An approach for high-yield requirements capture for e-commerce and its application

Web-based e-commerce software is typically real-time, responsive, and distributed software that must meet high quality requirements. Moreover, because of its Internet-based operating environment, e-commerce software must deal with concurrency, synchronization, and non-deterministic issues (such as delays) primarily caused by the heavy usage load and underlying network conditions. In this paper, we introduce a generic, cost-effective approach to optimize requirements capture (and subsequent development and testing) with respect to functional coverage and customer perception of quality. This high-yield approach is presented and illustrated by application to an e-commerce online shopping system and used to explain the principles of use-case requirements captured in the unified modeling language. Published online: 25 July 2001     

Evaluating non-speech sound visualizations for the deaf

Sounds such as co-workers chatting nearby or a dripping faucet help us maintain awareness of and respond to our surroundings. Without a tool that communicates ambient sounds in a non-auditory manner, maintaining this awareness is difficult for people who are deaf. We present an iterative investigation of peripheral, visual displays of ambient sounds. Our major contributions are: (1) a rich understanding of what ambient sounds are useful to people who are deaf, (2) a set of visual and functional requirements for a peripheral sound display, based on feedback from people who are deaf, (3) lab-based evaluations investigating the characteristics of four prototypes, and (4) a set of design guidelines for successful ambient audio displays, based on a comparison of four implemented prototypes and user feedback. Our work provides valuable information about the sound awareness needs of the deaf and can help to inform further design of such applications.     

Enabling Interoperability among Grid Meta-Schedulers

The goal of Grid computing is to integrate the usage of computer resources from cooperating partners in the form of Virtual Organizations (VO). One of its key functions is to match jobs to execution resources efficiently. For interoperability between VOs, this matching operation occurs in resource brokering middleware, commonly referred to as the meta-scheduler or meta-broker. In this paper, we present an approach to a meta-scheduler architecture, combining hierarchical and peer-to-peer models for flexibility and extensibility. Interoperability is further promoted through the introduction of a set of protocols, allowing meta-schedulers to maintain sessions and exchange job and resource state using Web Services. Our architecture also incorporates a resource model that enables an efficient resource matching across multiple Virtual Organizations, especially where the compute resources and state are dynamic. Experiments demonstrate these new functional features across three distributed organizations (BSC, FIU, and IBM), that internally use different job scheduling technologies, computing infrastructure and security mechanisms. Performance evaluations through actual system measurements and simulations provide the insights on the architecture’s effectiveness and scalability.     

GPU-based parallel Shadow Features generation at neural system for improving gait human activity recognition

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In this paper, we propose a new method for improving human activity recognition (HAR) datasets in order to increase their classification accuracy when trained...     

Technology application in project-based learning

Project-based learning is a student-centered comprehensive instructional approach where students collectively engage themselves in complex learning tasks. Recent advances in educational technologies have made student-centered learning in a technology rich environment both possible and feasible. This paper will report part of a larger study carried out at a school in the United States of America on the use ofconstructivism and technology in project-based learning. Data collection techniques included those typically associated with qualitative field research. In this paper, the technological infrastructure of the school and how technology is used in one of the project-based learning classes will be provided. Based on this study, some suggestions are also provided on how technology can be used in the context of other countries including in Malaysia.     

Extracting a largest redundancy-free XML storage structure from an acyclic hypergraph in polynomial time

Given a hypergraph and a set of embedded functional dependencies, we investigate the problem of determining the conditions under which we can efficiently generate redundancy-free XML storage structures with as few scheme trees as possible. Redundancy-free XML structures guarantee both economy in storage space and the absence of update anomalies, and having the least number of scheme trees requires the fewest number of joins to navigate among the data elements. We know that the general problem is intractable. The problem may still be intractable even when the hypergraph is acyclic and each hyperedge is in Boyce–Codd normal form (BCNF). As we show here, however, given an acyclic hypergraph with each hyperedge in BCNF, a polynomial-time algorithm exists that generates a largest possible redundancy-free XML storage structure. Successively generating largest possible scheme trees from among hyperedges not already included in generated scheme trees constitutes a reasonable heuristic for finding the fewest possible scheme trees. For many practical cases, this heuristic finds the set of redundancy-free XML storage structures with the fewest number of scheme trees. In addition to a correctness proof and a complexity analysis showing that the algorithm is polynomial, we also give experimental results over randomly generated but appropriately constrained hypergraphs showing empirically that the algorithm is indeed polynomial.     

Pi-coefficient analysis of update algorithms for adaptive systems

This paper finds the appropriate pi-coefficients for a parameter estimation adaptive system and uses them to analyze the stability of two estimation algorithms. The estimation error dynamics of the system are modeled by a linear time-invariant subsystem and a nonlinear time-varying update law in a feedback loop. Then the so-called max-p problems are formulated and solved to obtain the pi-coefficients for the linear subsystem and nonlinear update low. For the investigated system, the quantitative results show that the least-squares update algorithm has larger stability range than that of the gradient algorithm, and the σ-modification scheme gives larger stability ranges for both algorithms.     

A relational–XML data warehouse for data aggregation with SQL and XQuery

Integrating information from multiple data sources is becoming increasingly important for enterprises that partner with other companies for e‐commerce. However, companies have their internal business applications deployed on diverse platforms and no standard solution for integrating information from these sources exists. To support business intelligence query activities, it is useful to build a data warehouse on top of middleware that aggregates the data obtained from various heterogeneous database systems. Online analytical processing (OLAP) can then be used to provide fast access to materialized views from the data warehouse. Since extensible markup language (XML) documents are a common data representation standard on the Internet and relational tables are commonly used for production data, OLAP must handle both relational and XML data. SQL and XQuery can be used to process the materialized relational and XML data cubes created from the aggregated data. This paper shows how to handle the two kinds of data cubes from a relational–XML data warehouse using extract, transformation and loading. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Control Points for Multivariate B-Spline Surfaces over Arbitrary Triangulations

This paper describes first results of a test implementation that implements the new multivariate B-splines as recently developed by Dahmen et al. 10for quadratics and cubics. The surface scheme is based on blending functions and control points and allows the modelling of   C ^{k − 1}  -continuous piecewise polynomial surfaces of degree k over arbitrary triangulations of the parameter plane. The surface scheme exhibits both affine invariance and the convex hull property, and the control points can be used to manipulate the shape of the surface locally. Additional degrees of freedom in the underlying knot net allow for the modelling of discontinuities. Explicit formulas are given for the representation of polynomials and piecewise polynomials as linear combinations of B-splines.     

Rank preservation of matrices with structured uncertainties and itsapplications in robust control theory

Matrix rank is determined by the nonsingularity of its submatrices. For matrices in which entries are quadratic functions of some uncertain parameters, this paper derives sufficient conditions on parameters to that ensure the matrices preserve to some degrees the ranks they have when the parameters are all zero. The rank preservation problem is converted to the nonsingularity analysis problem of the minors of the matrix in discussion, and suitable tools such as the μ-analysis method are used to solve the problem. Applications in robust control theory, including tests for robust controllability/observability, minimum phaseness, coprimeness, and Schur stability, are given, together with illustrative examples,