Statistical synchronization among participants in real-time multimedia conferencing

In this paper, an algorithm to determine the set of packets generated continuously and periodically from different participants that are arriving at a node either for mixing at the master of a conference, or for simply playing back at a regular participant of a conference, is proposed. The essence of the algorithm is to estimate the expected packet arrival time (or reference time) for each participant. With the reference time at hand, the maximum jitter and the optimum waiting time for a mixer to wait packets from all participants can be determined. An enhancement to improve synchronization which deals with the estimation of the time offsets between the individual periods of the sources and the period of the receiver is also presented. The error of the proposed algorithm is enumerated by the Chernoff bound and demonstrated by simulation and is shown to be acceptable in practical application. The algorithm can also be employed when traffic sources operate with different periods.     

Novel thermally and mechanically stable hydrogel for enzyme immobilization of penicillin G acylase via covalent technique

κ‐Carrageenan hydrogel crosslinked with protonated polyethyleneimine (PEI⁺) and glutaraldehyde (GA) was prepared and evaluated as a novel biocatalytic support for covalent immobilization of penicillin G acylase (PGA). The method of modification of the carrageenan biopolymer is clearly illustrated using a schematic diagram and was verified by FTIR, elemental analysis, DSC, and INSTRON using the compression mode. Results showed that the gels' mechanical strength was greatly enhanced from 3.9 kg/cm² to 16.8 kg/cm² with an outstanding improvement in the gels thermal stability. It was proven that, the control gels were completely dissolved at 35°C, whereas the modified gels remained intact at 90°C. The DSC thermogram revealed a shift in the endothermic band of water from 62 to 93°C showing more gel‐crosslinking. FTIR revealed the presence of the new functionality, aldehydic carbonyl group, at 1710 cm^?1 for covalent PGA immobilization. PGA was successfully immobilized as a model industrial enzyme retaining 71% of its activity. The enzyme loading increased from 2.2 U/g (control gel) to 10 U/g using the covalent technique. The operational stability showed no loss of activity after 20 cycles. The present support could be a good candidate for the immobilization of industrial enzymes rich in amino groups, especially the thermophilic ones. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2008     

High-performance polymer alloys of polybenzoxazine and bismaleimide

Two series of high-performance polymer alloys were prepared by mixing typical benzoxine monomers, 3-phenyl-3,4-dihydro-2H-1,3-benzoxazine (P-a) or 6,6-(1-methylethyliden)-bis-(3,4-dihydro-3-phenyl-2H-1,3-benzoxazine) (B-a), with a typical bismaleimide, 4,4-bismaleimidodiphenyl methane by various ratios followed by thermal treatment up to 240 °C. DSC and IR of the alloys were examined to follow the curing reaction. These analyses showed that the obtained polymer alloys are AB co-cross-linked polymer networks through the formation of ether linkage between the hydroxyl group of polybenoxazine and the double bond of bismaleimide. Viscoelastic analysis and softening temperature measurement revealed that the polymer alloys have much higher glass transition temperatures than those of each homopolymer. The thermal stability also increased with the increase of bismaleimide content as evidenced by TGA.     

A sensing strategy for the reverse engineering of machined parts

The reverse engineering of machined parts requires sensing an existing part and producing a design (and perhaps a manufacturing process) for it. We have developed a reverse engineering system that has proven effective with a set of machined parts. This paper describes the system, presents some results, and discusses strategy for a new system.This work was supported by ARPA under ARO grant number DAAH04-93-G-0420, DARPA grant N00014-91-J-4123, NSF grant CDA 9024721, and a University of Utah Research Committee grant. All opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agencies.     

An accelerated algorithm for full band electron–phonon scattering rate computation

Computing scattering rates of electrons and phonons stands at the core of studies of electron transport properties. In the high field regime, the interactions between all electron bands with all phonon bands need to be considered. This full band interaction implies a huge computational burden in calculating scattering rates. In this study, a new accelerated algorithm is presented for this task, which speeds up the computation by two orders of magnitude (100 times) and dramatically simplifies the coding. At the same time, it visually demonstrates the physical process of scattering more clearly.     

Bandwidth Adaptive Cache Coherence Optimizations for Chip Multiprocessors

Chip Multiprocessors (CMPs) have different technological parameters and physical constraints than earlier multi-processor systems, which should be taken into consideration when designing cache coherence protocols. Also, contemporary cache coherence protocols use invalidate schemes that are known to generate a high number of coherence misses. This is especially true under producer-consumer sharing patterns that can become a performance bottleneck as the number of cores increases. This paper presents two mechanisms to design efficient and scalable cache coherence protocols for CMPs. First, we propose an adaptive hybrid protocol to reduce coherence misses observed in write-invalidate based protocols. The proposed protocol is based on a write-invalidate scheme. However, adaptively, it can push updates to potential consumers based on observed producer-consumer sharing patterns. Secondly, we extend this adaptive protocol with an interconnection resource aware mechanism. Experimental evaluations, conducted on a tiled-CMP via full-system simulation, were used to assess the performance from our proposed dynamic hybrid protocols. Performance analysis is presented on a set of scientific applications from the SPLASH-2 and NAS parallel benchmark suites. Results showed that the proposed mechanisms reduce cache-to-cache sharing misses up to 48 % and speed up application performance up to 34 %. In addition, the proposed interconnection resource aware mechanism is proven to perform well under varying interconnection utilizations.     

Delay composition in preemptive and non-preemptive real-time pipelines

Uniprocessor schedulability theory made great strides, in part, due to the simplicity of composing the delay of a job from the execution times of higher-priority jobs that preempt it. In this paper, we bound the end-to-end delay of a job in a multistage pipeline as a function of job execution times on different stages under preemptive as well as non-preemptive scheduling. We show that the end-to-end delay is bounded by that of a single virtual “bottleneck” stage plus a small additive component. This contribution effectively transforms the pipeline into a single stage system. The wealth of schedulability analysis techniques derived for uniprocessors can then be applied to decide the schedulability of the pipeline. The transformation does not require imposing artificial per-stage deadlines, but rather models the pipeline as a whole and uses the end-to-end deadlines directly in the single-stage analysis. It also does not make assumptions on job arrival patterns or periodicity and thus can be applied to periodic and aperiodic tasks alike. We show through simulations that this approach outperforms previous pipeline schedulability tests except for very short pipelines or when deadlines are sufficiently large. The reason lies in the way we account for execution overlap among stages. We discuss how previous approaches account for overlap and point out interesting differences that lead to different performance advantages in different cases. Further, we also show that in certain cases non-preemptive scheduling can result in higher system utilization than preemptive scheduling in pipelined systems. We hope that the pipeline delay composition rule, derived in this paper, may be a step towards a general schedulability analysis foundation for large distributed systems.

An Iterative Method for Deciding SVM and Single Layer Neural Network Structures

We present two new classifiers for two-class classification problems using a new Beta-SVM kernel transformation and an iterative algorithm to concurrently select the support vectors for a support vector machine (SVM) and the hidden units for a single hidden layer neural network to achieve a better generalization performance. To construct the classifiers, the contributing data points are chosen on the basis of a thresholding scheme of the outputs of a single perceptron trained using all training data samples. The chosen support vectors are used to construct a new SVM classifier that we call Beta-SVN. The number of chosen support vectors is used to determine the structure of the hidden layer in a single hidden layer neural network that we call Beta-NN. The Beta-SVN and Beta-NN structures produced by our method outperformed other commonly used classifiers when tested on a 2-dimensional non-linearly separable data set.     

Video transmission enhancement in presence of misbehaving nodes in MANETs

Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANET) are infrastructureless networks where self-configuring mobile nodes are connected by wireless links. Because of its decentralized operation, these nodes rely on each other to store and forward packets. Video transmission over MANETs is more challenging than over conventional wireless networks due to rapid topology changes and lack of central administration. Most of the proposed MANET protocols assume that all nodes are working within a cooperative and friendly network context. However, misbehaving nodes that exhibit abnormal behaviors can disrupt the network operation and affect the network availability by refusing to cooperate to route packets due to their selfish or malicious behavior. In this paper, we examine the effect of packet dropping attacks on video transmission over MANETs. We also study the effects of mitigation using intrusion detection systems to MANET in presence of video traffic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study multimedia over such environments. We propose a novel intrusion detection system, which is an adaptive acknowledgment scheme (AACK) with the ability to detect misbehaved nodes and avoid them in other transmissions. The aim of AACK scheme is to overcome watchdog weaknesses due to collisions and limited transmission power and also to improve TWOACK scheme. To demonstrate the performance of our proposed scheme, simulation experiments are performed. The results of our experiments show that MPEG4 is more suitable for our simulation environment than H264 video traffic. The simulation results show that AACK scheme provides better network performance with less overhead than other schemes; it also shows that AACK outperforms both TWOACK and watchdog in video transmission applications in the presence of misbehaving nodes.     

Disassembly Sequencing Using Tabu Search

End-of-life disassembly has developed into a major research area within the sustainability paradigm, resulting in the emergence of several algorithms and structures proposing heuristics techniques such as Genetic Algorithm (GA), Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Neural Networks (NN). The performance of the proposed methodologies heavily depends on the accuracy and the flexibility of the algorithms to accommodate several factors such as preserving the precedence relationships during disassembly while obtaining near- optimal and optimal solutions. This paper improves a previously proposed Genetic Algorithm model for disassembly sequencing by utilizing a faster metaheuristic algorithm, Tabu search, to obtain the optimal solution. The objectives of the proposed algorithm are to minimize (1) the traveled distance by the robotic arm, (2) the number of disassembly method changes, and (3) the number of robotic arm travels by combining the identical-material components together and hence eliminating unnecessary disassembly operations. In addition to improving the quality of optimum sequence generation, a comprehensive statistical analysis comparing the previous Genetic Algorithm and the proposed Tabu Search Algorithm is also included