Time Lattice: A Data Structure for the Interactive Visual Analysis of Large Time Series

Advances in technology coupled with the availability of low‐cost sensors have resulted in the continuous generation of large time series from several sources. In order to visually explore and compare these time series at different scales, analysts need to execute online analytical processing (OLAP) queries that include constraints and group‐by's at multiple temporal hierarchies. Effective visual analysis requires these queries to be interactive. However, while existing OLAP cube‐based structures can support interactive query rates, the exponential memory requirement to materialize the data cube is often unsuitable for large data sets. Moreover, none of the recent space‐efficient cube data structures allow for updates. Thus, the cube must be re‐computed whenever there is new data, making them impractical in a streaming scenario. We propose Time Lattice, a memory‐efficient data structure that makes use of the implicit temporal hierarchy to enable interactive OLAP queries over large time series. Time Lattice is a subset of a fully materialized cube and is designed to handle fast updates and streaming data. We perform an experimental evaluation which shows that the space efficiency of the data structure does not hamper its performance when compared to the state of the art. In collaboration with signal processing and acoustics research scientists, we use the Time Lattice data structure to design the Noise Profiler, a web‐based visualization framework that supports the analysis of noise from cities. We demonstrate the utility of Noise Profiler through a set of case studies.     

A Survey of Surface Reconstruction from Point Clouds

The area of surface reconstruction has seen substantial progress in the past two decades. The traditional problem addressed by surface reconstruction is to recover the digital representation of a physical shape that has been scanned, where the scanned data contain a wide variety of defects. While much of the earlier work has been focused on reconstructing a piece‐wise smooth representation of the original shape, recent work has taken on more specialized priors to address significantly challenging data imperfections, where the reconstruction can take on different representations—not necessarily the explicit geometry. We survey the field of surface reconstruction, and provide a categorization with respect to priors, data imperfections and reconstruction output. By considering a holistic view of surface reconstruction, we show a detailed characterization of the field, highlight similarities between diverse reconstruction techniques and provide directions for future work in surface reconstruction.     

A Relation-Based Page Rank Algorithm for Semantic Web Search Engines

With the tremendous growth of information available to end users through the Web, search engines come to play ever a more critical role. Nevertheless, because of their general purpose approach, it is always less uncommon that obtained result sets provide a burden of useless pages. Next generation Web architecture, represented by Semantic Web, provides the layered architecture possibly allowing to overcome this limitation. Several search engines have been proposed, which allow to increase information retrieval accuracy by exploiting a key content of Semantic Web resources, that is relations. However, in order to rank results, most of the existing solutions need to work on the whole annotated knowledge base. In this paper we propose a relation-based page rank algorithm to be used in conjunction with Semantic Web search engines that simply relies on information which could be extracted from user query and annotated resource. Relevance is measured as the probability that retrieved resource actually contains those relations whose existence was assumed by the user at the time of query definition.     

Embedded real-time systems in cyber-physical applications: a frequency domain analysis methodology

ABSTRACT

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) use sensors and actuators to interface between an embedded system and the physical world. The time-continuous domain of the physical world should be periodically sampled by real-time tasks in an embedded system to preserve its dynamic properties in the time-discrete domain.

Because the task execution pattern may vary during runtime, a jitter in the execution of a real-time task hinders the periodicity of its execution. The effects of jitters in CPSs are difficult to determine when the premises of the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem are not satisfied.

This paper proposes using frequency domain analysis to determine the perturbations that a real-time system produces on real-world applications; accordingly, the paper defines both a design and an evaluation criterion for real-time systems in CPS applications. The Fixed Priority discipline is analysed through simulations to conclude that no special design techniques are required when the utilization factors are less than 20%.     

Non-Commercial Digital Newspaper Libraries: Considering Usability

With the advent of the Internet there is now a growing expectation on the part of researchers to be able to have more immediate and functional access to newspaper archives and collections. In recent years newspaper digitization has moved to the forefront of efforts to provide this increased access to both historical and current newspapers. This article offers a brief overview of the unique challenges associated with creating non-commercial digital newspaper libraries and provides a preliminary look at the efficacy of these tools for the end user. The article focuses on a case study of usability testing done on the University of Florida's Florida Digital Newspaper Library (FDNL) and the National Digital Newspaper Project (NDNP)/Library of Congress Chronicling America digital newspaper collection. Additionally, it details a survey focused on gathering data regarding usability testing at other digital newspaper initiatives. Preliminary results from the small sample group surveyed indicate that for a variety of reasons testing is often underemphasized.     

Glass container production scheduling through hybrid multi-population based evolutionary algorithm

Driven by a real-world application in the capital-intensive glass container industry, this paper provides the design of a new hybrid evolutionary algorithm to tackle the short-term production planning and scheduling problem. The challenge consists of sizing and scheduling the lots in the most cost-effective manner on a set of parallel molding machines that are fed by a furnace that melts the glass. The solution procedure combines a multi-population hierarchically structured genetic algorithm (GA) with a simulated annealing (SA), and a tailor-made heuristic named cavity heuristic (CH). The SA is applied to intensify the search for solutions in the neighborhood of the best individuals found by the GA, while the CH determines quickly values for a relevant decision variable of the problem: the processing speed of each machine. The results indicate the superior performance of the proposed approach against a state-of-the-art commercial solver, and compared to a non-hybridized multi-population GA.     

Recent Aspects of Asymmetric Catalysis by Immobilized Chiral Metal Catalysts

In this paper, we have reviewed recent achievements in the field of asymmetric catalysis by metal complexes immobilized onto inorganic and organic supports. Besides allowing for facile catalyst recovery and reuse, immobilized metal complexes show a number of diverse applications and unique performances.     

A molecular model for correlating vapor-liquid equilibrium of propane+hydrocarbon mixtures

Simple analytical expressions are proposed for the calculation of the equilibrium pressure and the mole fractions of both liquid and vapor phases of propane+hydrocarbon binary mixtures. The new proposed expressions are based on a simple analytical expression for the vapor pressure of pure non-polar fluids, which, for a given temperature, only requires as input the values of the Lennard-Jones molecular parameters and the acentric factor. A properly modified Lorentz-Berthelot mixing rule is used, the interaction parameters being given as simple functions of the temperature and concentration with eight constants for each binary mixture. A different model is proposed to calculate the vapor mole fraction in which four appropriate constants are needed for each mixture. Here, it is shown how the models can reproduce accurately and straightforwardly the vapor liquid equilibrium properties (pressure, liquid mole fraction, and vapor mole fraction) of binary mixtures containing propane.