An effective DeepWINet CNN model for off-line text-independent writer identification

Pattern Analysis and Applications - Writer identification based on handwriting recognition is considered one of the most common research areas in pattern recognition and biometrics. It has...     

The reference temperature dependence of Young’s modulus of two-temperature thermoelastic damping of gold nano-beam

This work is concerning with the study of the thermoelastic damping of a nanobeam resonator in the context of the two-temperature generalized thermoelasticity theory. An explicit formula of thermoelastic damping has been derived when Young’s modulus is a function of the reference temperature. Influences of the beam height and Young’s modulus have been studied with some comparisons between the Biot model and the Lord–Shulman model (L–S) for one- and two-temperature types. Numerical results show that the values of the thermal relaxation parameter and the two-temperature parameter have a strong influence on thermoelastic damping at nanoscales.     

A new scalable multicast routing algorithm for interactive real-time applications

Quality of service (QoS) provisioning generally assumes more than one QoS measure that implies that QoS routing can be categorized as an instance of routing subject to multiple constraints: delay jitter, bandwidth, cost, etc. We study the problem of constructing multicast trees to meet the QoS requirements of real-time interactive applications where it is necessary to provide bounded delays and bounded delay variation among the source and all destinations while keeping overall cost of the multicast tree low. The main contribution of our work is a new strategy for constructing multiconstrained multicast trees. We first derive mathematically a new delay-variation estimation scheme and prove its efficiency. Thereafter, we propose a simple and competitive (in terms of running time) heuristic algorithm, for delay and delay variation constrained routing problem based on the proposed delay-variation estimation scheme and using the Extended Prim-Dijkstra tradeoffs’ algorithm. Our contribution also extends previous works in providing some properties and analyses of delay bounded paths satisfying delay variation constraints. Extensive simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms DVDMR in terms of multicast delay variation with the same time complexity as DVDMR.     

A probabilistic reputation model based on transaction ratings

This work introduces a probabilistic model allowing to compute reputation scores as close as possible to their intrinsic value, according to the model. It is based on the following, natural, consumer-provider interaction model. Consumers are assumed to order items from providers, who each has some intrinsic, latent, “quality of service” score. In the basic model, the providers supply the items with a quality following a normal law, centered on their intrinsic “quality of service”. The consumers, after the reception and the inspection of the item, rate it according to a linear function of its quality - a standard regression model. This regression model accounts for the bias of the consumer in providing ratings as well as his reactivity towards changes in item quality. Moreover, the constancy of the provider in supplying an equal quality level when delivering the items is estimated by the standard deviation of his normal law of item quality generation. Symmetrically, the consistency of the consumer in providing similar ratings for a given quality is quantified by the standard deviation of his normal law of ratings generation. Two extensions of this basic model are considered as well: a model accounting for truncation of the ratings and a Bayesian model assuming a prior distribution on the parameters. Expectation-maximization algorithms, allowing to estimate the parameters based on the ratings, are developed for all the models. The experiments suggest that these models are able to extract useful information from the ratings, are robust towards adverse behaviors such as cheating, and are competitive in comparison with standard methods. Even if the suggested models do not show considerable improvements over other competing models (such as Brockhoff and Skovgaard’s model [12]), they, however, also permit to estimate interesting features over the raters - such as their reactivity, bias, consistency, reliability, or expectation.     

3D characterization of hot metallic shells during industrial forging

During industrial forging of hot metallic shells, it is necessary to regularly measure the dimensions of the parts, especially the inner and outer diameters and the thickness of the walls. A forging sequence lasts 2 h or more during which the diameter of the shell is regularly measured in order to decide when to stop the forging process. For better working conditions, for the safety of the blacksmiths, and for a faster and more accurate measurement, we have developed a novel system based on two commercially available time of flight laser scanners for the measurement of the diameters of hot cylindrical metallic shells during the forging process. The advantages of using laser scanners are that they can be placed very far from the hot shell, more than 15 m, while at the same time giving an accurate point cloud from which three-dimensional views of the shell can be reconstructed and diameter measurements done. Moreover, more accurate measurement is achieved in less time with the laser system than with the conventional method using a large ruler. The system has been successfully used to measure the diameters of hot cylindrical metallic shells.     

Grid-Controlled Lightpaths for High Performance Grid Applications

Grid applications call for high performance networking support. One attractive solution is to deploy Grids over optical networks. However, resource management in optical domains is traditionally very rigid and cannot successfully meet the requirements of Grid applications, such as flexible provisioning and configuration. In this paper, we present a customizable resource management solution for optical networks where users can create lightpaths on demand and manage their own network resources. Thanks to a Grid-centric system architecture, lightpath resources can be shared among users and easily integrated with data and computation Grids.     

An optimal deployable bandwidth aggregation system

The explosive increase in data demand coupled with the rapid deployment of various wireless access technologies have led to the increase of number of multi-homed or multi-interface enabled devices. Fully exploiting these interfaces has motivated researchers to propose numerous solutions that aggregate their available bandwidths to increase overall throughput and satisfy the end-user’s growing data demand. These solutions, however, do not utilize their interfaces to the maximum without network support, and more importantly, have faced a steep deployment barrier. In this paper, we propose an optimal deployable bandwidth aggregation system (DBAS) for multi-interface enabled devices. We present the DBAS architecture that does not introduce any intermediate hardware, modify current operating systems, modify socket implementations, nor require changes to current applications or legacy servers. The DBAS architecture is designed to automatically estimate the characteristics of applications and dynamically schedule various connections and/or packets to different interfaces. We also formulate our optimal scheduler as a mixed integer programming problem yielding an efficient solution. We evaluate DBAS via implementation on the Windows OS and further verify our results with simulations on NS2. Our evaluation shows that, with current Internet characteristics, DBAS reaches the throughput upper bound with no modifications to legacy servers. It also highlights the significant enhancements in the response time introduced by DBAS, which directly enhances the user experience.     

Synthesis,photophysical properties,and application of optical brighteners based on stilbene-oxadiazole derivatives

A series of symmetrical optical brighteners based on stilbene-oxadiazole derivatives were prepared by the simple synthetic route of a condensation reaction between 4,4′-dicarboxystilbene and N,N′-carbonyldiimidazole reagent, forming stilbene 4,4′-ethene-1,2-diyldibenzohydrazide as a key intermediate. The obtained compounds were characterised by analysis of nuclear magnetic resonance, mass spectrometry, and elemental analysis data. The absorption maximum wavelength, fluorescence emission wavelength, and fluorescence quantum yield were measured in N,N-dimethylformamide solution at room temperature, and the fluorescence properties of the prepared compounds in the solid state were observed and measured. The compounds exhibited bluish and greenish fluorescence emission, with the fluorescence quantum yield in the range 0.2–0.8; the effects of substituents on the emission spectra of these compounds were interpreted. The prepared compounds were applied as optical brighteners to polyester and polyamide-6 fabrics at various concentrations, and their CIE whiteness index and fastness properties were studied.     

A clonal selection algorithm for the generalized cell formation problem considering machine reliability and alternative routings

The cell formation is the first step in the design of Cellular Manufacturing systems. It consists of grouping parts with similar processing needs into cells and identifying the set of machines needed to process these parts. The aim is to minimize the material handling costs and maximize the use of the machines. In this paper, the machine reliability and the alternative process routings are taken into account to form the production cells. The presence of these factors in addition to the production volume, operation sequence and production time makes the problem more realistic but also more complex. Most authors solve this kind of problems by mathematical programming approaches that require large amounts of computational efforts. Therefore, a modified version of the Clonal Selection Algorithm is introduced and a local search mechanism is adopted in this paper. The obtained results are compared with those of the Branch and Bound (B&B) method using LINGO software. The comparison reveals the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed method in terms of both solution quality and computation time required.