Delaunay triangulation of the game's underlying geometry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to specify databases completely at the conceptual level, conceptual database specification languages should contain a data definition (sub)language (DDL), for specifying data structures (+ constraints ), a data retrieval (sub)language (DRL), for specifying queries , as well as a (declarative) data manipulation (sub)language (DML), for specifying transactions . Object Role Modeling (ORM) is a powerful method for designing and querying database models at the conceptual level. By means of verbalization the application is also described in natural language as used by domain experts, for communication and validation purposes. ORM currently comprises a DDL and a DRL (ConQuer). However, the ORM-method does not yet contain an expressive DML for specifying transactions at the conceptual level. In an earlier paper we designed a syntactic extension of the ORM-method with a DML for specifying transactions at the conceptual level in a purely declarative way. For all transactions we proposed syntaxes, verbalizations, and diagrams. However, we did not give a formal semantics then. The purpose of this paper is to add a clear, formal and purely declarative semantics to the proposed ORM-transactions. The paper also formally defines rollbacks and illustrates everything with examples (including a solution to a well-known transaction specification problem). The extension of ORM with an expressive set of completely declaratively specified transactions makes ORM complete as a database specification method at the conceptual level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The knowledge of the technical condition of the water distribution systems (WDS) is a key issue to predict the performance of the WDS and to optimize maintenance and rehabilitation of the WDS. Common practice employs only practitioner experience to assess the technical condition of the WDS. The presented paper summarizes a basic theory of indirect condition assessment including several definitions of condition assessment, factors contributing to deterioration and possible outputs of the condition assessment. Furthermore, the legal requirements concerning this issue specifically in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic are listed. There is also a summary of the studies of condition assessment methods of water mains. As a part of the intended complex methodology for condition assessment of WDS, a methodology for condition assessment of water mains was developed. The methodology is based on condition indicators (CI) formulated using a multi-objective optimization. The paper presents the proposed methodology and its application in two case studies. The proposed methodology achieved good results and it showed certain significant benefits – e.g. satisfactory level of detail, optional user modification. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The paper presents the application of object-oriented modeling techniques to control software development for complex manufacturing systems, with particular focus on case studies taken from the packaging industry and design patterns that can be abstracted from such case studies. The proposed methodology for control software modeling and implementation is based on a practical approach refined on the basis of on-the-field experience and interactions with control engineers involved in the development projects. The final objective of the paper is to review and analyze patterns for the solution of design and implementation issues that typically arise in the considered application domain. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper describes a method to automatically discover features which distinguish the language use of cultural subgroups operating within the same broader language/culture. Sociolinguists have long known that special features such as vocabulary use, phonetic features (like accents), and syntactic characteristics develop within the in-group language of frequently interacting subgroups. These features set apart the group''s language from the discourse of others speaking the same broader language. Our interest is to learn these features automatically and use them to distinguish the writing of one subgroup from another. The s pecial vocabulary and jargon of various subgroups has often been catalogued. This research focuses instead on syntactic differences which can be learned from digital text and the specialized use of vocabulary which is not topic or domain specific (e.g. we deliberately omit domain related jargon.) Our main data source is blogs and related discussions from a number of North American subculture groups, such as radical feminists and militia groups. In this paper we present our findings on looking for blogs whose participants have a particular subcultural affiliation, designated as “blogs of interest.” Our hypothesis is that we can ignore the particular topic of a blog discussion, through means described in the paper, and isolate other linguistic indicators that help us determine whether or not a blog is “of interest” We start with an overview of the process of training our system and describe its use in identifying blogs of the desired cultural subgroup. We then describe in detail the training process in which a series of grams are scored and aggregated to find key, highly indicative blog passages. The last section reports on an experiment we conducted that proved the concept against several North American English language blogging communities [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A 2010 survey (Nielsen) showed that 22.7% of the time spent on the Internet is on a social network. Moreover, there is an increasing demand to access social networks by mobile phones, i.e., around 30% globally. Social networking has become a reality, and it generates an incredible amount of information that is sometimes difficult for users to process, especially from mobile phones. Several links, activities, and recommendations are proposed by networked friends every hour, which together are nearly impossible to manage. There is a need to filter and make accessible such information to users, which is the motivation behind developing a mobile recommender that exploits social network information. Thus, in this paper, we propose the design and the implementation of a SOcial Mobile Activity Recommender (SOMAR) that can integrate Facebook social network mobile data and sensor data to propose activities to the user (e.g., concert or computer science seminar). The recommendations are completely calculated in situ in the mobile device with an embedded data mining component. We analyze how to compute and update the social graph in case of changes in social relationships or user context. The paper also presents a case study to analyze the performance of the method. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Energy efficient medium access control (MAC) protocol designs for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have already generated interests among researches due to ever increasing range of applications of WSNs. Nodes in a WSN typically operate unattended with a limited power source, energy efficient operations of the sensor nodes especially at the MAC level is very important because majority of energy expenditure take place at the radio level. MAC protocols in WSNs for diverse applications with different objectives have been proposed by researchers. In this paper, we investigate three energy-efficient synchronous MAC protocols for WSNs emphasizing their strength and weakness. Our analysis as well as simulation studies reveal the suitability of these protocols in deployed sensor fields. As a result of our investigation, we found out some open research issues in energy-efficient MAC layer design which we highlighted toward the end of this paper. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, an adaptive channel reservation scheme for multi-class traffic is proposed to ensure the quality- of-service for multimedia wireless cellular networks and to minimize the dropping of handoff calls. Although different numbers of guard channels are reserved for the handoff calls of different traffic classes, handoff calls of a class with low priority can access the guard channels of its next higher class handoff calls with a certain probability determined by the mobility of calls and channel occupancy. In this paper we developed a generalized analytical model to investigate the performance of this proposed scheme. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights • Models for diagnosis aid may provoke distrust among practitioners and patients. • The development of models for diagnosis aid falls under data mining concerns. • The survey raises an expert-aware approach for suitable diagnosis aid. • Interpretability is a major concern for the acceptance of diagnosis aid models. • The recourse to data mining for diagnosis aid poses many technical challenges. Abstract Data mining continues to play an important role in medicine; specifically, for the development of diagnosis aid models used in expert and intelligent systems. Although we can find abundant research on this topic, clinicians remain reluctant to use decision support tools. Social pressure explains partly this lukewarm position, but concerns about reliability and credibility are also put forward. To address this reticence, we emphasize the importance of the collaboration between both data miners and clinicians. This survey lays the foundation for such an interaction, by focusing on the specifics of diagnosis aid, and the related data modeling goals. On this regard, we propose an overview on the requirements expected by the clinicians, who are both the experts and the final users. Indeed, we believe that the interaction with clinicians should take place from the very first steps of the process and throughout the development of the predictive models, thus not only at the final validation stage. Actually, against a current research approach quite blindly driven by data, we advocate the need for a new expert-aware approach. This survey paper provides guidelines to contribute to the design of daily helpful diagnosis aid systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper aims to introduce a marine and typhoon meteorological information system based on WebGIS and rich internet application(RIA), which integrate many kinds of data of typhoon and weather information according to a spatio-temporal model. The application based on such a system has been launched on the web with the URL http://typhoon.weather.com.cn/. This paper discusses the targets and design framework of the system, and analyzes the key problem of spatio-temporal model application in the system. Based on this typhoon information system, users can search every typhoon''s information in Pacific costal region from 1949, such as monitoring data, forecast, satellite images, radar images, weather alerts, typhoon tracks, etc. The system has a lot of advantages compares to other similar systems, and it is fit for promotion as practical applications in other fields. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper summarizes the development of electronic records management, and due to current defects and shortcomings, discusses the more effective and reasonable information security management program. For the system security issues, the paper has done an overall security analysis of system from the application layer, network layer, and database layer to physical and management levels, and has made a system''s security strategy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents the techniques of GIS and applies it into the management of the information system of Taihu Lake Basin, providing a new managing pattern for the Taihu Lake Basin. Through the construction of the integrated management information system of Taihu Lake Basin water among different departments of information sharing resources, it effectively use resource information scattered in various sectors and improves the data and useful information value. The paper illustrates the architecture and function module of the system and describes the main techniques in its realization. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the advances presented in the manuscripts included in this issue. The authors of these manuscripts were asked to propose future directions and challenges in their respective research areas. This paper summarises these proposals and concludes with general directions and challenges related to computing in civil and building engineering. The suggested directions include enhancing digital information modelling and extending the standardised product and process modelling technologies; improving decision-support capabilities and decision–implication analysis through integrating wider-aspects of the problem space; embedding optimisation techniques more holistically; and integrating all of these by making more use of virtualisation in an attempt to simplify the use of the output technologies. The challenges that will arise as a consequence will inevitably include reducing the inherent complexity in such a manner that the resulting models are both realistic and useable by all of the disciplines involved. Another main challenge is the inclusion of concepts that are significant but less readily formalised than traditional engineering ones. It could be argued that the high-level directions and challenges mentioned above are not very different from those that could have been predicted a considerable number of years ago. However, it is worth stressing that, with increased capabilities and reach of information technologies and greater expectations of decision makers, the current ambitions are an order of magnitude greater. The proposed directions and the resulting challenges are now much greater in both scale and breadth. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper proposes a novel application for estimating the size and evolution of web page populations, based on the capture–recapture methodology, which is mainly used in wildlife biological studies. Firstly, we present the necessary modifications and amendments needed for the web capture–recapture paradigm, and then we discuss the limitations confronted. The paper provides the implementation details of the proposed web capture recapture model along with its initial assessment. The anticipated outcome was to examine whether we can conduct capture–recapture experiments on the web (or a web sub-universe such as an Internet search engine directory), in order to further estimate evolution rates in web page populations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, password management problems of network and system management will be handled. In this concept, password management and its usage in systems and networks will be introduced. Then password management problems that occurs in such situations like employee change, internal or external password distribution, will be investigated. In this paper the determination of password management problems will be done and these problems will be introduced. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: According to the peer-to-peer (P2P) sociality, an expert-driven multi-semantic self-organized P2P semantic community model is built in this paper to resolve the two principle problems of P2P resource management, which are how to possess enormous number of high quality shared resource, how to find the resource quickly and accurately. The main contribution of this paper is: ① the autonomous peer (AP) model and Autonomic Semantic Community (ASC)model are build, ② one local domain-related trust and trusted evaluation is projected that bases on semantic similarity, history evaluation and time effect and it takes the requirement and owned resource two aspects into account to present one AP. ③ an algorithm of fusing APs’local trust degree and self-evaluation is designed.④ a procedure to collaboratively elect expert AP e is proposed. ⑤ Self-organized community formation algorithm SoFA and its communication mechanism are built. In SoFA, APs gather its communication information and according to it to evaluate itself and other APs locally, build and dynamically adjust local topology, elect the domain expert AP e and then an expert-driven ASC is established. Experiment shows our domain trust evaluation and self-evaluation mechanism and SoFA could not only adaptively optimize network to improve the efficiency of service (resource) discovery but also base on the synthesized trust degree to find the free-riders, malice peers, low quality service peers and to keep them within limits. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: High-speed networks are definitely essential tools for leading-edge applications in many research areas, including nuclear fusion research. This paper describes a number of advanced features in the Japanese next-generation science information network, called SINET3, and gives researchers clues on the uses of advanced high-speed network for their applications. The network services have four categories, multiple layer transfer, enriched virtual private network, enhanced quality-of-service, and bandwidth on demand services, and comprise a versatile service platform. The paper also describes the network architecture and advanced networking capabilities that enable economical service accommodation and flexible network resource assignment as well as effective use of Japan''s first 40-Gbps lines. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The work in this paper is directed towards sophisticated formalisms for reasoning under probabilistic uncertainty in ontologies in the Semantic Web. Ontologies play a central role in the development of the Semantic Web, since they provide a precise definition of shared terms in web resources. They are expressed in the standardized web ontology language OWL, which consists of the three increasingly expressive sublanguages OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full. The sublanguages OWL Lite and OWL DL have a formal semantics and a reasoning support through a mapping to the expressive description logics and , respectively. In this paper, we present the expressive probabilistic description logics P- and P-, which are probabilistic extensions of these description logics. They allow for expressing rich terminological probabilistic knowledge about concepts and roles as well as assertional probabilistic knowledge about instances of concepts and roles. They are semantically based on the notion of probabilistic lexicographic entailment from probabilistic default reasoning, which naturally interprets this terminological and assertional probabilistic knowledge as knowledge about random and concrete instances, respectively. As an important additional feature, they also allow for expressing terminological default knowledge, which is semantically interpreted as in Lehmann''s lexicographic entailment in default reasoning from conditional knowledge bases. Another important feature of this extension of and by probabilistic uncertainty is that it can be applied to other classical description logics as well. We then present sound and complete algorithms for the main reasoning problems in the new probabilistic description logics, which are based on reductions to reasoning in their classical counterparts, and to solving linear optimization problems. In particular, this shows the important result that reasoning in the new probabilistic description logics is decidable/computable. Furthermore, we also analyze the computational complexity of the main reasoning problems in the new probabilistic description logics in the general as well as restricted cases. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Bayesian Networks (Bns) are emerging as a valid approach for modelling and supporting decision making in the field of water resource management. Based on the coupling of an interaction graph to a probabilistic model, they have the potential to improve participation and allow integration with other models. The wide availability of ready-to-use software with which Bn models can be easily designed and implemented on a PC is further contributing to their spread. Although a number of papers are available in which the application of Bns to water-related problems is investigated, the majority of these works use the Bn semantics to model the whole water system, and thus do not discuss their integration with other types of model. In this paper some pros and cons of adopting Bns for water resource planning and management are analyzed by framing their use within the context of a participatory and integrated planning procedure, and exploring how they can be integrated with other types of models. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Visual analysts are engaged with the arduous task of scrutinizing increasingly larger data sets. Where conventional desktop displays are reaching their limits in terms of performance efficiency with large data sets, analysts can turn to larger displays. In a world of extensive multi-scale data sets, large high-resolution displays have the potential to show both more overview and detail for a given data set than their smaller counterparts. In addition, people are able to use their embodied resources, such as spatial memory, proprioception, and optical flow to help them maintain orientation and improve performance times on analytic tasks when using larger displays. This paper looks at how physical navigation, physically interacting with large scale visualizations (e.g. walking, crouching, moving the head), affects user performance times on analytic tasks, such as finding patterns in geospatial data. The paper extends the space–scale diagram to take into account physical navigation and explains the theoretical repercussions. The paper then explains an empirical study performed for the purpose of further understanding how physical and virtual navigation affect performance times of tasks on varying size displays. In general, we found that large displays can decrease performance time of basic visualization tasks by more than ten times. In addition, we found overwhelming evidence from the empirical study that participants preferred physical navigation over virtual navigation (e.g. mouse interaction). Specifically, we found that for a number of tasks 100% of the participants chose to physically navigate—physically moving to different areas on the display instead of using virtual navigation to manipulate the view on the display. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A quantitative measure for the fairness of network resource distribution was proposed in [1]. This fairness function is widely adopted in network design and management. This paper proposes a new distribution fairness score function. Compared to the fairness function proposed by Jain, Chiu and Hawe, the fairness function proposed in this paper keeps all the nice properties that Jain, Chiu and Hawe''s fairness function possesses. In addition, the proposed fairness score function has better performance in dealing with completely unfair cases. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper, we address the problem of the end-to-end QoS management for multimedia and real-time applications. We would focus on the presentation of a multi-profile communication environment and its reliability in ensuring end-to-end QoS management in the network communication processes. This communication environment, called Virtual Communication Support (VCS), provides a dynamic assignment of application requirements to the network resources reservation and protocol layers invocation. The advantage of this model is that it performs the capabilities of the network by abstracting the details of all communication stacks-layers that must be invoked in the communication process from application specificities and needs. A great attention is devoted to the end-to-end QoS management in the VCS communication model. We would present our approach for the development of a transport middleware for end-to-end QoS control. This middleware performs the QoS management with an adaptive and predictive algorithm based on the network jitter measurement. The main contribution of this paper is that it provides a solution to predict congestion during communication process and then it can avoid network overloading. This is of several importances when we are streaming multimedia real-time packets. In fact, when real-time application losses some packets it may lead to unfavorable situations. Our approach for the specification and the design of the middleware is based on the use of the Specification and Description Language (SDL). This is a formal description technique that enables model validation extension and reusability. The dynamic behavior of this model is being checked with the Message Sequence Chart (MSC). The simulation and validation of this middleware was performed for the VCS. It was simulated by The Network Simulator (NS). Some profiles with the JAVA language on the Fast-Ethernet Local Area Network. Its testing was performed for a real-time manufacturing process and multimedia supervision for control processes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The paper proposes an adaptive web system—that is, a website that is capable of changing its original design to fit user requirements. For the purpose of improving shortcomings of the website, and also to make it much easier for users to access information, the system analyzes user browsing patterns from their access records. This paper concentrates on the operating-efficiency of a website—that is, the efficiency with which a group of users browse a website. By achieving high efficiency, users spend less operating cost to accomplish a desired user goal. Based on user access data, we analyze each user''s operating activities as well as their browsing sequences. With this data, we can calculate a measure of the efficiency of the user''s browsing sequences. The paper develops an algorithm to accurately calculate this efficiency and to suggest how to increase the efficiency of user operations. This can be achieved in two ways: (i) by adding a new link between two web pages, or (ii) by suggesting to designers to reconsider existing inefficient links so as to allow users to arrive at their target pages more quickly. Using this algorithm, we develop a prototype to prove the concept of efficiency. The implementation is an adaptive website system to automatically change the website architecture according to user browsing activities and to improve website usability from the viewpoint of efficiency. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract Today, telecommunication networks are the basis for deploying different types of cloud applications and services in data centers. The growing use of the cloud computing concept to provide access to applications and services every year increases the amount of converged network traffic. Existing approaches for traffic routing which using in the software defined-network don't provide enough flexible solutions, able to adapt to changes in traffic flows in real time. At peak load, this leads to an overabundance of traffic to specific physical network nodes which are not prepared to handle a large data flow. One of the approaches that make it possible to solve this problem is the organization of adaptive traffic routing. In this paper are describes the developed approaches for effective control of traffic flow in the virtual data center. Our approaches are using the methods of the data mining and machine learning to more accurately classify and identify traffic flows of cloud applications and network services. This information helps for optimization traffic routes in real time. Another element of the proposed complex solution is solving the task of identifying routes in the virtual network of a data center. Within the framework of the research, the problem of route identification has been decomposed into two consecutive subproblems. The first part is aimed at the classification of communication channels in a virtual data center for a number of features that are characteristic of all superimposed networks. At the second part, based on the received data, the routes are clustered in accordance with the QoS requirements imposed by the current traffic flows. The received data are combined with information about the current flows of the circulating network and are fed to the input of the neural network to decide on the choice of a suitable route. Thus, the solution of the task of adaptive routing allows determining the priorities when creating the bandwidth of traffic flows, as well as establishing rules for managing the network of the data center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classification of subjects with different stages of knee OsteoArthritis (OA) using bone texture analysis is a challenging task in medical imaging. This paper presents a new approach for texture analysis of radiographic OA in knee X-ray images. First, a preprocessing step based on a 2D finite impulse response filter is applied on the X-ray images. Then, a set of image content descriptors is extracted from the complex wavelet decomposition using different statistics of a new concept of the relative phases of complex coefficients. The Von Mises and wrapped Cauchy probability density functions are used to model the distribution of relative phase coefficients. Finally, the estimated parameters for each image are used in the classification task, to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed texture analysis on knee X-ray images from the OsteoArthritis Initiative (OAI). Results show that the proposed approach leads to improved texture analysis with a classification rate of 80.38%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uniform energy consumption and its optimization is a major concern for designing the clustering and routing protocol for large scale wireless sensor networks. Most of the existing nature-inspired computing based solutions for cluster-based routing problem for wireless senor network, suffer from unbalanced energy consumption issues. This is due to fact that nodes near to the sink are overloaded in terms of traffic load. In this research work, problem of energy balanced node clustering and routing between cluster heads and the sink are considered. This paper proposed an improved cuckoo search-based energy balanced node clustering protocol which uses a novel objective function for uniform distribution of cluster heads. In addition, an improved harmony search based routing protocol is proposed for routing of the data packet between cluster heads and the sink. The performance of the proposed integrated clustering and routing protocol is evaluated using the average energy consumption, the number of alive nodes, number of dead nodes and network lifetime. The proposed Cuckoo–Harmony Search-based integrated clustering and routing protocol shows significant improvement over the state-of-art protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the trajectory tracking control problem of redundant robot manipulators at the actuator level is studied. In the proposed control scheme, RBF (Radial Basis Function) neural network and adaptive bound part is combined with the model based controller. All the existing uncertainties are learned with the RBF neural network without offline learning. The uncertain parameters, the bounded external disturbances and the neural network reconstruction error are approximated by the adaptive bound part. The hybrid controller is designed in such a way that both the trajectory tracking error and subtask task tracking error converges to zero as well as it controls the DC motors that are used to provide the required currents and torques. Finally, the Lyapunovs stability analysis is used to prove the overall closed loop system to be asymptotically stable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the literature, several researches on food recommendation and automatic menu generation have been proposed, taking into account different aspects, such as personal and cultural preferences, health and religion constraints, menu composition and recipe co-occurrence. However, recommending recipes and menus, which not only meet the user's preferences, but are also compliant with best food habits, is still an open issue. This paper presents the PREFer food recommender system, apt to provide users with personalized and healthy menus, taking into account both user's short/long-term preferences and medical prescriptions. Prescriptions classify the ideal user ' s nutrition behaviour from the health point of view, with constraints imposed by the specific user's phenotype. In fact, major novel contribution of the proposed system is the use of prescription types associated with users' profiles to improve users' behaviour in selecting food. The recommended menus are generated through three steps. First, according to user's request, recipes are selected by content-based filtering, based on comparisons among features used to annotate both users' profiles and recipes. Second, candidate menus are generated using the selected recipes. Third, menus are refined and ranked taking into account also prescriptions. The PREFer system has been developed within a regional project, related to the main topics “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life” of the 2015 World Exposition (EXPO2015, Milan, Italy), where the University of Brescia aimed at promoting healthy behavioural habits in nutrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anomaly detection has to do with finding patterns in data that do not conform to an expected behavior. It has recently attracted the attention of the research community because of its real-world application. The correct detection unusual events empower the decision maker with the capacity to act on the system in order to correctly avoid, correct, or react to the situations associated with them. Petroleum industry is one of such real-world application scenarios. In particular, heavy extraction machines for pumping and generation operations like turbomachines are intensively monitored by hundreds of sensors each that send measurements with a high frequency for damage prevention. For dealing with this and with the lack of labeled data, in this paper we describe a combination of a fast and high quality segmentation algorithm with a one-class support vector machine approach for efficient anomaly detection in turbomachines. As a result we perform empirical studies comparing our approach to another using Kalman filters in a real-life application related to oil platform turbomachinery anomaly detection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]