Sharing experiences through awareness systems in the home

In the current paper we hypothesize that providing peripheral awareness information to remotely located but socially close individuals will yield affective user benefits. An experiment in a controlled home-like environment was conducted to investigate the effects of providing different levels of peripheral awareness information on these affective benefits. In the experiment peripheral awareness aimed to support groups of friends to jointly watch a soccer match at remote locations. The experiment has shown that providing awareness information increases the social presence and the group attraction felt by individuals towards their remote partners. The experiment has provided concrete quantitative and qualitative evidence for the hypothesized benefits of supporting primary relationships through awareness systems and of the relevance of social presence as a requirement in the design of peripheral awareness displays.     

Location awareness in unstructured peer-to-peer systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has emerged as a popular model aiming at further utilizing Internet information and resources. However, the mechanism of peers randomly choosing logical neighbors without any knowledge about underlying physical topology can cause a serious topology mismatch between the P2P overlay network and the physical underlying network. The topology mismatch problem brings great stress in the Internet infrastructure. It greatly limits the performance gain from various search or routing techniques. Meanwhile, due to the inefficient overlay topology, the flooding-based search mechanisms cause a large volume of unnecessary traffic. Aiming at alleviating the mismatching problem and reducing the unnecessary traffic, we propose a location-aware topology matching (LTM) technique. LTM builds an efficient overlay by disconnecting slow connections and choosing physically closer nodes as logical neighbors while still retaining the search scope and reducing response time for queries. LTM is scalable and completely distributed in the sense that it does not require any global knowledge of the whole overlay network. The effectiveness of LTM is demonstrated through simulation studies.     

Integrating QoS awareness with virtualization in cloud computing systems for delay-sensitive applications

Cloud computing provides scalable computing and storage resources over the Internet. These scalable resources can be dynamically organized as many virtual machines (VMs) to run user applications based on a pay-per-use basis. The required resources of a VM are sliced from a physical machine (PM) in the cloud computing system. A PM may hold one or more VMs. When a cloud provider would like to create a number of VMs, the main concerned issue is the VM placement problem, such that how to place these VMs at appropriate PMs to provision their required resources of VMs. However, if two or more VMs are placed at the same PM, there exists certain degree of interference between these VMs due to sharing non-sliceable resources, e.g. I/O resources. This phenomenon is called as the VM interference. The VM interference will affect the performance of applications running in VMs, especially the delay-sensitive applications. The delay-sensitive applications have quality of service (QoS) requirements in their data access delays. This paper investigates how to integrate QoS awareness with virtualization in cloud computing systems, such as the QoS-aware VM placement (QAVMP) problem. In addition to fully exploiting the resources of PMs, the QAVMP problem considers the QoS requirements of user applications and the VM interference reduction. Therefore, in the QAVMP problem, there are following three factors: resource utilization, application QoS, and VM interference. We first formulate the QAVMP problem as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model by integrating the three factors as the profit of cloud provider. Due to the computation complexity of the ILP model, we propose a polynomial-time heuristic algorithm to efficiently solve the QAVMP problem. In the heuristic algorithm, a bipartite graph is modeled to represent all the possible placement relationships between VMs and PMs. Then, the VMs are gradually placed at their preferable PMs to maximize the profit of cloud provider as much as possible. Finally, simulation experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic algorithm by comparing with other VM placement algorithms.     

网络安全态势感知技术与系统

现如今网络规模正在逐渐壮大,网络结构也变得越来越复杂,各种网络病毒以及黑客攻击成为了普遍现象,过去的网络安全管理技术只是依靠防火墙、各种杀毒软件等单一的被动安全保护进行网络安全管理,在当今这个时代里早已无法满足网络安全的基本需求,基于这种原因,更加迫切的需要一种新的网络安全技术来进行预防和监控。而网络安全态势感知技术则很好的满足了这些需求,它可以对某段时间内的网络进行全方位监控和预警。     

Connecting Design with Code

Jon Bentley wrote his thesis on divide-and-conquer algorithms and came to greatly admire C.A.R. Hoare's original quicksort algorithm. Yet for years, Bentley "tiptoed around its innermost loop" because he didn't understand it (Beautiful Code, O'Reilly, 2007). It was only after he implemented his own quicksort based on an elegant partitioning scheme for programming Pearls (Addison-Wesley, 1999) that he truly understood the reason for that inner loop. He also trimmed the original bulkier algorithm to a mere dozen tight lines of code. Code clutter and unnecessary complexity can obscure a design. However, connecting design decisions to code won't happen unless developers embrace the practice of writing code as if expressing design intent matters.     

Connecting the physical world with pervasive networks

This article addresses the challenges and opportunities of instrumenting the physical world with pervasive networks of sensor-rich, embedded computation. The authors present a taxonomy of emerging systems and outline the enabling technological developments.     

Toward cost‐effective replica placements in cloud storage systems with QoS‐awareness

In this paper, we propose a simulation model to study real‐world replication workflows for cloud storage systems. With this model, we present three new methods to maximize the storage space usage during replica creation, and two novel QoS aware greedy algorithms for replica placement optimization. By using a simulation method, our algorithms are evaluated, through a comparison with the existing placement algorithms, to show that (i) a more evenly distributed replicas for a data set can be achieved by using round‐robin methods in replica creation phase and (ii) the two proposed greedy algorithms, named GS_QoS and GS_QoS_C1, not only have more economical results than those from Chen et al., but also guarantee the QoS for clients. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social presence and group attraction: exploring the effects of awareness systems in the home

This paper describes an experimental assessment of affective user benefits that may result from adding peripheral awareness information while remote friends share an activity in a home environment. The experiment has shown that providing awareness information increases the social presence and the group attraction felt by individuals towards remote partners.     

Oscillation family in weakly coupled identical systems

Consideration was given to an autonomous model with weakly coupled identical subsystems. Existence of a family of periodic solutions which is similar to the family in a subsystem was established. A scenario of bifurcations of the characteristic exponents was given, and the stabilization problem was solved. An example was given.     

Assessing systems adaptability to a product family

In many cases, product families are established on top of a successful pilot product. While this approach provides an option to measure many concrete attributes like performance and memory footprint, adequateness and adaptability of the architecture of the pilot cannot be fully verified. Yet, these properties are crucial business enablers for the whole product family. In this paper, we discuss an architectural assessment of one such seminal system, intended for monitoring electronic subsystems of a mobile machine, which is to be extended to support a wide range of different types of products. This paper shows how well the assessment reveals possible problems and existing flexibilities in assessed system, and this way helps different stakeholders in their further decisions.     

Globally exponentially attractive sets of the family of Lorenz systems

In this paper, the concept of globally exponentially attractive set is proposed and used to consider the ultimate bounds of the family of Lorenz systems with varying parameters. Explicit estimations of the ultimate bounds are derived. The results presented in this paper contain all the existing results as special cases. In particular, the critical cases, b→ 1^＋ and a→0^＋, for which the previous methods failed, have been solved using a unified formula.     

具有纹理感知能力的超像素分割方法

目的 超像素分割是计算机视觉领域常用的一项预处理技术,目标是将相邻像素聚集成为具有一定语义的子区域,能够大幅度降低后续处理的计算复杂度,但是对包含强梯度纹理的图像分割效果不佳,为此提出一种具有纹理感知能力的超像素分割方法。方法 提出一种能够区分强梯度噪声和纹理像素的颜色距离,其中利用带方向的1/4圆形窗口均值滤波后的颜色信息,提升包含强梯度噪声和纹理图像的超像素分割性能。利用区间梯度幅值与Sobel梯度幅值相乘得到混合梯度幅值,具有纹理抑制、结构保持以及边缘线条细的优点,能够提升超像素的贴合边缘性能,增强超像素形状规则程度。最后,利用混合梯度的幅值计算具有结构回避能力的综合聚类距离,进一步防止超像素跨越物体的边界,增强超像素的贴边性能。结果 在BSDS500（Berkeley segmentation dataset 500）图像数据集和强纹理马赛克图像等不同类型图像上的测试结果显示,与目前主流的超像素分割方法相比,本文算法在UE （undersegmentation error）、ASA （achievable segmentation accuracy）和CM （compactness measure）等性能指标上分别提高了1.5%、0.2%和4.3%。从视觉效果上看,能够在排除纹理干扰的情况下生成结构边缘贴合程度更好的形状规则超像素。结论 本文算法在包含强梯度纹理图像上的超像素分割性能优于对比方法,在目标识别、目标追踪和显著性检测等易受强梯度干扰的技术领域具有较大应用潜力。     

利用USB接口接入局域网的设计

提出了一种多台计算机可以方便地使用各自的USB接口接入局域网的方案.     

Simulating collaborative systems by means of awareness of interaction among intelligent agents

New specific collaboration models for distributive systems are needed for enabling effective collaboration processes between users of these dynamic environments. However, collaboration in distributive systems depends on several elements such as a negotiation mechanism, a load-balancing strategy, a mutual exclusion mechanism, and a learning strategy. Each of these elements should be analyzed separately in terms of efficiency and effectiveness in order to improve these two features in the global collaborative system. This paper presents a multi-agent based simulation tool and a simulation methodology used to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of a collaborative system by analyzing both the global system of each of the strategies or mechanisms involved in the system. Intelligent agents used in the simulation make use of the concept of awareness of interaction for quantifying the degree, nature and quality of the interaction between the agents.