Swarm Intelligence Approaches for Grid Load Balancing

With the rapid growth of data and computational needs, distributed systems and computational Grids are gaining more and more attention. The huge amount of computations a Grid can fulfill in a specific amount of time cannot be performed by the best supercomputers. However, Grid performance can still be improved by making sure all the resources available in the Grid are utilized optimally using a good load balancing algorithm. This research proposes two new distributed swarm intelligence inspired load balancing algorithms. One algorithm is based on ant colony optimization and the other algorithm is based on particle swarm optimization. A simulation of the proposed approaches using a Grid simulation toolkit (GridSim) is conducted. The performance of the algorithms are evaluated using performance criteria such as makespan and load balancing level. A comparison of our proposed approaches with a classical approach called State Broadcast Algorithm and two random approaches is provided. Experimental results show the proposed algorithms perform very well in a Grid environment. Especially the application of particle swarm optimization, can yield better performance results in many scenarios than the ant colony approach.     

Evaluation of artery visualizations for heart disease diagnosis

Heart disease is the number one killer in the United States, and finding indicators of the disease at an early stage is critical for treatment and prevention. In this paper we evaluate visualization techniques that enable the diagnosis of coronary artery disease. A key physical quantity of medical interest is endothelial shear stress (ESS). Low ESS has been associated with sites of lesion formation and rapid progression of disease in the coronary arteries. Having effective visualizations of a patient's ESS data is vital for the quick and thorough non-invasive evaluation by a cardiologist. We present a task taxonomy for hemodynamics based on a formative user study with domain experts. Based on the results of this study we developed HemoVis, an interactive visualization application for heart disease diagnosis that uses a novel 2D tree diagram representation of coronary artery trees. We present the results of a formal quantitative user study with domain experts that evaluates the effect of 2D versus 3D artery representations and of color maps on identifying regions of low ESS. We show statistically significant results demonstrating that our 2D visualizations are more accurate and efficient than 3D representations, and that a perceptually appropriate color map leads to fewer diagnostic mistakes than a rainbow color map.     

A microvalve for hybrid microfluidic systems

A hybrid valve for lab on chip applications is presented. The valve is assembled by bonding poly (methyl methacrylate), PMMA, and silicon-based elastomers. The process used to promote the hybrid bonding includes the deposition of an organosilane (TMSPM) on the thermoplastic polymer, PMMA to interface PMMA and elastomers. For this study, a membrane in ELASTOSIL^? is bonded in correspondence of the end of two microfluidic channels of a fabricated PMMA microfluidic chip. Prior the bonding, a plasma etching process has been used to remove the TMSPM in a confined circular area. This process made possible to bond selectively the edge of a membrane leaving free to move its central part. Actuating the membrane with an external positive pressure or vacuum is possible, respectively, to obstruct or to connect the microfluidic channels. The microvalve may be simply integrated in microfluidic devices and permits the control of microvolumes of fluid in processes such as transport, separation, and mixing. The deposition of the TMSPM, the bonding of the valve and its actuation has been characterized and tested. The flow rate control of liquids through the valve has been characterized. The results have been discussed and commented. The valve can stand up to 14 psi without showing leakages.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">A Midsummer Night’s Dream</Emphasis> (with flying robots)

Seven flying robot “fairies” joined human actors in the Texas A&;M production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production was a collaboration between the departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Theater Arts. The collaboration was motivated by two assertions. First, that the performing arts have principles for creating believable agents that will transfer to robots. Second, the theater is a natural testbed for evaluating the response of untrained human groups (both actors and the audience) to robots interacting with humans in shared spaces, i.e., were believable agents created? The production used two types of unmanned aerial vehicles, an AirRobot 100-b quadrotor platform about the size of a large pizza pan, and six E-flite Blade MCX palm-sized toy helicopters. The robots were used as alter egos for fairies in the play; the robots did not replace any actors, instead they were paired with them. The insertion of robots into the production was not widely advertised so the audience was the typical theatergoing demographic, not one consisting of people solely interested technology. The use of radio-controlled unmanned aerial vehicles provides insights into what types of autonomy are needed to create appropriate affective interactions with untrained human groups. The observations from the four weeks of practice and eight performances contribute (1) a taxonomy and methods for creating affect exchanges between robots and untrained human groups, (2) the importance of improvisation within robot theater, (3) insights into how untrained human groups form expectations about robots, and (4) awareness of the importance of safety and reliability as a design constraint for public engagement with robot platforms. The taxonomy captures that apparent affect can be created without explicit affective behaviors by the robot, but requires talented actors to convey the situation or express reactions. The audience’s response to robot crashes was a function of whether they had the opportunity to observe how the actors reacted to robot crashes on stage, suggesting that pre-existing expectations must be taken into account in the design of autonomy. Furthermore, it appears that the public expect robots to be more reliable (an expectation of consumer product hardening) and safe (an expectation from product liability) than the current capabilities and this may be a major challenge or even legal barrier for introducing robots into shared public spaces. These contributions are expected to inform design strategies for increasing public engagement with robot platforms through affect, and shows the value of arts-based approaches to public encounters with robots both for generating design strategies and for evaluation.     

Supporting Different Dimensions of Adaptability in Workflow Modeling

This paper discusses the theme of workflow systemadaptability in relation to process modeling. Startingfrom a discussion on the role of formal constructs incooperation, the main claim is that adaptabilityinvolves different dimensions of process modeling.These dimensions concern the possibility to flexiblycombine a rich set of basic categories in order toobtain the most suitable language for modeling thetarget business process and the work practices aroundit; to take into account various levels of visibilityof the contexts of definition and use of a processmodel; and finally to allow for temporary as well aspermanent modifications of the process itself.Ariadne, a notation conceived for the above purpose,is illustrated by means of a working example.Moreover, the paper presents the main designprinciples governing Ariadne's implementation.     

High-Energy Physics on the Grid: the ATLAS and CMS Experience

In this paper we present the experience of the ATLAS and CMS High-Energy Physics (HEP) experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with the LCG/EGEE Grid infrastructure. The activity developed around the following two main lines: large-scale physics and detector simulations and end-user analysis. The LCG/EGEE Grid infrastructure offers a large amount of computing and storage resources and is growing very rapidly. It provides the natural environment for large-scale physics and detector simulations. Also, the analysis of these detector simulation data (and in the near future of the reconstructed data from physics collisions) requires efficient end-users access to Grid resources. In this paper, the main findings and lessons learned in terms of performance, robustness and scalability of the whole system are discussed in detail.     

Performance evaluation of semantic registries: OWLJessKB and instanceStore

Service discovery is a critical task in distributed computing architectures for finding a particular service instance. Semantic annotations of services help to enrich the service discovery process. Semantic registries are an important component for the discovery of services and they allow for semantic interoperability through ontology-based query formulation and dynamic mapping of terminologies between system domains. This paper evaluates two semantic registries—OWLJessKB implementation and instanceStore—to determine the suitability of these with regards to the query response time and the overall scalability for use in mathematical services. Mathematical ontologies from the MONET project are used to undertake comparison. The results demonstrate that the performance of registries may be compared across two axes: (1) time to initialize (i.e. time to load an initial ontology into memory); (2) time to query (i.e. time to reason with an ontology loaded into memory).     

Development and applications of surface-activated chemical ionization

This review regards the recently developed ionization source named surface-activated chemical ionization (SACI) that employs an interaction with a surface placed at low voltage for the activation of the ionization of sample molecules to increase the sensitivity in the analysis of various compounds of biological and clinical interest. These results are due to the strong chemical noise decrease and the increase of ionization efficiency. This ionization source has been employed for the analysis of various compounds of different molecular mass and polarity (addicted and pharmaceutical drugs, amino acids, steroids, peptides, and proteins). The SACI development theoretical mechanism, benefits, disadvantages, applications, and future developments are reported and discussed.     

A semiotic engineering approach to user interface design

Designing software involves good perception, good reasoning, and a talent to express oneself effectively through programming and interactive languages. Semiotic theories can help HCI designers increase their power to perceive, reason and communicate. By presenting some of the results we have reached with semiotic engineering over the last few years, we suggest that the main contributions of semiotic theory in supporting HCI design are: to provide designers with new perceptions on the process and product of HCI design; to bind together all the stages of software development and use, giving them a unique homogeneous treatment; and to pose innovative questions that extend the frontiers of HCI investigations.     

Syntax-driven Behavior Partitioning for Model-checking of Esterel Programs

We consider the issue of exploiting the structural form of Esterel programs to partition the algorithmic RSS (reachable state space) fix-point construction used in model-checking techniques. The basic idea sounds utterly simple, as seen on the case of sequential composition: in P; Q, first compute entirely the states reached in P, and then only carry on to Q, each time using only the relevant transition relation part. Here a brute-force symbolic breadth-first search would have mixed the exploration of P and Q instead, in case P had different behaviors of various lengths, and that would result in irregular BBD representation of temporary state spaces, a major cause of complexity in symbolic model-checking.Difficulties appear in our decomposition approach when scheduling the different transition parts in presence of parallelism and local signal exchanges. Program blocks (or “Macro-states”) put in parallel can be synchronized in various ways, due to dynamic behaviors, and considering all possibilities may lead to an excessive division complexity. The goal is here to find a satisfactory trade-off between compositional and global approaches. Concretely we use some of the features of the TiGeR BDD library, and heuristic orderings between internal signals, to have the transition relation progress through the program behaviors to get the same effect as a global RSS computation, but with much more localized transition applications. We provide concrete benchmarks showing the usefulness of the approach.