Development of panel generation system for seakeeping analysis

In this paper, a panel generation system for analyzing seakeeping performance of a ship is developed. Given a set of offset data representing the ship hull, the system first creates a surface model of the ship. From the surface model, the wetted part of the ship is obtained by computing the intersection between the water surface and the hull, which is then processed to generate quadrilateral panels for the hull and the water surface. The system is designed to handle various kinds of ships such as ships with a mono-skeg, a twin-skeg and/or a bulbous bow in either an automatic or an interactive manner. Moreover, it can generate input panels for three different seakeeping analysis methods. Examples are provided to demonstrate the capabilities of the system.     

Building language resources for a Multi-Engine English-Filipino machine translation system

In this paper, we present the building of various language resources for a multi-engine bi-directional English-Filipino Machine Translation (MT) system. Since linguistics information on Philippine languages are available, but as of yet, the focus has been on theoretical linguistics and little is done on the computational aspects of these languages, attempts are reported here on the manual construction of these language resources such as the grammar, lexicon, morphological information, and the corpora which were literally built from almost non-existent digital forms. Due to the inherent difficulties of manual construction, we also discuss our experiments on various technologies for automatic extraction of these resources to handle the intricacies of the Filipino language, designed with the intention of using them for the MT system. To implement the different MT engines and to ensure the improvement of translation quality, other language tools (such as the morphological analyzer and generator, and the part of speech tagger) were developed.     

Control of Feature-point-driven Facial Animation Using a Hypothetical Face

A new approach to the generation of a feature-point-driven facial animation is presented. In the proposed approach, a hypothetical face is used to control the animation of a face model. The hypothetical face is constructed by connecting some predefined facial feature points to create a net so that each facet of the net is represented by a Coon's surface. Deformation of the face model is controlled by changing the shape of the hypothetical face, which is performed by changing the locations of feature points and their tangents. Experimental results show that this hypothetical-face-based method can generate facial expressions which are visually almost identical to those of a real face.     

Nonlevelable sets and immune sets in the accepting density hierarchy inNP

The complexity theoretic concept of levelability is introduced to the accepting density hierarchy inNP. A setA inNP islevelable with respect to densityu(n) if for every polynomial-time nondeterministic Turing machine (NTM)M that acceptsA there is a better NTMM forA that improves the accepting density ofM infinitely often from the density belowu(n) tou(n). We investigate the structural properties of nonlevelable sets inNP. A nonlevelable set must have a maximal complexity core, and its maximal cores must have relatively low complexity. Most naturalNP-complete sets are paddable and hence levelable with respect to the two lowest levels in the accepting density hierarchy. A relativized accepting density hierarchy is constructed to demonstrate the possibility of the existence of nonlevelable sets at each level of the hierarchy.This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants MCS-8103479 and MCS-8103479A01.     

DESIGN OF TEMPERATURE CONTROLLED QUARTZ CRYSTAL MICROBALANCE SYSTEM

In this study, the dual modulated quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) with heating and cooling control has been developed for the quantitative determination of biological molecules, as a biosensor. On the other hand, since, the Sauerbrey formula is misprinted in some publications, the correct form of formula is also discussed. The proposed QCM biosensor has three main parts, which are the oscillator circuit, temperature control circuit, and the differential frequency measurement unit. Colpitts oscillators with the buffer amplifier, microcontroller (PIC16F877) for the temperature control circuit and a peltier element were used for heating and cooling inside the developed system. Differential frequency measurement is a known technique to compensate environmental effects causing instability of crystals. For this reason, one of the crystals is implemented with oscillatory circuits, i.e., the detector; the other one is used as the reference. The designed system was tested between 8°C and 50°C and frequency shift versus temperature is observed at 0.5 ppm/°C over a given temperature range.     

Cost benefits from standardization of the packaging glass bottles

This study deals with a recycling system with two competing brewers. It is assumed that they coordinate their manufacturing operations through standardization of their glass bottles for easy implementation of extended producer responsibility (EPR). Immediate benefits from the standardization are three folds. Firstly, the sorting and exchange processes of the bottles collected for reuse by each brewer become no longer necessary. Secondly, cost reduction is achieved through streamlining of collection and reuse processes. Finally, under the stochastic demand of glass bottles their inventory holding costs and lost sales cost are reduced via inventory pooling. Through the development of the mathematical models we determine an optimal operation policy of the two brewers that maximizes the sum of benefits obtained from standardization. Numerical examples are solved to show the validity of the model. Sensitivity tests are also performed to examine the effects of system parameters on the objective function value and decision variables.     

A task‐based and resource‐aware approach to dynamically generate optimal software architecture for intelligent service robots

Intelligent service robots provide various services to users by understanding the context and goals of a user task. In order to provide more reliable services, intelligent service robots need to consider various factors, such as their surrounding environments, users' changing needs, and constrained resources. To handle these factors, most of the intelligent service robots are controlled by a task‐based control system, which generates a task plan that represents a sequence of actions, and executes those actions by invoking the corresponding functions. However, the traditional task‐based control systems lack the consideration of resource factors even though intelligent service robots have limited resources (limited computational power, memory space, and network bandwidth). Moreover, system‐specific concerns such as the relationships among functional modules are not considered during the task generation phase. Without considering both the resource conditions and interdependencies among software modules as a whole, it will be difficult to efficiently manage the functionalities that are essential to provide core services to users. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for intelligent service robots to efficiently use their resources on‐demand by separating system‐specific information from task generation. We have defined a sub‐architecture that corresponds to each action of a task plan, and provides a way of using the limited resources by minimizing redundant software components and maintaining essential components for the current action. To support the optimization of resource consumption, we have developed a two‐phase optimization process, which is composed of the topological and temporal optimization steps. We have conducted an experiment with these mechanisms for an infotainment robot, and simulated the optimization process. Results show that our approach contributed to increase the utilization rate by 20% of the robot resources. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effect of noise imbalance on dual-MRC over Rayleigh fading channels

The performance analysis of dual (two-branch) maximal ratio combining (MRC) under imperfect weight, named imperfect MRC, due to the noise imbalance is derived over independent but non-identical Rayleigh fading channels. Considering the system (or channel) conditions that the noise level of each branch is different, we present the accurate performance analysis of imperfect dual MRC in terms of average combined signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), outage probability and average symbol error rate for a large class of modulations in closed-form and compare them with the performance of the perfect MRC and the perfect selection combining (SC) over non-identical but independent Rayleigh fading channels based on the interesting statistical results on the combined SNR. From the performance results we provide the criterion in choosing the imperfect MRC, perfect MRC, or SC depending on the degree of the difference of the noise level between branches.     

Performance analysis of channel estimation for OFDM systems with residual timing offset

The authors present an analysis of the effect of timing offset on channel estimation for comb-type pilot-aided orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Residual timing offset does not negatively affect the channel estimation of the pilot subcarrier, but does corrupt the channel information obtained via interpolation. This paper provides the mean square error (MSE) channel estimation performance when a linear interpolation technique is used in a comb-type pilot-aided OFDM system. Analysis shows that the performance degradation of the channel estimator due to imperfect frame synchronization is dependent on the frequency correlation of the channels and the amount of timing offset