Logic Programs,Compatibility and Forward Chaining Construction

Logic programming under the stable model semantics is proposed as a non-monotonic language for knowledge representation and reasoning in artificial intelligence. In this paper, we explore and extend the notion of compatibility and the Λ operator, which were first proposed by Zhang to characterize default theories. First, we present a new characterization of stable models of a logic program and show that an extended notion of compatibility can characterize stable submodels. We further propose the notion of weak auto-compatibility which characterizes the Normal Forward Chaining Construction proposed by Marek, Nerode and Remmel. Previously, this construction was only known to construct the stable models of FC-normal logic programs, which turn out to be a proper subclass of weakly auto-compatible logic programs. We investigate the properties and complexity issues for weakly auto-compatible logic programs and compare them with some subclasses of logic programs.     

H-Trust: A Group Trust Management System for Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grid

Peer-to-Peer Desktop Grid (P2PDG) has emerged as a pervasive cyber-infrastructure tackling many large-scale applications with high impacts. As a burgeoning research area, P2PDG can support numerous applications, including scientific computing, file sharing, web services, and virtual organization for collaborative activities and projects. To handle trustworthiness issues of these services, trust and reputation schemes are proposed to establish trust among peers in P2PDG. In this paper, we propose a robust group trust management system, called H-Trust, inspired by the H-index aggregation technique. Leveraging the robustness of the H-index algorithm under incomplete and uncertain circumstances, H-Trust offers a robust personalized reputation evaluation mechanism for both individual and group trusts with minimal communication and computation overheads. We present the H-Trust scheme in five phases, including trust recording, local trust evaluation, trust query phase, spatial-temporal update phase, and group reputation evaluation phases. The rationale for its design, the analysis of the algorithm are further investigated. To validate the performance of H-Trust scheme, we designed the H-Trust simulator HTrust-Sim to conduct multi-agent-based simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that H-Trust is robust and can identify and isolate malicious peers in large scale systems even when a large portion of peers are malicious.     

Pattern discovery and change detection of online music query streams

Mining of music data is one of the most important problems in multimedia data mining. In this paper, two research issues of mining music data, i.e., online mining of music query streams and change detection of music query streams, are discussed. First, we proposed an efficient online algorithm, FTP-stream (Frequent Temporal Pattern mining of streams), to mine all frequent melody structures over sliding windows of music melody sequence streams. An effective bit-sequence representation is used in the proposed algorithm to reduce the time and memory needed to slide the windows. An effective list structure is developed in the FTP-stream algorithm to overcome the performance bottleneck of 2-candidate generation. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm FTP-stream only needs a half of memory requirement of original melody sequence data, and just scans the music query stream once. After mining frequent melody structures, we developed a simple online algorithm, MQS-change (changes of Music Query Streams), to detect the changes of frequent melody structures in current user-centered music query streams. Two music melody structures (set of chord-sets and string of chord-sets) are maintained and four melody structure changes (positive burst, negative burst, increasing change and decreasing change) are monitored in a new summary data structure, MSC-list (a list of Music Structure Changes). Experiments show that the MQS-change algorithm is an effective online method to detect the changes of music melody structures over continuous music query streams.

From MPEG-7 user interaction tools to hanging basket models: bridging the gap

The content–user gap is the difference between the limited range of content-relevant preferences that may be expressed using the MPEG-7 user interaction tools and the much wider range of metadata that may be represented using the MPEG-7 content tools. One approach for closing this gap is to make the user and content metadata isomorphic by using the existing MPEG-7 content tools to represent user (as well as content) metadata (Agius and Angelides 2006, 2007). Subsequently, user preferences may be specified for all content, without omission. Since there is a wealth of user preference and history metadata within the MPEG-7 user interaction tools that can usefully complement these specific content preferences, in this paper we develop a method by which all user and content metadata may be bridged.

Using visual and text features for direct marketing on multimedia messaging services domain

Traditionally, direct marketing companies have relied on pre-testing to select the best offers to send to their audience. Companies systematically dispatch the offers under consideration to a limited sample of potential buyers, rank them with respect to their performance and, based on this ranking, decide which offers to send to the wider population. Though this pre-testing process is simple and widely used, recently the industry has been under increased pressure to further optimize learning, in particular when facing severe time and learning space constraints. The main contribution of the present work is to demonstrate that direct marketing firms can exploit the information on visual content to optimize the learning phase. This paper proposes a two-phase learning strategy based on a cascade of regression methods that takes advantage of the visual and text features to improve and accelerate the learning process. Experiments in the domain of a commercial Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) show the effectiveness of the proposed methods and a significant improvement over traditional learning techniques. The proposed approach can be used in any multimedia direct marketing domain in which offers comprise both a visual and text component.

Global Asymptotic Robust Stability and Global Exponential Robust Stability of Neural Networks with Time-Varying Delays

In this paper, based on nonnegative matrix theory, the Halanay’s inequality and Lyapunov functional, some novel sufficient conditions for global asymptotic robust stability and global exponential robust stability of neural networks with time-varying delays are presented. It is shown that our results improve and generalize several previous results derived in the literatures. From the obtained results, some linear matrix inequality criteria are derived. Finally, a simulation is given to show the effectiveness of the results.     

Broadcasting scheme with low client buffers and bandwidths for video-on-demand applications

Efficient data broadcasting is independent of request arrivals, and is thus highly promising when transmitting popular videos. A conventionally adopted broadcasting method is periodic broadcasting, which divides a popular video into segments, which are then simultaneously broadcast on different data channels. Once clients want to watch the video, they download the segments from these channels. The skyscraper broadcasting (SkB) scheme supports clients with small bandwidths. An SkB client requires only two-channel bandwidths to receive video segments. This work proposes a reverse SkB (RSkB) scheme, which extends SkB by reducing buffering spaces. The RSkB is mathematically shown to achieve on-time video delivery and two-channel client bandwidths. A formula for determining the maximum number of segments buffered by an RSkB client is presented. Finally, an analysis of RSkB reveals that its client buffer requirements are usually 25–37% lower than SkB. Extensive simulations of RSkB further demonstrate that RSkB yields lower client buffer demand than other proposed systems.

Smooth Scheduling under Variable Rates or the Analog-Digital Confinement Game

This work considers non-terminating scheduling problems in which a system of multiple resources serves clients having variable needs. The system has m identical resources and n clients; in each time slot each resource may serve at most one client; in each such slot t each client γ has a rate, a real number ρ _γ (t), that specifies his needs in this slot. The rates satisfy the restriction ∑ _γ ρ _γ (t)≤m for any slot t. Except of this restriction, the rates can vary in arbitrary fashion. (This contrasts most prior works in this area in which the rates of the clients are constant.) The schedule is required to be smooth as follows: a schedule is Δ -smooth if for all time intervals I the absolute difference between the amount of service received by each client γ to his nominal needs of ∑ _t∈I ρ _γ (t) is less than Δ. Our objective are online schedulers that produce Δ-smooth schedules where Δ is a small constant which is independent of m and n. Our paper constructs such schedulers; these are the first online Δ-smooth schedulers, with a constant Δ, for clients with arbitrarily variable rates in a single or multiple resource system. Furthermore, the paper also considers a non-concurrent environment in which there is an additional restriction that each client is served at most once in each time slot; it presents the first online smooth schedulers for variable rates under this restriction. The above non-concurrent restriction is crucial in some applications (e.g., CPU scheduling). It has been pointed out that this restriction “adds a surprising amount of difficulty” to the scheduling problem. However, this observation was never formalized and, of course, was never proved. Our paper formalizes and proves some aspects of this observation. Another contribution of this paper is the introduction of a complete information, two player game called the analog-digital confinement game. In such a game pebbles are located on the real line; the two players, the analog player and the digital player, take alternating turns and each one, in his turn, moves some of the pebbles; the digital player moves the pebbles backwards by discrete distances while the analog player moves the pebbles forward by analog distances; the aim of the analog player is to cause one pebble (or more) to escape a pre-defined real interval while the aim of the digital player is to confine the pebbles into the interval. We demonstrate that this game is a convenient framework to study the general question of how to approximate an analog process by a digital one. All the above scheduling results are established via this game. In this derivation, the pebbles represent the clients, the analog player generates the needs of the clients and the digital player generates the schedule. Dedicated to the memory of Professor Shimon Even for his inspiration and encouragement