Continuous-Time Negotiation Mechanism for Software Agents

While there are several existing mechanisms and systems addressing the crucial and difficult issues of automated one-to-many negotiation, this paper develops a flexible one-to-many negotiation mechanism for software agents. Unlike the existing general one-to-many negotiation mechanism, in which an agent should wait until it has received proposals from all its trading partners before generating counterproposals, in the flexible one-to-many negotiation mechanism, an agent can make a proposal in a flexible way during negotiation, i.e., negotiation is conducted in continuous time. To decide when to make a proposal, two strategies based on fixed waiting time and a fixed waiting ratio is proposed. Results from a series of experiments suggest that, guided by the two strategies for deciding when to make a proposal, the flexible negotiation mechanism achieved more favorable trading outcomes as compared with the general one-to-many negotiation mechanism. To determine the amount of concession, negotiation agents are guided by four mathematical functions based on factors such as time, trading partners' strategies, negotiation situations of other threads, and competition. Experimental results show that agents guided by the four functions react to changing market situations by making prudent and appropriate rates of concession and achieve generally favorable negotiation outcomes     

Integrated position estimation using aerial image sequences

Presents an integrated system for navigation parameter estimation using sequential aerial images, where the navigation parameters represent the positional and velocity information of an aircraft for autonomous navigation. The proposed integrated system is composed of two parts: relative position estimation and absolute position estimation. Relative position estimation recursively computes the current position of an aircraft by accumulating relative displacement estimates extracted from two successive aerial images. Simple accumulation of parameter values reduces the reliability of the extracted parameter estimates as an aircraft goes on navigating, resulting in a large positional error. Therefore, absolute position estimation is required to compensate for the positional error generated by the relative position estimation. Absolute position estimation algorithms using image matching and digital elevation model (DEM) matching are presented. In the image matching, a robust-oriented Hausdorff measure (ROHM) is employed, whereas in the DEM matching, an algorithm using multiple image pairs is used. Experiments with four real aerial image sequences show the effectiveness of the proposed integrated position estimation algorithm     

Variation in phenol content in grapes during ripening: low-molecular-weight phenols

Summary Variations in low-molecular-weight phenolic compounds in different parts (must, skin, and seeds) of berries ofV. vinifera, variety Cencibel during ripening were studied using HPLC andTLC. Twenty-five different compounds were identified. The differences were chiefly quantitative, although some quantitative differences were also recorded.

---

Veränderungen des Phenolgehalts während der Reife der Weintrauben: Polyphenole mit niedrigem Molekulargewicht

Zusammenfassung Die Veränderungen der phenolischen Verbindungen mit niedrigem Molekulargewicht während der Reife in verschiedenen Teilen (Saft, Schale und Samen) der Beeren vonV. vinifera, Varietät Cencibel, wurden mit HPLC- und DS-Chromatographie untersucht. Fünfundzwanzig Verbindungen wurden identifiziert. Die Veränderungen waren hauptsächlich quantitativ; einige qualitative Veränderungen wurden ebenfalls beobachtet.

     

Human infection with Hymenolepis diminuta: case report from Spain

We report a case of Hymenolepis diminuta infection in a human. The patient was a 5-year-old girl referred to us through the onset of a cyanotic attack. Treatment with a single dose (10 mg/kg of body weight) of praziquantel was ineffective, but the parasite was eradicated after three treatment cycles with the same drug at dosages of 25 mg/kg/day for 5 days.     

A Study of the Rao-Blackwellised Particle Filter for Efficient and Accurate Vision-Based SLAM

With recent advances in real-time implementations of filters for solving the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem in the range-sensing domain, attention has shifted to implementing SLAM solutions using vision-based sensing. This paper presents and analyses different models of the Rao-Blackwellised particle filter (RBPF) for vision-based SLAM within a comprehensive application architecture. The main contributions of our work are the introduction of a new robot motion model utilizing structure from motion (SFM) methods and a novel mixture proposal distribution that combines local and global pose estimation. In addition, we compare these under a wide variety of operating modalities, including monocular sensing and the standard odometry-based methods. We also present a detailed study of the RBPF for SLAM, addressing issues in achieving real-time, robust and numerically reliable filter behavior. Finally, we present experimental results illustrating the improved accuracy of our proposed models and the efficiency and scalability of our implementation.     

A 60-GHz-Band Analog Optical System-on-Package Transmitter for Fiber-Radio Communications

We developed an analog optical system-on-package (SoP) transmitter for a 60-GHz-band radio-over-fiber (RoF) link. The SoP transmitter consisted of an electroabsorption modulator, radio frequency amplifiers, and a bandpass filter. The 60-GHz RoF wireless link was prepared to measure the performance of the SoP transmitter. The transmission characteristics of 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (64-QAM) data of the 60-GHz RoF wireless link, including the SoP transmitter, were investigated by measuring the error vector magnitude (EVM) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) with a baseband frequency. The EVM of the 60-GHz RoF wireless link was between 2.25% and 2.80%, and the SNR was between 27.36 and 29.31 dB from 140 and 770 MHz, at input baseband power of -9 dBm. The noise figure had the minimum of 8.44 dB at 500 MHz. We successfully transmitted digital community antenna television (CATV) system signals through the 60-GHz RoF wireless link, including the SoP transmitter. Digital CATV signals of 86 channels could be transmitted through the 60-GHz RoF wireless link, and the total throughput was found to be 2.61 Gb/s.     

Agent-based Cloud service composition

Service composition in multi-Cloud environments must coordinate self-interested participants, automate service selection, (re)configure distributed services, and deal with incomplete information about Cloud providers and their services. This work proposes an agent-based approach to compose services in multi-Cloud environments for different types of Cloud services: one-time virtualized services, e.g., processing a rendering job, persistent virtualized services, e.g., infrastructure-as-a-service scenarios, vertical services, e.g., integrating homogenous services, and horizontal services, e.g., integrating heterogeneous services. Agents are endowed with a semi-recursive contract net protocol and service capability tables (information catalogs about Cloud participants) to compose services based on consumer requirements. Empirical results obtained from an agent-based testbed show that agents in this work can: successfully compose services to satisfy service requirements, autonomously select services based on dynamic fees, effectively cope with constantly changing consumers’ service needs that trigger updates, and compose services in multiple Clouds even with incomplete information about Cloud participants.     

Probing stress effects in HfO2 gate stacks with time dependent measurements

Effects of constant voltage stress (CVS) on gate stacks consisting of an ALD HfO₂ dielectric with various interfacial layers were studied with time dependent sensing measurements: DC I–V, pulse I–V, and charge pumping (CP) at different frequencies. The process of injected electron trapping/de-trapping on pre-existing defects in the bulk of the high-κ film was found to constitute the major contribution to the time dependence of the threshold voltage (V_t) shift during stress. The trap generation observed with the low frequency CP measurements is suggested to occur within the interfacial oxide layer or the interfacial layer/high-κ interface, with only a minor effect on V_t.