A novel heuristic for multi-objective optimization of analog circuit performances

We present a novel heuristic for optimizing analog circuit performances. It deals with generating the Pareto front using the topological properties of the feasible solution space. This heuristic allows us generating optimal values of circuit parameters in reduced computation time and memory consumption. Unlike basic metaheuristics, it does not need optimization background from the user in order to be easily adapted to different applications. It can thus be smoothly integrated into an automated design flow. This novel approach enables us to further improve (good) performances that were already reached using other optimizing techniques. Robustness of the algorithm was proved using specific difficult test problems.     

Delivering interactive multimedia documents over networks

A family of applications that consists of interactive multimedia documents, such as electronic magazines and interactive TV shows, is examined and the links between application architecture, user behavior, and network performance are investigated. The kinds of application-specific information that influence the end-to-end quality of service are discussed. The architecture and dynamics of the interactive document in terms of presentation objects (P-Objects), which are the segments of information accessed by the application and which are described according to their size, media composition, and access links, are described. The same structural characteristics that may make an interactive multimedia document appealing to the end user are the characteristics that are helpful during dynamic network performance optimization. This observation is based on the hypothesis that the P-Objects' access graph, together with viewing time statistics, is the information most useful to the network delivery control mechanism for optimizing network performance. Preliminary guidelines for both network and application designers to address each other's concerns are presented     

基于J2EE构建多层分布式物资管理信息系统

分布式对象和WWW技术在构建分布式企业计算环境中发挥着越来越重要的作用。分布式对象可以从不同的平台获得封装的企业逻辑，而WWW技术则为终端用户提供了强大的信息集成和交互能力。J2EE应用基于网络技术为企业应用系统提供一个具有高度可移植性和兼容性的安全平台。本文从应用系统总体结构入手，首先描述了基于J2EE企业平台的多层分布式体系结构，然后结合某单位物资管理信息系统的功能及其结构设计，详细分析了该管理信息系统在J2EE平台上的实现过程。     

Automatic labeling and characterization of objects using artificial neural networks

Existing NASA supported scientific databases are usually developed and managed by a team of database administrators whose main concern is the efficiency of the databases in terms of normalization and data search constructs. The populating of the database is usually done in a manual fashion by row and column as the data become available, and the data dictionary is usually defined by the same team (at times with little input from the end science user). This process is tedious, error prone and self-limiting in terms of what can be described in a relational Data Base Management System (DBMS). The next generation Earth remote sensing platforms [i.e., Earth Observing System (EOS)] will be capable of generating data at a rate of over 300 Megabits per second from a suite of instruments designed for different applications. What is needed is an innovative approach that creates object-oriented data-bases that segment, characterize, and catalog, and are manageable in a domain-specific context, and whose contents are available interactively and in near-real-time to the user community. This paper describes work in progress that utilizes an artificial neural net approach to characterize satellite imagery of undefined objects into high-level data objects. The characterized data is then dynamically allocated to an object-oriented database where it can be reviewed and accessed by a user. The definition, development, and evolution of the overall data system model are steps in the creation of an application-driven knowledge-based scientific information system.     

The user profile for the virtual home environment

This article addresses user data issues for virtual home environment (VHE) management among heterogeneous networks and service applications. User data represent all information describing the network and personalized service environments related to a roaming user. After analyzing user data accessed by identified VHE functions and roles, a modular and flexible information model called a user profile has been designed. Various architecture scenarios are then addressed for the implementation of this user profile. Among them, the best one fits the needs and constraints due to existing network architectures, and eventually provides a global federating solution for VHE management.     

基于?IMEI的终端品牌忠诚度研究与应用

在移动互联网时代,各类应用琳琅满目,用户的可选择性相当丰富.然而,应用的增多,并未提升用户的客户感知,相反给客服带来巨大工作量.基于IMEI的终端品牌满意度研究,主要是从各类接口处提取用户的通话、上网数据,从中获取用户终端的IMEI,通过研究IMEI的变化,来预测用户换机时刻、用户行为和喜好、处理用户投诉等,进而进行用户画像,建立了终端研究的算法(库)、模型和方法(论),形成以终端忠诚度为核心的各类输出报告,为市场和客服提供有力支撑.     

Exploiting the Information Web

The World Wide Web is an increasingly important data source for business decision making; however, extracting information from the Web remains one of the challenging issues related to Web business intelligence applications. To use heterogeneous Web data for decision making, documents containing relevant data must be located, and the data of interest within the documents must be identified and extracted. Currently, most automatic information extraction systems can only cope with a limited set of document formats or do not adapt well to changes in document structure, as a result, many real-world data sources with complex document structures cannot be consistently interpreted using a single information extraction system. This paper presents an adaptive information extraction system prototype that combines multiple information extraction approaches to allow more accurate and resilient data extraction for a wide variety of Web sources. The Amorphic Web information extraction system prototype can locate data of interest based on domain knowledge or page structure, can automatically generate a wrapper for a data source, and can detect when the structure of a Web-based resource has changed and act on this to search the updated resource to locate the desired data. The prototype Amorphic information extraction system demonstrated improved information extraction accuracy for the four different extraction scenarios examined when compared with traditional data extraction approaches     

A trustworthy system for secure access to patient centric sensitive information

Smart technological innovations in healthcare are continuously generating digitized medical information about each patient, leading to the creation of Patient Centric Big Medical Data (PCBMD). Rapid adoption of PCBMD in healthcare ushers at the cost of its security and privacy concerns. Current methods focus on identifying authorized users who can access PCBMD but they barely identify the insider attackers. Alternatively, these methods do not prevent information leak by authorized users. Working towards this direction, this paper proposes a Trust based Access Control (TAC) system which not only identifies authorized users for PCBMD but also defends Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) of a patient from insider attacks. The proposed method calculates the trust value of each user by considering various quantitative parameters. Based on the calculated trust values, access rights are granted to each user such that SPI can be accessed by only highly trustworthy users. To implement access rights securely, a privacy scheme is also proposed. The experimental results show that the proposed security system can be efficiently used to protect the SPI of patients.     

Proactive data dissemination to mission sites

In many situations and domains it is important to deliver information to personnel as they work in the field. We consider a specialized content distribution application in wireless mesh networks. When a new mission arrives??for example, when a fire alarm sounds??data is pushed to storage nodes at the mission site where it may be retrieved locally by responding personnel (e.g., police, firefighters, paramedics, government officials, and the media). It is important that information is available at low latency, when requested or pulled by the personnel. The total latency experienced will be a combination of the push delay (if the personnel arrive at the mission site before all the data can be pushed), and the pull delay. Each delay component will in turn be a function of (1) the hop distance traveled by the data when pushed or pulled and (2) any congestion on the links. In this paper, we define algorithms and protocols that trade-off the push and pull latencies depending on the type of application. Our goal is to choose a storage node assignment minimizing the total latency-based cost. We start with a simple model in which cost is a function of distance, and then extend the model, explicitly taking congestion into account. Since the problem is NP-hard even to approximate, our focus is on developing efficient algorithms and distributed protocols that can be easily deployed in wireless mesh networks. In NS2 simulations, we find that our heuristic algorithms achieve, on average, a cost within at most 15% of the optimum.     

External Expansion Risk Management: Enhancing Microblogging Filtering Using Implicit Query

Microblogging filtering can help users filter out irrelevant content, and extract timely content effectively from microblogs. However, as a typical short text, microblogging filtering suffers from the insufficient samples problem that makes the probabilistic-like models unreliable. According to the current research, an explicit brief query has been thought to be only an abstract of the user’s information needs, and it’s hard to infer what is the users’ actual searching intents. Instead, we submit the relevant external documents as a user’s implicit prior knowledge and then build a corresponding filtering framework. To against the risk of external documents expansion, we suppose the external document can be viewed as a complete statement of an explicit query, and encode the filtering preferences with the diverge degree between the external document and the the original explicit query. Thus the optimal filtering action is the one that allows one to trade off diverge degree against generalization performance. With respect to the established baselines, our algorithm yields compelling results for providing a meaningful tweets retrieval. This work helps further understand the innate risk characteristics of external expansion for the design of Microblogging filtering systems.     

采用威胁启发粒子群算法的无人机航路规划

针对复杂地形和威胁环境下的无人机航路规划问题,对粒子群算法进行了改进,提出了融入威胁启发机制的改进粒子群算法.充分利用无人机在任务区域中已知的威胁信息,将其作为威胁启发项,构成粒子群速度更新公式的一部分,有效丰富粒子群算法的搜索行为,增强粒子在搜索过程中的针对性和指导性.使用最小威胁曲面方法,降低粒子编码的维数,并采用...     

Highly Personalized Information Delivery to Mobile Clients

The inherent limitations of mobile devices necessitate information to be delivered to mobile clients to be highly personalized according to their profiles. This information may be coming from a variety of resources like Web servers, company intranets, email servers. A critical issue for such systems is scalability, that is, the performance of the system should be in acceptable limits when the number of users increases dramatically. Another important issue is being able to express highly personalized information in the user profiles, which requires a querying power as that of SQL on relational databases. Finally, the results should be customized according to user needs, preferences and the mark up language of their mobile device. Since the queries will be executed on the documents fetched over the Internet, it is natural to expect the documents to be XML documents.This paper describes an architecture for mobile network operators to deliver highly personalized information from XML resources to mobile clients. To achieve high scalability in this architecture, we index the user profiles rather than the documents because of the excessively large number of profiles expected in the system. In this way all queries that apply to a document at a given time are executed in parallel through a finite state machine (FSM) approach while parsing the document. Furthermore, the queries that have the same FSM representation are grouped and only one finite state machine is created for each group which contributes to the excellent performance of the system as demonstrated in the performance evaluation section.To provide for user friendliness and expressive power, we have developed a graphical user interface that translates the user profiles into XML-QL. XML-QL's querying power and its elaborate CONSTRUCT statement allows the format of the results to be specified. The results to be pushed to the mobile clients are converted to the markup language of the mobile device such as Wireless Markup Language (WML), CHTML or XHTML by the delivery component of the system.     

On Interactive Object Shape Modeling Using Algebraic Curves

Query By Sketch for indexing into an image database involves presenting the machine with a sketch of the object to be found in the database. The sketch can be of the object shape or distinct contours on the image of the object. This sketch can be made from memory, or can be refined interactively in response to what the database search returns at each iteration. Or the sketch can be made by generating curves of an object boundary or object-surface image-discontinuities from an example image. This paper introduces and describes a family of 2D curves (implicit polynomial curves) for this purpose, and an algorithm for generating a representation which passes within of a set of control points specified by the user. Control points can be placed at arbitrary locations and in arbitrary order, and can be erased by the user at will, in order to arrive at the desired shape representation. Level sets of the object potential field have been used to facilitate the interaction process. The fitting algorithm is formulated in the efficient Linear Programming (LP) framework. We illustrate the use of this method in the application of content-based image retrieval.     

Contrast in Terahertz Images of Archival Documents—Part II: Influence of Topographic Features

We investigate the potential of terahertz time-domain imaging in reflection mode to reveal archival information in documents in a non-invasive way. In particular, this study explores the parameters and signal processing tools that can be used to produce well-contrasted terahertz images of topographic features commonly found in archival documents, such as indentations left by a writing tool, as well as sieve lines. While the amplitude of the waveforms at a specific time delay can provide the most contrasted and legible images of topographic features on flat paper or parchment sheets, this parameter may not be suitable for documents that have a highly irregular surface, such as water- or fire-damaged documents. For analysis of such documents, cross-correlation of the time-domain signals can instead yield images with good contrast. Analysis of the frequency-domain representation of terahertz waveforms can also provide well-contrasted images of topographic features, with improved spatial resolution when utilising high-frequency content. Finally, we point out some of the limitations of these means of analysis for extracting information relating to topographic features of interest from documents.     

Transforming large scale product documents into multimedia trainingmanuals

Current authoring tools have limitations in creating large-scale product training documents in a timely manner because of labor-intensive and time-consuming authoring processes. We present an automated authoring method based on a formal specification for dynamically generating ISO DSSSL document styles. From the generated styles, we transform the existing storage-based product documents into large-scale presentation-based product training manuals     

Markov decision process (MDP) framework for software power optimization using call profiles on mobile phones

We present an optimization framework for delay-tolerant data applications on mobile phones based on the Markov decision process (MDP). This process maximizes an application specific reward or utility metric, specified by the user, while still meeting a talk-time constraint, under limited resources such as battery life. This approach is novel for two reasons. First, it is user profile driven, which means that the user’s history is an input to help predict and reserve resources for future talk-time. It is also dynamic: an application will adapt its behavior to current phone conditions such as battery level or time before the next recharge period. We propose efficient techniques to solve the optimization problem based on dynamic programming and illustrate how it can be used to optimize realistic applications. We also present a heuristic based on the MDP framework that performs well and is highly scalable for multiple applications. This approach is demonstrated using two applications: Email and Twitter synchronization with different priorities. We present experimental results based on Google’s Android platform running on an Android Develepor Phone 1 (HTC Dream) mobile phone.     

Distributed resource allocation for rate-constrained users in multi-cell OFDMA networks

This letter addresses resource allocation in multi-cell OFDMA networks. It describes a heuristic for distributed sum power minimization under target data rate requirements. The proposed method establishes a set of target SINR per user and subcarrier, determined to reach the target data rate of each user, while avoiding power divergence situations. Power control can then be performed independently over each subcarrier. Compared to iterative water-filling, this method proves to be very efficient at any load in terms of resource consumption and users' rejection.     

Authentication with P2P Agents

The problem of network security is now heavily focused on user and agent authentication. In particular, higher levels of automated management and autonomous behaviour are economically necessary within security services. This work focuses on a peer-to-peer (P2P) network architecture in support of an authentication service application. The paper considers whether the key properties of P2P systems, such as scalability, robustness and resilience, may be of significant value in the context of designing a secure agent-based user authentication service. The task of authenticating legitimate network users across distributed systems and services remains a challenging process. The proposed solution is to use a distributed agent-based application to address the process of client authentication and the maintenance of user credentials. Using an agent-to-agent platform, an autonomous and scalable defence mechanism has been constructed. The agent architecture provides a number of security services with the goal of automating the process of user authentication and trust management. In particular, the agents handle all password, encryption keys and certificate management. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Provable Billing Protocol on the Current UMTS

This paper proposes a simple method that equips UMTS-based telecom companies with a mechanism to prove the records on mobile users’ phone bills. In the history of mobile phone communication, we have seen countless unsettled disputes where the mobile user disagrees with the telecom company either on the calling time or on the duration, or even on whether or not a call was actually made. In this paper, a provable billing protocol will be presented that can effectively solve disagreements between the two parties. Equipped with a non-repudiation function, the proposed protocol enables the service provider to hold on to the solid proofs as to exactly when and to which number a mobile phone user made a call so that the mobile user cannot deny; at the same time, the mobile user also gets to have his/her own share of proofs as to when and how the mobile services were accessed, so that the bill can be double checked to make sure nothing goes wrong. And, to make it even better, this new protocol is perfectly compatible with the standard UMTS protocol and is therefore readily applicable to the current mobile phone communication environments.     

一种基于A＊算法的Web Services动态组合策略

随着Web Services应用的发展,服务的动态组合技术为解决信息共享和应用协作的问题带来了新的方案,然而生成适应符合客户Qos需求的组合方案是耗时的优化问题.文中通过构建Qos驱动的服务组合依赖图模型,提出了基于A＊算法的启发式的最佳路径组合方法.该算法适用于存在多输入的Web Services动态组合情况并能够生成具有最小代价的简单调用序列.实验表明,该算法适用于多输入的Web Services动态组合情况,并且具有较好的运行效率.