An Internet-based negotiation server for e-commerce

This paper describes the design and implementation of a replicable, Internet-based negotiation server for conducting bargaining-type negotiations between enterprises involved in e-commerce and e-business. Enterprises can be buyers and sellers of products/services or participants of a complex supply chain engaged in purchasing, planning, and scheduling. Multiple copies of our server can be installed to complement the services of Web servers. Each enterprise can install or select a trusted negotiation server to represent his/her interests. Web-based GUI tools are used during the build-time registration process to specify the requirements, constraints, and rules that represent negotiation policies and strategies, preference scoring of different data conditions, and aggregation methods for deriving a global cost-benefit score for the item(s) under negotiation. The registration information is used by the negotiation servers to automatically conduct bargaining type negotiations on behalf of their clients. In this paper, we present the architecture of our implementation as well as a framework for automated negotiations, and describe a number of communication primitives which are used in the underlying negotiation protocol. A constraint satisfaction processor (CSP) is used to evaluate a negotiation proposal or counterproposal against the registered requirements and constraints of a client company. In case of a constraint violation, an event is posted to trigger the execution of negotiation strategic rules, which either automatically relax the violated constraint, ask for human intervention, invoke an application, or perform other remedial operations. An Event-Trigger-Rule (ETR) server is used to manage events, triggers, and rules. Negotiation strategic rules can be added or modified at run-time. A cost-benefit analysis component is used to perform quantitative analysis of alternatives. The use of negotiation servers to conduct automated negotiation has been demonstrated in the context of an integrated supply chain scenario. Received: 30 October 2000 / Accepted: 12 January 2001 Published online: 2 August 2001     

Artists portray human faces with the Fourier statistics of complex natural scenes

When artists portray human faces, they generally endow their portraits with properties that render the faces esthetically more pleasing. To obtain insight into the changes introduced by artists, we compared Fourier power spectra in photographs of faces and in portraits by artists. Our analysis was restricted to a large set of monochrome or lightly colored portraits from various Western cultures and revealed a paradoxical result. Although face photographs are not scale-invariant, artists draw human faces with statistical properties that deviate from the face photographs and approximate the scale-invariant, fractal-like properties of complex natural scenes. This result cannot be explained by systematic differences in the complexity of patterns surrounding the faces or by reproduction artifacts. In particular, a moderate change in gamma gradation has little influence on the results. Moreover, the scale-invariant rendering of faces in artists' portraits was found to be independent of cultural variables, such as century of origin or artistic techniques. We suggest that artists have implicit knowledge of image statistics and prefer natural scene statistics (or some other rules associated with them) in their creations. Fractal-like statistics have been demonstrated previously in other forms of visual art and may be a general attribute of esthetic visual stimuli.     

更好的浏览器

就性能而非市场份额来说,Opera一直是MicrosoftInternet Explorer的强有力的替代产品在过去两周,我一直在使用Opera 7.1作为我的主要浏览器。我想说它给我的印象深刻。就性能而非市场份额来说,Opera(www.opera.com) 一直是Microsoft InternetExplorer的强有力的替代产品。我感觉Opera比IE要快,并且它还有一个很棒的下载管理器,在一个单独的屏幕上保留着下载文件。再加上一个弹出式阻截器和带有标签的界面,可以将你打开的页面限定在Opera主窗口内。多元搜索窗口把你的搜索请求发送到Google 和AlltheWeb,然后在并列的窗口显示结果。对O…     

2003年采购指南

现在名牌笔记本电脑也卖到1000美元以下了,你也该想想你的下一台PC是否应该是笔记本     

Using network hacking techniques to disrupt military operational networks

It starts in a small way. An Internet-originated electronic mail message received by various technical ratings and Combat Information Center (CIC) officers on a ship deployed in a very high threat area of the Persian Gulf relays news of a natural disaster involving their families that supposedly occurred during a cookout:     

Cloning and Functional Characterization of Dog OCT1 and OCT2: Another Step in Exploring Species Differences in Organic Cation Transporters

OCT1 and OCT2 are polyspecific membrane transporters that are involved in hepatic and renal drug clearance in humans and mice. In this study, we cloned dog OCT1 and OCT2 and compared their function to the human and mouse orthologs. We used liver and kidney RNA to clone dog OCT1 and OCT2. The cloned and the publicly available RNA-Seq sequences differed from the annotated exon-intron structure of OCT1 in the dog genome CanFam3.1. An additional exon between exons 2 and 3 was identified and confirmed by sequencing in six additional dog breeds. Next, dog OCT1 and OCT2 were stably overexpressed in HEK293 cells and the transport kinetics of five drugs were analyzed. We observed strong differences in the transport kinetics between dog and human orthologs. Dog OCT1 transported fenoterol with 12.9-fold higher capacity but 14.3-fold lower affinity (higher K_M) than human OCT1. Human OCT1 transported ipratropium with 5.2-fold higher capacity but 8.4-fold lower affinity than dog OCT1. Compared to human OCT2, dog OCT2 showed 10-fold lower transport of fenoterol and butylscopolamine. In conclusion, the functional characterization of dog OCT1 and OCT2 reported here may have implications when using dogs as pre-clinical models as well as for drug therapy in dogs.     

芯片尺寸是否越大越好?

把更多的功能和更多的门电路集成在一块芯片上的能力——无论你将这块芯片称为SoC(单片系统)、ASIC(专用集成电路)还是称为一块大型集成电路——正在迅速提高。在亚微米设计和亚微米制造工艺的推动下,以及在更好的EDA工具和程序库的支持下,人们可以把数百万个子电路集成在一块硅片上。这种情况也许会有人认为,一种定制的、一块集成电路的体系结构——或许还能得到几个新奇而又     

Wireless capsule endoscopy video segmentation using an unsupervised learning approach based on probabilistic latent semantic analysis with scale invariant features

Since wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) is a novel technology for recording the videos of the digestive tract of a patient, the problem of segmenting the WCE video of the digestive tract into subvideos corresponding to the entrance, stomach, small intestine, and large intestine regions is not well addressed in the literature. A selected few papers addressing this problem follow supervised leaning approaches that presume availability of a large database of correctly labeled training samples. Considering the difficulties in procuring sizable WCE training data sets needed for achieving high classification accuracy, we introduce in this paper an unsupervised learning approach that employs Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) for extraction of local image features and the probabilistic latent semantic analysis (pLSA) model used in the linguistic content analysis for data clustering. Results of experimentation indicate that this method compares well in classification accuracy with the state-of-the-art supervised classification approaches to WCE video segmentation.