Timed Specification For Web Services Compatibility Analysis

Web services are becoming one of the main technologies for designing and building complex inter-enterprise business applications. Usually, a business application cannot be fulfilled by one Web service but by coordinating a set of them. In particular, to perform a coordination, one of the important investigations is the compatibility analysis. Two Web services are said compatible if they can interact correctly. In the literature, the proposed frameworks for the services compatibility checking rely on the supported sequences of messages. The interaction of services depends also on other properties, such that the exchanged data flow. Thus, considering only supported sequences of messages seems to be insufficient. Other properties on which the services interaction can rely on, are the temporal constraints. In this paper, we focus our interest on the compatibility analysis of Web services regarding their (1) supported sequences of messages, (2) the exchanged data flow, (3) constraints related to the exchanged data flow and (4) the temporal requirements. Based on these properties, we study three compatibility classes: (i) absolute compatibility, (ii) likely compatibility and (iii) absolute incompatibility.     

Food vacuole proteome of the malarial parasite Plasmodium falciparum

The Plasmodium falciparum food vacuole (FV) is a lysosome-like organelle where erythrocyte hemoglobin digestion occurs. It is a favorite target in the development of antimalarials. We have used a tandem mass spectrometry approach to investigate the proteome of an FV-enriched fraction and identified 116 proteins. The electron microscopy analysis and the Western blot data showed that the major component of the fraction was the FV and, as expected, the majority of previously known FV markers were recovered. Of particular interest, several proteins involved in vesicle-mediated trafficking were identified, which are likely to play a key role in FV biogenesis and/or FV protein trafficking. Recovery of parasite surface proteins lends support to the cytostomal pathway of hemoglobin ingestion as a FV trafficking route. We have identified 32 proteins described as hypothetical in the databases. This insight into FV protein content provides new clues towards understanding the biological function of this organelle in P. falciparum.     

Uniting Local and Global Controllers with Robustness to Vanishing Noise

We consider control systems for which we know two stabilizing controllers. One is globally asymptotically stabilizing, the other one is only locally asymptotically stabilizing but for some reason we insist on using it in a neighborhood of the origin. We look for a uniting control law being equal to the local feedback on a neighborhood of the origin, equal to the global one outside of a larger neighborhood and being a globally stabilizing controller. We study several solutions based on continuous, discontinuous, hybrid, time-varying controllers. One criterion of the selection of a controller is the robustness of the stability to vanishing noise. This leads us in particular to consider a kind of generalization of Krasovskii trajectories for hybrid systems. Date received: November 29, 1999. Date revised: August 7, 2000.     

Analytic Tangent Irradiance Environment Maps for Anisotropic Surfaces

Environment‐mapped rendering of Lambertian isotropic surfaces is common, and a popular technique is to use a quadratic spherical harmonic expansion. This compact irradiance map representation is widely adopted in interactive applications like video games. However, many materials are anisotropic, and shading is determined by the local tangent direction, rather than the surface normal. Even for visualization and illustration, it is increasingly common to define a tangent vector field, and use anisotropic shading. In this paper, we extend spherical harmonic irradiance maps to anisotropic surfaces, replacing Lambertian reflectance with the diffuse term of the popular Kajiya‐Kay model. We show that there is a direct analogy, with the surface normal replaced by the tangent. Our main contribution is an analytic formula for the diffuse Kajiya‐Kay BRDF in terms of spherical harmonics; this derivation is more complicated than for the standard diffuse lobe. We show that the terms decay even more rapidly than for Lambertian reflectance, going as l^–3, where l is the spherical harmonic order, and with only 6 terms (l = 0 and l = 2) capturing 99.8% of the energy. Existing code for irradiance environment maps can be trivially adapted for real‐time rendering with tangent irradiance maps. We also demonstrate an application to offline rendering of the diffuse component of fibers, using our formula as a control variate for Monte Carlo sampling.     

Solving large sparse linear systems in a grid environment: the GREMLINS code versus the PETSc library

Solving large sparse linear systems is essential in numerous scientific domains. Several algorithms, based on direct or iterative methods, have been developed for parallel architectures. On distributed grids consisting of processors located in distant geographical sites, their performance may be unsatisfactory because they suffer from too many synchronizations and communications. The GREMLINS code has been developed for solving large sparse linear systems on distributed grids. It implements the multisplitting method that consists in splitting the original linear system into several subsystems that can be solved independently. In this paper, the performance of the GREMLINS code obtained with several libraries for solving the linear subsystems is analyzed. Its performance is also compared with that of the widely used PETSc library that enables one to develop portable parallel applications. Numerical experiments have been carried out both on local clusters and on distributed grids.     

ISS-Lyapunov functions for time-varying hyperbolic systems of balance laws

A family of time-varying hyperbolic systems of balance laws is considered. The partial differential equations of this family can be stabilized by selecting suitable boundary conditions. For the stabilized systems, the classical technique of construction of Lyapunov functions provides a function which is a weak Lyapunov function in some cases, but is not in others. We transform this function through a strictification approach to obtain a time-varying strict Lyapunov function. It allows us to establish asymptotic stability in the general case and a robustness property with respect to additive disturbances of input-to-state stability (ISS) type. Two examples illustrate the results.     

A state dependent sampling for linear state feedback

In this work, a new state-dependent sampling control enlarges the sampling intervals of state feedback control. We consider the case of linear time invariant systems and guarantee the exponential stability of the system origin for a chosen decay rate. The approach is based on LMIs obtained thanks to sufficient Lyapunov–Razumikhin stability conditions and follows two steps. In the first step, we compute a Lyapunov–Razumikhin function that guarantees exponential stability for all time-varying sampling intervals up to some given bound. This value can be used as a lower-bound of the state-dependent sampling function. In a second step, an off-line computation provides a mapping from the state-space into the set of sampling intervals: the state is divided into a finite number of regions, and to each of these regions is associated an allowable upper-bound of the sampling intervals that will guarantee the global (exponential or asymptotic) stability of the system. The results are based on sufficient conditions obtained using convex polytopes. Therefore, they involve some conservatism with respect to necessary and sufficient conditions. However, at each of the two steps, an optimization on the sampling upper-bounds is proposed. The approach is illustrated with numerical examples from the literature for which the number of actuations is shown to be reduced with respect to the periodic sampling case.     

Genetic programming for multibiometrics

Biometric systems suffer from some drawbacks: a biometric system can provide in general good performances except with some individuals as its performance depends highly on the quality of the capture… One solution to solve some of these problems is to use multibiometrics where different biometric systems are combined together (multiple captures of the same biometric modality, multiple feature extraction algorithms, multiple biometric modalities…). In this paper, we are interested in score level fusion functions application (i.e., we use a multibiometric authentication scheme which accept or deny the claimant for using an application). In the state of the art, the weighted sum of scores (which is a linear classifier) and the use of an SVM (which is a non linear classifier) provided by different biometric systems provide one of the best performances. We present a new method based on the use of genetic programming giving similar or better performances (depending on the complexity of the database). We derive a score fusion function by assembling some classical primitives functions (+, ∗, −, … ). We have validated the proposed method on three significant biometric benchmark datasets from the state of the art.