Graft copolymerization of poly(methyl methacrylate) with some alkyl methacrylates by atom transfer radical polymerization method and thermal properties

The preparation of graft copolymers of poly(methyl methacrylate) with some alkyl methacrylates were carried out via atom transfer radical polymerization method catalyzed by CuCl/2,2′-bipyridine and using a macroinitiator, poly[(methyl methacrylate)-co-(3,5-bis(chloroacetoxy)phenyl methacrylate)], including an amount of 1 mol % having α-halogeno carbonyl group in the side groups. Although the number-average molecular weights of a graft copolymer series of n-butyl methacrylate (n-ButMA) ended at different times increased from 55,700 to 99,500, the polydispersities decreased from 1.85 to 1.39 with time. The thermal degradation kinetics of macroinitiator and a two-armed graft copolymer of n-ButMA with this macroinitiator, PMMA-g-PnButMA: 4% (by mol), were carried out at different heating rates by thermogravimetric analysis and the results were compared. Using both the Flynn–Wall–Ozawa and Kissinger methods, the decomposition activation energies for macroinitiator were determined as 168 and 162 kJ/mol, respectively; they were also calculated as 233 and 239 kJ/mol for PMMA-g-PnButMA: 4%. The solid state thermodegradation mechanisms of both macroinitiator and PMMA-g-PnButMA: 4% are R₁-type mechanism, a phase boundary-controlled reaction, and F₁-type mechanism, a random nucleation with one nucleus on the individual particle, respectively. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2012     

A WLAN band‐notched compact four element UWB MIMO antenna

A compact four‐element multiple‐input‐multiple‐output (MIMO) antenna for ultra‐wideband (UWB) applications with WLAN band‐notched characteristics is proposed here. The proposed antenna has been designed to operate from 2 to 12 GHz while reject the frequencies between 4.9 to 6.4 GHz. The four antenna elements are placed orthogonal to attain the polarization diversity and high isolation. A thin stub connected to the ground plane is deployed as a LC notch filter to accomplish the rejected WLAN band in each antenna element. The mutual coupling between the adjacent elements is at least 17 dB while it has low indoor and outdoor envelop correlation (<0.45) and high gain with compact size of two boards, each measuring 50 × 25 mm². To validate the concept, the prototype antenna is manufactured and measured. The comparison of the simulation results showed good agreement with the measured results. The low‐profile design and compact size of the proposed MIMO antenna make it a good candidate for diversity applications desired in portable devices operating in the UWB region.     

Feature Selection for Detecting ICMPv6-Based DDoS Attacks Using Binary Flower Pollination Algorithm

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the latest version of IP that goal to host 3.4 × 10³⁸ unique IP addresses of devices in the network. IPv6 has introduced new features like Neighbour Discovery Protocol (NDP) and Address Auto-configuration Scheme. IPv6 needed several protocols like the Address Auto-configuration Scheme and Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMPv6). IPv6 is vulnerable to numerous attacks like Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) which is one of the most dangerous attacks executed through ICMPv6 messages that impose security and financial implications. Therefore, an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is a monitoring system of the security of a network that detects suspicious activities and deals with a massive amount of data comprised of repetitive and inappropriate features which affect the detection rate. A feature selection (FS) technique helps to reduce the computation time and complexity by selecting the optimum subset of features. This paper proposes a method for detecting DDoS flooding attacks (FA) based on ICMPv6 messages using a Binary Flower Pollination Algorithm (BFPA-FA). The proposed method (BFPA-FA) employs FS technology with a support vector machine (SVM) to identify the most relevant, influential features. Moreover, The ICMPv6-DDoS dataset was used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method through different attack scenarios. The results show that the proposed method BFPA-FA achieved the best accuracy rate (97.96%) for the ICMPv6 DDoS detection with a reduced number of features (9) to half the total (19) features. The proven proposed method BFPA-FA is effective in the ICMPv6 DDoS attacks via IDS.     

Exploiting information extraction techniques for automatic semantic video indexing with an application to Turkish news videos

This paper targets at the problem of automatic semantic indexing of news videos by presenting a video annotation and retrieval system which is able to perform automatic semantic annotation of news video archives and provide access to the archives via these annotations. The presented system relies on the video texts as the information source and exploits several information extraction techniques on these texts to arrive at representative semantic information regarding the underlying videos. These techniques include named entity recognition, person entity extraction, coreference resolution, and semantic event extraction. Apart from the information extraction components, the proposed system also encompasses modules for news story segmentation, text extraction, and video retrieval along with a news video database to make it a full-fledged system to be employed in practical settings. The proposed system is a generic one employing a wide range of techniques to automate the semantic video indexing process and to bridge the semantic gap between what can be automatically extracted from videos and what people perceive as the video semantics. Based on the proposed system, a novel automatic semantic annotation and retrieval system is built for Turkish and evaluated on a broadcast news video collection, providing evidence for its feasibility and convenience for news videos with a satisfactory overall performance.     

On the revision of probabilistic beliefs using uncertain evidence

We revisit the problem of revising probabilistic beliefs using uncertain evidence, and report results on several major issues relating to this problem: how should one specify uncertain evidence? How should one revise a probability distribution? How should one interpret informal evidential statements? Should, and do, iterated belief revisions commute? And what guarantees can be offered on the amount of belief change induced by a particular revision? Our discussion is focused on two main methods for probabilistic revision: Jeffrey's rule of probability kinematics and Pearl's method of virtual evidence, where we analyze and unify these methods from the perspective of the questions posed above.     

Employing both gender and emotion cues to enhance speaker identification performance in emotional talking environments

Speaker recognition performance in emotional talking environments is not as high as it is in neutral talking environments. This work focuses on proposing, implementing, and evaluating a new approach to enhance the performance in emotional talking environments. The new proposed approach is based on identifying the unknown speaker using both his/her gender and emotion cues. Both Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and Suprasegmental Hidden Markov Models (SPHMMs) have been used as classifiers in this work. This approach has been tested on our collected emotional speech database which is composed of six emotions. The results of this work show that speaker identification performance based on using both gender and emotion cues is higher than that based on using gender cues only, emotion cues only, and neither gender nor emotion cues by 7.22 %, 4.45 %, and 19.56 %, respectively. This work also shows that the optimum speaker identification performance takes place when the classifiers are completely biased towards suprasegmental models and no impact of acoustic models in the emotional talking environments. The achieved average speaker identification performance based on the new proposed approach falls within 2.35 % of that obtained in subjective evaluation by human judges.     

A survey on search results diversification techniques

The quantity of information placed on the web has been greater than before and is increasing rapidly day by day. Searching through the huge amount of data and finding the most relevant and useful result set involves searching, ranking, and presenting the results. Most of the users probe into the top few results and neglect the rest. In order to increase user’s satisfaction, the presented result set should not only be relevant to the search topic, but should also present a variety of perspectives, that is, the results should be different from one another. The effectiveness of web search and the satisfaction of users can be enhanced through providing various results of a search query in a certain order of relevance and concern. The technique used to avoid presenting similar, though relevant, results to the user is known as a diversification of search results. This article presents a survey of the approaches used for search result diversification. To this end, this article not only provides a technical survey of existing diversification techniques, but also presents a taxonomy of diversification algorithms with respect to the types of search queries.     

Cit-CSP及其应用

介绍了Cit-CSP--Cit/E-commerce信息安全保障平台子系统，并阐述了它所提供的消息摘要、块加密、加密(公钥)、签名和MAC等功能和服务。     

Microscale and mesoscale discrete models for dynamic fracture of structures built of brittle material

In this work we present the discrete models for dynamic fracture of structures built of brittle materials. The models construction is based on Voronoi cell representation of the heterogeneous structure, with the beam lattice network used to model the cohesive and compressive forces between the neighboring cells. Each lattice component is a geometrically exact shear deformable beam which can describe large rigid body motion and the most salient fracture mechanisms. The latter can be represented through the corresponding form of the beam constitutive equations, which are derived either at microscale with random distribution of material properties or at a mesoscale with average deterministic values. The proposed models are also placed within the framework of dynamics, where special attention is paid to constructing the lattice network mass matrix as well as the corresponding time-stepping schemes. Numerical simulations of compression and bending tests is given to illustrate the models performance.     

Robust orientation control of multi‐DOF cell based on uncertainty and disturbance estimation

Multiple degrees‐of‐freedom (multi‐DOF) cell orientation control is a vital important technique involved in single cell surgery applications. Currently, few studies have been performed toward automation of multi‐DOF cell orientation control using robotically controlled optical tweezers. In this paper, a robust control framework is developed to perform multi‐DOF cell rotational control with consideration of model uncertainties and external disturbances. Both simulation and experimental studies are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed control strategy. The main contributions of this work lie in that this is the first time to develop a unified framework to achieve multi‐DOF cell orientation control without the need for accurate dynamic model parameters and/or any knowledge about uncertainty characteristic, which greatly enhances the robustness of the overall system.