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This paper deals with the problem of estimating the following road sign parameters: height, dimensions, visibility distance and partial occlusions. This work belongs to a framework whose main applications involve road sign maintenance, driver assistance, and inventory systems. From this paper we suggest a multisensory system composed from two cameras, a GPS receiver, and a distance measurement device,all of them installed in a car. The process consists of several steps which include road sign detection, recognition and tracking , and road signs parameters estimation. From some trigonometric properties, and a camera model, the information provided by the tracking subsystem and the distance measurement sensors, we estimate the road signs parameters.Results show that the described calculation methodology offers a correct estimation for all types of traffic signs.

Combining expressiveness and plainness in the design of web documents is a difficult task. Validation languages are very powerful and designers are tempted to over-design specifications. This paper discusses an offbeat approach: describing any structured content of any document by only using a very small set of patterns, regardless of the format and layout of that document. The paper sketches out a formal analysis of some patterns, based on grammars and language theory. The study has been performed on XML languages and DTDs and has a twofold goal: coding empirical patterns in a formal representation, and discussing their completeness.

The stream cipher TPypy has been designed by Biham and Seberry in January 2007 as the strongest member of the Py-family ciphers, after weaknesses in the other members Py, Pypy, Py6 were discovered. One main contribution of the paper is the detection of related-key weaknesses in the Py-family of ciphers including the strongest member TPypy. Under related keys, we show a distinguishing attack on TPypy with data complexity 2192,3 which is lower than the previous best known attack on the cipher by a factor of 288. It is shown that the above attack also works on the other members TPy, Pypy and Py. A second contribution of the paper is design and analysis of two fast ciphers RCR-64 and RCR-32 which are derived from the TPy and the TPypy respectively. The performances of the RCR-64 and the RCR-32 are 2.7 cycles/byte and 4.45 cycles/byte on Pentium III (note that the speeds of the ciphers Py. Pypy and RC4 are 2.8, 4.58 and 7.3 cycles/byte). Based on our security analysis, we conjecture that no attacks lower than brute force are possible on the RCR ciphers. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007. ispartof: pages:58-72 ispartof: Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol:4859 pages:58-72 ispartof: INDOCRYPT 2007 location:INDIA, Chennai date:9 Dec - 13 Dec 2007 status: published

In many forming operations, due to the severe forging loads, the press frame deflects elastically and, consequently, upper and lower dies deviate from the nominal relative position. These conditions produce skewed surfaces that, in a too stiff press, can have detrimental effects on the service life of the machine and the tooling as well. This paper presents a new method to evaluate the stiffness of presses for forming operations where realistic loading systems are utilised. To this aim, a special testing and calibration apparatus was developed that consists of (i) a loading device capable of generating and at the same time measuring forces and torques in different directions and (ii) a special transducer that measures the relative displacement between the ram and the bed of the press. The paper describes the application of the method to the evaluation of the stiffness of a screw press.

The hash algorithm forms the basis of many popular cryptographic protocols and it is therefore important to find throughput optimal implementations. Though there have been numerous published papers proposing high throughput architectures, none of them have claimed to be optimal. In this paper, we perform iteration bound analysis on the SHA2 family of hash algorithms. Using this technique, we are able to both calculate the theoretical maximum throughput and determine the architecture that achieves this throughput. In addition to providing the throughput optimal architecture for SHA2, the techniques presented can also be used to analyze and design optimal architectures for some other iterative hash algorithms. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007. ispartof: pages:102-114 ispartof: Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol:4867 pages:102-114 ispartof: WISA 2007 location:SOUTH KOREA, Cheju Isl date:27 Aug - 29 Aug 2007 status: published

Many people are under the mistaken belief that test creation is a simple endeavor. Few actually consider the steps involved. Just write a question down and then make up a few incorrect answers and you are done, right? In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. There is an entire profession focused on the process of creating tests to assess knowledge. The term “psychometrics” has been coined to describe this process. It turns out that question (item) writing is a very developed science. The procedure for item acquisition is outlined in this article. In 2005, the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) launched the program to develop a certification credential for imaging informatics professionals, the Certified Imaging Informatics Professional (CIIP). In preparing the program, SIIM has dedicated substantial resources and support to establish an examination that could be considered as a standard for professionals who want to be certified in imaging informatics. Credentialing individuals in a profession establishes criteria for fairness, quality, competence, and safety. The CIIP program is a knowledge-based certification that intends to measure competence as well as establish standards for professional knowledge, skills, and practice. The American Registry of Radiologic Technologists (ARRT) has also provided psychometric and training services to many of the individuals who have been tasked with the responsibility of writing questions for the CIIP exam. SIIM is pleased to be working in conjunction with such a well-respected and experienced organization. SIIM endeavors to meet the standards of the National Organization for Competency Assurance in developing its program. These include the creation of a job task analysis,1 followed by a test content outline that incorporates the tasks and skills central to the profession in the exam instrument.2 The first step in certification program development is to identify the goal. Primarily, we want to assess the knowledge and skills of the individual taking the exam.3 The creation of items must be carefully crafted to meet that goal. Although some of the questions should simply test whether the candidate can recall facts, others go a little deeper. Some questions on a professional-level exam should take the next step by assessing the individual's ability to understand the why and how of some concepts. It is also crucial that the questions asked are actually related to the practice being tested.2 Although it would be easy to include nuclear reaction physics on an imaging informatics exam, it would be discriminatory against individuals who had not received specific training in that discipline and has little or nothing to do with the actual job of an imaging informatics professional.4 The next question is what format the test will take. Should the exam be paper-based or computer-based? Will the exam be multiple choice or essay? Should the exam have a practical portion requiring onsite review? Each of these questions has to be carefully considered against the goals of the program. Although each format has its advantages and disadvantages, in most cases the multiple-choice exam is the most cost-effective and easily standardized format. Multiple-choice exams also provide the most flexible format for continued exam development. In an industry such as imaging informatics, where change is a constant, the ability to adapt the exam over time is crucial. The decision to make the CIIP exam computer-based was also an easy choice—in an industry that is based on the process of moving from printed media to digital, it would be a contradiction to offer the exam in a paper-based format. Several major tasks must take place before the first question is finalized for the test. To get an exam certified by the National Commission for Certifying Agencies, a strict set of guidelines must be followed.1 First, a job task analysis must be completed to define the tasks that are actually performed by professionals in the field. Based on the results of that task analysis, a test content outline must be defined and published. The next step is the item writing. And this is just the beginning. A brief outline of the process is shown in Figure 1. For the sake of simplicity, let us just focus on the item development and validation process. There has actually been a great deal of work performed to teach individuals to take tests. In many cases, it is possible to train an individual to pass an exam with no real practical knowledge of the topics covered. Take the following question, for example: The flub extension of the triangular que is also sometimes referred to as an: Oxen Bustom Chainor Doonan If you chose a as the correct answer, you were correct. Simple grammatical cluing such as shown in the example are dead giveaways. Another example: What is the primary purpose of the frang in coniging? To remove frang-clangs To pare chamalls To upon rognor To fix barnets Fig 1 Steps required to create a certification examination. Did you choose a again? You would not be alone if you were able to guess the answer based on the fact it was the only answer that included terms from within the question. Other types of cluing are also easy to miss by question writers, such as giving the answer to a question in the form of a previous item on the exam, use of plurality, and including the answer phrase within the question. Nonsense answers also have been shown to greatly improve the examinee's chance of guessing the correct answer. Because of the risk of certifying an individual who may not completely understand the subject matter, the SIIM Certification Committee has gone to great lengths to provide training from top-quality psychometricians who have worked with such organizations as the ARRT and the American College Testing Assessment. The committee has recruited some of the best and brightest from our field to assemble the questions. Given the diverse background of individuals who work in our profession, the goal was to have as many of those professional career paths as possible included. On the Item Acquisition Subcommittee, we have radiologists, radiologic technologists, physicists, computer science majors, network engineers PhDs, and others who now work within the field of imaging informatics. The items developed and approved for the exam will cover the entire domain of knowledge needed by an imaging informatics professional. Questions submitted for the exam must go through a multistep process before approval. Each question must be submitted by an approved item writer through an electronic submission program developed in conjunction with ARRT. Each question has to be linked to an item on the test content outline discussed previously. For the question to make it through the submission process, it must also include the reference material from which it was developed. A full listing of these references will be made available to those wanting to study for the exam. Based on the test content outline number assigned, the question will be referred to expert reviewers who have been assigned the responsibility of that particular content area. This process takes the question from development through the technical validation of the material. After the approval of the question by the expert reviewer, one final step is required. The Certification Committee felt it worthwhile to expand the process to include a final review by a committee of individuals who have experience and training in item review, and who will look at each question for cluing and/or grammatical errors. It is this additional check that finalizes the validation process and allows the item to be entered into the item bank. Items that make it into the item bank are then available for the test assembly committee, which will use the items in the bank to build the exam. This is not the end of the review process, however. The real test of an item is how it performs on the exam. Within the item bank itself, there are tools to evaluate how difficult the item is, as well as whether it is correctly answered by individuals who demonstrate a thorough grasp of the subject based on similar subject items. Every exam administered will be reviewed for questions that may need to be removed from active status within the bank. This review is carried out to ensure that subsequent exams are relevant and complete. In summary, the process of writing items for the SIIM CIIP exam is lengthy and difficult. From validating that the question is applicable to providing excellent training opportunities to the individuals involved, the volunteers in this process have worked very hard. It is only through their dedication and support that an endeavor such as this is possible. The goal of the certification committee is to produce a quality exam and certification credential that will make the individual achieving that credential a highly sought professional. We hope that the day will come that the bearer of these credentials will be able to do so with a great sense of pride and accomplishment.

This paper presents a formal system based on the notion of objects and asynchronous communication. Built on Milner's work on π-calculus, the communication primitive of the formal system is purely based on asynchronous communication, which makes it unique among various concurrency formalisms. Computationally this results in a consistent reduction of Milner's calculus, while retaining the same expressive power. Seen semantically asynchronous communication induces a surprisingly different framework where bisimulation is strictly more general than its synchronous counterpart. This paper shows basic construction of the formal system along with several illustrative examples.

The paper describes an agent-based approach and its application to intelligent support of disaster response and evacuation operations. The approach is based on the idea of knowledge logistics which stands for integration and transfer of the right knowledge from distributed sources to the right person within the right context at the right time to the right purpose. The problem in the approach is represented as configuring a network of knowledge sources and approach is called “KSNet-approach”. The paper concentrates on such aspects as multiagent architecture, knowledge representation formalism and presents an application of the approach via a case study.

In extensive form noncooperative game theory, at each instant t, each agent i sets its state x i independently of the other agents, by sampling an associated distribution, q i(x i). The coupling between the agents arises in the joint evolution of those distributions. Distributed control problems can be cast the same way. In those problems the system designer sets aspects of the joint evolution of the distributions to try to optimize the goal for the overall system. Now information theory tells us what the separate q i of the agents are most likely to be if the system were to have a particular expected value of the objective function G(x 1, x 2, ...). So one can view the job of the system designer as speeding an iterative process. Each step of that process starts with a specified value of E(G), and the convergence of the q i to the most likely set of distributions consistent with that value. After this the target value for E q(G) is lowered, and then the process repeats. Previous work has elaborated many schemes for implementing this process when the underlying variables x i all have a finite number of possible values and G does not extend to multiple instants in time. That work also is based on a fixed mapping from agents to control devices, so that the the statistical independence of the agents’ moves means independence of the device states. This paper also extends that work to relax all of these restrictions. This extends the applicability of that work to include continuous spaces and Reinforcement Learning. This paper also elaborates how some of that earlier work can be viewed as a first-principles justification of evolution-based search algorithms.

The paper is divided into three parts: In section 29.1 of the paper, Generalized Game Theory (GGT) is outlined, and its applications in formalizing key social science concepts such as institutions, social relationships, roles, judgment, and games are presented. Institutions operate as a type of social algorithm, organizing and regulating agents playing different roles as they engage in deliberation and judgment activities and make and implement collective decisions. Section 29.2 of the paper will present simple multi-agent simulation models and selected results of the simulation. Section 29.3 will briefly outline an agenda for societal research based on the application of GGT to explaining and managing problems of insecurity and social disorder in multi-agent systems. In the GGT perspective, the problem of security can be formulated in terms of regulating a system and its agents, and dealing with social disorder and crisis.

The paper considers one of the topmost security related problems that is situation assessment. Specific classification and data mining issues associated with this task and methods of their solution are the subjects of the paper. In particular, the paper discusses situation assessment data model specifying situation, approach to learning of situation assessment, generic architecture of multi-agent situation assessment systems and software engineering issues. Detection of abnormal use of computer network is a case study used for demonstration of the main research results.

The aim of this paper is the comparison of the document classification method based on distance analysis (cluster analysis) and based on coefficients of similarity (Salton's method). We are interested if the received groups of documents are identical (similar) and if new cases are similarly classificated. Getting the positive results will give us the basis to use the method based on coefficients of similarity to classify the set of rules. Classification based on the coefficient of similarity is used to create documentation structural based and retrieval in search engines. The cluster analysis is used to facts and rules classification in knowledge base. It seems that using the mechanism based on the coefficient of similarity can be very comfortable to inference's process. Our paper includes the first issue, it means the comparison of the rules's process classification based on the cluster analysis method and Salton's method.

The Full Spectrum Inversion (FSI) method was developed in the beginning of 2002 in an effort to solve the multipath problem in radio occultation measurements. The physical ideas, which lead to the method, were that the occultation path could be considered as a synthetic aperture and the radio occultation Doppler frequency in a single path was a monotonic function of time. In star occultations, at optical wavelengths, the multipath problem is easily solved by having a lens in front of an array detector separating the beams in space. The lens is performing a spatial Fourier transform i.e., a plane wave is focused into a point displaced from the optical axis an amount given by the direction (the spatial frequency) of the plane wave. The analogy to this space processing method in time, is to have a “time lens”, which can separate multiple temporal frequencies occurring at the same time: Obviously this is what a temporal Fourier transform does. These ideas were implemented in 2001 and tested successfully on simulations of radio occultation signals, which had circular satellite orbits. However, for non-circular orbits the plain Fourier method turned out to give a not fully correct result and the work on the FSI emerged realizing that some preprocessing steps were necessary in order to eliminate the impact of non-radial orbits. This involves pre-calculation of phases, which, multiplied on the occultation signal, reduces the impact of the non-circular orbits on the resulting Fourier transform of the preprocessed signal. In 2003 the phasematching method was developed, where the impact of the non-circular orbits was totally solved, but with the cost that the processing could not be implemented with a fast Fourier transform. Both the FSI and the phasematching methods will be discussed in detail in this paper. The present development on the FSI method includes its practical implementation and making the method robust for mass processing of radio occultation signals. Filtering of signals in the FSI method is important and different filtering methods will be discussed in this paper.

The use of ontology in order to provide a mechanism to enable machine reasoning has continuously increased during the last few years.This paper suggests an automated method for document classification using an ontology, which expresses terminology information and vocabulary contained in Web documents by way of a hierarchical structure. Ontology-based document classification involves determining document features that represent the Web documents most accurately, and classifying them into the most appropriate categories after analyzing their contents by using at least two pre-defined categories per given document features. In this paper, Web documents are classified in real time not with experimental data or a learning process, but by similar calculations between the terminology information extracted from Web texts and ontology categories. This results in a more accurate document classification since the meanings and relationships unique to each document are determined.

Feature selection is the process of identifying relevant features in the dataset and discarding everything else as irrelevant and redundant. Since feature selection reduces the dimensionality of the data, it enables the learning algorithms to operate more effectively and rapidly. In some cases, classification performance can be improved; in other instances, the obtained classifier is more compact and can be easily interpreted. There is much work done on feature selection methods for creating ensemble of classifiers. Thus, these works examine how feature selection can help ensemble of classifiers to gain diversity. This paper examines a different direction, i.e. whether ensemble methodology can be used for improving feature selection performance. In this paper we present a general framework for creating several feature subsets and then combine them into a single subset. Theoretical and empirical results presented in this paper validate the hypothesis that this approach can help finding a better feature subset.

The curse of dimensionality is a well known but not entirely well-understood phenomena. Too much data, in terms of the number of input variables, is not always a good thing. This is especially true when the problem involves unsupervised learning or supervised learning with unbalanced data (many negative observations but minimal positive observations). This paper addresses two issues involving high dimensional data: The first issue explores the behavior of kernels in high dimensional data. It is shown that variance, especially when contributed by meaningless noisy variables, confounds learning methods. The second part of this paper illustrates methods to overcome dimensionality problems with unsupervised learning utilizing subspace models. The modeling approach involves novelty detection with the one-class SVM.

The purpose of this paper is to supply web contents for PC to various multi platform device as PDA or portable device. The conventional studies could not consider these devices, so it created mobile contents beforehand, and then transmitted to the limited mobile device. In this point, the critical problem is to generate mobile contents which are suitable for all kinds of mobile device from PC Web content. This paper propose a service system for transmitting wire web content to various portable device by using MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework. It does not create mobile contents for each device. It just uses DIDL of MEPG-21 as intermediate language to express the structure, resource and description of mobile contents. In DIDL, the multimedia resource is transcoded in off-line previously. The description part is converted in real time as soon as service is requested by end-user. Mobile contents integrate adapted resource with appropriate description and then are transmitted. In addition, this paper proposes the Multi-level caching for reusing mobile contents and describes the result in experiment system.

The paper describes the organizational basis for computer simulation of complex physical processes at one of the most important Russian “weapon” computational institutions. The team passed a way of 50 years long from manual calculations to numerical simulation of various physical phenomena and processes in real, i.e. 2d and 3D, geometries. The paper presents the basic research fields and challenges, describes the generation and development steps of some new scientific approaches in simulation of solid mechanics, energy transfer and radiation transport, numerical studies of hydrodynamic instability etc. The paper addresses also the creation of high performance computers, organizational measures allowing the mathematicians to access the centralized computer kernel in a multiuser network.

Automatic parallelization of code written in a sequential language such as FORTRAN is of great importance. One natural approach to loop parallelization is to assign separate invocations of a loop to different processors. However, it is often necessary to delay the starting times of loops to avoid violating data dependences. In this paper we study a scheduling problem, called the Delay Problem, that models an aspect of the loop parallelization problem. We show that the Delay Problem is NP-Complete when the precedence constraints are a set of arbitrary trees. Our major result of the paper is a polynomial time algorithm for the case where the precedence constraints are a forest of in-trees or a forest of out-trees. This covers an important practical case for the Delay Problem.

This paper studies the problem of sorting N items on a P processor parallel machine, where N≥P. The central result of the paper is a new algorithm, called cubesort, that sorts N=P1+1/k items in O(k P1/k log P) time using a P processor shuffle-exchange. Thus for any positive constant k, cubesort provides an asymptotically optimal speed-up over sequential sorting. Cubesort also sorts N = P log P items using a P processor shuffle-exchange in O(log3 P/loglog P) time. Both of these results are faster than any previously published algorithms for the given problems. Cubesort also provides asymptotically optimal sorting algorithms for a wide range of parallel computers, including the cube-connected cycles and the hypercube. An important extension of the central result is an algorithm that simulates a single step of a Priority-CRCW PRAM with N processors and N words of memory on a P processor shuffle-exchange machine in O(k P1/k log P) time, where N=P1+1/k.

This paper introduces the work of the COGAIN “communication by gaze interaction” European Network of Excellence that is working toward giving people with profound disabilities the opportunity to communicate and control their environment by eye gaze control. It shows the need for developing eye gaze based communication systems, and illustrates the effectiveness of newly developed COGAIN eye gaze control systems with a series of case studies, each showing differing aspects of the benefits offered by gaze control. Finally, the paper puts forward a strong case for users, professionals and researchers to collaborate towards developing gaze based communication systems to enable and empower people with disabilities.

In a recent series of papers [FL1, FL2, FL3], we have proven the existence of decision algorithms with low-degree polynomial running times for a number of well-studied VLSI layout, placement and routing problems. These results make use of the powerful Robertson-Seymour theorems on the well-partial-ordering of graphs under both the minor and immersion orders. In the present paper, we study the complexity of construction versions of these problems, focusing on efficient self-reduction strategies. We introduce a notion of fast self-reduction in this setting and develop a general technique, which we term scaffolding, that is useful in the design of fast self-reduction algorithms.

An initial design for a fault tolerant, distributed version of UNIX was presented in an earlier paper [2]. That design left a number of open questions in two particular areas: Fault tolerance for server processes through which peripherals are accessed; recovery after a crash including the re-backup of processes. Since then, the fundamental design involving three-way message transmission has remained unchanged. However, server fault tolerance has been redesigned and is now more consistent with the fault tolerance of normal user processes. Recovery and re-backup have been completed in a more efficient manner than previously envisioned. In addition, important changes in the implementation have occurred. In this paper, we review the original design, borrowing heavily from the earlier paper in sections 1–3, and explain additions and modifications in later sections.

This paper deals with the logic program transformation using the fold-unfold technique. The major problem in the strategies using fold-unfold transformation is to find a sequence of unfolding that permits the folding. In this paper we propose a technique that solves this problem for a particular class of logic programs. This technique consists in studying the possibility of folding for some simple or basic programs and then to apply these results for some more general logic programs. This technique permits to compute the sequence of unfolding to achieve a folding or to detect the impossibility of a folding, in the latter case the technique permits the invention of new predicates.

Internet accessibility for the visually impaired community is still an open issue. Guidelines have been issued by the W3C consortium to help web designers to improve web site accessibility. However several studies show that a significant percentage of web page creators are still ignoring the proposed guidelines. Several tools are now available, general purpose, or web specific, to help visually impaired readers. But is reading a web page enough? Regular sighted users are able to scan a web page for a particular piece of information at high speeds. Shouldn't visually impaired readers have the same chance? This paper discusses some features already implemented to improve accessibility and presents a user feedback report regarding the AudioBrowser, a talking browser. Based on the user feedback the paper also suggests some avenues for future work in order to make talking browsers and screen readers compatible., The research reported in here was supported by SNRIP (The Portuguese National Secretariat of Rehabilitation and Integration for the Disabled) under program CITE 2001, and also FCT (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) and POSI/2001 (Operational Program for the Information Society) with funds partly awarded by FEDER.

In this paper we report on some research activities in the ATLAS team in Nantes and the GOOD OLD AI research group in Belgrade in the domain of model-based engineering. We start from the idea that a convenient organization of various technical spaces in three “metamodeling” layers offers a convenient working environment. The main message of this paper is that it is possible to consider software engineering and ontology engineering as two similarly organized areas, based on different metametamodels (M3-level). Consequently, building bridges between these spaces at the M3-level seems to offer some significant advantages that will be discussed in the paper.

The term soft computing refers to a family of techniques consisting of methods and procedures based on fuzzy logic, evolutionary computing, artificial neural networks, probabilistic reasoning, rough sets, chaotic computing. With the discovery that the Web is structured according to social networks exhibiting the small world property, the idea of using taxonomy principles has appeared as a complementary alternative to traditional keyword searching. One technique which has emerged from this principle was the “web-as-brain” metaphor. It is yielding new, associative, artificial neural networks- (ANN-) based retrieval techniques. The present paper proposes a unified formal framework for three major methods used for Web retrieval tasks: PageRank, HITS, I2R. The paper shows that these three techniques, albeit they stem originally from different paradigms, can be integrated into one unified formal view. The conceptual and notational framework used is given by ANNs and the generic network equation. It is shown that the PageRank, HITS and I2R methods can be formally obtained from the generic equation as different particular cases by making certain assumptions reflecting the corresponding underlying paradigm. The unified formal view sheds a new light upon the understanding of these methods: it may be said that they are only seemingly different from each other, they are particular ANNs stemming from the same equation and differing from one another in whether they are dynamic (a page’s importance varies in time) or static (a page’s importance is constant in time), and in the way they connect the pages to each other. The paper also gives a detailed mathematical analysis of the computational complexity of WTA-based IR techniques using the I2R method for illustration. The importance of this analysis consists in that it shows that (i) intuition may be misleading (contrary to intuition, a WTA-based algorithm yielding circles is not always “hard”), and (ii) this analysis can serve as a model that may be followed in the analysis of other methods.

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is an XML based language; the BPEL standard defines the structure, tags and attributes of an XML document that corresponds to a valid BPEL specification. In addition, the standard defines a number of natural language constraints of which some can be ambiguous and are complex. This paper uses the Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Object Constraint Language to provide a model of the XML based BPEL language. Based on this model the paper shows how OCL can be used to give a precise version of the natural language constraints defined in the BPEL standard. We then use this precise specification to generate a Validation tool automatically that can check that a BPEL document is well-formed.

In this paper we describe the conformance testing model of the open interfaces developed and applied in the PlugIT project in Finland during 2003–2004. Conformance testing is needed to integrate different software products without a vast amount of extra adaptation work, and to improve software inter-operability. The model has been developed and evaluated with co-operation of several healthcare software companies and hospital districts. The clinical context management interface specification is used as an example in this paper.

ftp://cui.unige.ch/iesa/I03-2--.pdf; Nowadays, Enterprise Integration (EI) constitutes a real and growing need for most of enterprises, especially for large and dynamic ones. It constitutes the main approach to deal with heterogeneity, and particularly to deal with semantic heterogeneity, which it forms the crucial problem of EI. This last problem is not correctly addressed by today's EI solutions that focus mainly on the technical and syntactical integration. Addressing the semantic aspect will promote EI by providing it more consistency and flexibility. Some efforts are suggested to solve the semantic problem at different level, but they are still not mature. Here, solutions based on service-oriented architectures and semantic web are promoted as nirvana of the integration problem, and they are being actively researched. The paper will outline the potential role that semantic web technologies can offer in solving some key challenges such as semantic mediation. In particular, the paper will propose a flexible approach called ODSOI (Ontology-Driven Service-Oriented Integration) that aims to extend the state-of-the-art in EI, especially in EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), in order to address the semantic problem.

Recently, efforts have been made to define the role of “context” in the Product Realization Process. This paper treats only a small slice of this problem and applies the notion of context to the automatic merging of geometric models created with the computer graphics language OpenGL. Context can be thought of as a set of properties or environmental variables of some entity that constrains or governs the behavior of that entity. The entity in this case is a three-dimensional geometric model and its context is the set of properties for viewing that model: lighting, viewing parameters, material reflective properties, colour. Now suppose a geometric model is made up of a collection of sub-models, each within its own context. If each context is associated with an integer, then the contexts can be ordered hierarchically. Thus the topmost context in the hierarchy becomes the global context for all the sub-models in the collection. Stated in another way, once a contextual hierarchy is defined, then the structure for combining these sub-models is established independently of when and in what individual contexts the sub-models are created. Consequently, context allows a concurrent generation of models within a formalized structure that automatically deals with conflict resolution — albeit in a limited way in this work. This paper describes a compiler in XML that will merge the OpenGL files automatically.

For the last 20 years, the focus has been on product development processes and developing tools to support them, addressing not only technological but also managerial issues. While these tools have been successfully supporting product development processes in a general sense, consensus on the direction of future developments seems to be lacking. In the paper, it is argued that horizontal seamless integration of product life cycle knowledge is the key toward the next generation product development. Knowledge fusion, rather than just knowledge integration, is considered crucial. In this paper, we will try to outline the directions of the next generation product development, its tools, and necessary research efforts.

The intramolecular model (Ehrenfeucht et al, 2001) for gene assembly in ciliates considers three operations, ld, hi, and dlad that can assemble any micronuclear gene pattern through folding and recombination: the molecule is folded so that two occurrences of a pointer (short nucleotide sequence) get aligned and then the sequence is rearranged through recombination of pointers. In general, the sequence rearranged by one operation can be arbitrarily long and may consist of many coding and non-coding blocks. We consider in this paper some restricted variants of the three operations, where only one coding block is rearranged at a time. We present in this paper the molecular model of these simple operations. We also introduce a mathematical model for the simple operations, on three levels of abstractions: MDS descriptors, signed permutations, and signed double occurrence strings. Interestingly, we show that simple assemblies possess rather involved properties: a gene pattern may have both successful and unsuccessful assemblies and also more than one successful strategy. TUCS Laboratory Computational Biomodelling Discrete Mathematics for Information Technology

The paper discusses three ongoing or recently finalised projects carried out at the Lund University Centre for Risk Analysis and Management (LUCRAM). The first section discusses decision making situations involving extreme or catastrophic events and the application of a newly developed decision analysis method. The second chapter discusses the framework and the methodological aspects of a computer based decision analysis tool for assessing and managing local or municipal vulnerability. The third part of the paper, finally, presents a comparative uncertainty analysis of a risk study of an ammonia storage facility employing a number of methods: Monte Carlo analysis, Interval analysis, Fuzzy arithmetic and Probability bounds theory.

The paper deals with the new challenges and the roles of metada and metainformation in the area of text/data mining in the area of statistics. In the first part, the paper is presenting some basic characteristics of the contemporary statistical information systems from the point of view of the needs for utilization of metadata and data/text mining. As it is well known, modern statistical systems are characterized by an enormous amounts of various statistical data what requires also specific methods and technologies for their processing. In the second part the mutual relations between metadata and metainformation are analysed and some conclusions and recommendations for the further research and development in that problem areas are presented.

In this paper is presented the overall process and the basic conclusions of a comparison study, which was applied in the framework of NEMIS project regarding text mining tools. The basic stages of the overall comparison process are described, together with the specified evaluation criteria. Finally, the main conclusions of the particular study constitute the last chapter of the paper.

This paper describes the use of the object-oriented programming language BETA for modelling and implementing a simple prototype of an ISDN D-channel layer 3 (I.451) entity. In particular, the implementation of ISDN supplementary services on top of the I.451 entity is considered using an object-oriented language, whereby several advantages are gained in comparison with other types of implementation languages. Aquaintance with the BETA programming language is assumed although the most vital constructs for use in this paper are explained.

This paper introduces and illustrates the use of ObjLog, an algebraic specification language for Object-Oriented Analysis and Design. ObjLog is fully abstract, i.e., it specifies the message-passing and instantiation of objects without explicit use of state. Object behavior is abstractly defined by traces composed of message send and response events, including instantiation requests. ObjLog extends equational algebraic specification techniques to specify these traces and to reason about state dependent transitions in objects. Unlike most existing specification languages, ObjLog is sufficiently expressive to specify the full range of value-based message-passing and instantiation behavior exhibited by sequential object-oriented programming languages. In this paper, ObjLog is used to specify a simple example which is difficult to fully specify using other specification languages. The resulting ObjLog specification is then refined in three different ways: subtyping by extension, specialization, and aggregation.

In distributed environments, location control of objects among hosts is a crucial concern. This paper proposes a new mechanism of object location control using meta-level programming which provides the following advantages to programmers. First, the description of location control can be separated from the application program by exploiting the meta-level architecture. This separation makes it easy for programmers to understand application programs and change location control policies. Second, it is possible for programmers to control object location using runtime information provided at the meta-level such as the number of remote messages. This information enables programmers to control object location more flexibly than in traditional distributed languages. The mechanism proposed in this paper has been implemented on an AL-1/D distributed reflective programming system. We show that our mechanism of location control using meta-level programming provides reasonable performance for a distributed application.

This paper describes the development of a class hierarchy to support distributed transaction processing. Inheritance and polymorphism, key features of the object oriented programming model, have been used to develop a hierarchy of classes which convey to their subclasses the behaviours of persistence, concurrency-control, recoverability and identity necessary for distributed transaction processing. The development is traced from the requirements of distributed transaction processing to the definition of classes supporting these key properties. The system is interesting in both its development and its results. The development, not based on any rigourous design methodology, illustrates some of the design decisions unique to object-oriented systems. The resulting class hierarchy provides a flexible, object-oriented interface for reliable distributed programming. The paper includes a step-by-step description of the design of the classes and the class hierarchy.

This paper presents the solutions of human-machine communication in scientific visualization, especially in the electromagnetic fields visualization. The methods described concern three issues: the navigation in three-dimensional result space connected with the position manipulation of the results set’s graphical representation, the user communication with the application using the special menu system and the value obtaining directly from the graphical representation. The method described in this paper was implemented by authors in own interactive and 3D stereo visualization system for electromagnetic fields having the virtual reality features.

The goal of the paper is to compare the performance of instance reduction algorithms (IRA) with other approaches. The paper briefly describes a family of instance reduction algorithms proposed by the authors. To evaluate their performance the computational experiment is carried out. The experiment involves comparing a performance of IRA with several other approaches using alternative machine learning classification tools.

The problem of verification of rule knowledge base covers the verification of dynamic properties, which reflect the processes occurring during inference. Process of detection of these anomalies requires modelling of dynamics of these processes. Suggested in previous papers the decision unit conception did not guarantee such a possibility. This paper gives attention to the analysis of possible use of Petri nets and incidence matrix as the way of representation of knowledge base. The paper presents the relation between Petri nets and decision units’ nets and simultaneously points at the possible use of Petri nets to develop the properties of decision units.

This paper introduces our method for automatic Schankian-like scripts retrieval from the Internet resources and its preliminary results which might be interesting for Social Sciences researchers. We describe the first module of our system, which is supposed to automatically retrieve commonsensical knowledge from the Web resources by using web-mining techniques. It retrieves minimal “object — action — action” scripts which show humans’ common activities changing due the origin of a webpage author. Such data can be used in fields of economics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, psychology, sociology or in language education. By this paper we would like to make NLP researchers notice the potential of commonsense retrieval and encourage them to consider creating such tools for their languages.

The paper investigates the influence of versatile crossover and mutation operators on the efficiency of evolutionary search in solving two important classes of hard optimization problems. Chromosome representations of set partitions and permutations defined in the paper are not problem-oriented and are described together with their versatile variation operators. The proposed representations are tested in evolutionary programs on standard partitions and permutation problems i.e. graph coloring (GCP) and traveling salesman (TSP). The optimization results vary depending on the problem class. They are relatively positive with respect to GCP and negative for TSP.

The paper deals with the probability of misclassification in a multistage classifier. This classification problem is based on a decision-tree scheme. For given tree skeleton and features to be used, the Bayes decision rules at each non-terminal node are presented. Additionally the information on objects features is fuzzy or nonfuzzy. The upper bound of the difference between probability of misclassification for the both information’s is presented. In the paper we use the maximum likelihood estimator for fuzzy data.

In the paper an approach to the construction of rule-based morphosyntactic tagger for Polish is proposed. The core of the tagger are modules of rules (classification systems), acquired from the IPI PAN corpus by application of Genetic Algorithms. Each module is specialised in making decisions concerning different parts of a tag (a structure of attributes). The acquired rules are combined with linguistic rules made by hand and memory-based rules acquired also from the corpus. The construction of the tagger and experiments concerning its properties are also presented in the paper.

The paper presents an attempt at the construction of a wide scale parser for English based on Inductive Learning and limited resources. The parser loosely preserves the shift-reduce scheme, enriched with powerful actions, and a compound Decision Tree instead of the decision table. The attempt originates directly from Hermjakob’s ideas [3], but an important goal was to analyse possible extensions to a wide scale solution. Several supporting heuristics, as well as the overview of the development process and experiments, are described in the paper.

Evolutionary algorithms work in an algorithmically simple manner but produce a huge amount of data. The extraction of useful information to gain further insight into the state of algorithm is a not-trivial task. In the paper, we propose a method of analysis of evolutionary algorithm by means of a graph theory. The method is inspired by latest results on scale-free network and small world phenomena. The paper presents visualization of evolutionary process based on network visualization software. The properties of such network are analyzed and various research possibilities are discussed.

Typical association rules, called in the paper “direct”, reflect relationships existing between items that relatively often co-occur in common transactions. In the web domain items correspond to pages and transactions to user sessions. The main idea of new approach is to discover indirect associations existing between pages that rarely occur together but there are other, “third” pages, called transitive, with which they appear relatively frequently. Two types of indirect associations rules are described in the paper: partial indirect associations and complete ones. The former respect a single transitive page, while the latter cover all existing transitive pages. The presented IDARM algorithm extracts complete indirect association rules with their important measure — confidence, using pre-calculated direct rules.