An empirical investigation of competency factors affecting e-business success in European SMEs

In the last decade there was growing interest in strategic management literature about factors that influence a company's ability to use IT. There is general consensus that knowledge and competency are necessary in developing an IT capability, but there is very little understanding of what the necessary competencies are, and how they influence IS usage in different contexts. The small and medium-sized enterprise context is particularly interesting for two reasons: it constitutes a major part of the economy and it has been relatively unsuccessful in exploiting e-business.     

Parameter identification for nonlinear systems: Guaranteed confidence regions through LSCR

In this paper we consider the problem of constructing confidence regions for the parameters of nonlinear dynamical systems. The proposed method uses higher order statistics and extends the LSCR (leave-out sign-dominant correlation regions) algorithm for linear systems introduced in Campi and Weyer [2005, Guaranteed non-asymptotic confidence regions in system identification. Automatica 41(10), 1751-1764. Extended version available at 〈http://www.ing.unibs.it/∼campi〉]. The confidence regions contain the true parameter value with a guaranteed probability for any finite number of data points. Moreover, the confidence regions shrink around the true parameter value as the number of data points increases. The usefulness of the proposed approach is illustrated on some simple examples.     

How to protect exchanged secrets in the fair exchange protocol with off-line TTP

The most efficient approach to a fair exchange is to use an off-line trusted third party (TTP for short) who gets involved only when a dispute between two parties occurs. However, exchanged secrets that are not protected properly may be exposed to the TTP when one of these two parties asks the TTP to mediate the dispute. The first work to protect exchanged secrets from TTP’s misuse was proposed by Franklin and Reiter in 1997. They provided an on-line semi-trusted third party instead of an off-line third party for a fair exchange. Their schemes forced the TTP to take part in the protocol for all the cases, and thus, deemed to be impractical.The present paper, introduces several models, including single and multiple TTPs, to focus the attention not only on security properties, but also on reliability functions. In the single TTP mode, our new scheme can protect the exchanged data through an efficient exchange protocol, whereas in the multiple TTP mode, we proposed an approach to balance the security level with the reliability of the system.     

An efficient controller structure with minimum roundoff noise gain

Based on a polynomial operator approach, a new sparse controller structure is derived, which is actually an improved version of the recently proposed structure [Li, G. (2004). A polynomial-operator-based DFIIt structure for IIR filters. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II, 51, 147-151]. The performance of the proposed structure is analyzed by deriving the corresponding expression of roundoff noise gain and the problem of finding optimized sparse structures is solved efficiently with a genetic algorithm (GA). A numerical example is given, which shows that the newly developed structure can achieve much better performance than some well-known structures and particularly outperforms the traditional optimal fully parametrized realization greatly in terms of reducing roundoff noise and implementation complexity.     

Physical design of the VCI wrappers for the on-chip packet-switched network named SPIN

This paper presents the physical design methodology of the VCI/SPIN wrappers. The challenge was the validation of the wrappers’ specification with Alliance CAD Tools.A wrapper is a standard gateway used by a subscriber to access an interconnect. Because there are as many wrappers as subscribers, it is relevant to have an estimation of the wrapper’s area, its frequency and then compare these results to the router’s.The interest to perform this study with academic tools is to show that commercial tools are not the unique way for experimentations.     

A rule-based approach for robust clump splitting

This paper presents a robust rule-based approach for the splitting of binary clumps that are formed by objects of diverse shapes and sizes. First, the deepest boundary pixels, i.e., the concavity pixels in a clump, are detected using a fast and accurate scheme. Next, concavity-based rules are applied to generate the candidate split lines that join pairs of concavity pixels. A figure of merit is used to determine the best split line from the set of candidate lines. Experimental results show that the proposed approach is robust and accurate.     

ID-based threshold decryption secure against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack

This paper proposes an identity-based threshold decryption scheme IB-ThDec and reduces its security to the Bilinear Diffie-Hellman problem. Compared with previous work, this conceals two pairing computations in the ciphertext validity verification procedure. The formal proof of security of this scheme is provided in the random oracle model. Additionally, we show that IB-ThDec can be applied to the threshold key escrow and the mediated cryptosystems.     

A region-based selective optical flow back-projection for genuine motion vector estimation

Motion vector plays one significant feature in moving object segmentation. However, the motion vector in this application is required to represent the actual motion displacement, rather than regions of visually significant similarity. In this paper, region-based selective optical flow back-projection (RSOFB) which back-projects optical flows in a region to restore the region's motion vector from gradient-based optical flows, is proposed to obtain genuine motion displacement. The back-projection is performed based on minimizing the projection mean square errors of the motion vector on gradient directions. As optical flows of various magnitudes and directions provide various degrees of reliability in the genuine motion restoration, the optical flows to be used in the RSOFB are optimally selected based on their sensitivity to noises and their tendency in causing motion estimation errors. In this paper a deterministic solution is also derived for performing the minimization and obtaining the genuine motion magnitude and motion direction.     

Fast, large-scale model predictive control by partial enumeration

Partial enumeration (PE) is presented as a method for treating large, linear model predictive control applications that are out of reach with available MPC methods. PE uses both a table storage method and online optimization to achieve this goal. Versions of PE are shown to be closed-loop stable. PE is applied to an industrial example with more than 250 states, 32 inputs, and a 25-sample control horizon. The performance is less than 0.01% suboptimal, with average speedup factors in the range of 80-220, and worst-case speedups in the range of 4.9-39.2, compared to an existing MPC method. Small tables with only 25-200 entries were used to obtain this performance, while full enumeration is intractable for this example.     

Cubic Bézier approximation of a digitized curve

In this paper we present an efficient technique for piecewise cubic Bézier approximation of digitized curve. An adaptive breakpoint detection method divides a digital curve into a number of segments and each segment is approximated by a cubic Bézier curve so that the approximation error is minimized. Initial approximated Bézier control points for each of the segments are obtained by interpolation technique i.e. by the reverse recursion of De Castaljau's algorithm. Two methods, two-dimensional logarithmic search algorithm (TDLSA) and an evolutionary search algorithm (ESA), are introduced to find the best-fit Bézier control points from the approximate interpolated control points. ESA based refinement is proved to be better experimentally. Experimental results show that Bézier approximation of a digitized curve is much more accurate and uses less number of points compared to other approximation techniques.