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Rewinding machines are used in the paper converting industrial sector to unroll paper veils from large source reels and wind them around smaller rolls, for the production of paper logs to be used in household activities. Many different types of rewinding machine exist, and they are mostly based on stapling devices which automatically unroll a large coil of paper, roll it up around a new log, stop the veil allowing it to be torn off, unload the completed paper log, and reload a new paper core to be rolled up. Winding units generally include a primary and a secondary roller, supplying the desired rotational speed for winding, and a pressure unit consisting of a pressure roller in contact with the paper log being rolled up, which assures adequate containment and avoids the paper log to escape. All known systems have some mechanical limitations, mainly due to the contact of the pressure roller with the paper log, causing instabilities and vibrations, particularly when working with soft paper veils. This limits the maximum possible winding speed. The aim of this paper is it to present a detailed kinematic analysis of a novel pressure unit which overcomes the aforementioned limitation.

In this paper, we analyze the intelligent subdesign of the simulated marking system through an in-depth study of it. This paper proposes a correlation analysis-based quantification of N-element sense values and a rationality enhancement-based scoring fitting algorithm for English essays. This paper also extracts word features, sentence features, and chapter structure features in essays to fit English composition scores. Since not all students can complete the essays according to the topic requirements, a triage scoring model is used to separate the normal essays from the low-scoring essays. Statistically, it was found that the essay scores also showed a certain normal distribution. The standard support vector regression algorithm is prone to data skewing problems, so this paper addresses this problem by using a rationality enhancement method that gives a corresponding penalty factor according to the distribution of the dataset. The results show that the English essay scoring fitting algorithm proposed in this paper can well improve the prediction accuracy of some data and solve the problem of skewed data where the scores show a normal distribution. This paper designs and implements an online mock examination system that incorporates an intelligent scoring system for essays, enabling it to meet the needs of teachers and students for online examinations and intelligent scoring.

In the paper industry, numerous studies have explored means of optimizing order allocation and cutting trim loss. However, enterprises may not adopt the resulting solutions because some widths of the inventory exceed or are less than those required for acceptable scheduling. To ensure that the results better suit the actual requirements, we present a new decision model based on the adjustment of scheduling and limitation of inventory quantity to differentiate trim loss and inventory distribution data. Differential analysis is used to reduce data filtering and the information is valuable for decision making. A numerical example is presented to illustrate the applicability of the proposed method. The results show that our proposed method outperforms the manual method regarding scheduling quantity and trim loss.

In the 1960s, through studies on Korean Medicine, Bonghan Kim proposed the Bonghan systems (BS) as the anatomical reality of the acupuncture meridians based on various experimental data. Since 2002, several groups, mainly led by a team at Seoul National University, who renamed the BS as the primo vascular system (PVS), have published around 70 papers showing biological structures corresponding to the BS. However, it is still difficult for other researchers to find them, especially under the skin, which Bonghan Kim first reported as acupuncture points, due to similar-looking biological tissues, for example, the lymphatic vessels, and such artifacts as blood clots or fascia debris. To solve these drawbacks, we examined the main methods for identifying the BS by comparing the original papers with the modern outcomes in terms of the common physical/chemical characteristics of the BS. In addition, effective methods of staining and microscopic observations discovered by modern teams are synthetically explained using visual materials such as diagrams and photos. Through the essentially organized methods in this review paper, we suggest that one can find the BS under the skin as putative acupuncture points by tracing the intraexternal BS, from which a new Korean Medicine will be born.

To attend or not to attend, that is the question. The Pittsburgh Conference continues to pose this conundrum to conferees and exhibitors alike. This year's conference was the first to be presented without a set of paper abstracts—a good thing some would say but this old codger always used the paper abstracts to select papers of interest to our readership and to seek a full publication. The exhibit took its usual format but it seemed that there were less manufacturers present. The information presented to the attendees was also lacking and many companies' details were missing from the final program book, an omission no doubt on their behalf—my company was one of these—however I feel sure that past Pittcon organizers would have been more persistent in getting the required details for the audience. As is now the norm, many of the presentations take the form of posters displayed within the exhibition area. Without a driver to get the audience there, the traffic was slow, to say the least. Lecture presentations were also attended in a mixed fashion. So the Pittsburgh Conference show moves on, and again next year it will be held in Orlando from 12 March to 17 March 2006. No doubt I will be there making it a straight 31 in a row; in Pittsburgh Conference terms I am just a beginner with many of the attendees making more shows in a run than that. Selected abstracts dealing with topics of interest to the readers of this journal follow—hopefully many of these groups will be willing to publish their work either within this journal or elsewhere.

Electromagnetic cloaking has been widely studied in recent years. In this review article we explain the basic principles of numerical modeling and characterization of selected broadband cloaking structures that are designed to operate within the microwave frequency range. Because the cloaks are periodical structures, the numerical modeling is simplified by employing symmetry boundary conditions. The modeling and characterization are done both with frequency-domain and time-domain simulations. Various experimental results are also compared to numerical results. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 22:483–495, 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Smartphones have become indispensable computational tools. However, some tasks can be difficult to perform on a smartphone because these devices have small displays. Here, we explore methods for augmenting the display of a smartphone, or other PDA, using interactive paper. Specifically, we present a prototype interface that enables a user to interactively interrogate technical drawings using an Anoto-based smartpen and a PDA. Our software system, called PaperCAD, enables users to query geometric information from CAD drawings printed on Anoto dot-patterned paper. For example, the user can measure a distance by drawing a dimension arrow. The system provides output to the user via a smartpen’s audio speaker and the dynamic video display of a PDA. The user can select either verbose or concise audio feedback, and the PDA displays a video image of the portion of the drawing near the pen tip. The project entails advances in the interpretation of pen input, such as a method that uses contextual information to interpret ambiguous dimensions and a technique that uses a hidden Markov model to correct interpretation errors in handwritten equations. Results of a user study suggest that our user interface design and interpretation techniques are effective and that users are highly satisfied with the system.

This example considers the problem of finding a suitable assignment of a set of referees to each one of a set of papers submitted to a conference, given the preferences expressed by the referees regarding the papers they are willing to review, the adequation between their areas of competence and the topics of the papers, and a set of regulations bearing on the global assignment. This example illustrates the issue of fusing heterogeneous data consisting of individual preference profiles and a set of global regulations. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

This is the third special issue published in this journal with selected contributions from the VI Southern Conference on Programmable Logic (SPL, www.splconf.org). SPL is one of the first-class conferences on programmable logic around the world. Started in 2005, SPL has since 2007 the technical cosponsorship of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS). The conference has been always organized in the south hemisphere. The selection of papers presented in this special issue is coming from the last 6th edition, held in Ipojuca, Brazil, from March 24 to 26, 2010. This issue is focused on speech and video acceleration applications. The first paper by P. Eh Kan et al., “FPGA implementation for GMM-based speaker identification” in the area of biometric-based speaker identification, describes the hardware implementation for classification of a text-independent (Gaussian mixture model) GMMbased speaker identification system. Authors show that the proposed hardware implementation allows simultaneous identification processing for a large number of voice streams in real time. In “FPGA implementation of a pipelined Gaussian calculation for HMM-based large-vocabulary speech recognition,” R. Veitch et al. present several alternatives for a Gaussian core as part of a larger speech recognition system. These cores are developed as an embedded peripheral and as a scalable, parallel hardware accelerator. Next, in “A high throughput hardware architecture for the H.264/AVC half-pixel motion estimation targeting high definition videos,” M. M. Correa et al. present a highperformance hardware implementation for the H.264/AVC half-pixel motion estimation that targets high-definition videos. This design can process very high-definition videos like QHDTV (3840 × 2048) in real time (30 frames per second). E. C. Pedrino et al. in the area of computer vision presented “A genetic programming approach to reconfigure a morphological image processing architecture.” They report the development of a reconfigurable architecture using logical, arithmetic, and morphological instructions generated automatically by a genetic programming approach. Related to cryptographic algorithms, G. Perin et al., in “Montgomery modular multiplication on reconfigurable hardware: systolic versus multiplexed implementation,” develop two Montgomery modular multiplication architectures: a systolic and a multiplexed circuit with competitive results. Finally, A. G. Silva-Filho et al. presented an advanced EDA tool in the paper “An ESL approach for energy consumption analysis of cache memories in SoC platforms” in the area of design space exploration. They propose an electronicsystem-level (ESL) approach for system modeling and cache energy consumption analysis of SoCs.

The fundamental need for environmental preservation has been calling, around the world, for the development and deployment of friendly industrial processes. Moreover, presently, development has to take into account sustainability. Within this context, enzyme technology is of outmost importance, having a major role for the achievement of the goals of sustainable development. This technology is of particular significance to Brazil due to the need to preserve Brazil's singular ecosystems, biodiversity, and quality and availability of the country's water resources. Furthermore, Brazil has an unrivalled availability of natural wealth, in both diversity and quantity, to be processed, via biocatalysis, into a wide range of diverse and innovative products as well as into biofules. Enzymes are the logical tool to process renewable resources as both of them have naturally evolved to match each other. It is now, therefore, time to develop dexterity and expand the use of enzymes in a fully efficient manner. As biochemical processes are cleaner than its chemical counterparts and generate higher-quality products, this shift would benefit the country's socioeconomic development. However, going from traditional chemistry into enzymatic processes is more than a technical and economical challenge, it is a change in the way we think technology—scientific and technical knowledge— and thoughtfulness are much needed. The Brazilian Seminar on Enzyme Technology (ENZITEC) has been taking place every two years since 2003. Its main objective has been to further the knowledge on the wide range of industrial, technical, and specialty enzymes alongside promoting its economic viability. The event encompasses the worldwide interest in industrial enzyme research and uses vis-a-vis the necessary move toward biocatalysis. Eight papers, which were selected from a wealth of submitted manuscripts, were accepted for publication in this special issue of Enzyme Research. They relate to fundamental areas of enzyme research and technology such as microbial screening, enzymes production and characterization, fine chemistry, biorefinery, and biofuels. Denise M. G. Freire Elba P. S. Bon Gustavo Viniegra-Gonzalez Francisco Girio Robert F. H. Dekker

As the chairs for the SC12 Technical Papers, we were surprised and delighted to have the highest number of technical paper submissions ever to the SC conference series. Authors submitted 472 paper for review, and the 175 member program committee accepted 100 of these papers for presentation during the conference – an acceptance rate of 21%. From these 100 papers, the committee also nominated exceptional papers as finalists for Best Paper and Best Student Paper, numbering six and nine papers, respectively, with two papers in both categories. The authors of several of these finalist papers were offered the opportunity to publish extended versions of their papers in this special issue; ten authors accepted. Here, we provide a brief introduction to these ten papers. “Compiler-directed file layout optimization for hierarchical storage systems” by Wei Ding, Yuanrui Zhang, Mahmut Kandemir and Seung Woo Son. This paper describes a new perspective on optimizing file layouts for hierarchical storage caches using compilerdriven analysis. The fully automated method shows improvements on 16 I/O intensive workloads, increasing performance by 23.7% on average. “Efficient and reliable network tomography in heterogeneous networks using BitTorrent broadcasts and clustering algorithms” by Kiril Dichev, Fergal Reid and Alexey Lastovetsky. This paper describes a new solution to the problem of managing end-to-end bandwidth in BitTorrent-style data transfers. Their method

1 Reconfigurable Computing Group, Computer Science Department, National Institute for Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, 72840 Puebla, PUE, Mexico 2Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech Configurable Computing Laboratory, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA 3 Institute for Information Processing Technology (ITIV), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany

The 2012 International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Security (CIS) is the ninth one focusing on all areas of two crucial fields in information processing: computational intelligence (CI) and information security (IS). In particular, the CIS Conference provides a platform to explore the potential applications of CI models, algorithms, and technologies to IS.

A fault detection, isolation, and estimation approach is proposed in this paper based on Interactive Multimodel (IMM) fusion filtering and Strong Tracking Filtering (STF) for asynchronous multisensors dynamic systems. Time-varying fault is considered and a candidate fault model is built by augmenting the unknown fault amplitude directly into the system state for each kind of possible fault mode. By doing this, the dilemma of predetermining the fault extent as model design parameters in traditional IMM-based approaches is avoided. After that, the time-varying fault amplitude is estimated based on STF using its strong ability to track abrupt changes and robustness against model uncertainties. Through fusing information from multiple sensors, the performance of fault detection, isolation, and estimation is approved. Finally, a numerical simulation is performed to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

Members of the aerospace fan community have systematically developed computational methods over the last five decades. The complexity of the developed methods and the difficulty associated with their practical application ensured that, although commercial computational codes date back to the 1980s, they were not fully exploited by industrial fan designers until the beginning of the 2000s. The application of commercial codes proved to be problematic as, unlike aerospace fans, industrial fans include electrical motors and other components from which the flow will invariably separate. Consequently, industrial fan designers found the application of commercial codes challenging. The decade from 2000 to 2010 was focused on developing techniques that would facilitate converged solutions that predicted the fans’ performance characteristics over the stable part of their operating range with reasonable accuracy, using a practical computational effort. In this paper, we focus on elucidating aspects of the flow physics that one cannot easily study in a laboratory environment, discussing the challenges involved and the relative merits of the available modelling techniques. The paper ends with a discussion of the practical problems associated with the use of commercial codes in a development environment and finally the legislation that is driving the need for aerospace style computation methods.

This special issue contains extensions of the best papers from the First International Workshops on Software Engineering for High Performance Computing in Computational Science & Engineering (SE-HPCCSE 2013), which was held during the SC’13 conference. For full details about the workshop (and others in this series), please visit the workshop website http://SE4Science.org/workshops, where the interested reader can find an overview of the workshop, the schedule, and links to the published proceedings. The goal of the workshop was to bring together researchers from different domains (i.e., computational science, software engineering, and high-performance computing) to present their work and discuss important issues related to the intersection of these fields. Because the format of the workshop allows for short paper presentations along with ample time for small group discussion, this workshop provides a unique venue where researchers fromdifferent backgrounds canmeet and interact in amore informal setting.This editorial first briefly describes the interesting results of the group discussions. Then, it provides a brief overview of the three papers included in the special issue.

With the advancement of high-throughput sequencing technologies, the amount of available sequencing data is growing at a pace that has now begun to greatly challenge the data processing and storage capacities of modern computer systems. Removing redundancy from such data by clustering could be crucial for reducing memory, disk space and running time consumption. In addition, it also has good performance on reducing dataset noise in some analysis applications. In this study, we propose a high-performance short sequence classification algorithm (HSC) for next generation sequencing (NGS) data based on efficient hash function and text similarity. First, HSC converts all reads intok-mers, then it forms a uniquek-merset by merging the duplicated and reverse complementary elements. Second, all uniquek-mersare stored in a hash table, where thek-merstring is stored in the key field, and the ID of the reads containing thek-merare stored in the value field. Third, each hash unit is transformed into a short text consisting of reads. Fourth, texts that satisfy the similarity threshold are combined into a long text, the merge operation is executed iteratively until there is no text that satisfies the merge condition. Finally, the long text is transformed into a cluster consisting of reads. We tested HSC using five real datasets. The experimental results showed that HSC cluster 100 million short reads within 2 hours, and it has excellent performance in reducing memory consumption. Compared to existing methods, HSC is much faster than other tools, it can easily handle tens of millions of sequences. In addition, when HSC is used as a preprocessing tool to produce assembly data, the memory and time consumption of the assembler is greatly reduced. It can help the assembler to achieve better assemblies in terms of N50, NA50 and genome fraction.

The paper is devoted to the problem of discriminating between operational and natural modes of structures excited by generic inputs. This case often occurs when the system under analysis holds rotating parts and is contemporary excited by ambient noise; in this case the output-only techniques may fail being easily trapped in a misinterpretation of the system eigenvalues. A survey of the methods available in literature is given, together with the explanation of their failures. To solve this problem, two new techniques are introduced and their capabilities are checked with numerical and experimental data from a paper machine.

It is the intention of this paper to demonstrate that environmental technology must be supplemented by other tools to be able to solve environmental problems properly. Five cases are used to illustrate the possibilities of ecological engineering, a new engineering field based on ecology, as chemical engineering is based on chemistry. It encompasses restoration of ecosystems, utilization of ecosystems to the benefit of both mankind and nature, construction of ecosystems, and ecologically sound planning of ecosystems from a holistic point of view. Ecological engineering requires a good knowledge of the system properties of ecosystems to be able to fully utilize the possibilities that ecosystem management offers. Models reflecting the ecosystem properties are furthermore needed to be able to quantify the effects of the ecological engineering solutions to the environmental problems. This is clearly demonstrated in two of the five case studies presented in the paper.

Unobtrusive Authentication Using ACTIvity-Related and Soft BIOmetrics (ACTIBIO) is an EU Specific Targeted Research Project (STREP) where new types of biometrics are combined with state-of-the-art unobtrusive technologies in order to enhance security in a wide spectrum of applications. The project aims to develop a modular, robust, multimodal biometrics security authentication and monitoring system, which uses a biodynamic physiological profile, unique for each individual, and advancements of the state of the art in unobtrusive behavioral and other biometrics, such as face, gait recognition, and seat-based anthropometrics. Several shortcomings of existing biometric recognition systems are addressed within this project, which have helped in improving existing sensors, in developing new algorithms, and in designing applications, towards creating new, unobtrusive, biometric authentication procedures in security-sensitive, Ambient Intelligence environments. This paper presents the concept of the ACTIBIO project and describes its unobtrusive authentication demonstrator in a real scenario by focusing on the vision-based biometric recognition modalities.

Query answering requirements for a knowledge-based treatment of user requests led us to introduce the concept of closure of an intuitionistic fuzzy set over a universe that has a hierarchical structure. We recommend the automatic analysis of queries according to concepts defined as part of knowledge-based hierarchies to guide the query answering as part of an integrated database environment with the aid of hierarchical intuitionistic fuzzy sets (H-IFS). In this paper based on the notion of H-IFS, we propose an ad hoc utility build on top of Oracle10g that allows us to enhance the query capabilities of by providing better, knowledgeable, and optimized answers to user's requests. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

SummarymiRNAs are small, non-coding RNAs that play critical roles in various cellular processes. Although there are several algorithms that can predict the potential candidate genes that are regulated by a miRNA, these algorithms require further experimental validation in order to demonstrate genuine targets of miRNAs. Moreover, most algorithms predict hundreds to thousands of putative target genes for each miRNA, and it is difficult to validate all candidates using the whole 3′-untranslated region (UTR) reporter assay. We report a fast, simple and efficient experimental approach to screening miRNA candidate targets using a 3′-UTR linker assay. Critically, the linker has only a short miRNA regulatory element sequence of approximately 22 base pairs in length and can provide a benefit for screening strong miRNA candidates for further validation using the whole 3′-UTR sequence. Our technique will provide a simplified platform for the high-throughput screening of miRNA target gene validation.