K(Knowledge)-net: building up and its dynamics

The essence of intelligence is to use certain abilities to obtain knowledge, to use that knowledge, and to operate with that knowledge. New knowledge learned by a human is often related to old existing knowledge, and sometimes we could have more conceptual knowledge based on old knowledge. So, the knowledge in the brain exists in a related structural form, and this structure is dynamic, and therefore is evolvable. Based on the understanding of the real process of learning by a human being, we discuss how to make a model to describe the dynamic structure of knowledge. This model is also a principle of artificial brain design. Most of the knowledge a child learns is from natural language and perception information, and we define this as semantic knowledge. The model to describe the process and structure of knowledge growing in a network form is called a K-net. It is a dynamic network with two main dynamics: one is new knowledge added, and the other is aggregating knowledge existing in the network with some probability. Under these very natural conditions, we found that the network is originally a simple random net, and then some characteristics of a complex network gradually appear when more new knowledge is added and aggregated. A more interesting phenomenon is the appearance of a random hierarchical structure. Does this mean emergence?     

Two dimensional shape optimization using partial control and finite element method for compressible flows

The objective of this study is to determine the two dimensional shape of a body located in a compressible viscous flow, where the applied fluid force is minimized. The formulation to obtain the optimal shape is based on an optimal control theory. An optimal state is defined as a state, in which the performance function defined as the integration of the square sum of the applied fluid forces is minimized due to a reduction in the applied fluid forces. Compressible Navier–Stokes equations are treated as constraint equations. In other words, the body is considered to have a shape that minimizes the fluid forces under the constraint of the Navier–Stokes equations. The gradient of the performance function is computed using the adjoint variables. A weighted gradient method is used as the minimization algorithm. The volume of the body is assumed to be the same as that of the initial body. In the case of the algorithm used in this study, both the creation of a structured mesh around the surface of the body and the smoothing procedure are employed for the computation of gradient. In this study, a remeshing technique based on the structured mesh around the body changing its configuration in the iteration cycle is employed. For the correction to keep the volume constant, the surface coordinates are moved along the radial direction. For the discretization of both the state and adjoint equations, the efficient bubble function interpolation presented previously by the authors [18] is employed. The algorithm, which is known as the partial control algorithm, is applied to the numerical procedure to determine the movement of the coordinates. In the case of the gradient method, in order to avoid the convergence of the final shape to the local minimum shape, the new algorithm, which is called the partial control algorithm, is presented in this study. In numerical studies, the shape determination of a body in a uniform flow field is carried out in 2D domains. The initial shape of the body is assumed to be an elliptical cylinder. The shape is modified by minimizing the applied fluid forces. Finally, the desired shape of a body, whose performance function is reduced and converged to a constant value, is obtained. By carrying out a procedure that involves the use of the partial control algorithm, the desired shape of a body, whose performance function is reduced further, is obtained. Stable shape determination of a body in a compressible viscous flow is carried out by using the presented method. It is indicated that the optimal shape can be obtained by using the partial control algorithm.     

Distributed multi-join query processing in data grids

Query processing in data grids is a difficult issue due to the heterogeneous, unpredictable and volatile behaviors of the grid resources. Applying join operations on remote relations in data grids is a unique and interesting problem. However, to the best of our knowledge, little is done to date on multi-join query processing in data grids. An approach for processing multi-join queries is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a relation-reduction algorithm for reducing the sizes of operand relations is presented in order to minimize data transmission cost among grid nodes. Then, a method for scheduling computer nodes in data grids is devised to parallel process multi-join queries. Thirdly, an innovative method is developed to efficiently execute join operations in a pipeline fashion. Finally, a complete algorithm for processing multi-join queries is given. Analytical and experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.     

Can the terminal condition of time-invariant linear control systems be made immune against small parameter variations?

Discussed in this short paper is a controllability question pertaining to a class of sensitivity problems. More specifically, the possibility is considered of transferring a time-invariant linear system from each initial state to any terminal state in a finite time and in such a way that the terminal condition is insensitive to small parameter variations. Partial controllability, suitably defined, leads to a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of the solution to such a problem. Terminal output insensitivity is also discussed and a similar result is proved when the output transformation is not affected by some parameter variations.     

Generalized theory of uncertainty (GTU)—principal concepts and ideas

Uncertainty is an attribute of information. The path-breaking work of Shannon has led to a universal acceptance of the thesis that information is statistical in nature. Concomitantly, existing theories of uncertainty are based on probability theory. The generalized theory of uncertainty (GTU) departs from existing theories in essential ways. First, the thesis that information is statistical in nature is replaced by a much more general thesis that information is a generalized constraint, with statistical uncertainty being a special, albeit important case. Equating information to a generalized constraint is the fundamental thesis of GTU. Second, bivalence is abandoned throughout GTU, and the foundation of GTU is shifted from bivalent logic to fuzzy logic. As a consequence, in GTU everything is or is allowed to be a matter of degree or, equivalently, fuzzy. Concomitantly, all variables are, or are allowed to be granular, with a granule being a clump of values drawn together by a generalized constraint. And third, one of the principal objectives of GTU is achievement of NL-capability, that is, the capability to operate on information described in natural language. NL-capability has high importance because much of human knowledge, including knowledge about probabilities, is described in natural language. NL-capability is the focus of attention in the present paper. The centerpiece of GTU is the concept of a generalized constraint. The concept of a generalized constraint is motivated by the fact that most real-world constraints are elastic rather than rigid, and have a complex structure even when simple in appearance. The paper concludes with examples of computation with uncertain information described in natural language.     

Facial Recognition System for Suspect Identification Using a Surveillance Camera

Nowadays, finding and Tracking a person in the world of technology is becoming a necessary task for various security purposes. Since the advent of technology, the development in the field of Facial Recognition plays an important role and has been exponentially increasing in today’s world. In this, a model is proposed for facial recognition to identify and alert the system when a person in search has been found at a specific location under the surveillance of a CCTV camera. The CCTV cameras are connected to a centralized server to which the live streaming feed is uploaded by cameras at each location. The server contains a database of all persons to be found. Based on the video feed from each camera, if a particular person in search is found in a certain feed, then the location of that person will be tracked and also a signal is passed to the system responsible. This model is based on image processing concepts to match live images with the existing trained images of the person in search. Since this model recognizes a person based on the first and foremost primary unique feature of a human, that is, only the person’s face image is required and will be found to be stored in the database. Hence the task of finding a person reduces to the task of detecting human faces in the video feed and matching with the existing images from the database.     

Redundancy and data compression in recursive estimation

The problem of the existence of redundancy in the data in a recursive estimation problem is investigated. Given a certain data rate, should the estimator be run at the same rate? It is shown that under certain conditions there is redundancy in the data and the estimator can be run at a lower rate using compressed data with practically the same performance as when no data compression is utilized. It is also pointed out that, although at the higher rate there is redundancy in the data, the performance deteriorates noticeably when the data rate is lowered. Conditions for the existence of redundancy in the data and the procedure to remove it are presented. The procedure to compress the data is obtained such as to preserve the information in the sense of Fisher. The effect of data compression is a reduction in the computation requirements by a factor equal to the compression ratio. Such a reduction might be important in real-time applications in which the computing power is limited or too expensive. The application of this technique to the tracking of a reentry vehicle with a linearized filter is discussed in more detail and simulation results are presented.     

Single-Row Transformation of Complete Graphs

A complete graph is a fully-connected graph where every node is adjacent to all other nodes in the graph. Very often, many applications in science and engineering are reducible to this type of graph. Hence, a simplified form of a complete graph contributes in providing the solutions to these problems. In this paper, we present a technique for transforming a complete graph into a single-row routing problem. Single-row routing is a classical technique in the VLSI design that is known to be NP-complete. We solved this problem earlier using a method called ESSR, and, the same technique is applied to the present work to transform a complete graph into its single-row routing representation. A parallel computing model is proposed which contributes in making the problem modular and scalable. We also discuss the application of this work on the channel assignment problem in the wireless cellular telephone networks.     

The effect of action video game experience on task-switching

There is now a substantial body of work demonstrating that action video game experience results in enhancements in a wide variety of perceptual skills. More recently, several groups have also demonstrated improvements in abilities that are more cognitive in nature, in particular, the ability to efficiently switch between tasks. In a series of four experiments, we add to this body of work, demonstrating that the action video game player advantage is not exclusively due to an ability to map manual responses onto arbitrary buttons, but rather generalizes to vocal responses, is not restricted to tasks that are perceptual in nature (e.g. respond to a physical dimension of the stimulus such as its color), but generalizes to more cognitive tasks (e.g. is a number odd or even), and is present whether the switch requires a goal-switch or only a motor switch. Finally, a training study establishes that the relationship between the reduction in switch cost and action game playing is causal.     

Stability analysis of PWM feedback control systems with PID regulators

Stability analysis is of great significance in those feedback control systems in which the power amplifier is operated as a pulse-modulator device, since under these circumstances the whole control system is highly non-linear. Stability in PWM feedback control systems with a proportional type regulator has been amply described in the literature. Only recently, however, have such studies been extended to include systems with a proportional-plus-integral regulator. In this paper the problem is considered for the case involving a PWM control system, where the regulator is a proportional-plus-integral-plus-derivative, the PWM modulator is of a very general type and the controlled process is of arbitrary order. The stability of the system is analysed by means of a discrete version of the second Lyapunov method ; this method in turn leads to an investigation of the positivity region of a quadratic form defined in the parameter space of the regulator. To improve the stability region obtained, a procedure is investigated whereby only a few parameters of the quadratic Lyapunov function need to be varied. The method proposed has proved extremely simple and flexible to apply, even in cases where the system is of arbitrary order.     

A Lagrange duality characterisation for stability under arbitrary switching in switched positive linear systems

The present communication is concerned with uniform exponential stability, under arbitrary switching, in discrete-time switched positive linear systems. Lagrange duality is used in order to obtain a new characterisation for uniform exponential stability which is in terms of sets of inequalities involving each of the matrices that represent the modes of the system. These sets of inequalities are shown to generalise the classical linear Lyapunov inequality that characterises, in positive matrices, the property of being Schur. Each solution to these sets of inequalities is shown to provide a representation, in terms of a number of linear functionals, for a common Lyapunov function for the switched positive linear system. A result is further presented which conveys to, a conservative upper bound on the minimum required number of linear functionals (in the above mentioned representation), and also to a method for computing them. Our proof for the aforementioned characterisation is based on another (equivalent) characterisation, in terms of the solvability of a dynamic programming equation associated to the switched positive linear system, which is also reported in the paper. In particular, it is shown that the associated dynamic programming equation has at most one solution. And this solution is shown to be convex, monotonic, positively homogeneous, and it yields a common Lyapunov function for the switched positive linear system.     

混合关系中的函数依赖及其相关规则

在实际应用中有这样一类关系数据库,其中数据项在某个属性上的取值本身又是一个关系。讨论这种混合关系中的函数依赖及其相应的相关规则具有一定的理论意义和实际应用价值。给出这种混合关系的形式定义、混合关系中4种类型的函数依赖关系以及相应的4种类型的相关规则;并给出混合关系到一般关系的转换,通过这个转换说明了混合关系与普通关系的联系及其差别。给出一个实际应用中的例子,来说明混合关系中的函数依赖和相关规则的形式多样性。     

From CSP models to Markov models

It is shown how a probabilistic dependability model of a safety-critical system can be derived from a trace-based functional model of the system. The functional model is a communicating sequential process (CSP) that includes command, failure, and repair events. The dependability model is a time homogeneous Markov process with transitions determined by these events. The method applies to deterministic systems that can be described in terms of a finite number of states and in which all event occurrences are stochastic with exponential time distribution. The derivation is carried out in two steps. An algorithmic determination is made of a finite automaton from the specification of the CSP process. The automaton is transformed into a Markov process. The Markov model for this system is used to determine the waiting time to terminal failure. The theory is applied to a larger and more realistic example: a gas burner system operating in the on-off mode. For this system, the waiting time to terminal failure is calculated, and the number of failures per year in a large population of identical, independently operated systems is estimated     

A distributed event-triggered dynamic average consensus scheme with a time-varying threshold and its application in DC microgrid

We propose a distributed event-triggered dynamic average consensus (DAC) scheme with a time-varying threshold for a multi-agent system (MAS) in a directed graph. In this scheme, each agent is not required to monitor its neighbors in real time, and a threshold is chosen related to consensus performance directly in an MAS, where the threshold is adjusted adaptively according to average consensus performance. Also, we introduce a bounded and monotonically increasing function in a time-varying threshold, and this function is for guaranteeing the value of a threshold to locate in an appropriate range. Stability analysis shows that the tracking error is eventually bounded and the MAS achieves DAC without Zeno behaviors. Furthermore, the proposed event-triggered DAC scheme is applied to voltage restoration and adjustable current sharing in DC microgrid. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is verified by two examples.     

Partial shape recognition: a landmark-based approach

A method of recognizing partially occluded objects is presented in which each object is represented by a set of landmarks. Given a scene consisting of partially occluded objects, a model object in the scene is hypothesized by matching the landmarks of the model with those in the scene. A measure of similarity between two landmarks is needed to perform this matching. A local shape measure, sphericity, is introduced. It is shown that any invariant function under a similarity transformation is a function of the sphericity. To match landmarks between the model and the scene, a table of compatibility is constructed. A technique, known as hopping dynamic programming, is described to guide the landmark matching through the compatibility table. The location of the model in the scene is estimated with a least-squares fit among the matched landmarks. A heuristic measure is then computed to decide if the model is in the scene     

基于WebService的高校应用集成

目前高校中都存在业务系统异构难于集成的问题.根据这个问题,提出了基于WebService的高校应用集成的解决方案.该方案主要是把高校中现存的业务系统通过重新改造成WebService,从而利用WebService良好的低耦合性和标准性,实现应用集成.在WebService的基础上,给出了高校应用集成的SOA架构;给出了该架构下每个模块的技术实现,其中遗留业务系统的改造是最困难的部分;最后在WSAD上实现了一个业务模块的改造.在技术上实现了基于WebService的高校应用集成,并成功实现了一个业务模块,从而证明了基于WebService的高校应用集成的可行性,并给出了下一步的改进方向.     

Fuzzy logic = computing with words

As its name suggests, computing with words (CW) is a methodology in which words are used in place of numbers for computing and reasoning. The point of this note is that fuzzy logic plays a pivotal role in CW and vice-versa. Thus, as an approximation, fuzzy logic may be equated to CW. There are two major imperatives for computing with words. First, computing with words is a necessity when the available information is too imprecise to justify the use of numbers, and second, when there is a tolerance for imprecision which can be exploited to achieve tractability, robustness, low solution cost, and better rapport with reality. Exploitation of the tolerance for imprecision is an issue of central importance in CW. In CW, a word is viewed as a label of a granule; that is, a fuzzy set of points drawn together by similarity, with the fuzzy set playing the role of a fuzzy constraint on a variable. The premises are assumed to be expressed as propositions in a natural language. In coming years, computing with words is likely to evolve into a basic methodology in its own right with wide-ranging ramifications on both basic and applied levels     

Optimal price and order size for a reseller under partial backordering

The problem of determining the optimal price and lot size for a reseller is considered in this paper. It is assumed that demand can be backlogged and that the selling price is constant within the inventory cycle. The backlogging phenomenon is modeled without using the backorder cost and the lost sale cost since these costs are not easy to estimate in practice. The case in which the selling price is fixed and therefore, demand is a known constant is also considered. Given the new way of modeling the backlogging phenomenon, the results for the case of constant demand are developed. Analysis is also presented for the reselling situation in which a nonperishable product is sold.Scope and purposePerishable products constitute a sizable component of inventories. A common question in a reselling situation involving a perishable (or a nonperishable) product is: What should be the size of the replenishment? If demand for the product is sensitive to price, then another question is: What should be the selling price? Although the ability to vary price within an inventory cycle is important, in many cases, the reseller may opt for a policy of constant selling price for administrative convenience. In this paper the pricing and/or lot sizing problem faced by a reseller is modeled assuming a general deterioration rate and a general demand function. The model allows for backlogging of demand. When a product is highly perishable, the reseller may need to backlog demand to contain costs due to deterioration. In this sense, perishability and backlogging are complementary conditions. Given that the problem entails revenue and costs, a natural objective function for the model is profit per period. The conventional approach to modeling the backlogging phenomenon requires the use of the backorder cost and the lost sale cost. These costs, however, are difficult to estimate in practice. A new approach is used in which customers are considered impatient. Hence the fraction of demand that gets backlogged at a given point in time is a decreasing function of waiting time. First the subproblem in which price is fixed is solved to determine the optimal inventory policy. The subproblem represents the important case in which the reseller has no flexibility to change the selling price. Then a procedure is developed for determining the optimal quantity and the selling price for the broader problem. The procedure can be implemented on a spreadsheet.     

基于标志点注册及探测球的光源追踪算法

增强现实系统中,解决虚拟物体表面光照情况与真实环境匹配问题关键的一步是进行光源追踪。基于标志点注册及具有漫反射特性的探测球提出一种光源追踪算法。该算法仅对一幅被单一光源照射的标志立方体和探测球图像进行分析,利用图中标志点确定探测球相对照相机的位置、姿态关系,利用探测球表面的亮度信息推算光源向量。该探测球图像要进行一系列图像处理程序,其中等亮度线的提取及拟合是关键步骤。实验结果表明,本文算法能够达到预期效果,较好地实现了光源追踪,适用于各种位置的单一光源照射情况及基于标志点注册的增强现实系统。     

An LMI approach to synthesis subject to almost asymptotic regulation constraints

A multi-objective controller synthesis problem is considered in which an output is to be regulated approximately by assuring a bound on the steady-state peak amplification in response to an infinite-energy disturbance, while also guaranteeing a desired level of performance measured in terms of the worst-case energy gain from a finite-energy input to a performance output. Relying on a characterization of the controllers with which almost asymptotic regulation is accomplished, the problem of guaranteeing the desired level of performance is reduced to solving a system of linear matrix inequalities subject to a set of linear equality constraints. Based on the solution of this system, a procedure is outlined for the construction of a suitable controller whose order is equal to the order of the plant plus the order of the exogenous system.