Preconditioning the solution of the time-dependent neutron diffusion equation by recycling Krylov subspaces

Spectral preconditioners are based on the fact that the convergence rate of the Krylov subspace methods is improved if the eigenvalues of the smallest magnitude of the system matrix are ‘removed’. In this paper, two preconditioning strategies are studied to solve a set of linear systems associated with the numerical integration of the time-dependent neutron diffusion equation. Both strategies can be implemented using the matrix–vector product as the main operation and succeed at reducing the total number of iterations needed to solve the set of systems.     

Uncooperative gait recognition by learning to rank

Gait is a useful biometric because it can operate from a distance and without subject cooperation. However, it is affected by changes in covariate conditions (carrying, clothing, view angle, etc.). Existing methods suffer from lack of training samples, can only cope with changes in a subset of conditions with limited success, and implicitly assume subject cooperation. We propose a novel approach which casts gait recognition as a bipartite ranking problem and leverages training samples from different people and even from different datasets. By exploiting learning to rank, the problem of model over-fitting caused by under-sampled training data is effectively addressed. This makes our approach suitable under a genuine uncooperative setting and robust against changes in any covariate conditions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach drastically outperforms existing methods, achieving up to 14-fold increase in recognition rate under the most difficult uncooperative settings.     

Incremental inconsistency detection with low memory overhead

Ensuring models’ consistency is a key concern when using a model‐based development approach. Therefore, model inconsistency detection has received significant attention over the last years. To be useful, inconsistency detection has to be sound, efficient, and scalable. Incremental detection is one way to achieve efficiency in the presence of large models. In most of the existing approaches, incrementalization is carried out at the expense of the memory consumption that becomes proportional to the model size and the number of consistency rules. In this paper, we propose a new incremental inconsistency detection approach that only consumes a small and model size‐independent amount of memory. It will therefore scale better to projects using large models and many consistency rules. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Scheduling component replacement for timely execution in dynamic systems

Timely run‐time software replacement techniques are a corner stone for reconciling real‐time systems development and dynamic behavior. Typical real‐time systems do not consider dynamic behavior because it deeply challenges predictability and timeliness. Current efforts are starting to merge the safe and predictable execution with a controllable level of dynamicity by imposing a set of bounds and limitations to the system dynamic behavior. One of the obstacles for this is how to time‐bound the different operations required to effectively implement component replacement. In this paper, the main challenges for this problem are identified, and a model to ensure that components can be replaced at run time preserving the temporal properties of the system is provided that also avoids failures in replacements. A real example and simulations of our replacement model are provided that validate the presented ideas. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effect of reactive diluents on properties of unsaturated polyester/montmorillonite nanocomposites

Unsaturated polyester (UP)/montmorillonite (MMT) nanocomposite was prepared by using hydroxypropylacrylate (HPA) as a reactive diluent instead of conventional styrene monomer and the effect of polarity of reactive diluent on properties of nanocomposite was investigated. X‐ray and mechanical test data indicated that mixing for an extended period of time is essential to enhance the physical properties of nanocomposites in the UP/Cloisite 6A system. This was attributed to the high polarity of HPA that may disturb the preintercalation of UP resin into the galleries of MMT. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 92: 238–242, 2004     

Tensile properties of hollow glass bead‐filled polypropylene composites

The tensile properties of polypropylene (PP) filled with hollow glass beads have been measured at room temperature to identify the effects of the particle contents, size and its distribution on them in the present article. The mean diameters of the fillers were 11, 35, and 70 μm, and they were named as TK10, TK35, and TK70 respectively. The surface of these particles was pretreated with silane coupling agent. The results showed that the yield stress (σ_y) decreased gently for PP/TK70 systems, whereas decreased relatively obviously for PP/TK35 systems with increasing the volume fraction (?_f) of the fillers. When ?_f was less than 5%, the tensile strength at break (σ_b) of the composites increased with the increase of ?_f. When ?_f was more than 5%, σ_b was almost a constant for PP/TK70 systems, while σ_b decreased linearly for PP/TK35 systems. The tensile fracture strain (ε_b) of the composites decreased suddenly when ?_f was less than 5%, and then decreased slightly with increasing ?_f. When ?_f was 10%, σ_y and σ_b increased while ε_b decreased with the increase of the bead diameter. Furthermore, the σ_y was predicted by means an equation proposed in the previous work, and good interfacial adhesion was shown between the hollow glass beads and the matrix. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 104: 1697–1701, 2007     

Removal of formaldehyde at low concentration using various activated carbon fibers

Adsorption of low concentration formaldehyde on pitch‐based, rayon‐based, and PAN‐based activated carbon fibers (ACFs) and an unactivated PAN‐based carbon fiber (PAN‐CF) was investigated by a dynamic method. The pore structure and surface chemistry of these samples were characterized by liquid nitrogen adsorption, elemental analysis, and X‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Results revealed that the pore structure, especially surface chemical composition, greatly influence the formaldehyde adsorption. PAN‐based ACFs showed the highest formaldehyde adsorption capacity because there are more abundant nitrogen‐containing groups, especially pyrrolic, pyridonic, pyridinic, and quaternary on the surface. The breakthrough time and formaldehyde adsorption capacity of one kind of PAN‐ACF were 361 min and 0.478 mmol/g, respectively. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2007     

A randomized algorithm for natural object colorization

Natural objects often contain vivid color distribution with wide variety of colors. Conventional colorization techniques, on the other hand, produce colors that are relatively flat with little color variation. In this paper, we introduce a randomized algorithm which considers not only the value of target color but also the distribution of target color. In essence, our algorithm paints a color distribution to a region which synthesizes color distribution of a natural object. Our approach models the correlation between intensity and color in HSV color space in terms of H – S, H – V and S – V joint histogram. During the colorization process, we randomly swap and reassign color of a pixel to minimize a cost function that measures color consistency to its neighborhood and intensity‐to‐color correlation captured in the joint histogram. We tested our algorithm extensively on many natural objects and our user study confirms that our results are more vivid and natural compared to results from previous techniques.     

Morphologies and dynamic mechanical properties of core‐shell emulsifier‐free latexes and their copolymers for P(BA/MMA)/P(MMA/BA) and P(BA/MMA)/PSt systems in the presence of AHPS

Different poly(methyl methacrylate/n‐butyl acrylate)/poly(n‐butyl acrylate/methyl methacrylate) [P(BA/MMA)/P(MMA/BA)] and poly(n‐butyl acrylate/methyl methacrylate)/polystyrene [P(BA/MMA)/PSt] core‐shell structured latexes were prepared by emulsifier‐free emulsion polymerization in the presence of hydrophilic monomer 3‐allyloxy‐2‐hydroxyl‐propanesulfonic salt (AHPS). The particle morphologies of the final latexes and dynamic mechanical properties of the copolymers from final latexes were investigated in detail. With the addition of AHPS, a latex of stable and high‐solid content (60 wt %) was prepared. The diameters of the latex particles are ～0.26 μm for the P(BA/MMA)/P(MMA/BA) system and 0.22–0.24 μm for the P(BA/MMA)/PSt system. All copolymers from the final latexes are two‐phase structure polymers, shown as two glass transition temperatures (T_gs) on dynamic mechanical analysis spectra. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 86: 3078–3084, 2002     

Sky Based Light Metering for High Dynamic Range Images

Image calibration requires both linearization of pixel values and scaling so that values in the image correspond to real‐world luminances. In this paper we focus on the latter and rather than rely on camera characterization, we calibrate images by analysing their content and metadata, obviating the need for expensive measuring devices or modeling of lens and camera combinations. Our analysis correlates sky pixel values to luminances that would be expected based on geographical metadata. Combined with high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, which gives us linear pixel data, our algorithm allows us to find absolute luminance values for each pixel—effectively turning digital cameras into absolute light meters. To validate our algorithm we have collected and annotated a calibrated set of HDR images and compared our estimation with several other approaches, showing that our approach is able to more accurately recover absolute luminance. We discuss various applications and demonstrate the utility of our method in the context of calibrated color appearance reproduction and lighting design.