Queueing Petri nets with product form solution

The product form results recently published for stochastic Petri nets are combined with the well-known product form results for queueing networks in the model formalism of queueing Petri nets yielding the class of product form queueing Petri nets. This model class includes stochastic Petri nets with product form solution and BCMP queueing networks as special cases. We introduce an arrival theorem for the model class and present an exact aggregation approach extending known approaches from queueing networks.     

Control Points for Multivariate B-Spline Surfaces over Arbitrary Triangulations

This paper describes first results of a test implementation that implements the new multivariate B-splines as recently developed by Dahmen et al. 10for quadratics and cubics. The surface scheme is based on blending functions and control points and allows the modelling of   C ^{k − 1}  -continuous piecewise polynomial surfaces of degree k over arbitrary triangulations of the parameter plane. The surface scheme exhibits both affine invariance and the convex hull property, and the control points can be used to manipulate the shape of the surface locally. Additional degrees of freedom in the underlying knot net allow for the modelling of discontinuities. Explicit formulas are given for the representation of polynomials and piecewise polynomials as linear combinations of B-splines.     

Optimizing Disparity for Motion in Depth

Beyond the careful design of stereo acquisition equipment and rendering algorithms, disparity post‐processing has recently received much attention, where one of the key tasks is to compress the originally large disparity range to avoid viewing discomfort. The perception of dynamic stereo content however, relies on reproducing the full disparity‐time volume that a scene point undergoes in motion. This volume can be strongly distorted in manipulation, which is only concerned with changing disparity at one instant in time, even if the temporal coherence of that change is maintained. We propose an optimization to preserve stereo motion of content that was subject to an arbitrary disparity manipulation, based on a perceptual model of temporal disparity changes. Furthermore, we introduce a novel 3D warping technique to create stereo image pairs that conform to this optimized disparity map. The paper concludes with perceptual studies of motion reproduction quality and task performance in a simple game, showing how our optimization can achieve both viewing comfort and faithful stereo motion.     

ArchaeoSTOR: A data curation system for research on the archeological frontier

The broad adoption of diagnostic and analytical techniques in the field of archeology, presents a unique opportunity for e-Science in the form of scientific explanation, drawing from methodologies aimed at recording, archiving, analyzing, and disseminating, rich data collections to create the needed infrastructure for both research and web-based curation and data management system. This paper presents a needed stepping stone towards synergy between information technology and archeology, by introducing a data acquisition, tagging and characterization pipeline along with a novel method for spatially querying archeological data.     

Pre‐convolved Radiance Caching

The incident indirect light over a range of image pixels is often coherent. Two common approaches to exploit this inter‐pixel coherence to improve rendering performance are Irradiance Caching and Radiance Caching. Both compute incident indirect light only for a small subset of pixels (the cache), and later interpolate between pixels. Irradiance Caching uses scalar values that can be interpolated efficiently, but cannot account for shading variations caused by normal and reflectance variation between cache items. Radiance Caching maintains directional information, e.g., to allow highlights between cache items, but at the cost of storing and evaluating a Spherical Harmonics (SH) function per pixel. The arithmetic and bandwidth cost for this evaluation is linear in the number of coefficients and can be substantial. In this paper, we propose a method to replace it by an efficient per‐cache item pre‐filtering based on MIP maps — such as previously done for environment maps — leading to a single constant‐time lookup per pixel. Additionally, per‐cache item geometry statistics stored in distance‐MIP maps are used to improve the quality of each pixel's lookup. Our approximate interactive global illumination approach is an order of magnitude faster than Radiance Caching with Phong BRDFs and can be combined with Monte Carlo‐raytracing, Point‐based Global Illumination or Instant Radiosity.     

Long-term stability of Ag and Cu thin films on glass, LTCC and alumina substrates

Silver (Ag) and copper (Cu) are regarded as advanced material for metallization systems in microelectronic devices because of their high electrical conductivity and enhanced electromigration resistance. Typically, organic circuit boards as well as ceramic and glass–ceramic substrates use galvanic deposited Cu films or screen-printed metallization for this purpose. When applying the latter approach, however, the lateral resolution in the μm-region being required e.g. for novel high frequency applications can not be guaranteed. Hence, sputter deposition is envisaged for the realization of thin film metallization systems. The reliability of 300?nm thick Cu and Ag thin films is comparatively investigated under accelerated aging conditions, utilizing a test structure which consists of parallel lines stressed with current densities up to 2.5?×?10^6?A?cm^?2 at temperatures up to 300°C on Si/SiO₂, glass, LTCC (low temperature co-fired ceramics) and alumina substrates. To detect the degradation via the temporal characteristics of the current signal a constant voltage is applied according to the overall resistance of the test structure. Knowing the mean time to failure (MTF) and the activation energy at elevated temperatures conclusions on the migration mechanism can be drawn. Whereas on LTCC substrates the activation energy E_a is about 0.75?eV for both Ag and Cu thin films, the higher activation energies of about E_a?~?1?eV measured for Cu on glass and alumina indicate a suppression of back diffusion especially at enhanced temperature levels. This effect is predominantly caused by a stable oxide layer which is formed at high temperatures and which acts as passivation layer. Therefore, the overall electromigration resistance is lower compared to Ag.     

Reconstruction of volume data with quadratic super splines

We propose a new approach to reconstruct nondiscrete models from gridded volume samples. As a model, we use quadratic trivariate super splines on a uniform tetrahedral partition. We discuss the smoothness and approximation properties of our model and compare to alternative piecewise polynomial constructions. We observe, as a nonstandard phenomenon, that the derivatives of our splines yield optimal approximation order for smooth data, while the theoretical error of the values is nearly optimal due to the averaging rules. Our approach enables efficient reconstruction and visualization of the data. As the piecewise polynomials are of the lowest possible total degree two, we can efficiently determine exact ray intersections with an isosurface for ray-casting. Moreover, the optimal approximation properties of the derivatives allow us to simply sample the necessary gradients directly from the polynomial pieces of the splines. Our results confirm the efficiency of the quasi-interpolating method and demonstrate high visual quality for rendered isosurfaces.