MIMO transmission and reception techniques using three-element ESPAR antennas

A novel scheme for spatially multiplexing two BPSK signals using a 3-element ESPAR (electronically steerable parasitic array radiator) antenna was reported in. In this paper we first optimize the set of loads controlling the parasitic elements within the transmission mode by maximizing the outage capacity. We also propose different reception techniques for spatially demultiplexing real and complex signals (using the same set of loads). The proposed transmission and reception schemes are evaluated in an indoor peer-to-peer mobile ad-hoc channel via simulations, where each ad-hoc node is equipped with a 3-element ESPAR terminal.     

Applying evolutionary computation to the school timetabling problem: The Greek case

In this contribution, an adaptive algorithm based on evolutionary computation techniques is designed, developed and applied to the timetabling problem of educational organizations. Specifically, the proposed algorithm has been used in order to create feasible and efficient timetables for high schools in Greece. The algorithm has been tested exhaustively with real-world input data coming from many different high schools and has been compared with several other effective techniques in order to demonstrate its efficiency and superior performance. Simulation results showed that the algorithm is able to construct a feasible and very efficient timetable more quickly and easily compared to other techniques, thus preventing disagreements and arguments among teachers and assisting each school to operate with its full resources from the beginning of the academic year. Except from that, due to its inherent adaptive behavior it can be used each time satisfying different specific constraints, in order to lead to timetables, thus meeting the different needs that each school may have.     

Effects of hot working procedure on surface relief characteristic in an Fe–Mn–Si–Cr shape memory alloy

The paper reports the evolution of surface relief and shape memory behavior in an Fe–28Mn–6Si–5Cr (mass%) shape memory alloy (SMA) as a function of the applied hot working procedure. The objective of this paper is to discuss the relationship between surface relief characteristic, structural changes and the type of hot working processing. Particular aspects concerning the relief of martensite plates were reported after the alloy was subjected to two types of hot working procedures, namely hot rolling and hot forging at 1273 K. The observations were performed by means of optical (OM) and atomic force (AFM) microscopy, on bi‐dimensional and three‐dimensional micrographs, corroborated with statistical evaluations. Aiming to reveal the presence of solid phase transitions enabled by hot working, differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) measurements were performed between room temperature and 673 K.     

Best terms: an efficient feature-selection algorithm for text categorization

In this paper, we propose a new feature-selection algorithm for text classification, called best terms (BT). The complexity of BT is linear in respect to the number of the training-set documents and is independent from both the vocabulary size and the number of categories. We evaluate BT on two benchmark document collections, Reuters-21578 and 20-Newsgroups, using two classification algorithms, naive Bayes (NB) and support vector machines (SVM). Our experimental results, comparing BT with an extensive and representative list of feature-selection algorithms, show that (1) BT is faster than the existing feature-selection algorithms; (2) BT leads to a considerable increase in the classification accuracy of NB and SVM as measured by the F1 measure; (3) BT leads to a considerable improvement in the speed of NB and SVM; in most cases, the training time of SVM has dropped by an order of magnitude; (4) in most cases, the combination of BT with the simple, but very fast, NB algorithm leads to classification accuracy comparable with SVM while sometimes it is even more accurate.     

Top-k spatial joins

Given two spatial data sets A and B, a top-k spatial join retrieves the k objects from A or B that intersect the largest number of objects from the other data set. Depending on the application requirements, there exist several variations of the problem. For instance, B may be a point data set, and the goal may be to retrieve the regions of A that contain the maximum number of points. The processing of such queries with conventional spatial join algorithms is expensive. However, several improvements are possible based on the fact that we only require a small subset of the result (instead of all intersection/containments pairs). In this paper, we propose output-sensitive algorithms for top-k spatial joins that utilize a variety of optimizations for reducing the overhead.     

Capacity-approaching space-time codes for systems employing four transmitter antennas

The design of space-time codes that are capable of approaching the capacity of multiple-input-single-output (MISO) antenna systems is a challenging problem, yet one of high practical importance. While a remarkably simple scheme of Alamouti (1998) is capable of attaining the channel capacity in the case of two-transmitter and one-receiver antennas (2,1), no such schemes are known for the case of more than two transmitter antennas. We propose a family of space-time codes that are especially designed for the case of four-transmitter antennas and that are shown to allow the attainment of a significant fraction of the open-loop Shannon capacity of the (4,1) channel.     

Continuous Monitoring of Spatial Queries in Wireless Broadcast Environments

Wireless data broadcast is a promising technique for information dissemination that leverages the computational capabilities of the mobile devices in order to enhance the scalability of the system. Under this environment, the data are continuously broadcast by the server, interleaved with some indexing information for query processing. Clients may then tune in the broadcast channel and process their queries locally without contacting the server. Previous work on spatial query processing for wireless broadcast systems has only considered snapshot queries over static data. In this paper, we propose an air indexing framework that 1) outperforms the existing (i.e., snapshot) techniques in terms of energy consumption while achieving low access latency and 2) constitutes the first method supporting efficient processing of continuous spatial queries over moving objects.     

Power System Stabilization via Parameter Optimization - Application to the Hellenic Interconnected System

Dynamic stability problems are usually overcome through the application of Power System Stabilizers. This paper presents an alternative approach for power system stabilization based upon the tuning of the existing generator controllers, both governors and A.V.R.'s. The sensitivities of the eigenvalues to the controller parameters are evaluated and an optimization technique is developed to maximize the dynamic stability. Application of the parameter optimization method on a realistic model of the Hellenic Interconnected System has proved an efficient way to stabilize a number of unstable oscillatory modes by relatively small parameter variations. The results are tested with a nonlinear simulation program and the achieved stabilization, as shown by the rotor angle swings, is found to be significant.     

Range aggregate processing in spatial databases

A range aggregate query returns summarized information about the points falling in a hyper-rectangle (e.g., the total number of these points instead of their concrete ids). This paper studies spatial indexes that solve such queries efficiently and proposes the aggregate Point-tree (aP-tree), which achieves logarithmic cost to the data set cardinality (independently of the query size) for two-dimensional data. The aP-tree requires only small modifications to the popular multiversion structural framework and, thus, can be implemented and applied easily in practice. We also present models that accurately predict the space consumption and query cost of the aP-tree and are therefore suitable for query optimization. Extensive experiments confirm that the proposed methods are efficient and practical.