Cost-Efficient SHA Hardware Accelerators

This paper presents a new set of techniques for hardware implementations of Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) hash functions. These techniques consist mostly in operation rescheduling and hardware reutilization, therefore, significantly decreasing the critical path and required area. Throughputs from 1.3 Gbit/s to 1.8 Gbit/s were obtained for the SHA implementations on a Xilinx VIRTEX II Pro. Compared to commercial cores and previously published research, these figures correspond to an improvement in throughput/slice in the range of 29% to 59% for SHA-1 and 54% to 100% for SHA-2. Experimental results on hybrid hardware/software implementations of the SHA cores, have shown speedups up to 150 times for the proposed cores, compared to pure software implementations.      

HIV-1 and HIV-2 antibodies in pregnant women in the City of Maputo, Mozambique. A comparative study between 1982/1983 and 1990

The seroprevalence of HIV-1 and HIV-2 among pregnant women in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, was compared between the years 1982/83, 1988 and 1990. None of the 432 serum samples collected in 1982/83 was positive for HIV antibodies whereas in 1988 the HIV-1 and HIV-2 seroprevalence was 0.4% (2/500) and 0.6% (3/500), respectively, and in 1990 0.6% (12/2014) and 0.2% (4/2014), respectively. These results indicate that HIV infection has been introduced recently in Maputo and is spreading at a slow rate among women.     

Evaluating a graphical notation for modelling software development methodologies

This work aims at evaluating a graphical notation for modelling software (and other kinds of) development methodologies, thus demonstrating how useful the graphical aspects can be for sharing knowledge between the people responsible for documenting information and those responsible for understanding and putting it into practice. We acknowledge the importance of having a common set of symbols that can be used to create, use and disseminate information for a larger audience than is possible today with a variety of alternatives and lack of a common ground. Using a cognitive dimensions framework, we make a standard evaluation of the elements and diagrams of the notation proposed to support the ISO/IEC 24744 methodology metamodel standard, considering the trade-offs between different dimensions. We suggest improvements to this existing notation based on this analysis, in the context of improving communication between creators and users of methodologies.     

A Complete and Highly Effective Mothproofing Agent Comprising a Pyrethroid and a Hexahydropyrimidine

Pyrethroids, considered as a general class of compounds, have been shown to provide effective protection from the larvae of the keratin-digesting insects Tineola bisselliella H., Tinea pellionella Linn., Hofmannophila pseudo-spretella Station and Attagenus piceus Oliv. The position regarding the susceptibility of the furniture carpet beetle to pyrethroids is less clear, however. It has been reported that both deltamethrin and permethrin are effective against Anthrenus flavipes Le Conte, whilst permethrin is also reported elsewhere to be effective against the same species. Results obtained in our laboratory, however, have indicated that pyrethroids may offer inadequate protection against Anthrenus vorax Waterh. [1, 2]. This latter species is identical to Anthrenus flavipes var. seminiveus Casey, a colour variety of Anthrenus flavipes Le Conte. The 1,3-disubstituted5-phenylcarbamoyl-2,4,6-trioxo- and 4,6-dioxo-2-thione-hexahydropyrimidine derivatives described in this paper exhibit a surprisingly high and selective toxicity to the Anthrenus species. Thus, a combination of an appropriate hexahydropyrimidine with a suitable pyrethroid, e.g. permethrin, provides complete control of a wide range of commonly encountered textile insect pests. The influence of substituents on the mothproofing activity is discussed.     

The Building Blocks of a PaaS

Traditional cloud computing providers enable developers to program and deploy applications in the cloud by using platform as a service (PaaS) providers. Despite the benefits of such an approach, this service model usually comes with a high level of the lock in effect into the service provider. The lock in effect occurs when a software developer needs to change its cloud provider. When this happens, it usually means a major application rewrite, specific for the new PaaS. This paper details the initial results of a project whose goal is to build a PaaS where vendor lock in does not occur. With this PaaS, developers wishing to deploy their applications into the cloud may continue to program using their usual development environments. There are no necessary changes required to make the application PaaS compatible. As a proof of concept, we developed an open source PaaS management application as a regular web application and then deployed it on the cloud.     

Augmented reality system to assist inexperienced pool players

Computational Visual Media - Pool and billiards are amongst a family of games played on a table with six pockets along the rails. This paper presents an augmented reality tool designed to assist...     

The MAC method

In this article recent advances in the Marker and Cell (MAC) method will be reviewed. The MAC technique dates back to the early 1960s at the Los Alamos Laboratories and this article starts with a historical review, and then a brief discussion of related techniques. Improvements since the early days of MAC (and the Simplified MAC - SMAC) include automatic time-stepping, the use of the conjugate gradient method to solve the Poisson equation for the corrected velocity potential, greater efficiency through stripping out the virtual particles (markers) other than those near the free surface, and more accurate approximations of the free surface boundary conditions, the addition of bounded high accuracy upwinding for the convected terms (thereby being able to solve higher Reynolds number flows), and a (dynamics) flow visualization facility. More recently, effective techniques for surface and interfacial flows and, in particular, for accurately tracking the associated surface(s)/interface(s) including moving contact angles have been developed. This article will concentrate principally on a three-dimensional version of the SMAC method. It will eschew both code verification and model validation; instead it will emphasize the applications that the MAC method can solve, from multiphase flows to rheology.     

Distributed planning and control systems for the virtual enterprise: organizational requirements and development life-cycle

This paper describes the requirements analysis and system specification of an Order Promise module to be used as part of a broader Decision Support System for production and operations planning of a Virtual Enterprise. This work is part of a broader project with a particular focus on the microelectronics industry which is a good example of Virtual Enterprise, and where a quick response to the customers needs and to unpredictable changes in production conditions is considered a major factor for success. First, the analysis and specification are presented within a development framework that involves the study of organizational issues of semiconductor enterprises. The use of ontological engineering for supporting the communication and shared understanding of the system concepts is explained and a virtual enterprise ontology is outlined. Following the clarification of the concept of virtual enterprise, the generic techno-organizational requirements for the information system are derived. Finally, a specification of the global planning module and a more detailed one regarding the order promise module is presented.     

Dissimilarity-based classification of chromatographic profiles

This paper proposes a non-parametric method for the classification of thin-layer chromatographic (TLC) images from patterns represented in a dissimilarity space. Each pattern corresponds to a mixture of Gaussian approximation of the intensity profile. The methodology comprises various phases, including image processing and analysis steps to extract the chromatographic profiles and a classification phase to discriminate among two groups, one corresponding to normal cases and the other to three pathological classes. We present an extensive study of several dissimilarity-based approaches analysing the influence of the dissimilarity measure and the prototype selection method on the classification performance. The main conclusions of this paper are that, Match and Profile-difference dissimilarity measures present better results, and a new prototype selection methodology achieves a performance similar or even better than conventional methods. Furthermore, we also concluded that simplest classifiers, such as k-NN and linear discriminant classifiers (LDCs), present good performance being the overall classification error less than 10% for the four-class problem.