Modeling,simulation, and practice of floor control for synchronous and ubiquitous collaboration

Floor control refers to the need for coordinating activities occurred in synchronously cooperating applications shared among collaborators. We address this for ubiquitous collaboration—the capability of multiple users to link together with disparate access device anytime and anywhere. Floor control has been studied for years but most researchers focus on relaxed coordination mechanisms with stationary devices that allow updates by any user on any object and resolve the uncoordinated updates. In this paper we present a floor control mechanism, called XGSP-Floor, which implements a coordination mechanism at application level for enabling users to consistently share the same resource in real time (synchronous collaboration) in ubiquitous collaboration environment. The implementation platform on cell phone devices may not be new. But we believe the implementation and experiment for XGSP-Floor on cell phone devices is a new challenge in ubiquitous collaboration environment even though the coordination mechanism can intuitively impose a tremendous overhead in worst case. We also describe the results of the modeling of XGSP-Floor and formal verification to prove the correctness of the modeling using Colored Petri Nets. We describe lessons learned and discuss future work.     

Binding conformation prediction between human acetylcholinesterase and cytochrome c using molecular modeling methods

The acetylcholinesterase (AChE) is important to terminate acetylcholine-mediated neurotransmission at cholinergic synapses. The pivotal role of AChE in apoptosome formation through the interactions with cytochrome c (Cyt c) was demonstrated in recent study. In order to investigate the proper binding conformation between the human AChE (hAChE) and human Cyt c (hCyt c), macro-molecular docking simulation was performed using DOT 2.0 program. The hCyt c was bound to peripheral anionic site (PAS) on hAChE and binding mode of the docked conformation was very similar to the reported crystal structure of the AChE and fasciculin-II (Fas-II) complex. Two 10ns molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were carried out to refine the binding mode of docked structure and to observe the differences of the binding conformations between the absent (Apo) and presence (Holo) of heme group. The key hydrogen bonding residues between hAChE and hCyt c proteins were found in Apo and Holo systems, as well as each Tyr341 and Trp286 residue of hAChE was participated in cation-pi (π) interactions with Lys79 of hCyt c in Apo and Holo systems, respectively. From the present study, although the final structures of the Apo and Holo systems have similar binding pattern, several differences were investigated in flexibilities, interface interactions, and interface accessible surface areas. Based on these results, we were able to predict the reasonable binding conformation which is indispensable for apoptosome formation.     

Multi-sector multi-range control for self-organizing wireless networks

In this paper, we propose a distributed multi-sector multi-range (MSMR) control algorithm for supporting self-organizing wireless networks. The algorithm enables us to reduce the unnecessary coverage with fine-tuned range control and also to increase the network-wide capacity with enhanced spatial reusability. The proposed algorithm discovers neighboring nodes within the maximum transmission range at every node, divides its transmission area into multiple non-overlapping angular sectors of a given degree, chooses the home sector for each neighboring node according to its relative position, and constructs a spanning subgraph per sector by determining appropriate transmission range to maintain connectivity. Since the range control influences on network connectivity directly, we prove in the first place that the proposed algorithm preserves both network-wide and local connectivity as far as both connectivity exist in the network that uses the maximum transmission range. In order to investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we implemented it in the ns-2 simulator, and performed an extensive set of simulation study in comparison with other transmission range control schemes. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme is superior to other schemes with respect to the network-wide throughput and its normalized value per energy in various simulation configurations. In specific, the algorithm achieves minimally one order and maximally two orders of magnitude improvement in those performance evaluations. The improvement becomes more salient as the number of nodes increases and is immune to traffic type, network size, node distribution, or node density.     

Sequence classification via large margin hidden Markov models

We address the sequence classification problem using a probabilistic model based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). In contrast to commonly-used likelihood-based learning methods such as the joint/conditional maximum likelihood estimator, we introduce a discriminative learning algorithm that focuses on class margin maximization. Our approach has two main advantages: (i) As an extension of support vector machines (SVMs) to sequential, non-Euclidean data, the approach inherits benefits of margin-based classifiers, such as the provable generalization error bounds. (ii) Unlike many algorithms based on non-parametric estimation of similarity measures that enforce weak constraints on the data domain, our approach utilizes the HMM’s latent Markov structure to regularize the model in the high-dimensional sequence space. We demonstrate significant improvements in classification performance of the proposed method in an extensive set of evaluations on time-series sequence data that frequently appear in data mining and computer vision domains.     

Higher-order schemes for the Laplace transformation method for parabolic problems

In this paper we solve linear parabolic problems using the three stage noble algorithms. First, the time discretization is approximated using the Laplace transformation method, which is both parallel in time (and can be in space, too) and extremely high order convergent. Second, higher-order compact schemes of order four and six are used for the the spatial discretization. Finally, the discretized linear algebraic systems are solved using multigrid to show the actual convergence rate for numerical examples, which are compared to other numerical solution methods.     

Performance assessment in an interactive call center workforce simulation

In this paper, a new performance assessment methodology for human-in-the-loop call center systems at the level of customer-agent interactions (CAI) is proposed. We develop a team-in-the-loop simulation test bed, to analyze CAI-level performance of a service system using a temporal performance measure with time windows. The proposed framework should allow researchers to collect and analyze individual as well as team performance at a finer granularity than current call center efforts which focus on queue-centered analysis. The software framework is object-oriented and has been designed to be configurable. A sample simulation study in different scenarios is illustrated to provide the usages and advantages of the proposed method with index of Interactive Service Performance.     

Improving responsiveness of soft aperiodic tasks using proportional slack time

In a real-time system with both hard real-time periodic jobs and soft real-time aperiodic jobs, it is important to guarantee that the deadline of each periodic job is met, as well as to provide a fast response time for each aperiodic job. We propose an algorithm, called Proportional Slack Reserve (PSR), that produces an efficient schedule for such an environment. For every execution unit of a periodic job, the PSR algorithm reserves time which can be used for execution of aperiodic jobs. If reserved time is not available, the algorithm assigns a deadline to an aperiodic job for achieving better responsiveness of aperiodic jobs. The proposed algorithm can fully utilize processing power while meeting all deadlines of periodic jobs. It can also easily reclaim the time unused by the periodic job. We analytically show that for each aperiodic job, the response time in a PSR schedule is no longer than that in a TBS schedule, which is known to be efficient for servicing aperiodic jobs. We also present simulation results in which the response time of PSR is significantly improved over that of TBS, and moreover the performance of PSR compares favorably with TB(N) considering scheduling overhead.     

Forgery attacks on Kang et al.’s identity-based strong designated verifier signature scheme and its improvement with security proof

Recently, Kang et al. proposed a new identity-based strong designated verifier signature scheme (ID-SDVS) and identity-based designated verifier proxy signature scheme (ID-DVPS). They claimed that their schemes are unforgeable. However, we found out that their schemes are universally forgeable in the sense that anyone can forge valid ID-SDVS and ID-DVPS on an arbitrary message without the knowledge of the secret key of either the signer or the designated verifier. Finally, we propose an improved ID-SDVS which is unforgeable. We give formal security proof of universal unforgeability of our scheme. We also give an improved ID-DVPS.     

Multiple change-point detection of multivariate mean vectors with the Bayesian approach

Bayesian multiple change-point models are proposed for multivariate means. The models require that the data be from a multivariate normal distribution with a truncated Poisson prior for the number of change-points and conjugate priors for the distributional parameters. We apply the stochastic approximation Monte Carlo (SAMC) algorithm to the multiple change-point detection problems. Numerical results show that SAMC makes a significant improvement over RJMCMC for complex Bayesian model selection problems in change-point estimation.     

A Data‐driven Segmentation for the Shoulder Complex

The human shoulder complex is perhaps the most complicated joint in the human body being comprised of a set of three bones, muscles, tendons, and ligaments. Despite this anatomical complexity, computer graphics models for motion capture most often represent this joint as a simple ball and socket. In this paper, we present a method to determine a shoulder skeletal model that, when combined with standard skinning algorithms, generates a more visually pleasing animation that is a closer approximation to the actual skin deformations of the human body. We use a data‐driven approach and collect ground truth skin deformation data with an optical motion capture system with a large number of markers (200 markers on the shoulder complex alone). We cluster these markers during movement sequences and discover that adding one extra joint around the shoulder improves the resulting animation qualitatively and quantitatively yielding a marker set of approximately 70 markers for the complete skeleton. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our skeletal model by comparing it with ground truth data as well as with recorded video. We show its practicality by integrating it with the conventional rendering/animation pipeline.