Integrated Adaptive QoS Management in Middleware: A Case Study

Distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems in which application requirements and environmental conditions may not be known a priori—or which may vary at run-time—can benefit from an adaptive approach to management of quality-of-service (QoS) to meet key constraints, such as end-to-end timeliness. Moreover, coordinated management of multiple QoS capabilities across multiple layers of applications and their supporting middleware can help to achieve necessary assurances of meeting these constraints.This paper offers two contributions to the study of adaptive DRE computing systems: (1) a case study of our integration of multiple middleware QoS management technologies to manage quality and timeliness of imagery adaptively within a representative DRE avionics system and (2) empirical results and analysis of the impact of that integration on key trade-offs between timeliness and image quality in that system.This work was supported in part by AFRL contract F33615-97-D-1155/0005 (WSOA), NSF ITR CCR-0312859, Siemens, and DARPA/AFRL contracts F33615-03-C-4112, F30602-98-C-0187 and F33615-00-C-1694. Approved for public release, distribution unlimited.Christopher D. Gill is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He has published over 50 refereed technical articles in leading journals, conferences, workshops, and book series. His research focuses on distributed real-time embedded systems, with particular emphasis on adaptive mresource management, scheduling, and software design and implementation for time-and-space constrained systems. Dr. Gill has chaired numerous workshop and conference program committees, and has participated widely in review panels and standards organizations in the distributed and real-time systems areas. The research he has led has produced several freely available open-source software frameworks including the Kokyu scheduling and dispatching framework and the nORB small-footprint real-time object request broker.Jeanna Gossett joined The Boeing Company in 1999 as a member of Bold Stroke/Open Systems Architecture team. Jeanna has worked on several CRAD projects including Weapon Systems Open Architecture (WSOA) where she was responsible for incorporating quality of service and resource management software technology into the fighter aircraft real-time embedded system application. Jeanna has since joined the F/A-18 New Product Development Mission Systems team. Prior to joining The Boeing Company in 1999, she worked in the telecommunications industry as an embedded systems developer at Ericsson and Siemens AG. Jeanna received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville and is a 2005 M.B.A. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis.David Corman is a Technical Fellow at the Boeing Company, located in St. Louis, Mo. Dave is the chief scientist for the Network Centric Operations (NCO) thrust in Phantom Works (PW) and is responsible for developing the NCO technology research agenda and investment strategy. He is also the Principle Investigator (PI) for a variety of Air Force and Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) programs that are producing technologies for integrating legacy platforms into the emerging Global Information Grid and for autonomous control of unmanned systems. Since joining the former McDonnell-Douglas (now part of the Boeing Company) in 1983, Dave has worked on numerous projects ranging from embedded systems to large C4I and weapon systems. A major focus of Daves career has been on the development of C4I system simulations and in mission planning system development for aircraft and missiles. He has also served as a consultant to many weapon system and C4I programs in St. Louis, Seattle, and California. Prior to joining McDonnell-Douglas, Dave spent five years at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He was the first recipient of a Naval Research Laboratory Fellowship from the University of Maryland—College Park where he received his PhD in Electrical Engineering in 1983.Joseph Loyall is a division scientist at BBN Technologies, where he leads the Distributed Real-time Embedded (DRE) systems research thrust in the Distributed Systems Advanced Middleware Technology group. He is actively involved in developing integrated dynamic resource management capabilities and advanced software engineering using model driven architecture (MDA) approaches, and in applying adaptive behavior to operational embedded systems such as collections of unmanned and manned air vehicles. Dr. Loyall has a Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois and a B.S. in computer science from Indiana University. He can be contacted at jloyall@bbn.com.Richard E. Schantz is a principal scientist at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Mass., where he has been a key contributor to advanced distributed computing R&D for the past 30 years. His research has been instrumental in defining and evolving the concepts underlying middleware since its emergence in the early days of the Internet. He was directly responsible for developing the first operational distributed object computing capability and transitioning it to production use. More recently, he has led research efforts toward developing and demonstrating the effectiveness of middleware support for adaptively managed Quality Of Service control, as principal investigator on a number of key DARPA projects in the areas of adaptive real-time behavior, survivability and advanced software engineering. Schantz received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in 1974.Michael Atighetchi is a senior scientist at BBN Technologies and a senior member of the Distributed Systems Advanced Middleware Technology group. His interests include use of adaptation in survivable systems, network and operating system security, and distributed coordination. Contact him at matighet@bbn. comDouglas C. Schmidt (d.schmidt@vanderbilt.edu) is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Associate Chair of the Computer Science and Engineering program, and a Senior Researcher in the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) at Vanderbilt University. He has published over 300 technical papers and books that cover a range of research topics, including patterns, optimization techniques, and empirical analyses of software frameworks and domain-specific modeling environments that facilitate the development of distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) middleware and applications running over high-speed networks and embedded system interconnects. Dr. Schmidt has served as a Deputy Office Director and a Program Manager at DARPA, where he led the national R&D effort on middleware for DRE systems.     

Data-Mining-Cup 2007

Zusammenfassung  Die Aufgabe des Data-Mining-Cups 2007 war die Entwicklung einer vollautomatischen Methode zur effektiven Steuerung des Einsatzes von Rabattcoupons. Vorverarbeitung und Parameter wurden durch eine Kreuzvalidierung optimiert. Experimente zeigen, dass ein einzelner Klassifikator in der Regel nicht genügt, die Aufgabenstellung mit ausreichender Güte zu l?sen. Vielmehr müssen mehrere, m?glichst verschiedene, Klassifikatoren dazu herangezogen werden. Die eingereichten L?sungen entstanden durch Kombination von bis zu 2.000 Klassifikatoren und haben im Wettbewerb sehr gut abgeschnitten: Sechs von neun Abgaben lagen unter den ersten zehn Pl?tzen, die übrigen drei L?sungen sind immer noch unter den ersten 20 von insgesamt 230 Pl?tzen.     

Analytical Methods for Determination of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) — A Historical Perspective on the 16 U.S. EPA Priority Pollutant PAHs

The identification of 16 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) as priority pollutants by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1976 has been a primary driver for analytical methods development for the determination of PAHs. In this article, the historical development of methods in liquid chromatography (LC) and gas chromatography (GC) to separate these 16 PAHs is discussed. In LC a significant effort was the search for and the fundamental understanding of the unique stationary phase capable of achieving the desired separation of the 16 EPA PAHs. For GC methods, the focus on stationary phase development has been the separation of critical isomers with a broader scope than the 16 EPA PAHs. The current routine LC and GC methods for the 16 EPA PAHs are well established; however, new advances in analytical techniques beyond LC and GC are discussed. Many analysts are now interested in more than just the 16 EPA PAHs (e.g., higher molecular mass PAHs and alkyl-substituted PAHs) and analytical methods have emerged to address these needs. Reference materials and their use in the determination of PAHs are discussed.     

Managing end-to-end QoS in distributed embedded applications

Maintaining end-to-end quality of service (QoS) is a challenge in distributed real time embedded systems due to dynamically changing network environments and resource requirements. The authors' middleware QoS management approach encapsulates QoS behaviors as software components. Using the Corba component model, they build these specialized QoS components and combine them to produce a comprehensive management system that maintains QoS. The authors illustrate the approach by building a real-world medium-scale system with these components. Using this example, they demonstrate the reusability of each component in different contexts.     

p53, but not p16 mutations in oral squamous cell carcinomas are associated with specific CYP1A1 and GSTM1 polymorphic genotypes and patient tobacco use

Inactivation of tumor suppressor genes like p53 and p16 play a key role in tumor progression, with a high incidence of mutations existing for both genes in oral squamous cell carcinomas. Previous studies have demonstrated, (i) a correlation between the prevalence of p53 mutations and tobacco use [Brennan et al. (1995) New Engl. J. Med., 332, 712-717; Lazarus et al. (1996) Carcinogenesis, 17, 733-739], and (ii) a link between genotypes in specific xenobiotic metabolizing enzymes and oral cancer susceptibility [Park et al. (1997) Cancer Epid. Biomarkers Prev., 6, 791-797). In this paper, we present results of our examination of a series of 80 oral squamous cell carcinomas for p53 exons 5-9 and p16 exons 1-2 mutations, and the potential association of these mutations with specific genotyping patterns. p53 mutation prevalence in oral tumors was linked with increased patient tobacco use using several stratification criteria. There was a significantly higher prevalence of p53 mutations in OCSCCs from patients who smoked > 30 pack-years as compared to tumors from patients who smoked < or = 30 pack-years (OR = 2.8; CI = 1.1-7.2). No significant association was observed with patient alcohol consumption. There was a significant association between the prevalence of p53 mutations in oral tumors and CYP1A1 genotyping patterns in these oral cancer patients, with the highest p53 mutation prevalence observed in subjects with the CYP1A1 [val]/GSTM1 [+] genotype (OR = 6.0; CI = 1.2-29.7). A significant association was not observed between the prevalence of p16 mutations in oral tumors and tobacco use, or CYP1A1 [val] or GSTM1 (0/0) genotypes. These data suggest that the induction of mutations in specific tumor suppressor genes or oncogenes in oral tumors may be associated with specific carcinogen exposures, and that this association may be linked to specific polymorphic genotypes in xenobiotic-metabolizing enzyme genes.     

Polymorphism and transcription of Mhc class I genes in a passerine bird, the great reed warbler

The class I genes of the major histocompatibility complex (Mhc) are here investigated for the first time in a passerine bird. The great reed warbler is a rare species in Sweden with a few semi-isolated populations. Yet, we found extensive Mhc class I variation in the study population. The variable exon 3, corresponding to the alpha2 domain, was amplified from genomic DNA with degenerated primers. Seven different genomic class I sequences were detected in a single individual. One of the sequences had a deletion leading to a shift in the reading frame, indicating that it was not a functional gene. A randomly selected clone was used as a probe for restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) studies in combination with the restriction enzyme Pvu II. The RFLP pattern was complex with 21-25 RFLP fragments per individual and extensive variation. Forty-nine RFLP genotypes were detected in 55 tested individuals. To study the number of transcribed genes, we isolated 14 Mhc class I clones from a cDNA library from a single individual. We found eight different sequences of four different lengths (1.3-2.2 kilobases), suggesting there are at least four transcribed loci. The number of nonsynonymous substitutions (dN) in the peptide binding region of exon 3 were higher than the number of synonymous substitutions (dS), indicating balancing selection in this region. The number of transcribed genes and the numerous RFLP fragments found so far suggest that the great reed warbler does not have a "minimal essential Mhc" as has been suggested for the chicken.