AssetCollector: a system for managing collections of cultural assets

In this paper, AssetCollector is presented, which is a system for managing collections of cultural assets. AssetCollector covers the needs of collection curators towards defining, populating and searching a collection in a flexible way, while supporting them in generating reports based on the collection’s assets and reusing them in order to build web sites and CD-ROMs. In order to support the above functionality, the system provides the content structuring subsystem, the content input subsystem, the search subsystem and the report subsystem. The use of the subsystems is straightforward and requires no technical skills from the curators. AssetCollector has been successfully applied for organizing various collections of cultural assets in Greece, such as archaeological sites, museums and published books. In the future, an evaluation procedure is planned in order to further refine the use of the system according to the targeted users’ needs. Furthermore, more import and export facilities will be provided, which will make the system compliant with widely accepted standards.     

Revisiting the cutting of the firing squad synchronization

Various synchronization algorithms have been introduced in literature during the last decades to deal with the firing squad synchronization problem on cellular automata (CA). Among others defective CA algorithms, where the CA cell is able to transmit information without previous processing, have been also presented. In our case, originating from the classical Mazoyer’s paper, where a minimum-time solution is presented with 6 states, a one-dimensional CA where one cell may permanently fail is presented. In the proposed algorithm, the defective cell can neither process nor transmit information any longer, while it is considered that such dynamic defects may become apparent in any time step of computation. A thorough analysis of the synchronization, in terms of location and time at which cell fails, for the cells found in both sides of defective cell is delivered to decipher the corresponding maximal possible number of synchronized cells in each part of the cut, due to defect, CA array. The proposed algorithm is properly extended to consider more than one defective cells that may occur in the under study one-dimensional CA. Based on the aforementioned analysis, we provide the generalization of synchronization with multiple totally defective cells, while application examples of the generalized CA algorithm in case of two defective cells are also presented. Finally, another intriguing aspect refers to handling of states that could be tentatively characterized as unknown, in a confrontation similar to the previous defective state but also different, since now this(these) cell(s) are not stated as faulty but unknown. As a result, a new one-dimensional CA with less states, compared to the previous CA defective algorithms, able to synchronize the maximal possible number of cells in each part occurs.     

手动式电磁定位及图像导航的短径癌症放射治疗系统

提出一个用于高剂量短径癌症放射治疗的手动式电磁定们及图像导航系统，该系统主要由4个模块组成：预处理、术前规划、术内导航和术后计划，它们分别对应高剂量短径癌症放射治疗的4个流程：在术前规划阶段，用户可交互地设计探针放置位置以及三维重建病灶轮廓；在手术进行过程中，六自由度的电磁式定位技术实时而精确地跟踪探针位置，高质量的可视化技术指引医生完成手术探针放置任务；手术探针全部放置完毕后，术后计划模板计算剂量分布并利用后装机设备进行放射治疗。初步实验表明，计算机辅助的探针定位比手工定位精度提高2-3倍，手术时间减少5倍以上，同时也减轻了病人所承受的放射剂量。     

Securing Recommender Systems Against Shilling Attacks Using Social-Based Clustering

Recommender systems (RS) have been found supportive and practical in e-commerce and been established as useful aiding services. Despite their great adoption in the user communities, RS are still vulnerable to unscrupulous producers who try to promote their products by shilling the systems. With the advent of social networks new sources of information have been made available which can potentially render RS more resistant to attacks. In this paper we explore the information provided in the form of social links with clustering for diminishing the impact of attacks. We propose two algorithms, CluTr and WCluTr, to combine clustering with "trust" among users. We demonstrate that CluTr and WCluTr enhance the robustness of RS by experimentally evaluating them on data from a public consumer recommender system Epinions.com.     

The contribution of proteomics towards deciphering the enigma of Coxiella burnetii

Coxiella burnetii, the causative agent of Q fever, is an intracellular bacterium and a potential weapon for bioterrorism. The widespread throughout the world, zoonosis is manifested clinically as a self-limited febrile illness, as pneumonia (acute Q fever) or as a chronic illness with endocarditis being its major complication. The recent Netherlands Q fever outbreak has driven the bacterium from a relatively cryptic, underappreciated, “niche” microorganism on the sideline of bacteriology, to one of possibly great impact on public health. Advances in the study of this microorganism proceeded slowly, primarily due to the, until recently, obligatory intracellular nature of the pathogen that in its virulent phase I must be manipulated under biosafety level-3 conditions. Proteomic studies, in particular, have generated a vast amount of information concerning several aspects of the bacterium such as virulence factors, detection/diagnostic and immunogenic biomarkers, inter-/intraspecies variation, resistance to antibiotics, and secreted effector proteins with significant clinical impact. The phenomenon observed following the genomics era, that of generation and accumulation of huge amount of data that ultimately end up unexploited on several databases, begins to emerge in the proteomics field as well. This review will focus on the advances in the field of C. burnetii proteomics through MS, attempting in parallel to utilize some of the proteomics findings by suggesting future directions for the improvement of Q fever diagnosis and therapy.     

Multiscale Molecular Simulations of Polymer-Matrix Nanocomposites

Following the substantial progress in molecular simulations of polymer-matrix nanocomposites, now is the time to reconsider this topic from a critical point of view. A comprehensive survey is reported herein providing an overview of classical molecular simulations, reviewing their major achievements in modeling polymer matrix nanocomposites, and identifying several open challenges. Molecular simulations at multiple length and time scales, working hand-in-hand with sensitive experiments, have enhanced our understanding of how nanofillers alter the structure, dynamics, thermodynamics, rheology and mechanical properties of the surrounding polymer matrices.     

Hand dexterity assessment based on mouse pointer trajectory measurements in children with learning disabilities

Universal Access in the Information Society - We present an investigation of the systematic differences in upper limb motor skills between children with learning disabilities (LDs) and children...     

Inverse lighting design using a coverage optimization strategy

Lighting design is an essential process in computer cinematography, games, architectural design and various other applications for correctly illuminating or highlighting parts of a scene and enhancing storytelling. When targeting specific illumination goals and constraints, this process can be tedious and counter-intuitive even for experienced users and thus automatic, goal-driven methods have emerged for the estimation of a lighting configuration to match the desired result. We present a general automatic approach to such an inverse lighting design problem, where the number of light sources along with their position and emittance are computed given a set of user-specified lighting goals. To this end, we employ a special hierarchical light clustering that operates in the lighting goal coverage domain and overcomes limitations of previous approaches in environments with high occlusion or structural complexity. Our approach is independent of the underlying light transport model and can quickly converge to usable solutions. We validate our results and provide comparative evaluation with the current state of the art.     

Experiments on Surface Reconstruction for Partially Submerged Marine Structures

Over the past 10 years, significant scientific effort has been dedicated to the problem of three‐dimensional (3‐D) surface reconstruction for structural systems. However, the critical area of marine structures remains insufficiently studied. The research presented here focuses on the problem of 3‐D surface reconstruction in the marine environment. This paper summarizes our hardware, software, and experimental contributions on surface reconstruction over the past few years (2008–2011). We propose the use of off‐the‐shelf sensors and a robotic platform to scan marine structures both above and below the waterline, and we develop a method and software system that uses the Ball Pivoting Algorithm (BPA) and the Poisson reconstruction algorithm to reconstruct 3‐D surface models of marine structures from the scanned data. We have tested our hardware and software systems extensively in Singapore waters, including operating in rough waters, where water currents are around 1–2 m/s. We present results on construction of various 3‐D models of marine structures, including slowly moving structures such as floating platforms, moving boats, and stationary jetties. Furthermore, the proposed surface reconstruction algorithm makes no use of any navigation sensor such as GPS, a Doppler velocity log, or an inertial navigation system.     

Interactive mixed reality white cane simulation for the training of the blind and the visually impaired

This paper presents a mixed reality tool developed for the training of the visually impaired based on haptic and auditory feedback. The proposed approach focuses on the development of a highly interactive and extensible Haptic Mixed Reality training system that allows visually impaired to navigate into real size Virtual Reality environments. The system is based on the use of the CyberGrasp™ haptic device. An efficient collision detection algorithm based on superquadrics is also integrated into the system so as to allow real time collision detection in complex environments. A set of evaluation tests is designed in order to identify the importance of haptic, auditory and multimodal feedback and to compare the MR cane against the existing Virtual Reality cane simulation system.