Integrated Use of a Continuous Simulation Model and Multi-Attribute Decision-Making for Ranking Urban Watershed Management Alternatives

The objective of this paper is to introduce a continuous simulation-based screening procedure for ranking urban watershed management alternatives using multi-attribute decision making (MADM). The procedure integrates continuous urban runoff simulation results from the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) with the use of an alternative evaluation index (AEI) and MADM techniques, following the driver-pressure-state-impact-response (DPSIR) approach. The analytic hierarchy process estimates the weights of the criteria, and SWMM results are used to quantify the effects of the management alternatives on water quantity and quality metrics. In addition, the tendency of AEI to reflect resident preferences toward management objectives is incorporated to include stakeholder participation in the decision-making process. This systematic decision support process is demonstrated for a Korean urban watershed. According to the AEI, seven alternatives were divided into three groups: poor (0∼0.3), acceptable (0.3∼0.6), and good (0.6∼1). The use of multiple MADM techniques provided a consistency check. The demonstration illustrates the ability of the continuous simulation-based MADM approach to provide decision makers with a ranking of suitable urban watershed management alternatives which incorporate stakeholder feedback.     

Application of load balancing based on symmetric balanced incomplete block design to random networks

In a load balancing algorithm [O. Lee, M. Anshel, I. Chung, Design of an efficient load balancing algorithm on distributed networks by employing symmetric balanced incomplete block design, IEE Proceedings - Communications 151 (6) (2004) 535-538] based on the SBIBD (Symmetric Balanced Incomplete Block Design), each node receives global workload information by only two round message exchange with traffic overhead, where v is the number of nodes. It is very efficient and works well only when v=p²+p+1 is used for a prime number p. In this paper, we generated a special incidence structure using the SBIBD and then propose a new load balancing algorithm, which executes well for an arbitrary number of nodes. To accomplish this, we add a number of links to nodes in order for each node to receive more than 80% of the workload information by two round message exchange. For performance of our algorithm, we carried out an experiment for the number of nodes, w, which was up to 5000. Traffic overhead is less than in a round and standard deviation of traffic overhead shows that each node has a mostly well-balanced amount of traffic.     

Image mosaicking for polyhedral scene and in particular singly visible surfaces

Image mosaic construction is about stitching together a number of images about the same scene to construct a single image with a larger field of view. The majority of the previous work was rooted at the use of a single image-to-image mapping termed planar homography for representing the imaged scene. However, the mapping is applicable only to cases where the imaged scene is either a single planar surface, or very distant from the cameras, or imaged under a pure rotation of the camera, and that greatly limits the range of applications of the mosaicking methods. This paper presents a novel mosaicking solution for scenes that are polyhedral (thus consisting of multiple surfaces) and that are pictured possibly in closed range of the camera. The solution has two major advantages. First, it requires only a few correspondences over the entire scene, not correspondences over every surface patch in it to work. Second, it conquers a seemingly impossible task—warping image data of surfaces that are visible in only one of the input images, which we refer to as the singly visible surfaces, to another viewpoint to constitute the mosaic there. We also provide a detail analysis of what determines whether a singly visible surface could be mosaicked or not. Experimental results on real image data are presented to illustrate the performance of the method.     

A scalable algorithm for mining maximal frequent sequences using a sample

In this paper, we propose an efficient scalable algorithm for mining Maximal Sequential Patterns using Sampling (MSPS). The MSPS algorithm reduces much more search space than other algorithms because both the subsequence infrequency-based pruning and the supersequence frequency-based pruning are applied. In MSPS, a sampling technique is used to identify long frequent sequences earlier, instead of enumerating all their subsequences. We propose how to adjust the user-specified minimum support level for mining a sample of the database to achieve better overall performance. This method makes sampling more efficient when the minimum support is small. A signature-based method and a hash-based method are developed for the subsequence infrequency-based pruning when the seed set of frequent sequences for the candidate generation is too big to be loaded into memory. A prefix tree structure is developed to count the candidate sequences of different sizes during the database scanning, and it also facilitates the customer sequence trimming. Our experiments showed MSPS has very good performance and better scalability than other algorithms. Congnan Luo received the B.E. degree in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R. China, in 1997, the M.S. degree in Computer Science from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R. China, in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Wright State University, Dayton, OH, in 2006. Currently he is a technical staff at the Teradata division of NCR in San Diego, CA, and his research interests include data mining, machine learning, and databases. Soon M. Chung received the B.S. degree in Electronic Engineering from Seoul National University, Korea, in 1979, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea, in 1981, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, in 1990. He is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University, Dayton, OH. His research interests include database, data mining, Grid computing, text mining, XML, and parallel and distributed processing.     

A Randomized Linear-Work EREW PRAM Algorithm to Find a Minimum Spanning Forest

We present a randomized EREW PRAM algorithm to find a minimum spanning forest in a weighted undirected graph. On an n -vertex graph the algorithm runs in o(( log n) ^{1+ ɛ} ) expected time for any ɛ >0 and performs linear expected work. This is the first linear-work, polylog-time algorithm on the EREW PRAM for this problem. This also gives parallel algorithms that perform expected linear work on two general-purpose models of parallel computation—the QSM and the BSP.     

Generating useful images for medical applications from the Visible Korean Human

For the Visible Korean Human (VKH), a male cadaver was serially ground off to acquire the serially sectioned images (SSIs) of a whole human body. Thereafter, more than 700 structures in the SSIs were outlined to produce detailed segmented images; the SSIs and segmented images were volume- and surface-reconstructed to create three-dimensional models. For outlining and reconstruction, popular software (Photoshop, MRIcro, Maya, AutoCAD, 3ds max, and Rhino) was mainly used; the technique can be reproduced by other investigators for creating their own images. For refining the segmentation and volume reconstruction, the VOXEL-MAN system was used. The continuously upgraded technique was applied to a female cadaver's pelvis to produce the SSIs with 0.1mm sized intervals and 0.1mm x 0.1mm sized pixels. The VKH data, distributed worldwide, encouraged researchers to develop virtual dissection, virtual endoscopy, and virtual lumbar puncture contributing to medical education and clinical practice. In the future, a virtual image library including all the Visible Human Project data, Chinese Visible Human data, and VKH data will hopefully be established where users will be able to download one of the data sets for medical applications.     

An Adaptive Fuzzy-Inference-Rule-Based Flexible Model for Automatic Elastic Image Registration

In this study, a fuzzy-inference-rule-based flexible model (FIR-FM) for automatic elastic image registration is proposed. First, according to the characteristics of elastic image registration, an FIR-FM is proposed to model the complex geometric transformation and feature variation in elastic image registration. Then, by introducing the concept of motion estimation and the corresponding sum-of-squared-difference (SSD) objective function, the parameter learning rules of the proposed model are derived for general image registration. Based on the likelihood objective function, particular attention is also paid to the derivation of parameter learning rules for the case of partial image registration. Thus, an FIR-FM-based automatic elastic image registration algorithm is presented here. It is distinguished by its 1) strong ability in approximating complex nonlinear transformation inherited from fuzzy inference; 2) efficiency and adaptability in obtaining precise model parameters through effective parameter learning rules; and 3) completely automatic registration process that avoids the requirement of manual control, as in many traditional landmark-based algorithms. Our experiments show that the proposed method has an obvious advantage in speed and is comparable in registration accuracy as compared with a state-of-the-art algorithm.     

A study of roll‐printing technology for TFT‐LCD fabrication

Abstract— Recently, potential breakthrough technologies for low‐cost processing of TFT‐LCDs and new process developments for flexible‐display fabrication have been widely studied. A roll‐printing process using etch‐resist material as a replacement for photolithographic patterning was investigated. The characterization of the properties of patterns formed in roll printing, a method to fabricate cliché plates for fine patterns, and the design of a new formulation for resist printing ink is reported. The pattern position accuracy, which is one of the most important issues for the successful application of printing processes in display manufacturing was studied and how it can be improved by optimizing the blanket roll structure is explained. New design rules for the layout of the thin‐film‐transistor array was derived to improve the compatibility of roll printing. As a result, a prototype 15‐in.‐XGA TFT‐LCD panel was fabricated by using printing processes to replace all the photolithographic patterning steps conventionally used.     

12.1‐in. WXGA AMOLED display driven by InGaZnO thin‐film transistors

Abstract— A full‐color 12.1‐in.WXGA active‐matrix organic‐light‐emitting‐diode (AMOLED) display was, for the first time, demonstrated using indium‐gallium‐zinc oxide (IGZO) thin‐film transistors (TFTs) as an active‐matrix backplane. It was found that the fabricated AMOLED display did not suffer from the well‐known pixel non‐uniformity in luminance, even though the simple structure consisting of two transistors and one capacitor was adopted as the unit pixel circuit, which was attributed to the amorphous nature of IGZO semiconductors. The n‐channel a‐IGZO TFTs exhibited a field‐effect mobility of 17 cm²/V‐sec, threshold voltage of 1.1 V, on/off ratio >10⁹, and subthreshold gate swing of 0.28 V/dec. The AMOLED display with a‐IGZO TFT array is promising for large‐sized applications such as notebook PCs and HDTVs because the a‐IGZO semiconductor can be deposited on large glass substrates (larger than Gen 7) using the conventional sputtering system.