Use of conditioning time to investigate the mechanisms of interactions of selected fatty acids on hematite Part II laboratory investigations

It is the aim of this paper to examine the effects of conditioning time on the flotation of hematite using three technical grade fatty acid reagents as providing additional evidence on their mechanism of interaction with the hematite surface. Various mechanisms have been postulated as occurring as conditioning time is increased. Both physical (e.g. conditioning time and power input) and chemical (nature, dispersion and solubility of the adsorbing species) contribute to the mechanisms of attachment of collector. In this paper, the mechanism of attachment of oleate to hematite can be readily explained by chemisorption, but the mechanism of attachment of lauric acid appears to be physical adsorption at neutral pH. The flotation of hematite with a mixture of tallow-type fatty acids (palmitic, stearic and oleic acids) is very sensitive to conditioning time, and suggests that, even though flotation is very effective at short conditioning times, it is very susceptible to the presence of fines and their associated high surface areas. It is therefore obvious that both the physical and chemical conditions contribute to the mechanisms of adsorption of fatty acids on iron-containing oxide minerals and must be understood in order to optimise the flotation of these minerals in an industrial situation.     

Profit maximization of TSP through a hybrid algorithm

Here a new model of Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) with uncertain parameters is formulated and solved using a hybrid algorithm. For this TSP, there are some fixed number of cities and the costs and time durations for traveling from one city to another are known. Here a Traveling Salesman (TS) visits and spends some time in each city for selling the company’s product. The return and expenditure at each city are dependent on the time spent by the TS at that city and these are given in functional forms of t. The total time limit for the entire tour is fixed and known. Now, the problem for the TS is to identify a tour program and also to determine the stay time at each city so that total profit out of the system is maximum. Here the model is solved by a hybrid method combining the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) and Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). The problem is divided into two subproblems where ACO and PSO are used successively iteratively in a generation using one’s result for the other. Numerical experiments are performed to illustrate the models. Some behavioral studies of the models and convergences of the proposed hybrid algorithm with respect to iteration numbers and cost matrix sizes are presented.     

Low‐order optimal regulation of parabolic PDEs with time‐dependent domain

Observer and optimal boundary control design for the objective of output tracking of a linear distributed parameter system given by a two‐dimensional (2‐D) parabolic partial differential equation with time‐varying domain is realized in this work. The transformation of boundary actuation to distributed control setting allows to represent the system's model in a standard evolutionary form. By exploring dynamical model evolution and generating data, a set of time‐varying empirical eigenfunctions that capture the dominant dynamics of the distributed system is found. This basis is used in Galerkin's method to accurately represent the distributed system as a finite‐dimensional plant in terms of a linear time‐varying system. This reduced‐order model enables synthesis of a linear optimal output tracking controller, as well as design of a state observer. Finally, numerical results are prepared for the optimal output tracking of a 2‐D model of the temperature distribution in Czochralski crystal growth process which has nontrivial geometry. © 2014 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 61: 494–502, 2015     

Background and foreground interaction: Influence of complementary colors on the search task

Labels are indispensable visual (communication) elements that completely deliver the geospatial message of maps. The objective of this study is to investigate the impact of complementary colors between the map's background and text on the readability of cartographic texts and thus on the efficiency of the map user's search task. This is compared with the use of the “traditional” black labels on the corresponding colored backgrounds. Furthermore, a number of user characteristics, such as gender and expertise, are taken into account as well. The users' eye movements were registered to study their attentive behavior during the visual search task. In addition to the complement of the color's hue, the analyses were based on the difference in luminance, which could also affect the labels' readability. The difference between the black and colored label design was significantly different versus the eye‐tracking metrics. A correlation was found between the color difference and reaction time measurement and between the luminance difference and fixation duration. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Col Res Appl, 40, 437–445, 2015     

Toward the adaptation of component‐based architectures by model transformation: behind smart user interfaces

Graphical user interfaces are not always developed for remaining static. There are GUIs with the need of implementing some variability mechanisms. Component‐based GUIs are an ideal target for incorporating this kind of operations, because they can adapt their functionality at run‐time when their structure is updated by adding or removing components or by modifying the relationships between them. Mashup user interfaces are a good example of this type of GUI, and they allow to combine services through the assembly of graphical components. We intend to adapt component‐based user interfaces for obtaining smart user interfaces. With this goal, our proposal attempts to adapt abstract component‐based architectures by using model transformation. Our aim is to generate at run‐time a dynamic model transformation, because the rules describing their behavior are not pre‐set but are selected from a repository depending on the context. The proposal describes an adaptation schema based on model transformation providing a solution to this dynamic transformation. Context information is processed to select at run‐time a rule subset from a repository. Selected rules are used to generate, through a higher‐order transformation, the dynamic model transformation. This approach has been tested through a case study which applies different repositories to the same architecture and context. Moreover, a web tool has been developed for validation and demonstration of its applicability. The novelty of our proposal arises from the adaptation schema that creates a non pre‐set transformation, which enables the dynamic adaptation of component‐based architectures. Copyright © 2014 Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Hierarchical power management of a system with autonomously power-managed components using reinforcement learning

This paper presents a hierarchical dynamic power management (DPM) framework based on reinforcement learning (RL) technique, which aims at power savings in a computer system with multiple I/O devices running a number of heterogeneous applications. The proposed framework interacts with the CPU scheduler to perform effective application-level scheduling, thereby enabling further power savings. Moreover, it considers non-stationary workloads and differentiates between the service request generation rates of various software application. The online adaptive DPM technique consists of two layers: component-level local power manager and system-level global power manager. The component-level PM policy is pre-specified and fixed whereas the system-level PM employs temporal difference learning on semi-Markov decision process as the model-free RL technique, and it is specifically optimized for a heterogeneous application pool. Experiments show that the proposed approach considerably enhances power savings while maintaining good performance levels. In comparison with other reference systems, the proposed RL-based DPM approach, further enhances power savings, performs well under various workloads, can simultaneously consider power and performance, and achieves wide and deep power-performance tradeoff curves. Experiments conducted with multiple service providers confirm that up to 63% maximum energy saving per service provider can be achieved.     

A New Time-Aware Collaborative Filtering Intelligent Recommendation System

Aiming at the problem that the traditional collaborative filtering recommendation algorithm does not fully consider the influence of correlation between projects on recommendation accuracy, this paper introduces project attribute fuzzy matrix, measures the project relevance through fuzzy clustering method, and classifies all project attributes. Then, the weight of the project relevance is introduced in the user similarity calculation, so that the nearest neighbor search is more accurate. In the prediction scoring section, considering the change of user interest with time, it is proposed to use the time weighting function to improve the influence of the time effect of the evaluation, so that the newer evaluation information in the system has a relatively large weight. The experimental results show that the improved algorithm improves the recommendation accuracy and improves the recommendation quality.     

Geosynthetic reinforced piled embankment modeling using discrete and continuum approaches

Understanding the load transfer mechanism can support engineers having more economical design of geosynthetic reinforced piled embankments. This study aims to investigate the load transfer mechanisms by two different numerical methods including the Discrete Element Method (DEM) and the Finite Difference Method (FDM). The DEM model adopts (a) discrete particles to simulate the micro-structure of the granular materials and (b) coupled discrete element – finite element method (DEM-FEM) to capture the interaction between granular materials and geotextiles. On the other hand, the FDM model uses an advanced constitutive soil model considering the hardening and softening behaviour of the granular materials. The numerical results show that the geotextiles can only contribute to the vertical loading resistance in cases where the soils between piles are soft enough. In terms of design, an optimum value of the geotextile tensile stiffness can be found considering the load, the soft soil stiffness and the thickness of the embankment. Both the DEM and the FDM show that a high geotextile tensile stiffness is not required since an extra stiffness will slightly contribute to the efficiency of the geosynthetic reinforced piled embankments. Nevertheless, both models are useful to optimize the design of geosynthetic reinforced piled embankments.     

Detection of correlation characteristics between financial time series based on multi-resolution analysis

Interactions between financial time series are complex and changeable in both time and frequency domains. To reveal the evolution characteristics of the time-varying relations between bivariate time series from a multi-resolution perspective, this study introduces an approach combining wavelet analysis and complex networks. In addition, to reduce the influence the phase lag between the time series has on the correlations, we propose dynamic time-warping (DTW) correlation coefficients to reflect the correlation degree between bivariate time series. Unlike previous studies that symbolized the time series only based on the correlation strength, the second-level symbol is set according to the correlation length during the coarse-graining process. This study presents a novel method to analyze bivariate time series and provides more information for investors and decision makers when investing in the stock market. We choose the closing prices of two stocks in China’s market as the sample and explore the evolutionary behavior of correlation modes from different resolutions. Furthermore, we perform experiments to discover the critical correlation modes between the bull market and the bear market on the high-resolution scale, the clustering effect during the financial crisis on the middle-resolution scale, and the potential pseudo period on the low-resolution scale. The experimental results exactly match reality, which provides powerful evidence to prove that our method is effective in financial time series analysis.     

融合时间隐语义填充和子群划分的推荐算法

随着个性化推荐技术的发展，推荐系统面临着越来越多的挑战。传统的推荐算法通常存在数据稀疏性和推荐精度低等问题。针对以上问题，提出了一种融合时间隐语义填充和子群划分的推荐算法[K]-TLFM（Time Based Latent Factor Model Integrated with [k]-means）。该算法利用融合时间因素的隐语义模型对原始用户物品评分矩阵缺失项进行填充，避免了用全局平均值或者用户/物品平均值补全矩阵带来的误差，有效缓解了数据稀疏性问题，同时融合时间因素有效地刻画了用户偏好随时间的变化；完成评分矩阵缺失项填充后，基于二分[k]-means聚类算法将偏好、兴趣特征相似的对象划分到同一个子群中，在目标用户所属的子群中基于选定的协同过滤算法为用户产生推荐列表，提高了推荐效率和准确性。在MovieLens和Netflix数据集上对该算法的推荐性能进行了对比实验，结果表明该算法具有更高的推荐精度。