Combining the Power of Taverna and caGrid: Scientific Workflows that Enable Web-Scale Collaboration

Service-oriented architecture represents a promising approach to integrating data and software across different institutional and disciplinary sources, thus facilitating Web-scale collaboration while avoiding the need to convert different data and software to common formats. The US National Cancer Institute's Biomedical Information Grid program seeks to create both a service-oriented infrastructure (caGrid) and a suite of data and analytic services. Workflow tools in caGrid facilitate both the use and creation of services by accelerating service discovery, composition, and orchestration tasks. The authors present caGrid's workflow requirements and explain how they met these requirements by adopting and extending the Taverna system.     

Towards the next generation of artificial neural networks for civil engineering

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate interest within the civil engineering research community for developing the next generation of applied artificial neural networks. In particular, it identifies what the next generation of these devices needs to achieve, and provides direction in terms of how their development may proceed. An analysis of the current situation indicates that progress in the development of artificial neural network applications has largely stagnated. Suggestions are made for advancing the field to the next level of sophistication and application, using genetic algorithms and related techniques. It is shown that this approach will require the design of some very sophisticated genetic coding mechanisms in order to develop the required higher-order network structures, and will utilize development mechanisms observed in nature such as growth, self-organization, and multi-stage objective functions. The capabilities of such an approach and the way in which they can be achieved are explored with reference to the problems of: (a) determining truck attributes from the strain envelopes they induce in structural members when crossing a bridge, and; (b) developing a decision support system for dynamic control of industrialized manufacturing of houses.     

Aero-structural optimization using adjoint coupled post-optimality sensitivities

A new subspace optimization method for performing aero-structural design is introduced. The method relies on a semi-analytic adjoint approach to the sensitivity analysis that includes post-optimality sensitivity information from the structural optimization subproblem. The resulting coupled post-optimality sensitivity approach is used to guide a gradient-based optimization algorithm. The new approach simplifies the system-level problem, thereby reducing the number of calls to a potentially costly aerodynamics solver. The aero-structural optimization of an aircraft wing is performed using linear aerodynamic and structural analyses, and a performance comparison is made between the new approach and the conventional multidisciplinary feasible method. The new asymmetric suboptimization method is found to be the more efficient approach when it adequately reduces the number of system evaluations or when there is a large enough discrepancy between disciplinary solution times.     

A novel induction motor control scheme using IDA-PBC

A new control scheme for induction motors is proposed in the present paper, applying the interconnection and damping assignment-passivity based control （IDA-PBC） method. The scheme is based exclusively on passivity based control, without restricting the input frequency as it is done in field oriented control （FOC）. A port-controlled Hamiltonian （PCH） model of the induction motor is deduced to make the interconnection and damping of energy explicit on the scheme. The proposed controller is validated under computational simulations and experimental tests using an inverter prototype.     

Icon identification in context: the changing role of icon characteristics with user experience

OBJECTIVE: This research examined the relative importance of icon characteristics in determining the speed and accuracy of icon identification. BACKGROUND: Studies to date have focused on the role of one or two icon characteristics when users first experience an icon set. This means that little is known about the relative importance of icon characteristics or how the role of icon characteristics might change as users gain experience with icons. METHODS: Thirty participants carried out an icon identification task over a long series of trials to simulate learning through experience. Icon characteristics investigated included semantic distance, concreteness, familiarity, and visual complexity. RESULTS: Icon characteristics were major determinants of performance, accounting for up to 69% of the variance observed in performance. However, the importance of icon characteristics changed with experience: Semantic distance is crucial initially while icon-function relationships are learned, but familiarity is important later because it has lasting effects on access to long-term memory representations. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that icon concreteness may not be of primary importance when identifying icons and that semantic distance and familiarity may be more important. APPLICATION: Designers need to take into account icon characteristics other than concreteness when creating icons, particularly semantic distance and familiarity. The precise importance of the latter characteristics will vary depending on whether icons are rarely encountered or frequently used.     

Globus Toolkit Version 4: Software for Service-Oriented Systems

The Globus Toolkit （GT） has been developed since the late 1990s to support the development of serviceoriented distributed computing applications and infrastructures. Core GT components address, within a common framework, fundamental issues relating to security, resource access, resource management, data movement, resource discovery, and so forth. These components enable a broader ＂Globus ecosystem＂ of tools and components that build on, or interoperate with, GT functionality to provide a wide range of useful application-level functions. These tools have in turn been used to develop a wide range of both ＂Grid＂ infrastructures and distributed applications. I summarize here the principal characteristics of the recent Web Services-based GT4 release, which provides significant improvements over previous releases in terms of robustness, performance,, usability, documentation, standards compliance, and functionality. I also introduce the new ＂dev.globus＂ community development process, which allows a larger community to contribute to the development of Globus software.     

Visual signatures in video visualization

Video visualization is a computation process that extracts meaningful information from original video data sets and conveys the extracted information to users in appropriate visual representations. This paper presents a broad treatment of the subject, following a typical research pipeline involving concept formulation, system development, a path-finding user study, and a field trial with real application data. In particular, we have conducted a fundamental study on the visualization of motion events in videos. We have, for the first time, deployed flow visualization techniques in video visualization. We have compared the effectiveness of different abstract visual representations of videos. We have conducted a user study to examine whether users are able to learn to recognize visual signatures of motions, and to assist in the evaluation of different visualization techniques. We have applied our understanding and the developed techniques to a set of application video clips. Our study has demonstrated that video visualization is both technically feasible and cost-effective. It has provided the first set of evidence confirming that ordinary users can be accustomed to the visual features depicted in video visualizations, and can learn to recognize visual signatures of a variety of motion events.     

A study of the polymerization behaviour of N-(4-phenoxy)-phenylmaleimide using DSC analysis

Summary The thermal cure of a monofunctional maleimide N-(4-phenoxy)-phenylmaleimid (1) was examined using differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). The analogous bis-maleimide bis-(4-maleimidophenyl)ether (2) was also analyzed in the same manner for comparison. Polymerization kinetics derived from scanning DSC measurements showed an order of reaction varying between n=1 and 2 for (1), compared to an order of reaction between n=2 and 3 (by multiple linear regression analysis) for (2). The overall enthalpy of polymerization (H_o) for N-(4-phenoxy)-phenylmaleimide (94kJ/mole) agrees well with that obtained for maleimide itself (89kJ/mole) using conventional calorimetric techniques indicating that polymerization appears complete within the timescale of the experiment. In contrast the analogous BMI displays a markedly lower overall polymerization enthalpy (ca. 66kJ/mole) indicating an apparent conversion of only 37%.