Supporting Scientific Collaboration: Methods, Tools and Concepts

This paper discusses the interrelationship between e-Science and CSCW in terms of key substantive, methodological and conceptual innovations made in both fields. In so doing, we hope to draw out the existing relationship between CSCW and e-Science research, and to map out some key future challenges where the two areas of research may become more closely aligned. In considering what may be required to draw the two more closely together, the paper focuses primarily on investigations that have been undertaken in two dedicated initiatives into e-Science, along with the key issues emerging from these studies.     

主动网络的概念应用及其范例

主动网络是可编程网络,主动网络中的网络结点具有计算能力,它能对流经本地的数据进行计算和修改,本文介绍了主动网络（active network)的应用,实现方案并通过具体实例Bowman和CANEs来阐述。     

Simulating Network Delays: Applications,Algorithms, and Tools

Organizations are rushing to establish a presence on the World Wide Web (WWW). Researchers, designers, and users all recognize the importance of network delays, with longer delays frequently being associated with more negative user experiences. Although some delay is unavoidable, design decisions do contribute to the total delay users experience. In this article, a collection of tools that allow individuals to experience realistic network delays during informal evaluations, usability studies, and controlled experiments are described. These tools allow practitioners to more effectively assess usability in the context of realistic network delays, researchers to more effectively investigate the factors that affect the usability of information and applications delivered via the WWW, and educators to more effectively convey the importance of design decisions in the context of the WWW. This article describes how these tools may be used as well as the tools themselves, including the algorithms that make them effective. 2 approaches for validating simulations with results are presented. The first validation suggests that the simulation process utilized in the wide-area network delay simulator tools (Borella & Sears, 1997) effectively reproduces the network delays observed when retrieving material via the WWW. The second validation provides even stronger support, indicating that the simulation process can be used to reproduce a specific set of network conditions more accurately than the network itself. Directions for additional research are also discussed.     

Metamodels in Europe: Languages, Tools, and Applications

Editor's note:This article provides an overview of current efforts in Europe for using metamodeling in the integrated development of critical systems such as automotive electronics. It distinguishes between lightweight versus heavyweight approaches, surveys a number of related current European projects, and gives details about the Speeds project to illustrate the role of metamodeling-driven system engineering.—Sandeep Shukla, Virginia Tech     

Cellular-Logic Devices: Concepts and Applications

Cellular-logic devices, using a parallel processing element for each element of a rotating memory, allow fast data search and manipulation.     

Book Review: User Interfaces for All: Concepts,Methods and Tools

User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction -     

An Online Learning Approach: A Methodology for Time Varying Applications

In this paper, a new procedure to continuously adjust weights in a multi-layered neural network is proposed. The network is initially trained by using a traditional backpropagation algorithm. After this first step, a non-linear programming technique is used to properly calculate the new weights sets online. This methodology is tailored to be used in time varying (non-stationary) models, eliminating the necessity for retraining. Numerical results for a controlled experiment and for real data are presented.     

Exhaustive and Efficient Constraint Propagation: A Graph-Based Learning Approach and Its Applications

This paper presents a novel pairwise constraint propagation approach by decomposing the challenging constraint propagation problem into a set of independent semi-supervised classification subproblems which can be solved in quadratic time using label propagation based on $k$ -nearest neighbor graphs. Considering that this time cost is proportional to the number of all possible pairwise constraints, our approach actually provides an efficient solution for exhaustively propagating pairwise constraints throughout the entire dataset. The resulting exhaustive set of propagated pairwise constraints are further used to adjust the similarity matrix for constrained spectral clustering. Other than the traditional constraint propagation on single-source data, our approach is also extended to more challenging constraint propagation on multi-source data where each pairwise constraint is defined over a pair of data points from different sources. This multi-source constraint propagation has an important application to cross-modal multimedia retrieval. Extensive results have shown the superior performance of our approach.     

Particle Swarm Optimization: Basic Concepts, Variants and Applications in Power Systems

Many areas in power systems require solving one or more nonlinear optimization problems. While analytical methods might suffer from slow convergence and the curse of dimensionality, heuristics-based swarm intelligence can be an efficient alternative. Particle swarm optimization (PSO), part of the swarm intelligence family, is known to effectively solve large-scale nonlinear optimization problems. This paper presents a detailed overview of the basic concepts of PSO and its variants. Also, it provides a comprehensive survey on the power system applications that have benefited from the powerful nature of PSO as an optimization technique. For each application, technical details that are required for applying PSO, such as its type, particle formulation (solution representation), and the most efficient fitness functions are also discussed.     

Editorial Note: Multimodal Data Fusion,Learning and Applications

Multimedia Tools and Applications -     

Nonlinear Bivariate Comovements of Asset Prices: Methodology, Tests and Applications

Comovements among asset prices have received a lot of attention for several reasons. For example, comovements are important in cross-hedging and cross-speculation; they determine capital allocation both domestically and in international mean-variance portfolios and also, they are useful in investigating the extent of integration among financial markets. In this paper we propose a new methodology for the non-linear modelling of bivariate comovements. Our approach extends the ones presented in the recent literature. In fact, our methodology, outlined in three steps, allows the evaluation and the statistical testing of non-linearly driven comovements between two given random variables. Moreover, when such a bivariate dependence relationship is detected, our approach creates a polynomial approximation. We illustrate our three-step methodology to the time series of energy related asset prices. Finally, we exploit this dependence relationship and its polynomial approximation to obtain analytical approximations of the Greeks for the European call and put options in terms of an asset whose price comoves with the price of the underlying asset.     

On Learning Visual Concepts and DNF Formulae

We consider the problem of learning DNF formulae in the mistake-bound and the PAC models. We develop a new approach, which is called polynomial explainability, that is shown to be useful for learning some new subclasses of DNF (and CNF) formulae that were not known to be learnable before. Unlike previous learnability results for DNF (and CNF) formulae, these subclasses are not limited in the number of terms or in the number of variables per term; yet, they contain the subclasses of k-DNF and k-term-DNF (and the corresponding classes of CNF) as special cases. We apply our DNF results to the problem of learning visual concepts and obtain learning algorithms for several natural subclasses of visual concepts that appear to have no natural boolean counterpart. On the other hand, we show that learning some other natural subclasses of visual concepts is as hard as learning the class of all DNF formulae. We also consider the robustness of these results under various types of noise.An earlier version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the Sixth Annual ACM Workshop on Computational Learning Theory, COLT93.Current address: Department of Computer Science, Technion, Israel. e-mail:eyalk@cs.technion.ac.il     

Design and Programming Tools for Time Critical Applications

The development of time critical applications needs specific tools able to cope with both functional and non-functional requirements. In this paper we describe a design and programming environment to assist the development of hard real-time applications. An interactive graphic interface is provided to facilitate the design of the application according to three hierarchical levels. The development model we propose is based on an iterative process in which the real-time scheduling support is considered from the beginning of the design phases.Our graphic environment integrates several tools to analyze, test, and simulate the real-time application under development. In particular, the tools we have implemented are: a Design Tool, to describe the structure of the application, a Schedulability Analyser Tool (SAT), to verify off-line the feasibility of the schedule of a critical task set, a Scheduling Simulator, to test the average behavior of the application, and a Maximum Execution Time (MET) estimator to bound the worst case duration of each task.     

原7-11 CIO的提案《新IT经营》第1讲站在灵活应用IT的崭新视角

在本连载文章中，作者将就如何灵活应用IT（信息技术）和信息系统的新思维和新方法进行论述。作者在2003年底之前的25年间，一直就职于日本7—11的信息系统部门，曾担任日本7-11常务董事兼信息系统本部长。作者希望充分发挥在IT应用领域的实务经验以及专业知识，形成针对相关企业的新解决方案。     

Semantic Annotating of Text Documents: Basic Concepts and Taxonomic Approach

One of the tools for the semantic enrichment of the content of information resources is semantic annotating, which makes it possible to comment on and evaluate annotated resources and their fragments and to carry out a semantic search on their basis. The use of the taxonomic approach simultaneously allows classifying the subjects of annotating and generating new scientometric indicators. This paper considers the essence of semantic annotating, defines the basic concepts, discusses the general model of semantic annotation and taxonomic approach to presenting the semantics of annotations, and gives the examples of taxonomies based on various properties of annotations. The implementation of semantic annotating in the Socionet scientific information system is considered as an example.