The principle of Selecten Jumping Searching andC,C 0 ′ ,C * algorithms

A new searching approach, Selecten Jumping Searching (SJS), in which the length of every seaching step from a node to another node along a path is much longer than one, has been proposed this paper. In addition to all the problems which can be solved by GPS or MPS, SJS can also solve other problems such as theN Queens problems, theN Puzzle problems, etc., which GPS and MPS fail whenN is large and whose computational complexity are exponential by the general searching approach or MPS. The searching algorithms of SJS, algorithmsC,C ₀ (orC ₀ ^′ ) andC ^* whose computational complexity is only polynomial and linear respectively have been proposed also in this paper. Finally, the experimental results of the Five Hundred Queens problem, more than two Thousand Queens problem and theN Puzzle problem (whereN is more than one thousand) are given. In order to get the first some solutions of the Fifty Queens problem and to build the 35²?1 Puzzle problem’s Macro Table of MPS, both of them would take 10²⁵ years even using a 10¹⁵ ops supercomputer by the general searching approach. But using proposed approach and algorithms (whose computational complexity isO(N) andO(N ^3/2) respectively), 4000 solutions of the Five Hundred Queens problem have been got when program runs about 227 minutes on HP 9000/835 and the average solution time to solve the 35²?1 Puzzle problem with arbitrary problem state is less than one minute on HP 9000/300. SJS is a searching approach as a result mapped from Macro Transformation approach.     

Adaptive image data hiding using transformation and error replacement

Watermarking is popular method for effective copyright protection of digital data. The invisible image watermarking is a type of watermarking which is used to conceal secret information in a cover image. In any watermarking system, there is a trade-off between imperceptibility and payload of the data to be hidden in the cover medium. Therefore, only a limited amount of data can be concealed in the cover image while watermark remain imperceptible. This paper proposes a new method of adaptive blind digital image data hiding in Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) domain using Minimum Error Lease Significant Bit Replacement (MELSBR) method and Genetic Algorithm (GA). In the proposed method, the secret image is embedded into the DCT transformed cover image. Initially, the host and the secret image both are partitioned into equal sized blocks. Then for each secret image block, host image block is intelligently selected through GA and is embedded using MELSBR method. GA helps in identifying the target cover image blocks such that with the LSB embedding, both visual quality of the cover image and imperceptibility of the secret image remain least affected. In watermark extraction process, the watermarked image is decomposed into equal sized blocks and then using the Jigsaw Puzzle Solver (JPS) the secret image is reconstructed. In spite of doubling the payload of the data to hide, the experimental results have shown better imperceptibility and robustness results of the proposed method as compared to the current approaches in this domain.     

A methodological approach to optimizing RFID deployment

The interest of adopting RFID continues to grow in many industries, ranging from supply chain automation to healthcare management. However, dynamics of the operating environment is one of the major challenges that impede RFID deployment. Even though numerous researchers focus on controlled laboratory experiments to enhance the success of deployment, it is found that system performance in the actual production environment may differ significantly from that conducted in a controlled laboratory, resulting in poor deployment result. To cope with this situation, this paper proposes an RFID Deployment Optimizer (RFIDDO), which is a generic methodology for optimizing the RFID configuration to provide objective, quantifiable data about the data capture performance of RFID readers for comparing and optimizing RFID applications in a scientific manner. A case study has also been conducted in a logistics company to demonstrate the implementation of RFIDDO and provide contextual details to help other firms in coping with the environmental dynamics in the journey of RFID deployment.     

A Prolog technology theorem prover

An extension of Prolog, based on the model elimination theorem-proving procedure, would permit production of a logically complete Prolog technology theorem prover capable of performing inference operations at a rate approaching that of Prolog itself.     

Peacock: a customizable MapReduce for multicore platform

MapReduce has been demonstrated to be a promising alternative to simplify parallel programming with high performance on single multicore machine. Compared to the cluster version, MapReduce does not have bottlenecks in disk and network I/O on single multicore machine, and it is more sensitive to characteristics of workloads. A single execution flow may be inefficient for many classes of workloads. For example, the fixed execution flow of the MapReduce program structure can impose significant overheads for workloads that inherently have only one emitted value per key, which are mainly caused by the unnecessary reduce phase. In this paper, we refine the workload characterization from Phoenix++ according to the attributes of key-value pairs, and give a demonstration that the refined workload characterization model covers all classes of MapReduce workloads. Based on the model, we propose a new MapReduce system with workload-customizable execution flow. The system, namely Peacock, is implemented on top of Phoenix++. Experiments with four different classes of benchmarks on a 16-core Intel-based server show that Peacock achieves better performance than Phoenix++ for workloads that inherently have only one emitted value per key (up to a speedup of \(3.6\times \) ) while identical for other classes of workloads.     

An efficient mutual authentication RFID scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography

Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been widely deployed in many applications, such as supply chain management, inventory control, and traffic card payment. However, these applications can suffer from security issues or privacy violations when the underlying data-protection techniques are not properly designed. Hence, many secure RFID authentication protocols have been proposed. According to the resource usage of the tags, secure RFID protocols are classified into four types: full-fledged, simple, lightweight, and ultra-lightweight. In general, non-full-fledged protocols are vulnerable to desynchronization, impersonation, and tracking attacks, and they also lack scalability. If the tag resources allow more flexibility, full-fledged protocols seem to be an attractive solution. In this study, we examine full-fledged RFID authentication protocols and discuss their security issues. We then design a novel RFID authentication protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography, to avoid these issues. In addition, we present a detailed security analysis and a comparison with related studies; the results show that our scheme is more resistant to a variety of attacks and that it has the best scalability, while maintaining competitive levels of efficiency.     

Fabrication of gold nanoparticle pattern using imprinted hydrogen silsesquioxane pattern for surface-enhanced Raman scattering

This is the first report of surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) substrate fabrication using a combination of imprinted hydrogen silsesquioxane (HSQ: HSiO_3/2) patterns and self-assembly of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). To assemble the AuNPs inside the imprinted HSQ pattern, it is important to understand the interactions between AuNPs and AuNPs, and those between AuNPs and HSQ. The authors investigated the effects HSQ surface charges on the self-assembly of AuNPs. It was found that the negatively charged AuNPs were successfully assembled according to the geometry of the negatively charged HSQ pattern. In addition, it was shown that the SERS substrate fabricated from an HSQ consisting of an inorganic polymer was suitable for organic chemical analysis, by comparing it with a substrate fabricated using an organic polymer.     

The Prolog not-predicate and negation as failure rule

Clark’s query evaluation procedure for computing negative information in deductive databases using a “negation as failure” inference rule requires a safe computation rule which may only select negative literals if they are ground. This is a very restrictive condition, which weakens the usefulness of negation as failure in a query evaluation procedure. This paper studies the definition and properties of the “not” predicate defined in most Prolog systems which do not enforce the above mentioned condition of a safe computation rule. We show that the negation in clauses and the “not” Predicate of Prolog are not the same. In fact a Prolog program may not be in clause form. An extended query evaluation procedure with an extended safe computation rule is proposed to evaluate queries which involve the “not” predicate. The soundness and completeness of this extended query evaluation procedure with respect to a class of logic programs are proved. The implementation of such an extended query evaluation procedure in a Prolog system can be implemented by a preprocessor for executing range restricted programs and requires no modification to the interpreter/compiler of an existing Prolog system. We compare this proposed extended query evaluation procedure with the extended program proposed by Lloyd and Topor, and the negation constructs in NU-Prolog. The use of the “not” predicate for integrity constraint checking in deductive databases is also presented.     

A logic programming language based on the Andorra model

The Andorra model is a parallel execution model of logic programs which exploits the dependent and-parallelism and or-parallelism inherent in logic programming. We present a flat subset of a language based on the Andorra model, henceforth called Andorra Prolog, that is intended to subsume both Prolog and the committed choice languages. Flat Andorra, in addition todon’t know anddon’t care nondeterminism, supports control of or-parallel split, synchronisation on variables, and selection of clauses. We show the operational semantics of the language, and its applicability in the domain of committed choice languages. As an examples of the expressiveness of the language, we describe a method for communication between objects by time-stamped messages, which is suitable for expressing distributed discrete event simulation applications. This method depends critically on the ability to expressdon’t know nondeterminism and thus cannot easily be expressed in a committed choice language.     

JackHare: a framework for SQL to NoSQL translation using MapReduce

As data exploration has increased rapidly in recent years, the datastore and data processing are getting more and more attention in extracting important information. To find a scalable solution to process the large-scale data is a critical issue in either the relational database system or the emerging NoSQL database. With the inherent scalability and fault tolerance of Hadoop, MapReduce is attractive to process the massive data in parallel. Most of previous researches focus on developing the SQL or SQL-like queries translator with the Hadoop distributed file system. However, it could be difficult to update data frequently in such file system. Therefore, we need a flexible datastore as HBase not only to place the data over a scale-out storage system, but also to manipulate the changeable data in a transparent way. However, the HBase interface is not friendly enough for most users. A GUI composed of SQL client application and database connection to HBase will ease the learning curve. In this paper, we propose the JackHare framework with SQL query compiler, JDBC driver and a systematical method using MapReduce framework for processing the unstructured data in HBase. After importing the JDBC driver to a SQL client GUI, we can exploit the HBase as the underlying datastore to execute the ANSI-SQL queries. Experimental results show that our approaches can perform well with efficiency and scalability.     

SAM meets MEMS: reliable fabrication of stable Au-patterns embedded in PDMS using dry peel-off process

This paper describes a reliable method for fabrication of stable gold patterns embedded in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) using a direct peel-off process. Two different surface modifications with self-assembled monolayers were carried out for easy and reliable transfer of Au micro-patterns to the PDMS: (1) perfluorodecyltrichlorosilane on a Si substrate for easy release of the Au patterns from the Si substrate, and (2) (3-mercaptopropyl)trimethoxysilane on the Au patterns to promote the adhesion between the Au patterns and PDMS. Au features as small as 2 μm, in shapes of line and dots, were successfully transferred from the Si substrate to the PDMS over a 3-inch wafer. Transfer of Au patterns to PDMS using the dry peel-off process did not cause any contamination of PDMS, typically seen in wet chemical methods. Finally, the stability of the Au patterns embedded in PDMS was confirmed by the Scotch-tape adhesion test.     

The Aurora or-parallel Prolog system

Aurora is a prototype or-parallel implementation of the full Prolog language for shared-memory multiprocessors, developed as part of an informal research collaboration known as the “Gigalips Project”. It currently runs on Sequent and Encore machines. It has been constructed by adapting Sicstus Prolog, a fast, portable, sequential Prolog system. The techniques for constructing a portable multiprocessor version follow those pioneered in a predecessor system, ANL-WAM. The SRI model was adopted as the means to extend the Sicstus Prolog engine for or-parallel operation. We describe the design and main implementation features of the current Aurora system, and present some experimental results. For a range of benchmarks, Aurora on a 20-processor Sequent Symmetry is 4 to 7 times faster than Quintus Prolog on a Sun 3/75. Good performance is also reported on some large-scale Prolog applications.     

High performance Prolog on a RISC

This paper presents some benchmark timings from an optimising Prolog compiler using global analysis for a RISC workstation, the MIPS R2030. These results are extremely promising. For example, the infamous naive reverse benchmark runs at 2 mega LIPS. We compare these timings with those for other Prolog implementations running on the same workstation and with published timings for the KCM, a recent piece of special purpose Prolog hardware. The comparison suggests that global analysis is a fruitful source of information for an optimising Prolog compiler and that the performance of special purpose Prolog hardware can be at least matched by the code from a compiler using such information. We include some analysis of the sources of the improvement global analysis yields. An overview of the compiler is given and some implementation issues are discussed. This paper is an extended version of Ref. 15)     

Quantitative steganalysis of spatial ±1 steganography in JPEG decompressed images

On the basis of the analysis of JPEG error and stegonoise, we propose a novel quantitative steganalyzer for spatial ±1 steganography in JPEG decompressed images. First, we present a particular theoretical argument that the cover images, which are originally stored in JPEG format, can be approximately estimated through JPEG recompression with the detected quantization table. Then, on the basis of the relationship between the message embedding rate and the variance of the stegonoise in the discrete cosine transformation (DCT) domain, we construct a polynomial regression model to estimate the secret message length. The extensive experimental results show that the proposed scheme is computationally feasible and that it significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art estimators, especially for the images with high quality factors and embedding rates. The order of magnitude of the prediction error using the proposed scheme can remain in the 10^?4 range, as measured by the median absolute difference. Moreover, our estimator is stable and robust with respect to the embedding rate and quality factor.     

P-Prolog: A parallel logic language based on exclusive relation

This paper presents a parallel logic programming language named P-Prolog which is being developed as a logic programming language featuring both and- and or-parallelism. Compared with the other parallel logic programming languages, syntactic constructs such as read-only annotation,⁶⁾ mode declaration²⁾ and communication constraints⁷⁾ are not used in P-Prolog. A new concept introduced in P-Prolog is the exclusive relation of guarded Horn clauses. Advances included in P-prolog. are:

1. The synchronization mechanism can determine the direction of data flow dynamically.
2. Guarded Horn clauses can be interpreted as eitherdon’t care nondeterminism ordon’t know non-determinism.

A prototype interpreter of P-Prolog has been implemented in C-Prolog. We are now implementing a P-Prolog interpreter in the C language.     

Sequential Prolog machine PEK

The sequential Prolog machine PEK currently under development is described. PEK is an experimental machine designed for high speed execution of Prolog programs. The PEK machine is controlled by horizontal-type microinstructions. The machine includes bit slice microprocessor elements comprising a microprogram sequencer and ALU, and possesses hardware circuits for unification and backtracking. The PEK machine consists of a host processor (MC68000) and a backend processor (PEK engine). A Prolog interpreter has been developed on the machine and the machine performance evaluated. A single inference can be executed in 89 microinstructions, and execution speed is approximately 60–70 KLIPS.     

Bounded-wait merge in Shapiro’s Concurrent Prolog

InA Subset of Concurrent Prolog and Its Interpreter (1983), E. Y. Shapiro introduces the language Concurrent Prolog. In his presentation, the problem of guaranteeing bounded-waiting during a merge operation is used as a programming example. Solutions are proposed for binary and n-ary merges. The solutions are, however, completely dependent on specific operational characteristics of a Concurrent Prolog machine or interpreter. This paper presents an alternate approach in which the property of bounded-waiting is incorporated into the semantics of the programs, demonstrable given only the computational model of the language. The solution strategy is to utilize the familiar systems programming techniques of block-on-input and busy-wait. This approach requires that the language be augmented with a metalogical predicate analogous to thevar(_) predicate of Sequential Prolog. The resultant programs are interesting and illustrative examples of Concurrent Prolog as a programming language.