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Electrical installations in hazardous locations (classified areas) need careful attention because nonconformities can bring considerable risks not only to the site but also for other industries and residential areas nearby. To assure safe operation of an industrial facility, it is not only necessary for all electrical and electronic equipment to be used in hazardous locations to be correctly specified and purchased (known as “Ex equipment”) but also properly installed and maintained. The discussion in this paper is largely based upon International Electrotechnical Commission standards; however, conceptually, the same philosophy is also found in American standards and installations as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a considerable number of software projects, the creation of effective test cases is hindered by design documentation that is either lacking, incomplete, or obsolete. The exploratory testing approach can serve as a sound method in such situations. However, the efficiency of this testing approach strongly depends on the method, the documentation of explored parts of a system, the organization and distribution of work among individual testers on a team, and the minimization of potential (very probable) duplicities in performed tests. In this paper, we present a framework for replacing and automating a portion of these tasks. A screen-flow-based model of the tested system is incrementally reconstructed during the exploratory testing process by tracking testers’ activities. With additional metadata, the model serves for an automated navigation process for a tester. Compared with the exploratory testing approach, which is manually performed in two case studies, the proposed framework allows the testers to explore a greater extent of the tested system and enables greater detection of the defects present in the system. The results show that the time efficiency of the testing process improved with the framework support. This efficiency can be increased by team-based navigational strategies that are implemented within the proposed framework, which is documented by another case study presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geospatial data provenance records sources and processing steps that are used in deriving geospatial data products. In the Web of Data environment enabled by Linked Data technologies, sources and processing steps, such as geospatial data and geoprocessing services, can be published as part of the Web of Data. To take full advantages of the machine-understandable format and linkages among heterogeneous data items in the Web of Data, this paper proposes to publish geospatial data provenance into the Web of Data. In particular, it analyzes how a catalogue for provenance, i.e., geospatial data provenance managed by a geospatial metadata catalog service, can be published into the Web of Data using a Linked Data approach. Consequently, queries over linked geospatial data provenance are analyzed and tested to demonstrate the benefits of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating dynamic functional network connectivity (dFNC) of the brain from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data can reveal both spatial and temporal organization and can be applied to track the developmental trajectory of brain maturity as well as to study mental illness. Resting state fMRI (rs-fMRI) is regarded as a promising task since it reflects the spontaneous brain activity without an external stimulus. The sliding window method has been successfully used to extract dFNC but typically assumes a fixed window size. The hidden Markov model (HMM) based method is an alternative approach for estimating time-varying connectivity. In this paper, we propose a sparse HMM based on Gaussian HMM and Gaussian graphical model (GGM). In this model, the time-varying neural processes are represented as discrete brain states which are described with functional connectivity networks. By enforcing the sparsity on the precision matrix, we can get interpretable connectivity between different functional regions. The optimization of our model can be realized with the expectation maximization (EM) and graphical least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (glasso) algorithms. The proposed model is validated on both simulated blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) time series and rs-fMRI data. Results indicate that the proposed model can capture both stationary and abrupt brain activity fluctuations. We also compare dFNC patterns between children and young adults from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) study. Both spatial and temporal behavior of the dFNC are analyzed and compared. The results provide insight into the developmental trajectory across childhood and motivate further research on brain connectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides instructions and guidelines to prospective authors who wish to submit manuscripts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes the combined use of ground penetrating radar (GPR) data with historical archives performed in the silo-yard of Valencia (Spain) to identify and map various pavement construction periods. The Valencian silos were constructed to house the underground grain storage of Valencia City. This architectural complex is composed of three buildings and a big square (silo-yard), under which 41 silos are placed. The construction of the silo-yard pavement extended for two centuries (16–18th century) following different construction systems. Historical archives confirmed seven pavement construction periods. However, archive data provided scant information on pavement layers and the construction periods. A GPR survey was carried out for pinpointing the seven pavement construction periods. A GSSI SIR-3000 equipment with a 400-MHz frequency antenna was used for collecting 1 \times 1\;\textm grid - 141 profiles across the square (5110\;\textm^2), reaching 1.5-m depth. In addition, a GPS survey was performed specifically for surface mapping the silo-yard in detail. The combined use of the GPR data (2-D reflection profiles, spectra, and amplitude slice maps) with the historical archives allowed identifying and delineating the different pavement construction periods on the silo-yard map in terms of materials and thicknesses. These results demonstrate GPR is a noninvasive and nondestructive technique for mapping soils and near surface horizons. Additionally, the combined use of the GPR data with the historical documentation makes this technique even more efficient for the comprehension of shallow ground layers, especially in cultural heritage studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The complexity of modern chips is rapidly increasing. To fulfill tight time-to-market constraints, more and more blocks from previous designs are reused or third party IP blocks are licensed. However, such blocks are often only poorly documented making adjustments to the blocks a difficult task. This paper presents a technique for automatic feature localization for hardware designs. Our approach helps a developer in understanding a design by localizing parts of the code which implement a certain feature of interest. We evaluate the approach on three open source designs. For those designs, our approach yields a more precise localization of the code implementing the different features than the documentation of the design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: This document describes the implementation of an automated document-generation process for the creation of software-quality reports compliant with the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) standards. Research statement: We propose a solution for the generation of technical documents that collect and aggregate data from different sources. In addition, we analyze the feasibility of building a solution that supports engineers in the generation of these complex artifacts. Situating the case: The structure and content of Software Product Assurance Milestone Reports and Software Verification Reports are defined in ECSS-Q-ST-80C and ECSS-M-ST-40C. Companies developing software for the European Space Agency must prepare these reports to detail development activities and the subsequent quality of software products. These reports incorporate data generated from different activities and managed with different software engineering tools. Case study: The automation techniques described in this paper were designed to create complex documents (quality and verification reports) based on the use of XML for data exchange and integration, and a set of connectors to collect software engineering data generated using different applications for requirements management, architectural design, testing, etc. Conclusions: The feasibility of the proposed solution was validated by applying it to two projects in the aerospace industry. The conclusion demonstrates that the automatic generation of complex documents from multiple sources of data is economically feasible and may produce benefits, including time to delivery and a significant reduction of production costs, by using existing XML-related technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-mails are, rightly or wrongly, a staple of the information and communication technology for managing work and collaborative activities. This paper examines the value of the content of e-mail at a project level rather than at the often-studied level of the individual user. The dataset consists of e-mails authored by an engineering team associated with a large, complex, long term, systems integration project, typical of the aerospace, marine, and defense sectors. The research applied a qualitative content analysis methodology to classify the content (what the e-mail contains) and purpose (why the e-mail was sent) of the e-mail in the dataset. The results of the content analysis were compared and contrasted with secondary evidence from interviews and project documentation to enable a time-phased analysis. The findings show that classifying e-mail content by the categories of management, information, and problem-solving transactions revealed signatures that align with project phases and, more importantly, problems encountered. Finally, we found that the purpose of e-mail is not necessarily consistent with the designated job role or responsibility of the sender or recipient. This paper contributes to empirical data on the relation between communication and project performance and the changing nature of e-mail communication throughout the lifecycle of a project. The findings point to a new way to leverage e-mail content to “manage by e-mail”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Improvements in protection and control via communications methods used to exchange digital bits (DBs) among devices are common in progressive utilities in high-voltage substations. These improvements are now being incorporated into the process-sensitive electric power distribution systems of large industrial plants. Until now, new equipment purchases for new projects in industrial facilities using microprocessor (μP) multifunction protective relaying technology were typically done as a direct replacement of older technologies or as an updated equivalent. This paper describes a recently commissioned electrical substation design philosophy, including implementation, construction, maintenance, and performance with μP-based protective relaying, metering, and control schemes. These schemes extensively utilize the interdevice DB exchange and programmable logic capabilities of time-synchronized μP technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual privacy will be at risk if a published data set is not properly deidentified. κ-Anonymity is a major technique to deidentify a data set. Among a number of κ-anonymization schemes, local recoding methods are promising for minimizing the distortion of a κ-anonymity view. This paper addresses two major issues in local recoding κ-anonymization in attribute hierarchical taxonomies. First, we define a proper distance metric to achieve local recoding generalization with small distortion. Second, we propose a means to control the inconsistency of attribute domains in a generalized view by local recoding. We show experimentally that our proposed local recoding method based on the proposed distance metric produces higher quality κ-anonymity tables in three quality measures than a global recoding anonymization method, Incognito, and a multidimensional recoding anonymization method, Multi. The proposed inconsistency handling method is able to balance distortion and consistency of a generalized view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines, through citations, where the intelligent systems (IS) field has been and who of its key contributors have been. He states that to determine the set of articles to consider, he first found the article that had the most ISI citations and the number of Google citations for those reports. He relates that he utilized the H-Index to identify the number of papers on the most cited list. He discusses thet the number of articles in the most cited list differ according to year, but the correlation between year and number of citations was not statistically substantial.

Development of algorithms for automated text categorization in massive text document, sets is an important research area of data mining and knowledge discovery. Most of the text-clustering methods were grounded in the term-based measurement of distance or similarity, ignoring the Structure of the documents. In this paper, we present a novel method named structured cosine similarity (SCS) that furnishes document clustering with a new way of modeling on document summarization, considering the structure of the documents so as to improve the performance of document clustering in terms of quality, stability, and efficiency. This study was motivated by the problem of clustering speech documents (of no rich document features) attained from the wireless experience oral sharing conducted by mobile workforce of enterprises, fulfilling audio-based knowledge management. In other words, this problem aims to facilitate knowledge acquisition and sharing by speech. The evaluations also show fairly promising results on our method of structured cosine similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time update of access control policies, that is, updating policies while they are in effect and enforcing the changes immediately, is necessary for many security-critical applications. In this paper, we consider real-time update of access control policies in a database system. Updating policies while they are in effect can lead to potential security problems, such as, access to database objects by unauthorized users. In this paper, we propose several algorithms that not only prevent such security breaches but also ensure the correctness of execution. The algorithms differ from each other in the degree of concurrency provided and the semantic knowledge used. Of the algorithms presented, the most concurrency is achieved when transactions are decomposed into atomic steps. Once transactions are decomposed, the atomicity, consistency, and isolation properties no longer hold. Since the traditional transaction processing model can no longer be used to ensure the correctness of the execution, we use an alternate semantic-based transaction processing model. To ensure correct behavior, our model requires an application to satisfy a set of necessary properties, namely, semantic atomicity, consistent execution, sensitive transaction isolation, and policy-compliant. We show how one can verify an application statically to check for the existence of these properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial clustering has attracted a lot of research attention due to its various applications. In most conventional clustering problems, the similarity measurement mainly takes the geometric attributes into consideration. However, in many real applications, the nongeometric attributes are what users are concerned about. In the conventional spatial clustering, the input data set is partitioned into several compact regions and data points which are similar to one another in their nongeometric attributes may be scattered over different regions, thus making the corresponding objective difficult to achieve. To remedy this, we propose and explore in this paper a new clustering problem on two domains, called dual clustering, where one domain refers to the optimization domain and the other refers to the constraint domain. Attributes on the optimization domain are those involved in the optimization of the objective function, while those on the constraint domain specify the application dependent constraints. Our goal is to optimize the objective function in the optimization domain while satisfying the constraint specified in the constraint domain. We devise an efficient and effective algorithm, named Interlaced Clustering-Classification, abbreviated as ICC, to solve this problem. The proposed ICC algorithm combines the information in both domains and iteratively performs a clustering algorithm on the optimization domain and also a classifications algorithm on the constraint domain to reach the target clustering effectively. The time and space complexities of the ICC algorithm are formally analyzed. Several experiments are conducted to provide the insights into the dual clustering problem and the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data dictionary contains the description of all types of data produced, managed, exchanged, and maintained in an organization. Data descriptions (very often hundreds of schemas) should be organized in such a way to allow all the users of the information system to understand the meaning of data and their relationships. In this paper, a new set of structuring primitives is presented for a dictionary of entity relationship data schemas. The formal properties of such structuring primitives ire investigated and the feasibility of their usage is shown by providing a methodology for dictionary design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The SPD (Structured Programming Diagram) is a documentation technology used to design well structured programs. With SPD, designers can easily express functional structure, control structure, and physical layout of a program on one sheet of paper. Its straightforward expression appeals to both document writers and readers. SPD concept and conventions are introduced in this paper. SPD usage is then explained with a program design example. Other documentation technologies used in coordination with SPD are briefly touched upon. Finally; SPD reputation and evolution in the last ten years are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Code fragments with identical or similar functionality are called code clones. This study aims to detect semantic clones in Java-based programs, focusing on the method-level granularity. To accomplish this, our approach extracts and compares both semantical and structural features of Java methods and applies certain heuristics to obtain the final result set. The semantics of a method are often described by its documentation, while its structural details are characterized by its implementation within the code body. However, Java methods may not always be accompanied by descriptive documentation. To address this, we have employed a Generative AI tool named ChatGPT, which has the ability to understand the given code and generate its documentation. To compare the documentation of methods, we have used various corpus-based and knowledge-based information retrieval (IR) techniques. However, for comparing a method’s structural details, we tokenized the method’s body and applied an information retrieval technique called VSM (Vector Space Modelling) on the tokenized body. Additionally, we also extracted and compared certain method-level metrics for this purpose. Further, while doing the semantical comparison of methods, eight IR variants are formed based on the internal processing requirements of different IR techniques. The technique proposed in this paper relies on the textual and metrics-based analysis of Java programs with few parsing requirements, making it lightweight and less computation-intensive. To examine the efficiency of the proposed technique, we have validated it using a semantic clone benchmark. The results show that the proposed technique detects semantic clones with high recall values ranging from 67% to 81% and precision values ranging from 60% to 96% for different IR variants explored in our research.

The article discusses the use of intelligent systems in preserving and archiving digital artifacts. According to the article, such system is applicable in the identification, authentication, retrieval and creation of digital assets. In addition, it highlights the First International Workshop on Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web in Pusan, South Korea, wherein several papers were submitted concerning the topic. Furthermore, it provides some examples of the issues which offers a wide range of information and retain its diversity.

Aspect-oriented software development has become an important development and maintenance approach to software engineering across requirements, design and implementation phases. However, discovering early aspects from requirements for a better integration of crosscutting concerns into a target system is still not well addressed in the existing works. In this paper, we propose a Goal-driven Early Aspect approach (called GEA) to discovering early aspects by means of a clustering algorithm in which relationships among goals and use cases are utilized to explore similarity degrees of clustering goals, and total interaction degrees are devised to check the validity of the formation of each cluster. Introducing early aspects not only enhances the goal-driven requirements modeling to manage crosscutting concerns, but also provides modularity insights into the analysis and design of software development. Moreover, relationships among goals represented numerically are more informative to discover early aspects and more easily to be processed computationally than qualitative terms. The proposed approach is illustrated by using two problem domains: a meeting scheduler system and a course enrollment system. An experiment is also conducted to evaluate the benefits of the proposed approach with Mann-Whitney U-test to show that the difference between with GEA and without GEA is statistically significant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Source code lexicon plays a paramount role in software quality: poor lexicon can lead to poor comprehensibility and even increase software fault-proneness. For this reason, renaming a program entity, i.e., altering the entity identifier, is an important activity during software evolution. Developers rename when they feel that the name of an entity is not (anymore) consistent with its functionality, or when such a name may be misleading. A survey that we performed with 71 developers suggests that 39 percent perform renaming from a few times per week to almost every day and that 92 percent of the participants consider that renaming is not straightforward. However, despite the cost that is associated with renaming, renamings are seldom if ever documented—for example, less than 1 percent of the renamings in the five programs that we studied. This explains why participants largely agree on the usefulness of automatically documenting renamings. In this paper we propose REanaming Program ENTities (REPENT), an approach to automatically document—detect and classify—identifier renamings in source code. REPENT detects renamings based on a combination of source code differencing and data flow analyses. Using a set of natural language tools, REPENT classifies renamings into the different dimensions of a taxonomy that we defined. Using the documented renamings, developers will be able to, for example, look up methods that are part of the public API (as they impact client applications), or look for inconsistencies between the name and the implementation of an entity that underwent a high risk renaming (e.g., towards the opposite meaning). We evaluate the accuracy and completeness of REPENT on the evolution history of five open-source Java programs. The study indicates a precision of 88 percent and a recall of 92 percent. In addition, we report an exploratory study investigating and discussing how identifiers are renamed in the five programs, according to our taxonomy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a set of tools that are integrated with a word processor to produce documents in a visually impaired person's "preferred format." The paper considers the motivation for producing such tools and describes tools to perform spoken transcription (to cassette tape) and intelligent large print production.

Reading reference documentation is an important part of programming with application programming interfaces (APIs). Reference documentation complements the API by providing information not obvious from the API syntax. To improve the quality of reference documentation and the efficiency with which the relevant information it contains can be accessed, we must first understand its content. We report on a study of the nature and organization of knowledge contained in the reference documentation of the hundreds of APIs provided as a part of two major technology platforms: Java SDK 6 and .NET 4.0. Our study involved the development of a taxonomy of knowledge types based on grounded methods and independent empirical validation. Seventeen trained coders used the taxonomy to rate a total of 5,574 randomly sampled documentation units to assess the knowledge they contain. Our results provide a comprehensive perspective on the patterns of knowledge in API documentation: observations about the types of knowledge it contains and how this knowledge is distributed throughout the documentation. The taxonomy and patterns of knowledge we present in this paper can be used to help practitioners evaluate the content of their API documentation, better organize their documentation, and limit the amount of low-value content. They also provide a vocabulary that can help structure and facilitate discussions about the content of APIs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Assessing similarity of policies is crucial in a variety of scenarios, such as finding the cloud service providers which satisfy users' privacy concerns, or finding collaborators which have matching security and privacy settings. Existing approaches to policy similarity analysis are mainly based on logical reasoning and Boolean function comparison. Such approaches are computationally expensive and do not scale well for large heterogeneous distributed environments (like the cloud). In this paper, we propose a policy similarity measure as a lightweight ranking approach to help one party quickly locate parties with potentially similar policies. In particular, given a policy $(P)$, the similarity measure assigns a ranking (similarity score) to each policy compared with $(P)$. We formally define the measure by taking into account various factors and prove several important properties of the measure. Our extensive experimental study demonstrates the efficiency and practical value of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When calling a method that requires multiple arguments, programmers must pass the arguments in the expected order. For statically typed languages, the compiler helps programmers by checking that the type of each argument matches the type of the formal parameter. Unfortunately, types are futile for methods with multiple parameters of the same type. How can a programmer check that equally typed arguments are passed in the correct order? This paper presents two simple, yet effective, static program analyses that detect problems related to the order of equally typed arguments. The key idea is to leverage identifier names to infer the semantics of arguments and their intended positions. The analyses reveal problems that affect the correctness, understandability, and maintainability of a program, such as accidentally reversed arguments and misleading parameter names. Most parts of the analyses are language-agnostic. We evaluate the approach with 24 real-world programs written in Java and C. Our results show the analyses to be effective and efficient. One analysis reveals anomalies in the order of equally typed arguments; it finds 54 relevant problems with a precision of 82 percent. The other analysis warns about misleading parameter names and finds 31 naming bugs with a precision of 39 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to recent calls to extend the theoretical perspectives taken on the important organizational activity of managing projects, based on a deeper understanding of the reality of their day-to-day social practice. Drawing on theoretical constructs from sociologist Strauss, we conceptualize projects as a “social trajectory,” whose progress is determined by ongoing interaction between parties with different “world views” seeking to promote their interpretations and interests within a network of organizational power relations. This theoretical framework is used to interpret an 18-month participant–observer ethnographic study of an IT-enabled business change project, seeing the management of the project in terms of intense social interaction seeking alignment between multiple perspectives and interests. From the rich data from the case study, we demonstrate the relationship between the effectiveness of this “alignment-seeking” and the perceived progress of the project trajectory, and develop a model of projects as social trajectories where the trajectory progress is linked to the key characteristics of the “alignment-seeking” process. This model extends current project management theory and points to a different way of thinking about project management, emphasizing management interventions not typically part of mainstream project management methods. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Modeling is a fundamental activity within the requirements engineering process and concerns the construction of abstract descriptions of requirements that are amenable to interpretation and validation. The choice of a modeling technique is critical whenever it is necessary to discuss the interpretation and validation of requirements. This is particularly true in the case of functional requirements and stakeholders with divergent goals and different backgrounds and experience. This paper presents the results of a family of experiments conducted with students and professionals to investigate whether the comprehension of functional requirements is influenced by the use of dynamic models that are represented by means of the UML sequence diagrams. The family contains five experiments performed in different locations and with 112 participants of different abilities and levels of experience with UML. The results show that sequence diagrams improve the comprehension of the modeled functional requirements in the case of high ability and more experienced participants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Object-oriented frameworks are widely used to develop new applications. They provide reusable concepts that are instantiated in application code through potentially complex implementation steps such as subclassing, implementing interfaces, and calling framework operations. Unfortunately, many modern frameworks are difficult to use because of their large and complex APIs and frequently incomplete user documentation. To cope with these problems, developers often use existing framework applications as a guide. However, locating concept implementations in those sample applications is typically challenging due to code tangling and scattering. To address this challenge, we introduce the notion of concept-implementation templates, which summarize the necessary concept-implementation steps and identify them in the sample application code, and a technique, named FUDA, to automatically extract such templates from dynamic traces of sample applications. This paper further presents the results of two experiments conducted to evaluate the quality and usefulness of FUDA templates. The experimental evaluation of FUDA with 14 concepts in five widely used frameworks suggests that the technique is effective in producing templates with relatively few false positives and false negatives for realistic concepts by using two sample applications. Moreover, we observed in a user study with 28 programmers that the use of templates reduced the concept-implementation time compared to when documentation was used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As translation of technical documents continues to grow rapidly and translation becomes more automated, the roles of professional communicators and translators appear to be converging. This paper updates preliminary findings first presented at the 2008 International Professional Communication Conference, Montreal, QC, Canada. It analyzes trends revealed from recent surveys and recommends follow-up research to determine if the trends may continue and become entrenched. The authors conclude with recommendations for academic programs interested in adjusting to the trends. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we describe, in detail, a design method that assures that the designed product satisfies a set of prescribed demands while, at the same time, providing a concise representation of the design that facilitates communication in multidisciplinary design teams. This Demand Compliant Design (DeCoDe) method was in itself designed to comply with a set of demands. The demands on the method were determined by an analysis of some of the most widely used design methods and from the needs arising in the practice of design for quality. We show several modes of use of the DeCoDe method and illustrate with examples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years, several design notations have been proposed to model domain-specific applications or reference architectures. In particular, Conallen has proposed the UML Web Application Extension (WAE): a UML extension to model Web applications. The aim of our empirical investigation is to test whether the usage of the Conallen notation supports comprehension and maintenance activities with significant benefits, and whether such benefits depend on developers ability and experience. This paper reports and discusses the results of a series of four experiments performed in different locations and with subjects possessing different experience--namely, undergraduate students, graduate students, and research associates--and different ability levels. The experiments aim at comparing performances of subjects in comprehension tasks where they have the source code complemented either by standard UML diagrams or by diagrams stereotyped using the Conallen notation. Results indicate that, although, in general, it is not possible to observe any significant benefit associated with the usage of stereotyped diagrams, the availability of stereotypes reduces the gap between subjects with low skill or experience and highly skilled or experienced subjects. Results suggest that organizations employing developers with low experience can achieve a significant performance improvement by adopting stereotyped UML diagrams for Web applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific and business communities are adopting large-scale distributed systems as a means to solve a wide range of resource-intensive tasks. These communities also have requirements in terms of provenance. We define the provenance of a result produced by a distributed system as the process that led to that result. This paper describes a protocol for recording documentation of a distributed system's execution. The distributed protocol guarantees that documentation with characteristics suitable for accurately determining the provenance of results is recorded. These characteristics are confirmed through a number of proofs based on an abstract state machine formalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A single source video may be compressed using different encoders with different settings. In the context of online video sharing, many such video copies exist, and an end user may have access to a few of them and would like to reconstruct a video sequence with quality superior to all available copies. In this paper, we propose a scheme to improve the video quality by projecting the reconstructed video onto the quantization constraint sets defined by multiple video copies. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of improving video quality both subjectively and objectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Topology errors constitute one of the significant source of problems for today's state estimators. They may cause significant biases in state estimation solutions and may occasionally lead to divergence of the numerical solution algorithms. Existing methods of detecting and identifying topology errors rely on the measurement residuals which are in turn dependent on the measurement configuration and network topology. Hence, the capability to effectively process topology errors is closely linked to proper measurement design. In particular, detection of a topology error associated with a given branch may or may not be possible depending upon the existing measurement configuration. Hence, it is possible to efficiently improve the topology error processing capability for a given system by strategically placing few extra measurements. In this paper, a systematic procedure will be developed in order to accomplish this by using not only the traditional power flow and injection measurements but also the newly emerging phasor measurement units (PMUs). Numerical examples will be provided in order to illustrate the proposed measurement placement strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the problem of efficient distance-based similarity search over high-dimensional data. We show that a promising approach to this problem is to reduce dimensions and allow fast approximation. Conventional reduction approaches, however, entail a significant shortcoming: The approximation volume extends across the dataspace, which causes overestimation of retrieval sets and impairs performance. This paper focuses on a new criterion for dimensionality reduction methods: bounded approximation. We show that this requirement can be accomplished by a novel nonlinear transformation scheme that extracts t~vo important parameters from the data. We devise two approximation formulations, namely, rectangular and spherical range search, each corresponding to a closed volume around the original search sphere. We discuss in detail how we can derive tight bounds for the parameters and prove further results, as well as highlight insights into the problems and our proposed solutions. To demonstrate, the benefits of the new criterion, we study the effects of (un)boundedness on approximation performance, including selectivity, error toleration, and efficiency. Extensive experiments confirm the superiority of this technique over recent state-of-the-art schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many applications that track and analyze spatiotemporal data, movements obey periodic patterns; the objects follow the same routes (approximately) over regular time intervals. For example, people wake up at the same time and follow more or less the same route to their work everyday. The discovery of hidden periodic patterns in spatiotemporal data could unveil important information to the data analyst. Existing approaches for discovering periodic patterns focus on symbol sequences. However, these methods cannot directly be applied to a spatiotemporal sequence because of the fuzziness of spatial locations in the sequence. In this paper, we define the problem of mining periodic patterns in spatiotemporal data and propose an effective and efficient algorithm for retrieving maximal periodic patterns. In addition, we study two interesting variants of the problem. The first is the retrieval of periodic patterns that are frequent only during a continuous subinterval of the whole history. The second problem is the discovery of periodic patterns, whose instances may be shifted or distorted. We demonstrate how our mining technique can be adapted for these variants. Finally, we present a comprehensive experimental evaluation, where we show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Web is evolving from a space for publication/consumption of documents to an environment for collaborative work, where digital content can travel and be replicated, adapted, decomposed, fusioned, and transformed. We call this the Fluid Web perspective. This view requires a thorough revision of the typical document-oriented approach that permeates content management on the Web. This paper presents our solution for the Fluid Web, which allows moving from the document-oriented to a content-oriented perspective, where "content" can be any digital object. The solution is based on two axes: a self-descriptive unit to encapsulate any kind of content artifact—the Digital Content Component (DCC) and a Fluid Web infrastructure that provides management and deployment of DCCs through the Web, and whose goal is to support collaboration on the Web. Designed to be reused and adapted, DCCs encapsulate data and software using a single structure, thus allowing homogeneous composition and processing of any digital content, executable or not. These properties are exploited by our Fluid Web infrastructure, which supports DCC multilevel annotation and discovery mechanisms, configuration management, and version control. Our work extensively explores taxonomic ontologies and Semantic Web standards, which serve as a semantic bridge, unifying DCC management vocabularies, and improving DCC description/indexing/discovery. DCCs and infrastructure have been implemented and are illustrated by means of a running example, for a scientific application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the multiresolution motion estimation (MRME) techniques originally proposed by Zhang and Zafar, four MRME algorithms have been proposed. In one of these algorithms, the motion vectors in the low-pass subband are properly scaled and used as the final motion vectors for all the other subbands, and, in another, the properly scaled motion vectors in the first algorithm are used as predictions and further refined. The former algorithm requires a much lighter computational load and fewer coding bits for the motion vectors than the latter; on the other hand, the latter is able to provide a better MRME performance than the former. In this paper, we propose a new MRME technique that takes advantage of both of the above algorithms. In the proposed algorithm, the sum of absolute difference associated with each of the scaled motion vectors as in the first algorithm is calculated, and the result compared with the sum of the absolute values of the amplitudes of the wavelet coefficients within the motion block to be compensated. The outcome of the comparison decides if these scaled motion vectors are accepted as the final ones. For the coding of motion information, the motion vectors used for the prediction and their patterns of applicability to higher resolution levels, called the indices, are coded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an approach which reverses the traditional order of cluster discovery. The Lingo algorithm combines common phrase discovery and latent semantic indexing techniques to separate search results into meaningful groups. It looks for meaningful phrases to use as cluster labels and then assigns documents to the labels to form groups. Instead of calculating proximity between documents and then labeling the discovered groups, this paper attempts to find good, conceptually varied cluster labels and then assign documents to the labels to form groups. A combination of three common text-preprocessing methods was used. Some of the important enhancements to Lingo were outlined.

The performance of a Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system, presented in the form of Precision-Recall or Precision-Scope graphs, offers an incomplete overview of the system under study: The influence of the irrelevant items (embedding) is obscured. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive and well-normalized description of the ranking performance compared to the performance of an Ideal Retrieval System defined by ground-truth for a large number of predefined queries. We advocate normalization with respect to relevant class size and restriction to specific normalized scope values (the number of retrieved items). We also propose new three and two-dimensional performance graphs for total recall studies in a range of embeddings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last five years, the large scale integrated circuit placement community achieved great strides in the understanding of placement problems, developed new high-performance algorithms, and achieved impressive empirical results. These advances have been supported by a nontrivial benchmarking infrastructure, and future achievements are set to draw on benchmarking as well. In this paper, we review motivations for benchmarking, especially for commercial electronic design automation, analyze available benchmarks, and point out major pitfalls in benchmarking. Our empirical data offers perhaps the first comprehensive evaluation of several leading large-scale placers on multiple benchmark families. We outline major outstanding problems and discuss the future of placement benchmarking. Furthermore, we attempt to extrapolate our experience to circuit layout tasks beyond placement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major emphasis of this paper is on analytical techniques for predicting the performance of various collection fusion scenarios. Knowledge of analytical models of information retrieval system performance, both with single processors and with multiple processors, increases our understanding of the parameters (e.g., number of documents, ranking algorithms, stemming algorithms, stop word lists, etc.) affecting system behavior. While there is a growing literature on the implementation of distributed information retrieval systems and digital libraries, little research has focused on analytic models of performance. We analytically describe the performance for single and multiple processors, both when different processors have the same parameter values and when they have different values. The use of different ranking algorithms and parameter values at different sites is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical software engineering research needs research guidelines to improve the research and reporting processes. We propose a preliminary set of research guidelines aimed at stimulating discussion among software researchers. They are based on a review of research guidelines developed for medical researchers and on our own experience in doing and reviewing software engineering research. The guidelines are intended to assist researchers, reviewers, and meta-analysts in designing, conducting, and evaluating empirical studies. Editorial boards of software engineering journals may wish to use our recommendations as a basis for developing guidelines for reviewers and for framing policies for dealing with the design, data collection, and analysis and reporting of empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using design patterns is claimed to improve programmer productivity and software quality. Such improvements may manifest both at construction time (in faster and better program design) and at maintenance time (in faster and more accurate program comprehension). This paper focuses on the maintenance context and reports on experimental tests of the following question: Does it help the maintainer if the design patterns in the program code are documented explicitly (using source code comments) compared to a well-commented program without explicit reference to design patterns? Subjects performed maintenance tasks on two programs ranging from 360 to 560 LOC including comments. Both programs contained design patterns. The controlled variable was whether the use of design patterns was documented explicitly or not. The experiments thus tested whether pattern comment lines (PCL) help during maintenance if patterns are relevant and sufficient program comments are already present. It turns out that this question is a challenge for the experimental methodology: A setup leading to relevant results is quite difficult to find. We discuss these issues in detail and suggest a general approach to such situations. The experiment was performed with Java by 74 German graduate students and then repeated with C++ by 22 American undergraduate students. A conservative analysis of the results supports the hypothesis that pattern-relevant maintenance tasks were completed faster or with fewer errors if redundant design pattern information was provided. Redundant means that the information carried in pattern comments is also available in different form in other comments. The contribution of this article is twofold: It provides the first controlled experiment results on design pattern usage and it presents a solution approach to an important class of experiment design problems for experiments regarding documentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image forensics has attracted wide attention during the past decade. However, most existing works aim at detecting a certain operation, which means that their proposed features usually depend on the investigated image operation and they consider only binary classification. This usually leads to misleading results if irrelevant features and/or classifiers are used. For instance, a JPEG decompressed image would be classified as an original or median filtered image if it was fed into a median filtering detector. Hence, it is important to develop forensic methods and universal features that can simultaneously identify multiple image operations. Based on extensive experiments and analysis, we find that any image operation, including existing anti-forensics operations, will inevitably modify a large number of pixel values in the original images. Thus, some common inherent statistics such as the correlations among adjacent pixels cannot be preserved well. To detect such modifications, we try to analyze the properties of local pixels within the image in the residual domain rather than the spatial domain considering the complexity of the image contents. Inspired by image steganalytic methods, we propose a very compact universal feature set and then design a multiclass classification scheme for identifying many common image operations. In our experiments, we tested the proposed features as well as several existing features on 11 typical image processing operations and four kinds of anti-forensic methods. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy significantly outperforms the existing forensic methods in terms of both effectiveness and universality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes a new form of program documentation that is precise, systematic and readable. This documentation comprises a set of displays supplemented by a lexicon and an index. Each display presents a program fragment in such a way that its correctness can be examined without looking at any other display. Each display has three parts: 1) the specification of the program presented in the display, 2) the program itself, and 3) the specifications of programs invoked by this program. The displays are intended to be used by Software Engineers as a reference document during inspection and maintenance. This paper also introduces a specification technique that is a refinement of Mills' functional approach to program documentation and verification; programs are specified and described in tabular form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Provides instructions and guidelines to prospective authors who wish to submit manuscripts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An information-theoretic projection design framework is proposed, of interest for feature design and compressive measurements. Both Gaussian and Poisson measurement models are considered. The gradient of a proposed information-theoretic metric (ITM) is derived, and a gradient-descent algorithm is applied in design; connections are made to the information bottleneck. The fundamental solution structure of such design is revealed in the case of a Gaussian measurement model and arbitrary input statistics. This new theoretical result reveals how ITM parameter settings impact the number of needed projection measurements, with this verified experimentally. The ITM achieves promising results on real data, for both signal recovery and classification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]