Abstract: Phylogenetic tree is a graphical representation of the
evolutionary relationship among three or more genes or organisms.
These trees show relatedness of data sets, species or genes
divergence time and nature of their common ancestors. Quality of a
phylogenetic tree requires parsimony criterion. Various approaches
have been proposed for constructing most parsimonious trees. This
paper is concerned about calculating and optimizing the changes of
state that are needed called Small Parsimony Algorithms. This paper
has proposed enhanced small parsimony algorithm to give better
score based on number of evolutionary changes needed to produce
the observed sequence changes tree and also give the ancestor of the
given input.
Abstract: Firstly, this study briefly presents the current situation that there exists a vast gap between current Chinese and Japanese seismic design specification for bridge pile foundation in liquefiable and liquefaction-induced lateral spreading ground; The Chinese and Japanese seismic design method and technical detail for bridge pile foundation in liquefying and lateral spreading ground are described and compared systematically and comprehensively, the methods of determining coefficient of subgrade reaction and its reduction factor as well as the computing mode of the applied force on pile foundation due to liquefaction-induced lateral spreading soil in Japanese design specification are especially introduced. Subsequently, the comparison indicates that the content of Chinese seismic design specification for bridge pile foundation in liquefiable and liquefaction-induced lateral spreading ground, just presenting some qualitative items, is too general and lacks systematicness and maneuverability. Finally, some defects of seismic design specification in China are summarized, so the improvement and revision of specification in the field turns out to be imperative for China, some key problems of current Chinese specifications are generalized and the corresponding improvement suggestions are proposed.
Abstract: The subcellular organelles called oil bodies (OBs) are lipid-filled quasi-spherical droplets produced from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) and then released into the cytoplasm during seed development. It is believed that an OB grows by coalescence with other OBs and that its stability depends on the composition of oleosins, major proteins inserted in the hemi membrane that covers OBs. In this study, we measured the OB-volume distribution from different genotypes of A. thaliana after 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 days of seed development. In order to test the hypothesis of OBs dynamics, we developed a simple mathematical model using non-linear differential equations inspired from the theory of coagulation. The model describes the evolution of OB-volume distribution during the first steps of seed development by taking into consideration the production of OBs, the increase of triacylglycerol volume to be stored, and the growth by coalescence of OBs. Fitted parameters values show an increase in the OB production and coalescence rates in A. thaliana oleosin mutants compared to wild type.
Abstract: In recent years, we see an increase of interest for efficient tracking systems in surveillance applications. Many of the proposed techniques are designed for static cameras environments. When the camera is moving, tracking moving objects become more difficult and many techniques fail to detect and track the desired targets. The problem becomes more complex when we want to track a specific object in real-time using a moving Pan and Tilt camera system to keep the target within the image. This type of tracking is of high importance in surveillance applications. When a target is detected at a certain zone, the possibility of automatically tracking it continuously and keeping it within the image until action is taken is very important for security personnel working in very sensitive sites. This work presents a real-time tracking system permitting the detection and continuous tracking of targets using a Pan and Tilt camera platform. A novel and efficient approach for dealing with occlusions is presented. Also a new intelligent forget factor is introduced in order to take into account target shape variations and avoid learning non desired objects. Tests conducted in outdoor operational scenarios show the efficiency and robustness of the proposed approach.
Abstract: With the drastically growth in optical communication
technology, a lossless, low-crosstalk and multifunction optical switch
is most desirable for large-scale photonic network. To realize such a
switch, we have introduced the new architecture of optical switch
that embedded many functions on single device. The asymmetrical
architecture of OXADM consists of 3 parts; selective port, add/drop
operation, and path routing. Selective port permits only the interest
wavelength pass through and acts as a filter. While add and drop
function can be implemented in second part of OXADM architecture.
The signals can then be re-routed to any output port or/and perform
an accumulation function which multiplex all signals onto single path
and then exit to any interest output port. This will be done by path
routing operation. The unique features offered by OXADM has
extended its application to Fiber to-the Home Technology (FTTH),
here the OXADM is used as a wavelength management element in
Optical Line Terminal (OLT). Each port is assigned specifically with
the operating wavelengths and with the dynamic routing management
to ensure no traffic combustion occurs in OLT.
Abstract: A series of Ti based shape memory alloys with
composition of Ti50Ni49Cr1, Ti50Ni47Cr3 and Ti50Ni45Cr5 were
developed by vacuum arc-melting under a purified argon atmosphere.
The histometric and corrosion evaluation of Ti-Ni-Cr shape memory
alloys have been considered in this research work. The alloys were
developed by vacuum arc melting and implanted subcutaneously in
rabbits for 4, 8 and 12 weeks. Metallic implants were embedded in
order to determine the outcome of implantation on histometric and
corrosion evaluation of Ti-Ni-Cr metallic strips. Encapsulating
membrane formation around the alloys was minimal in the case of all
materials. After histomorphometric analyses it was possible to
demonstrate that there were no statistically significant differences
between the materials. Corrosion rate was also determined in this
study which is within acceptable range. The results showed the Ti-
Ni-Cr alloy was neither cytotoxic, nor have any systemic reaction on
living system in any of the test performed. Implantation shows good
compatibility and a potential of being used directly in vivo system.
Abstract: The nanofiber sheet of Multiwall Cabon Nanotube
(MWCNTs)/Polyacylonitile (PAN) composites was fabricated from
electrospun nanofiber. Firstly the surface of MWCNTs was
chemically modified, comparing two different techniques consisting
of admicellar polymerization and functionalization to improve the
dispersion and prevent the aggregation in the PAN matrix. The
modified MWCNTs were characterized by the dispersion in
dimethylformamide (DMF) solvent, Laser particle size, and FTRaman.
Lastly, DSC, SEM and mechanical properties of the
nanofiber sheet were examined. The results show that the mechanical
properties of the nanofiber sheet prepared from admicellar
polymerization-modified MWCNTs were higher than those of the
others.
Abstract: Effective cooling of electronic equipment has emerged
as a challenging and constraining problem of the new century. In the
present work the feasibility and effectiveness of jet impingement
cooling on electronics were investigated numerically and
experimentally. Studies have been conducted to see the effect of the
geometrical parameters such as jet diameter (D), jet to target
spacing (Z) and ratio of jet spacing to jet diameter (Z/D) on the heat
transfer characteristics. The values of Reynolds numbers considered
are in the range 7000 to 42000. The results obtained from the
numerical studies are validated by conducting experiments. From the
studies it is found that the optimum value of Z/D ratio is 5. For a
given Reynolds number, the Nusselt number increases by about 28%
if the diameter of the nozzle is increased from 1mm to 2mm.
Correlations are proposed for Nusselt number in terms of Reynolds
number and these are valid for air as the cooling medium.
Abstract: In this study a two dimensional axisymmetric, steady state and incompressible laminar flow in a rotating single disk is numerically investigated. The finite volume method is used for solving the momentum equations. The numerical model and results
are validated by comparing it to previously reported experimental data for velocities, angles and moment coefficients. It is
demonstrated that increasing the axial distance increases the value of axial velocity and vice versa for tangential and total velocities. However, the maximum value of nondimensional radial velocity
occurs near the disk wall. It is also found that with increase rotational Reynolds number, moment coefficient decreases.
Abstract: Process-oriented software development is a new
software development paradigm in which software design is modeled
by a business process which is in turn translated into a process
execution language for execution. The building blocks of this
paradigm are software units that are composed together to work
according to the flow of the business process. This new paradigm
still exhibits the characteristic of the applications built with the
traditional software component technology. This paper discusses an
approach to apply a traditional technique for software component
fabrication to the design of process-oriented software units, called
process components. These process components result from
decomposing a business process of a particular application domain
into subprocesses, and these process components can be reused to
design the business processes of other application domains. The
decomposition considers five managerial goals, namely cost
effectiveness, ease of assembly, customization, reusability, and
maintainability. The paper presents how to design or decompose
process components from a business process model and measure
some technical features of the design that would affect the
managerial goals. A comparison between the measurement values
from different designs can tell which process component design is
more appropriate for the managerial goals that have been set. The
proposed approach can be applied in Web Services environment
which accommodates process-oriented software development.
Abstract: A numerical analysis of wave and hydrodynamic models
is used to investigate the influence of WAve and Storm Surge
(WASS) in the regional and coastal zones. The numerical analyzed
system consists of the WAve Model Cycle 4 (WAMC4) and the
Princeton Ocean Model (POM) which used to solve the energy
balance and primitive equations respectively. The results of both
models presented the incorporated surface wave in the regional
zone affected the coastal storm surge zone. Specifically, the results
indicated that the WASS generally under the approximation is not
only the peak surge but also the coastal water level drop which
can also cause substantial impact on the coastal environment. The
wave–induced surface stress affected the storm surge can significantly
improve storm surge prediction. Finally, the calibration of wave
module according to the minimum error of the significant wave height
(Hs) is not necessarily result in the optimum wave module in the
WASS analyzed system for the WASS prediction.
Abstract: In this paper, a generalized synchronization scheme, which is called function synchronization, for chaotic systems is studied. Based on Lyapunov method and active control method, we design the synchronization controller for the system such that the error dynamics between master and slave chaotic systems is asymptotically stable. For verification of our theory, computer and circuit simulations for a specific chaotic system is conducted.
Abstract: This paper presents a design and prototype
implementation of new home automation system that uses WiFi
technology as a network infrastructure connecting its parts. The
proposed system consists of two main components; the first part is
the server (web server), which presents system core that manages,
controls, and monitors users- home. Users and system administrator
can locally (LAN) or remotely (internet) manage and control system
code. Second part is hardware interface module, which provides
appropriate interface to sensors and actuator of home automation
system. Unlike most of available home automation system in the
market the proposed system is scalable that one server can manage
many hardware interface modules as long as it exists on WiFi
network coverage. System supports a wide range of home
automation devices like power management components, and
security components. The proposed system is better from the
scalability and flexibility point of view than the commercially
available home automation systems.
Abstract: The increasing complexity of software development based on peer to peer networks makes necessary the creation of new frameworks in order to simplify the developer-s task. Additionally, some applications, e.g. fire detection or security alarms may require real-time constraints and the high level definition of these features eases the application development. In this paper, a service model based on a component model with real-time features is proposed. The high-level model will abstract developers from implementation tasks, such as discovery, communication, security or real-time requirements. The model is oriented to deploy services on small mobile devices, such as sensors, mobile phones and PDAs, where the computation is light-weight. Services can be composed among them by means of the port concept to form complex ad-hoc systems and their implementation is carried out using a component language called UM-RTCOM. In order to apply our proposals a fire detection application is described.
Abstract: Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) describes how mobile node can change its point of attachment from one access router to another. As a demand for wireless mobile devices increases, many enhancements for macro-mobility (inter-domain) protocols have been proposed, designed and implemented in Mobile IPv6. Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) is one of them that is designed to reduce the amount of signaling required and to improve handover speed for mobile connections. This is achieved by introducing a new network entity called Mobility Anchor Point (MAP). This report presents a comparative study of the Hierarchical Mobility IPv6 and Mobile IPv6 protocols and we have narrowed down the scope to micro-mobility (intra-domain). The architecture and operation of each protocol is studied and they are evaluated based on the Quality of Service (QoS) parameter; handover latency. The simulation was carried out by using the Network Simulator-2. The outcome from this simulation has been discussed. From the results, it shows that, HMIPv6 performs best under intra-domain mobility compared to MIPv6. The MIPv6 suffers large handover latency. As enhancement we proposed to HMIPv6 to locate the MAP to be in the middle of the domain with respect to all Access Routers. That gives approximately same distance between MAP and Mobile Node (MN) regardless of the new location of MN, and possible shorter distance. This will reduce the delay since the distance is shorter. As a future work performance analysis is to be carried for the proposed HMIPv6 and compared to HMIPv6.
Abstract: A new robust nonlinear control scheme of a manipulator is proposed in this paper which is robust against modeling errors and unknown disturbances. It is based on the principle of variable structure control, with sliding mode control (SMC) method. The variable structure control method is a robust method that appears to be well suited for robotic manipulators because it requers only bounds on the robotic arm parameters. But there is no single systematic procedure that is guaranteed to produce a suitable control law. Also, to reduce chattring of the control signal, we replaced the sgn function in the control law by a continuous approximation such as tangant function. We can compute the maximum load with regard to applied torque into joints. The effectivness of the proposed approach has been evaluated analitically demonstrated through computer simulations for the cases of variable load and robot arm parameters.
Abstract: The segmentation of endovascular tools in fluoroscopy images can be accurately performed automatically or by minimum user intervention, using known modern techniques. It has been proven in literature, but no clinical implementation exists so far because the computational time requirements of such technology have not yet been met. A classical segmentation scheme is composed of edge enhancement filtering, line detection, and segmentation. A new method is presented that consists of a vector that propagates in the image to track an edge as it advances. The filtering is performed progressively in the projected path of the vector, whose orientation allows for oriented edge detection, and a minimal image area is globally filtered. Such an algorithm is rapidly computed and can be implemented in real-time applications. It was tested on medical fluoroscopy images from an endovascular cerebral intervention. Ex- periments showed that the 2D tracking was limited to guidewires without intersection crosspoints, while the 3D implementation was able to cope with such planar difficulties.
Abstract: The speech signal conveys information about the
identity of the speaker. The area of speaker identification is
concerned with extracting the identity of the person speaking the
utterance. As speech interaction with computers becomes more
pervasive in activities such as the telephone, financial transactions
and information retrieval from speech databases, the utility of
automatically identifying a speaker is based solely on vocal
characteristic. This paper emphasizes on text dependent speaker
identification, which deals with detecting a particular speaker from a
known population. The system prompts the user to provide speech
utterance. System identifies the user by comparing the codebook of
speech utterance with those of the stored in the database and lists,
which contain the most likely speakers, could have given that speech
utterance. The speech signal is recorded for N speakers further the
features are extracted. Feature extraction is done by means of LPC
coefficients, calculating AMDF, and DFT. The neural network is
trained by applying these features as input parameters. The features
are stored in templates for further comparison. The features for the
speaker who has to be identified are extracted and compared with the
stored templates using Back Propogation Algorithm. Here, the
trained network corresponds to the output; the input is the extracted
features of the speaker to be identified. The network does the weight
adjustment and the best match is found to identify the speaker. The
number of epochs required to get the target decides the network
performance.
Abstract: In recent years there has been renewal of interest in the
relation between Green IT and Cloud Computing. The growing use of
computers in cloud platform has caused marked energy consumption,
putting negative pressure on electricity cost of cloud data center. This
paper proposes an effective mechanism to reduce energy utilization in
cloud computing environments. We present initial work on the
integration of resource and power management that aims at reducing
power consumption. Our mechanism relies on recalling virtualization
services dynamically according to user-s virtualization request and
temporarily shutting down the physical machines after finish in order
to conserve energy. Given the estimated energy consumption, this
proposed effort has the potential to positively impact power
consumption. The results from the experiment concluded that energy
indeed can be saved by powering off the idling physical machines in
cloud platforms.
Abstract: Investment in a constructed facility represents a cost in
the short term that returns benefits only over the long term use of the
facility. Thus, the costs occur earlier than the benefits, and the owners
of facilities must obtain the capital resources to finance the costs of
construction. A project cannot proceed without an adequate
financing, and the cost of providing an adequate financing can be
quite large. For these reasons, the attention to the project finance is an
important aspect of project management. Finance is also a concern to
the other organizations involved in a project such as the general
contractor and material suppliers. Unless an owner immediately and
completely covers the costs incurred by each participant, these
organizations face financing problems of their own. At a more
general level, the project finance is the only one aspect of the general
problem of corporate finance. If numerous projects are considered
and financed together, then the net cash flow requirements constitute
the corporate financing problem for capital investment. Whether
project finance is performed at the project or at the corporate level
does not alter the basic financing problem .In this paper, we will first
consider facility financing from the owner's perspective, with due
consideration for its interaction with other organizations involved in a
project. Later, we discuss the problems of construction financing
which are crucial to the profitability and solvency of construction
contractors. The objective of this paper is to present the steps utilized
to determine the best combination of minimum project financing.
The proposed model considers financing; schedule and maximum net
area .The proposed model is called Project Financing and Schedule
Integration using Genetic Algorithms "PFSIGA". This model
intended to determine more steps (maximum net area) for any project
with a subproject. An illustrative example will demonstrate the
feature of this technique. The model verification and testing are put
into consideration.