Ultrasonic treatment restores the photoelectric parameters of silicon solar cells degraded under the action of <Superscript>60</Superscript>Co gamma radiation

The photoelectric parameters of silicon solar cells degraded under the action of ⁶⁰Co gamma-radiation can be partly restored using an ultrasonic treatment (UST). The growth of the maximum output power of solar cells after the UST is related to a redistribution of the radiation defects and an increase in the homogeneity of a semiconductor crystal structure.     

Phase states of a two-dimensional non-Heisenberg ferromagnet

The effects of a biquadratic exchange and an external magnetic field on the phase states of a twodimensional non-Heisenberg ferromagnet have been studied with allowance for magnetoelastic and magnetodipolar interactions.     

Lattice structure on some fuzzy algebraic systems

In this paper, we study the lattice structure of some fuzzy algebraic systems such as (G-)fuzzy groups, some fuzzy ordered algebras and fuzzy hyperstructures. We prove that under suitable conditions, these structures form a distributive or modular lattice. This research partially is supported by the “ Fuzzy Systems and its Applications Center of Excelence, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Iran”.     

Toward Human Level Machine Intelligence - Is It Achievable? The Need for a Paradigm Shift

Officially, AI was born in 1956. Since then, very impressive progress has been made in many areas - but not in the realm of human level machine intelligence. During much of its early history, AI "was rife "with exaggerated expectations. A headline in an article published in the late forties of last century was headlined, "Electric brain capable of translating foreign languages is being built". Today, more than half a century later, we do have translation software, but nothing that can approach the quality of human translation. Clearly, achievement of human level machine intelligence is a challenge that is hard to meet. A prerequisite to achievement of human level machine intelligence is mechanization of these capabilities and, in particular, mechanization of natural language understanding. To make significant progress toward achievement of human level machine intelligence, a paradigm shift is needed. More specifically, what is needed is an addition to the armamentarium of AI of two methodologies: (a) a nontraditional methodology of computing with words (CW) or more generally, NL-Computation; and (b) a countertraditional methodology "which involves a progression from computing with numbers to computing with words. The centerpiece of these methodologies is the concept of precisiation of meaning. Addition of these methodologies to AI would be an important step toward the achievement of human level machine intelligence and its applications in decision-making, pattern recognition, analysis of evidence, diagnosis, and assessment of causality. Such applications have a position of centrality in our infocentric society.     

Reliability assessment of an automated distribution system

Automation can greatly enhance distribution-network reliability by speeding up service restoration and thus significantly reduce customer-outage time. The paper presents an approach to assess quantitatively the adequacy of a particular automated distribution scheme designated as the `low interruption system' (LIS). Owing to the use of a high-speed communication system and line sensors, this automated scheme can reduce drastically the number of interruptions, the service interruption time and also the area affected by the fault. This scheme provides a simple and cost-effective way to automate distribution systems in which the remotely controlled switches speed up isolation of faulted sections and the restoration of healthy sections through alternative routes. The step-by-step calculation procedure is presented using a typical small automated distribution system. The proposed technique is then applied to a larger distribution system to examine the effectiveness of the technique and also to examine the level of reliability improvement achieved by automation     

QoS assessment of 3G video-phone calls by tracing watermarking exploiting the new colour space `YST?

Tracing watermarking has been recently proposed as a technique to provide a blind measure of the quality of service of the communication link, focusing on multimedia communication scenarios. 3G communication scenarios, where each customer transmits both voice and MPEG-4 video sequences in real time, have been considered. Typical video-phone call consists of close shots of speakers, framing their face in the foreground. For such particular application, a novel colour space (YST) is adopted to minimise the perceptual distortions on face coding introduced by watermarking. In the YST space, the luminance component (Y) is the same as in conventional YUV space, whereas the vectors S and T lie within the chrominance (UV) plane. The S (skin) component is a linear combination of U and V obtained as the 'average' chrominance estimated from an assorted set human faces to achieve a reasonable generalisation. The third component, T, is defined as orthogonal to the YS plane. The results show the benefits obtained in digital watermarking by the new representation against the conventional approach. In fact, the sensitivity of the YST representation outperforms the conventional one in terms of objective (mean square error, peak signal-to-noise ratio) and subjective (video-quality metrics) indicators.     

Investigation of Maximum and Minimum Satisfiability Problems Using L-Partition

Problems of the maximum and the minimum satisfiability on the basis of the integer linear programming and L-partition are studied. The L-structure of polyhedrons of the problems is investigated. Families are set up of unweighted problems of the maximum and the minimum satisfiability, the powers of L-coverings of which grow exponentially with an increase in the number of variables in a formula.     

A quantitative study of firewall configuration errors

The protection that firewalls provide is only as good as the policy they are configured to implement. Analysis of real configuration data show that corporate firewalls are often enforcing rule sets that violate well established security guidelines. Firewalls are the cornerstone of corporate intranet security. Once a company acquires a firewall, a systems administrator must configure and manage it according to a security policy that meets the company's needs. Configuration is a crucial task, probably the most important factor in the security a firewall provides.     

Power management in networked devices

Networks are one of the most significant developments in computing and a hallmark of modern society. However, along with increasing efficiency and productivity, both at home and in the workplace, networks have costs. One cost is the additional energy that electronic devices consume when attached to networks. Power management, a standard feature of modern PCs, was primarily developed to increase battery lifetime in laptop PCs, which historically were not network-connected when using battery power. Today, however, many laptops are connected to a network - typically a Wi-Fi network - as are the majority of desktop computers. Three key drivers of energy use are induced consumption by devices prevented by network connections from entering low-power states, increasing link data rates that inherently consume more energy for the network interfaces, and proliferation of network-connected displays that actively update and display data when no one is present.