New trends on e-Procurement applying semantic technologies: Current status and future challenges

The present paper introduces and reviews existing technology and research works in the field of e-Procurement. More specifically this survey aims to collect those relevant approaches that have tackled the challenge of delivering more advanced and intelligent e-Procurement management systems due to its relevance in the industry to afford more timely, adaptable and flexible decisions in purchasing processes. Although existing tools and techniques have demonstrated their ability to manage e-Procurement processes as a part of a supply management system there is a lack of interoperability among tools, tangled dependencies between processes or difficulties to exploit existing data and information to name a few that are preventing a proper use of the new dynamic and data-based environment. On the other hand semantic-based technologies emerge to provide the adequate building blocks to represent domain-knowledge and elevate the meaning of information resources through a common and shared data model (RDF) with a formal query language (SPARQL) and accessible via the Internet Protocols. In this sense the Linked Data effort has gained momentum to apply the principles of the aforementioned initiative to boost the re-use of information and data across different tools and processes. That is why authors review both existing open issues in the context e-Procurement with special focus on public procurement and semantic-based approaches to address them. To do so a preliminary research study is conducted to assess the state of the art in the context of e-Procurement and semantic-based systems. Afterwards main drawbacks of existing e-Procurement systems are presented to narrow down in semantic-based approaches applied to this field. Once the current status in both areas is reviewed, authors purpose the use and creation of an e-Procurement index to evaluate the quality of service of procurement systems. In this light the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is used to set up an initial weight for each indicator in the index and to perform a first comparison between traditional and semantic-based approaches. Finally some discussion, conclusions and future challenges are also outlined.     

Sustainability in Web server systems

The exponential growth of Internet during the last decade leads us to make more efforts in the researching and developing of sustainable Web servers in order to decrease the global energy demand. In this paper, we cover, as a first step, a proper review of the literature related to the energy efficiency research in Web server systems to depict the state of the art to plan further contributions as more research in sustainable Web systems. We also propose and implement an energy metric that permits to establish a relation between the Quality of Service (QoS) obtained by the system and the power it consumes.     

Different degrees of malnutrition and immunological alterations according to the aetiology of cirrhosis: a prospective and sequential study

Objectives

In this work we investigated how immunological dysfunction and malnutrition interact in alcoholic and viral aetiologies of cirrhosis.

Methods

To investigate the matter, 77 cirrhotic patients divided in three aetiologies [Alcohol, HCV and Alcohol + HCV) and 32 controls were prospectivelly and sequentially studied. Parameters of humoral immunity (Components 3 and 4 of seric complement and immunoglobulins A M, G and E) and of cellular immunity (total leukocytes and lymphocytes in peripheral blood, T lymphocytes subpopulations, CD4+ and CD8+, CD4+/CD8+ ratio and intradermic tests of delayed hypersensitivity), as well as nutrititional parameters: anthropometric measures, serum albumin and transferrin were evaluated.

Results

Multiple statistical comparisons showed that IgM was higher in HCV group; IgG was significantly elevated in both HCV and Alcohol + HCV, whereas for the Alcohol group, IgE was found at higher titles. The analysis of T- lymphocytes subpopulations showed no aetiologic differences, but intradermic tests of delayed hypersensitivity did show greater frequency of anergy in the Alcohol group. For anthropometric parameters, the Alcohol +HCV group displayed the lowest triceps skinfold whereas creatinine – height index evaluation was more preserved in the HCV group. Body mass index, arm muscle area and arm fat area showed that differently from alcohol group, the HCV group was similar to control.

Conclusion

Significant differences were found among the main aetiologies of cirrhosis concerning immunological alterations and nutritional status: better nutrition and worse immunology for HCV and vice-versa for alcohol.

     

Comparison of relative viscosity measurement of polyvinylpyrrolidone in water by glass capillary viscometer and differential dual‐capillary viscometer

The relative viscosity (RV) of polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) with different molecular weights was measured with a glass capillary viscometer and with a differential dual‐capillary viscometer in water at different concentrations. For the differential dual‐capillary viscometer, RV increases with a decreasing flow rate, especially for high molecular weight PVP at a 1% concentration. A good agreement in the RV between the two methods can be obtained for PVP with different molecular weights and at various concentrations if an appropriate flow rate is selected for the differential dual‐capillary viscometer. Special precaution is needed when using the differential dual‐capillary viscometer to measure the viscosity of a pure solvent. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 86: 1312–1315, 2002     

Straightforward modeling of dynamic I–V characteristics for microwave FETs

This work presents a straightforward approach aimed at modeling the dynamic I–V characteristics of microwave active solid‐state devices. The drain‐source current generator represents the most significant source of nonlinearity in a transistor and, therefore, its correct modeling is fundamental to predict accurately the current and voltage waveforms under large‐signal operation. The proposed approach relies on using a small set of low‐frequency time‐domain waveform measurements combined with numerical optimization‐based estimation of the nonlinear model parameters. The procedure is applied to a gallium nitride HEMT and silicon FinFET. The effectiveness of the modeling procedure in terms of prediction accuracy and generalization capability is demonstrated by validation of the extracted models under operating conditions different than the ones used for the parameters estimation. Good agreement between measurements and model simulations is achieved for both technologies and in both low‐ and high‐frequency range. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:109–116, 2014.     

Online FPS games: effect of router buffer and multiplexing techniques on subjective quality estimators

First Person Shooters are a genre of online games in which users demand a high interactivity, because the actions and the movements are very fast. They usually generate high rates of small packets which have to be delivered to the server within a deadline. When the traffic of a number of players shares the same link, these flows can be aggregated in order to save bandwidth. Certain multiplexing techniques are able to merge a number of packets, in a similar way to voice trunking, creating a bundle which is transmitted using a tunnel. In addition, the headers of the original packets can be compressed by means of standard algorithms. The characteristics of the buffers of the routers which deliver these bundled packets may have a strong influence on the network impairments (mainly delay, jitter and packet loss) which determine the quality of the game. A subjective quality estimator has been used in order to study the mutual influence of the buffer and multiplexing techniques. Taking into account that there exist buffers which size is measured in terms of bytes, and others measured in packets, both kinds of buffers have been tested, using different sizes. Traces from real game parties have been merged in order to obtain the traffic of 20 simultaneous players sharing the same Internet access. The delay and jitter produced by the buffer of the access router have been obtained using simulations. In general, the quality is expected to be reduced as the background traffic grows, but the results show an anomalous region in which the quality rises with the background traffic amount. Small buffers present better subjective quality results than bigger ones. When the total traffic amount gets above the available bandwidth, the buffers measured in bytes add to the packets a fixed delay, which grows with buffer size. They present a jitter peak when the offered traffic is roughly the link capacity. On the other hand, buffers which size is measured in packets add a smaller delay, but they increase packet loss for gaming traffic. The obtained results illustrate the need of knowing the characteristics of the buffer in order to make the correct decision about traffic multiplexing. As a conclusion, it would be interesting for game developers to identify the behaviour of the router buffer so as to adapt the traffic to it.     

Smoothing: A natural way to detect contour features

This work presents a dominant point detector. The angles of the contour are characterized through local entropy produced by a rotationally symmetric smoothing. The proposed scheme uses a punctual multi-scale approach in which only the candidates are analyzed in higher scales. To preserve the angle-entropy relationship in higher scales, we propose a smoothing kernel which presents special features that ensure its steepness in every scale. It is built from the sum of two Gaussians with different openings resembling center-surround receptive fields. The outputs of the proposed method are confronted to a ground-truth found in the literature, and to popular boundary based corner detectors that used the same set of images. Results reveal that the proposed detector performs extremely well.     

Binary and m-ary encoding in applications of tree-based genetic algorithms for QoS routing

Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing (UPC) applications often have Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. These become constraints for the UPC network infrastructure. In this paper, we refer to Mobile ad Hoc Networks, one of the most important technologies supporting UPC, and investigate on Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for QoS routing. GAs are part of the soft computing paradigm and can solve the NP search of QoS routes with multiple constraints. We elaborate on tree-based GAs, which represent the set of paths from source to destination as a tree and encode them through the crossed junctions. While their most well-known applications use m-ary encoding representing single paths in the chromosomes, in this paper we discuss a binary encoding with the objective of improving the convergence speed. The binary encoding represents classes of paths in the chromosomes and allows local search on classes of paths. These classes are both collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive. Simulation results compare convergence speed and scalability of GA applications with binary and m-ary encoding in networks with an increasing number of nodes and links per node. As the per-class processing is reason of additional computational cost, an hybrid GA application that uses both binary and m-ary encoding is introduced.     

Łukasiewicz logic and Riesz spaces

We initiate a deep study of Riesz MV-algebras which are MV-algebras endowed with a scalar multiplication with scalars from \([0,1]\) . Extending Mundici’s equivalence between MV-algebras and \(\ell \) -groups, we prove that Riesz MV-algebras are categorically equivalent to unit intervals in Riesz spaces with strong unit. Moreover, the subclass of norm-complete Riesz MV-algebras is equivalent to the class of commutative unital C \(^*\) -algebras. The propositional calculus \({\mathbb R}{\mathcal L}\) that has Riesz MV-algebras as models is a conservative extension of ?ukasiewicz \(\infty \) -valued propositional calculus and is complete with respect to evaluations in the standard model \([0,1]\) . We prove a normal form theorem for this logic, extending McNaughton theorem for ? ukasiewicz logic. We define the notions of quasi-linear combination and quasi-linear span for formulas in \({\mathbb R}{\mathcal L},\) and relate them with the analogue of de Finetti’s coherence criterion for \({\mathbb R}{\mathcal L}\) .     

Morphology and thermomechanical properties of recycled PET–organoclay nanocomposites

Recycled PET/organoclay nanocomposites were prepared by melt intercalation process with several amounts (1, 3, and 5 wt %) of clay modified with quaternary ammonium salt (DELLITE 67G) dispersed in a recycled poly(ethylene terephthalate) (rPET) matrix. The resultant mechanical properties (modulus and yield strength) of the nanocomposites were found to be different from those of rPET. Wide angle X‐ray scattering (WAXS) and Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) measurements have shown that although complete exfoliation was not achieved, delaminated clay platelets could be observed. Thermal analysis did not show significant changes in the thermal properties from those of recycled PET. Mechanical testing showed that nanocomposite properties were superior to the recycled PET in terms of strength and elasticity modulus. This improvement was attributed to nanoscale effects and strong interaction between the rPET matrix and the clay interface, as revealed by WAXS and TEM. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 104: 1839–1844, 2007