Theoretical Considerations for Software Component Metrics

We have defined two suites of metrics, which cover static and dynamic aspects of component assembly. The static metrics measure complexity and criticality of component assembly, wherein complexity is measured using Component Packing Density and Component Interaction Density metrics. Further, four criticality conditions namely, Link, Bridge, Inheritance and Size criticalities have been identified and quantified. The complexity and criticality metrics are combined to form a Triangular Metric, which can be used to classify the type and nature of applications. Dynamic metrics are collected during the runtime of a complete application. Dynamic metrics are useful to identify super-component and to evaluate the degree of utilisation of various components. In this paper both static and dynamic metrics are evaluated using Weyuker-s set of properties. The result shows that the metrics provide a valid means to measure issues in component assembly. We relate our metrics suite with McCall-s Quality Model and illustrate their impact on product quality and to the management of component-based product development.

Confronting the Uncertainty of Systemic Innovation in Public Welfare Services

Faced with social and health system capacity constraints and rising and changing demand for welfare services, governments and welfare providers are increasingly relying on innovation to help support and enhance services. However, the evidence reported by several studies indicates that the realization of that potential is not an easy task. Innovations can be deemed inherently complex to implement and operate, because many of them involve a combination of technological and organizational renewal within an environment featuring a diversity of stakeholders. Many public welfare service innovations are markedly systemic in their nature, which means that they emerge from, and must address, the complex interplay between political, administrative, technological, institutional and legal issues. This paper suggests that stakeholders dealing with systemic innovation in welfare services must deal with ambiguous and incomplete information in circumstances of uncertainty. Employing a literature review methodology and case study, this paper identifies, categorizes and discusses different aspects of the uncertainty of systemic innovation in public welfare services, and argues that uncertainty can be classified into eight categories: technological uncertainty, market uncertainty, regulatory/institutional uncertainty, social/political uncertainty, acceptance/legitimacy uncertainty, managerial uncertainty, timing uncertainty and consequence uncertainty.

Expressive Modes and Species of Language

Computer languages are usually lumped together into broad -paradigms-, leaving us in want of a finer classification of kinds of language. Theories distinguishing between -genuine differences- in language has been called for, and we propose that such differences can be observed through a notion of expressive mode. We outline this concept, propose how it could be operationalized and indicate a possible context for the development of a corresponding theory. Finally we consider a possible application in connection with evaluation of language revision. We illustrate this with a case, investigating possible revisions of the relational algebra in order to overcome weaknesses of the division operator in connection with universal queries.

Hydrogen Rich Fuel Gas Production from 2- Propanol Using Pt/Al2O3 and Ni/Al2O3 Catalysts in Supercritical Water

Hydrogen is an important chemical in many industries and it is expected to become one of the major fuels for energy generation in the future. Unfortunately, hydrogen does not exist in its elemental form in nature and therefore has to be produced from hydrocarbons, hydrogen-containing compounds or water. Above its critical point (374.8oC and 22.1MPa), water has lower density and viscosity, and a higher heat capacity than those of ambient water. Mass transfer in supercritical water (SCW) is enhanced due to its increased diffusivity and transport ability. The reduced dielectric constant makes supercritical water a better solvent for organic compounds and gases. Hence, due to the aforementioned desirable properties, there is a growing interest toward studies regarding the gasification of organic matter containing biomass or model biomass solutions in supercritical water. In this study, hydrogen and biofuel production by the catalytic gasification of 2-Propanol in supercritical conditions of water was investigated. Pt/Al2O3and Ni/Al2O3were the catalysts used in the gasification reactions. All of the experiments were performed under a constant pressure of 25MPa. The effects of five reaction temperatures (400, 450, 500, 550 and 600°C) and five reaction times (10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 s) on the gasification yield and flammable component content were investigated.

Multiobjective Optimal Power Flow Using Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm

This paper solves the environmental/ economic dispatch power system problem using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) and its hybrid with a Convergence Accelerator Operator (CAO), called the NSGA-II/CAO. These multiobjective evolutionary algorithms were applied to the standard IEEE 30-bus six-generator test system. Several optimization runs were carried out on different cases of problem complexity. Different quality measure which compare the performance of the two solution techniques were considered. The results demonstrated that the inclusion of the CAO in the original NSGA-II improves its convergence while preserving the diversity properties of the solution set.

Linux based Embedded Node for Capturing, Compression and Streaming of Digital Audio and Video

A prototype for audio and video capture and compression in real time on a Linux platform has been developed. It is able to visualize both the captured and the compressed video at the same time, as well as the captured and compressed audio with the goal of comparing their quality. As it is based on free code, the final goal is to run it in an embedded system running Linux. Therefore, we would implement a node to capture and compress such multimedia information. Thus, it would be possible to consider the project within a larger one aimed at live broadcast of audio and video using a streaming server which would communicate with our node. Then, we would have a very powerful and flexible system with several practical applications.

Radiation Damage as Nonlinear Evolution of Complex System

Irradiated material is a typical example of a complex system with nonlinear coupling between its elements. During irradiation the radiation damage is developed and this development has bifurcations and qualitatively different kinds of behavior. The accumulation of primary defects in irradiated crystals is considered in frame work of nonlinear evolution of complex system. The thermo-concentration nonlinear feedback is carried out as a mechanism of self-oscillation development. It is shown that there are two ways of the defect density evolution under stationary irradiation. The first is the accumulation of defects; defect density monotonically grows and tends to its stationary state for some system parameters. Another way that takes place for opportune parameters is the development of self-oscillations of the defect density. The stationary state, its stability and type are found. The bifurcation values of parameters (environment temperature, defect generation rate, etc.) are obtained. The frequency of the selfoscillation and the conditions of their development is found and rated. It is shown that defect density, heat fluxes and temperature during self-oscillations can reach much higher values than the expected steady-state values. It can lead to a change of typical operation and an accident, e.g. for nuclear equipment.

Artificial Neural Networks for Identification and Control of a Lab-Scale Distillation Column Using LABVIEW

LABVIEW is a graphical programming language that has its roots in automation control and data acquisition. In this paper we have utilized this platform to provide a powerful toolset for process identification and control of nonlinear systems based on artificial neural networks (ANN). This tool has been applied to the monitoring and control of a lab-scale distillation column DELTALAB DC-SP. The proposed control scheme offers high speed of response for changes in set points and null stationary error for dual composition control and shows robustness in presence of externally imposed disturbance.

Performance Evaluation of an Amperometric Biosensor using a Simple Microcontroller based Data Acquisition System

In this paper we have proposed a methodology to develop an amperometric biosensor for the analysis of glucose concentration using a simple microcontroller based data acquisition system. The work involves the development of Detachable Membrane Unit (enzyme based biomembrane) with immobilized glucose oxidase on the membrane and interfacing the same to the signal conditioning system. The current generated by the biosensor for different glucose concentrations was signal conditioned, then acquired and computed by a simple AT89C51-microcontroller. The optimum operating parameters for the better performance were found and reported. The detailed performance evaluation of the biosensor has been carried out. The proposed microcontroller based biosensor system has the sensitivity of 0.04V/g/dl, with a resolution of 50mg/dl. It has exhibited very good inter day stability observed up to 30 days. Comparing to the reference method such as HPLC, the accuracy of the proposed biosensor system is well within ± 1.5%. The system can be used for real time analysis of glucose concentration in the field such as, food and fermentation and clinical (In-Vitro) applications.

Nutrients Removal from Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plant Effluent using Eichhornia Crassipes

Water hyacinth has been used in aquatic systems for wastewater purification in many years worldwide. The role of water hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) species in polishing nitrate and phosphorus concentration from municipal wastewater treatment plant effluent by phytoremediation method was evaluated. The objective of this project is to determine the removal efficiency of water hyacinth in polishing nitrate and phosphorus, as well as chemical oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia. Water hyacinth is considered as the most efficient aquatic plant used in removing vast range of pollutants such as organic matters, nutrients and heavy metals. Water hyacinth, also referred as macrophytes, were cultivated in the treatment house in a reactor tank of approximately 90(L) x 40(W) x 25(H) in dimension and built with three compartments. Three water hyacinths were placed in each compartments and water sample in each compartment were collected in every two days. The plant observation was conducted by weight measurement, plant uptake and new young shoot development. Water hyacinth effectively removed approximately 49% of COD, 81% of ammonia, 67% of phosphorus and 92% of nitrate. It also showed significant growth rate at starting from day 6 with 0.33 shoot/day and they kept developing up to 0.38 shoot/day at the end of day 24. From the studies conducted, it was proved that water hyacinth is capable of polishing the effluent of municipal wastewater which contains undesirable amount of nitrate and phosphorus concentration.

Analytical and Numerical Approaches in Coagulation of Particles

In this paper we discuss the effect of unbounded particle interaction operator on particle growth and we study how this can address the choice of appropriate time steps of the numerical simulation. We provide also rigorous mathematical proofs showing that large particles become dominating with increasing time while small particles contribute negligibly. Second, we discuss the efficiency of the algorithm by performing numerical simulations tests and by comparing the simulated solutions with some known analytic solutions to the Smoluchowski equation.

A Hybrid Search Algorithm for Solving Constraint Satisfaction Problems

In this paper we present a hybrid search algorithm for solving constraint satisfaction and optimization problems. This algorithm combines ideas of two basic approaches: complete and incomplete algorithms which also known as systematic search and local search algorithms. Different characteristics of systematic search and local search methods are complementary. Therefore we have tried to get the advantages of both approaches in the presented algorithm. The major advantage of presented algorithm is finding partial sound solution for complicated problems which their complete solution could not be found in a reasonable time. This algorithm results are compared with other algorithms using the well known n-queens problem.

A Study on Evaluation of Strut Type Suspension Noise Caused by Rubber Degradation

When cars are released from the factory, strut noises are very small and therefore it is difficult to perceive them. As the use time and travel distance increase, however, strut noises get larger so as to cause users much uneasiness. The noises generated at the field include engine noises and flow noises and therefore it is difficult to clearly discern the noises generated from struts. This study developed a test method which can reproduce field strut noises in the lab. Using the newly developed noise evaluation test, this study analyzed the effects that insulator performance degradation and failure can have on car noises. The study also confirmed that the insulator durability test by the simple back-and-forth motion cannot completely reflect the state of the parts failure in the field. Based on this, the study also confirmed that field noises can be reproduced through a durability test that considers heat aging.

An Improved Method to Watermark Images Sensitive to Blocking Artifacts

A new digital watermarking technique for images that are sensitive to blocking artifacts is presented. Experimental results show that the proposed MDCT based approach produces highly imperceptible watermarked images and is robust to attacks such as compression, noise, filtering and geometric transformations. The proposed MDCT watermarking technique is applied to fingerprints for ensuring security. The face image and demographic text data of an individual are used as multiple watermarks. An AFIS system was used to quantitatively evaluate the matching performance of the MDCT-based watermarked fingerprint. The high fingerprint matching scores show that the MDCT approach is resilient to blocking artifacts. The quality of the extracted face and extracted text images was computed using two human visual system metrics and the results show that the image quality was high.

Designing a Framework for Network Security Protection

As the Internet continues to grow at a rapid pace as the primary medium for communications and commerce and as telecommunication networks and systems continue to expand their global reach, digital information has become the most popular and important information resource and our dependence upon the underlying cyber infrastructure has been increasing significantly. Unfortunately, as our dependency has grown, so has the threat to the cyber infrastructure from spammers, attackers and criminal enterprises. In this paper, we propose a new machine learning based network intrusion detection framework for cyber security. The detection process of the framework consists of two stages: model construction and intrusion detection. In the model construction stage, a semi-supervised machine learning algorithm is applied to a collected set of network audit data to generate a profile of normal network behavior and in the intrusion detection stage, input network events are analyzed and compared with the patterns gathered in the profile, and some of them are then flagged as anomalies should these events are sufficiently far from the expected normal behavior. The proposed framework is particularly applicable to the situations where there is only a small amount of labeled network training data available, which is very typical in real world network environments.

An Efficient and Optimized Multi Constrained Path Computation for Real Time Interactive Applications in Packet Switched Networks

Quality of Service (QoS) Routing aims to find path between source and destination satisfying the QoS requirements which efficiently using the network resources and underlying routing algorithm and to fmd low-cost paths that satisfy given QoS constraints. One of the key issues in providing end-to-end QoS guarantees in packet networks is determining feasible path that satisfies a number of QoS constraints. We present a Optimized Multi- Constrained Routing (OMCR) algorithm for the computation of constrained paths for QoS routing in computer networks. OMCR applies distance vector to construct a shortest path for each destination with reference to a given optimization metric, from which a set of feasible paths are derived at each node. OMCR is able to fmd feasible paths as well as optimize the utilization of network resources. OMCR operates with the hop-by-hop, connectionless routing model in IP Internet and does not create any loops while fmding the feasible paths. Nodes running OMCR not necessarily maintaining global view of network state such as topology, resource information and routing updates are sent only to neighboring nodes whereas its counterpart link-state routing method depend on complete network state for constrained path computation and that incurs excessive communication overhead.

Comparison between Higher-Order SVD and Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion

In digital signal processing it is important to approximate multi-dimensional data by the method called rank reduction, in which we reduce the rank of multi-dimensional data from higher to lower. For 2-dimennsional data, singular value decomposition (SVD) is one of the most known rank reduction techniques. Additional, outer product expansion expanded from SVD was proposed and implemented for multi-dimensional data, which has been widely applied to image processing and pattern recognition. However, the multi-dimensional outer product expansion has behavior of great computation complex and has not orthogonally between the expansion terms. Therefore we have proposed an alterative method, Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion short for 3-OTPE. 3-OTPE uses the power method instead of nonlinear optimization method for decreasing at computing time. At the same time the group of B. D. Lathauwer proposed Higher-Order SVD (HOSVD) that is also developed with SVD extensions for multi-dimensional data. 3-OTPE and HOSVD are similarly on the rank reduction of multi-dimensional data. Using these two methods we can obtain computation results respectively, some ones are the same while some ones are slight different. In this paper, we compare 3-OTPE to HOSVD in accuracy of calculation and computing time of resolution, and clarify the difference between these two methods.

Connectionist Approach to Generic Text Summarization

As the enormous amount of on-line text grows on the World-Wide Web, the development of methods for automatically summarizing this text becomes more important. The primary goal of this research is to create an efficient tool that is able to summarize large documents automatically. We propose an Evolving connectionist System that is adaptive, incremental learning and knowledge representation system that evolves its structure and functionality. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for Part of Speech disambiguation using a recurrent neural network, a paradigm capable of dealing with sequential data. We observed that connectionist approach to text summarization has a natural way of learning grammatical structures through experience. Experimental results show that our approach achieves acceptable performance.

CFD Analysis of Incompressible Turbulent Swirling Flow through Circle Grids Space Filling Plate

Circle grid space filling plate is a flow conditioner with a fractal pattern and used to eliminate turbulence originating from pipe fittings in experimental fluid flow applications. In this paper, steady state, incompressible, swirling turbulent flow through circle grid space filling plate has been studied. The solution and the analysis were carried out using finite volume CFD solver FLUENT 6.2. Three turbulence models were used in the numerical investigation and their results were compared with the pressure drop correlation of BS EN ISO 5167-2:2003. The turbulence models investigated here are the standard k-ε, realizable k-ε, and the Reynolds Stress Model (RSM). The results showed that the RSM model gave the best agreement with the ISO pressure drop correlation. The effects of circle grids space filling plate thickness and Reynolds number on the flow characteristics have been investigated as well.

Semi-Automatic Approach for Semantic Annotation

The third phase of web means semantic web requires many web pages which are annotated with metadata. Thus, a crucial question is where to acquire these metadata. In this paper we propose our approach, a semi-automatic method to annotate the texts of documents and web pages and employs with a quite comprehensive knowledge base to categorize instances with regard to ontology. The approach is evaluated against the manual annotations and one of the most popular annotation tools which works the same as our tool. The approach is implemented in .net framework and uses the WordNet for knowledge base, an annotation tool for the Semantic Web.