Neural network method to solve inverse problems for canopy radiative transfer models

Vegetation parameter retrieval is considered as the inverse of modeling canopy radiative transfer. To solve this problem, a new computationally efficient method based on mixture density networks (MDNs) is proposed to estimate the errors of retrieved parameters for each given set of reflectances. The properties of neural networks of traditional architecture and MDNs are considered. The method is tested using a simple model and the PROSPECT leaf radiative transfer model and is validated against real data. The paper is supported by the joint project of the Science and Technology Center in Ukraine (STCU) and National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU), “Grid Technologies for Multi-Source Data Integration” (No. 4928). Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 3, pp. 159–172, May–June 2009. Original article submitted January 29, 2009.     

From Kalman—Mesarovic realization to a normal-hyperbolic linear model

The principles of the methodology are formulated, which underlie the procedures of the Kalman—Mesarovic realization for dynamic systems with state equations in the class of autonomous linear differential equations in the normalized Frechet space. In this connection, the key approaches to the solution of classical problems of realization theory regarding linear dissipation models of normal-hyperbolic type are interpreted. The study was sponsored by the Russian Fund for Basic Research (grant No. 05-01-00623), the “Integration” Russian Federal Target Program (grant No. B0077), and the Program for Basic Research of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences (program No. 19, project 2.5). __________ Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 6, pp. 137–157, November–December 2005.     

Grid Data Management: Open Problems and New Issues

Initially developed for the scientific community, Grid computing is now gaining much interest in important areas such as enterprise information systems. This makes data management critical since the techniques must scale up while addressing the autonomy, dynamicity and heterogeneity of the data sources. In this paper, we discuss the main open problems and new issues related to Grid data management. We first recall the main principles behind data management in distributed systems and the basic techniques. Then we make precise the requirements for Grid data management. Finally, we introduce the main techniques needed to address these requirements. This implies revisiting distributed database techniques in major ways, in particular, using P2P techniques. Work partially funded by ARA “Massive Data” of the French ministry of research (project Respire), the European Strep Grid4All project, the CAPES–COFECUB Daad project and the CNPq–INRIA Gridata project.     

On two versions of the Loomis–Sikorski Theorem for algebraic structures

We present two versions of the Loomis–Sikorski Theorem, one for monotone σ-complete generalized pseudo effect algebras with strong unit satisfying a kind of the Riesz decomposition property. The second one is for Dedekind σ-complete positive pseudo Vitali spaces with strong unit. For any case we can find an appropriate system of nonnegative bounded functions forming an algebra of the given type with the operations defined by points that maps epimorphically onto the algebra. The paper has been supported by the Center of Excellence SAS—Physics of Information—I/2/2005, the grant VEGA No. 2/6088/26 SAV, the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contract No. APVV-0071-06, Slovak-Italian Project No. 15:“Algebraic and logical systems of soft computing”, and MURST, project “Analisi Reale”.     

Optimization of data exchange in parallel computers with distributed memory

The problem of optimization of communications during the execution of a program on a parallel computer with distributed memory is investigated. Statements are formulated that make it possible to determine the possibility of organization of data broadcast and translation. The conditions proposed are represented in the form suitable for practical application and can be used for automated parallelization of programs. This work was done within the framework of the State Program of Fundamental Studies of the Republic of Belarus (under the code name “Mathematical structures 21”) with the partial support of the Foundation for Fundamental Studies of the Republic of Belarus (grant F03-062). __________ Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 2, pp. 166–182, March–April 2006.     

The Doomsday distributed termination detection protocol

Distributed termination detection (DTD) algorithms are important since they detect globally stable states in distributed computations. Here we introduce a new DTD mechanism, the Doomsday protocol together with its proof of correctness. Doomsday is generic since it forms the basis for a number of new and existing DTD algorithms for which the correctness proof may be reused. The paper describes the Doomsday protocol, provides its formal proof, derives one new DTD algorithm and shows how other hitherto unrelated algorithms, Dijkstra–Scholten, Task Balancing and Credit Recovery, can be derived from the protocol. The paper concludes by examining various properties of the protocol in the context of existing DTD algorithms. This work was supported in part by Visiting Fellowship grant EPSRC GR/R84481/01 “The Doomsday Protocol” and by Australian Research Council ARC Linkage International Grant LX0349049 “Extending a Family of Garbage Collectors”.     

Building a Peer-to-peer Information System in Grids via Self-organizing Agents

A Grid information system should rely upon two basic features: the replication and dissemination of information about Grid services and resources, and the distribution of such information among Grid hosts. This paper examines an approach based on ant systems to replicate and map Grid services information on Grid hosts according to the semantic classification of such services. The Ant-based Replication and MApping Protocol (ARMAP) is used to disseminate resource information by a decentralized mechanism, and its effectiveness is evaluated by means of an entropy index. Information is disseminated by agents – ants – that traverse the Grid by exploiting P2P interconnections among Grid hosts. A mechanism inspired by real ants’ pheromone is used by each agent to autonomously drive its behavior on the basis of its interaction with the environment. “Swarm Intelligence” emerges from the activity of a high number of ants. The ARMAP protocol enables the use of a semi-informed search algorithm which can drive query messages towards a cluster of peers having information about resources belonging to the requested class. A simulation analysis has been performed to evaluate the performance of ARMAP.     

Rudolph M. Schindler—Proportion,Scale and the “Row”

Jin-Ho Park interprets Schindler’s “reference frames in space” as set forth in his 1916 lecture note on mathematics, proportion, and architecture, in the context of Robinson’s1898–99 articles in the Architectural Record. Schindler’s unpublished, handwritten notes provide a source for his concern for “rhythmic” dimensioning in architecture. He uses a system in which rectangular dimensions are arranged in “rows.” Architectural examples of Schindler’s Shampay, Braxton-Shore and How Houses illustrate the principles.     

Elements of the information technology of cytological specimen analysis: Taxonomy and factor analysis

The automated software system “Black Square,” Version 1.2 is described. The system is intended for the automation of image processing, analysis, and recognition. It is an open system for generating new knowledge: objects, algorithms of image processing, recognition procedures originally not intended for image processing, and methods for solving applied problems. The system combines the features of information retrieval, reference, training, and computing systems. This work was partially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project nos. 03-07-90406, 05-04-49846, and 05-07-08000; by the INTAS grant no. 04-77-7067; by the Cooperative grant “Image Analysis and Synthesis: Theoretical Foundations and Prototypical Applications in Medical Imaging” within agreement between Italian National Research Council and Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS); by the grant of the RAS in the framework of the Program “Fundamental Science to Medicine.” An erratum to this article is available at .     

Application of genetic algorithms to optimization of neuronet recognition devices

The possibilities of applying genetic algorithms to optimization of the structure of neural networks that solve problems of recognition of handwritten and printed symbols and words are considered. The results of an experimental study are given. The experiments performed demonstrate an increase in the efficiency of neural networks after optimization. Ways of improving the results obtained are discussed. These results were partially obtained due to grant U4M000 of the Soros International Scientific Fund and also due to the“Neurocomputer” project (1992-994) of the State Committee of NAS of Ukraine on Science and Engineering. Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 5, pp. 23–32, September–October, 1999.     

About the Collatz conjecture

This paper refers to the Collatz conjecture. The origin and the formalization of the Collatz problem are presented in the first section, named “Introduction”. In the second section, entitled “Properties of the Collatz function”, we treat mainly the bijectivity of the Collatz function. Using the obtained results, we construct a (set of) binary tree(s) which “simulate(s)”– in a way that will be specified – the computations of the values of the Collatz function. In the third section, we give an “efficient” algorithm for computing the number of iterations (recursive calls) of the Collatz function. A comparison between our algorithm and the standard one is also presented, the first being at least 2.25 “faster” (3.00 in medium). Finally, we describe a class of natural numbers for which the conjecture is true. Received 28 April 1997 / 10 June 1997     

Layered hidden Markov models for real-time daily activity monitoring using body sensor networks

This paper presents an inferring and training architecture for long-term and continuous daily activity monitoring using a wearable body sensor network. Energy efficiency and system adaptivity to wearers are two of the most important requirements of a body sensor network. This paper discusses a two-layered hidden Markov model (HMM) architecture for in-network data processing to achieve energy efficiency and model individualization. The bottom-layer HMM is used to process sensory data locally at each wireless sensor node to significantly reduce data transmissions. The top-layer HMM is utilized to find the activity sequence from the result of the local processing. This approach is energy efficient in that only the results of the decoding procedure in each node need to be transmitted rather than raw sensing data. Therefore, the volume of data are significantly reduced. When the algorithm is applied in online monitoring systems, the results of local processing are transmitted only upon hidden state changes. The top-layer processing uses “old data” of one sensor node when it does not receive a “new” result sequence of the local processing from that sensor node. The adaption to various wearers is also discussed, and the robustness of this classification system is depicted. Experiments of 19 activity sequences to be classified are taken by 5 subjects to evaluate the performance of this system.     

Calculation of the number of complete mappings for permutations

The computation time for counting “good” permutations rapidly grows as the length of permutations increases. The paper presents algorithms for enumeration of “good” permutations. Algorithms reducing twice the number of “good” permutations that should be counted are considered along with the algorithm employing the concept of weight of a “good” permutation. Translated from Kibernetika i Sistemnyi Analiz, No. 2, pp. 106–110, March–April, 2000.     

Development of the open system for the automation of scientific research in image understanding Black Square, Version 1.2

The automated software system Black Square, Version 1.2 is described. The system is intended for the automation of image processing, analysis, and recognition. It is an open system for generating new knowledge: objects, algorithms of image processing, recognition procedures originally not intended for image processing, and methods for solving applied problems. The system combines the features of information retrieval, reference, training, and computing systems. This work was partially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, project nos. 04-07-90187 and 05-07-08000; by the INTAS grant no. 04-77-7067; by the Cooperative grant “Image Analysis and Synthesis: Theoretical Foundations and Prototypical Applications in Medical Imaging” within agreement between Italian National Research Council and Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS); by the RAS Program “Fundamental Science to Medicine”; and by the Program of Scientific Research of the Presidium of RAS “Mathematical Modeling and Intellectual Systems.”     

Grid and Databases: BaSTI as a Practical Integration Example

Stellar Astrophysics and in particular stellar evolutionary computations are extremely important to face a wealth of astrophysical problems, but they are also extremely demanding in terms of computing power and data storage. The Bag of Stellar Tracks and Isochrones (BaSTI) database is a theoretical astrophysical catalogue that collects fundamental data sets involving stars formation and evolution. To create this database it is necessary to run a large number of stellar evolutionary computations. The Grid technology seems to be a promising answer to data storage and processing needs of the BaSTI catalogue. In the framework of the EGEE Grid infrastructure, we managed to run a number of experiments aimed at designing and defining an application specific environment for the stellar simulation software and its interaction with the BaSTI database. Our successful implementation demonstrates that the “gridification” of stellar evolution code is not only possible but also even extremely convenient in terms of data processing speed and data sharing, and it can be a valuable instrument to support Astrophysical research.     

Discovering Dynamic Characteristics of Biochemical Pathways using Geometric Patterns among Parameter-Parameter Dependencies in Differential Equations

This paper proposes a novel approach to the analysis and validation of mathematical models using two-dimensional geometrical patterns representing parameter-parameter dependencies (PPD) in dynamic systems. A geometrical pattern is obtained by calculating moment values, such as the area under the curve (AUC), area under the moment curve (AUMC), and mean residence time (MRT), for a series of simulations with a wide range of parameter values. In a mathematical model of the metabolic pathways of the cancer drug irinotecan (CPT11), geometrical patterns can be classified into three major categories: “independent,” “hyperbolic,” and “complex.” These categories characterize substructures arising in differential equations, and are helpful for understanding the behavior of large-scale mathematical models. The Open Bioinformatics Grid (OBIGrid) provides a cyber-infrastructure for users to share these data as well as computational resources.     

The word problem for visibly pushdown languages described by grammars

Visibly pushdown languages are an interesting subclass of deterministic context-free languages that can model nonregular properties of interest in program analysis. Such class properly contains typical classes of parenthesized languages such as “parenthesis”, “bracketed”, “balanced” and “input-driven” languages. It is closed under boolean operations and has decidable decision problems such as emptiness, inclusion and universality. We study the membership problem for visibly pushdown languages, and show that it can be solved in time linear in both the size of the input grammar and the length of the input word. The algorithm relies on a reduction to the reachability problem for game graphs. We also discuss the time complexity of the membership problem for the class of balanced languages which is the largest among those cited above. Besides the intrinsic theoretical interest, we further motivate our main result showing an application to the validation of XML documents against Schema and Document Type Definitions (DTDs). Work partially supported by funds for the research from MIUR 2006, grant “Metodi Formali per la verifica di sistemi chiusi ed aperti”, Università di Salerno. A preliminary version of this paper was published in the Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis (ATVA 2006), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4218, pp. 96–109, 2006.     

Information assimilation framework for event detection in multimedia surveillance systems

Most multimedia surveillance and monitoring systems nowadays utilize multiple types of sensors to detect events of interest as and when they occur in the environment. However, due to the asynchrony among and diversity of sensors, information assimilation – how to combine the information obtained from asynchronous and multifarious sources is an important and challenging research problem. In this paper, we propose a framework for information assimilation that addresses the issues – “when”, “what” and “how” to assimilate the information obtained from different media sources in order to detect events in multimedia surveillance systems. The proposed framework adopts a hierarchical probabilistic assimilation approach to detect atomic and compound events. To detect an event, our framework uses not only the media streams available at the current instant but it also utilizes their two important properties – first, accumulated past history of whether they have been providing concurring or contradictory evidences, and – second, the system designer’s confidence in them. The experimental results show the utility of the proposed framework.     

Functional completeness criteria in Dijkstra algebra

The study was supported by the International Soros Program for basic Research and Education in Exact Sciences of the International Foundation “Renaissance,” grant No. VA0000.