Interface Mutation Test Adequacy Criterion: An Empirical Evaluation

An experiment was conducted to evaluate an inter-procedural test adequacy criterion named Interface Mutation. Program SPACE, developed for the European Space Agency (ESA), was used in this experiment. The development record available for this program was used to find the faults uncovered during its development. Using this information the test process was reproduced starting with a version of SPACE containing several faults and then applying Interface Mutation. Thus we could evaluate the fault revealing effectiveness of Interface Mutation. Results from the experiment suggest that (a) the application of Interface Mutation favors the selection of fault revealing test cases when they exist and (b) Interface Mutation tends to select fault revealing test cases more efficiently than in the case where random selection is used.     

Detecting inappropriate access to electronic health records using collaborative filtering

Many healthcare facilities enforce security on their electronic health records (EHRs) through a corrective mechanism: some staff nominally have almost unrestricted access to the records, but there is a strict ex post facto audit process for inappropriate accesses, i.e., accesses that violate the facility’s security and privacy policies. This process is inefficient, as each suspicious access has to be reviewed by a security expert, and is purely retrospective, as it occurs after damage may have been incurred. This motivates automated approaches based on machine learning using historical data. Previous attempts at such a system have successfully applied supervised learning models to this end, such as SVMs and logistic regression. While providing benefits over manual auditing, these approaches ignore the identity of the users and patients involved in a record access. Therefore, they cannot exploit the fact that a patient whose record was previously involved in a violation has an increased risk of being involved in a future violation. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose a collaborative filtering inspired approach to predicting inappropriate accesses. Our solution integrates both explicit and latent features for staff and patients, the latter acting as a personalized “fingerprint” based on historical access patterns. The proposed method, when applied to real EHR access data from two tertiary hospitals and a file-access dataset from Amazon, shows not only significantly improved performance compared to existing methods, but also provides insights as to what indicates an inappropriate access.     

Superconducting state parameters of ternary metallic glasses

The well-known empty core (EMC) model potential of Ashcroft was used to study the theoretical investigation of the superconducting state parameters (SSP) viz. electron-phonon coupling strength λ, Coulomb pseudopotential µ*, transition temperature T _C, isotope effect exponent α and effective interaction strength N _O V of some ternary metallic glasses. Most recent local field correction function due to Sarkar et al is used to study the screening influence on the aforesaid properties. Quadratic T _C equations have been proposed and found successful. Also, the present findings are found to be in qualitative agreement with other such earlier reported data, which confirms the superconducting phase in the ternary superconductors. The pseudo-alloy-atom (PAA) model was applied for the first time instead of Vegard’s law.     

New approach to determine the effects of polarization mode dispersion and chromatic dispersion on pulse and RF signals

We present a novel analytical expression relating the output state of polarization (SOP) and the polarization mode dispersion (PMD) vector, including polarization-dependent chromatic dispersion (PCD), in terms of the angle of precession of the output SOP around the PMD vector. We derive a number of new expressions incorporating for the first time this angle of precession. First, a general relation to study the effect of differential group delay, PCD, and chromatic dispersion on pulses of arbitrary shapes is given. From this general relation, we derive expressions for pulse broadening and power penalty for Gaussian pulses. Moreover, a new expression for PMD-induced power fading for single-sideband modulated radio frequency signals is also derived. Measured experimental results are presented to support the derived expressions.     

Switchable Coherence-Free Microwave Photonic Notch Filter Using a Pair of Intensity Modulators

A simple switchable coherence-free microwave photonic filter configuration is presented. It is based on a pair of intensity modulators modulating an optical signal at different times. The design is free from the velocity mismatch problem of an electrooptic modulator. This all-optical structure realizes two-tap filters with the capability of switching the sign of one of the taps to positive or negative. The sign depends on whether the linear slopes of the transfer functions of the two intensity modulators at their respective bias points are the same or opposite. The case of a phase shift between the two radio-frequency drive signals is also considered. Measured results confirm the theoretical expressions and demonstrate a stable switchable notch filter response.     

On the Analysis of Envelope Correlation and Spectra for Rician Fading Channel

Physical fading radio channels encountered in wireless mobile communication are often modeled as a complex Gaussian process whose envelope is statistically described by Rayleigh or Rician probability distribution function (PDF). In most of the literature, the accuracy of the simulation model is estimated by comparing the simulated autocorrelation function (ACF) of inphase (or quadrature phase) component of the fading process and ACF of squared envelope with the analytical ones. In this paper, we examine the performance of a sum of sinusoid (SOS) based Rician fading channel simulator on the basis of the ACF and power spectral density (PSD) of the fading envelope. We obtained simplified approximate expressions for the autocorrelation and mean value of the fading envelope which become more accurate as the value of Rice factor increases. In the simulation, the line-of-sight (LOS) component is modeled as a zero-mean random variable with pre-chosen angle of arrival (AOA) and random initial phase. We showed that the AOA of the LOS component significantly affects the level crossing rate (LCR) and average fade duration (AFD) of the fading envelope. All simulation results are compared with the analytical results and a very good agreement between them is found.

Amorphous Metallic Alloys: Pathways for Enhanced Wear and Corrosion Resistance

Amorphous metallic alloys are widely used in bulk form and as coatings for their desirable corrosion and wear behavior. Nevertheless, the effects of heat treatment and thermal cycling on these surface properties are not well understood. In this study, the corrosion and wear behavior of two Zr-based bulk metallic glasses were evaluated in as-cast and thermally relaxed states. Significant improvement in wear rate, friction coefficient, and corrosion penetration rate was seen for both alloys after thermal relaxation. A fully amorphous structure was retained with thermal relaxation below the glass transition. There was an increase in surface hardness and elastic modulus for both alloys after relaxation. The improvement in surface properties was explained based on annihilation of free volume.     

Nanopatterned cadmium selenide Langmuir-Blodgett platform for leukemia detection

We present results of the studies relating to preparation of Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) monolayers of tri-n-octylphosphine oxide-capped cadmium selenide quantum dots (QCdSe) onto indium-tin oxide (ITO) coated glass substrate. The monolayer behavior has been studied at the air-water interface under various subphase conditions. This nanopatterned platform has been explored to fabricate an electrochemical DNA biosensor for detection of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) by covalently immobilizing the thiol-terminated oligonucleotide probe sequence via a displacement reaction. The results of electrochemical response studies reveal that this biosensor can detect target DNA in the range of 10(-6) to 10(-14) M within 120 s, has a shelf life of 2 months, and can be used about 8 times. Further, this nucleic acid sensor has been found to distinguish the CML-positive and the control negative clinical patient samples.     

Performance of WDM fiber-radio network using distributed Raman amplifier

We investigate the impairment induced by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) effect and noise characteristics of wavelength-division-multiplexing fiber-radio network assisted by distributed Raman amplifier (DRA) or erbium-doped fiber amplifier. Experimental results indicate that forward-pumping DRA can increase the link optical output power limited by SBS effect in downstream transmission and backward-pumping DRA can improve signal-to-noise ratio in upstream transmission, which is verified by binary phase-shift keying transmission experiments. Moreover, our experimental results show that DRA does not introduce additional impairment from interchannel crosstalk due to cross-phase modulation and degradation in spur-free dynamic range.