1624571
Non-uniform dependences partitioned by recurrence chains
Nonuniform distance loop dependences are a known obstacle to find parallel iterations. To find the outermost loop parallelism in these "irregular" loops, a novel method is presented based on recurrence chains. The scheme organizes nonuniformly dependent iterations into lexicographically ordered monotonic chains. While the initial and final iterations of monotonic chains form two parallel sets, the remaining iterations form an intermediate set that can be partitioned further. When there is only one pair of coupled array references, the nonuniform dependences are represented by a single recurrence equation. In that case, the chains in the intermediate set do not bifurcate and each can be executed as a WHILE loop. The independent and the initial iterations of monotonic dependence chains constitute the outermost parallelism. The proposed approach compares favorably with other treatments of nonuniform dependences in the literature. When there are multiple recurrence equations, a dataflow parallel execution can be scheduled using the technique to find maximum loop parallelism.
11507388
JPT: A Java Parallelization Tool
PVM is a succesfull programming environment for distributed computing in the languages C and Fortran. Recently several implementations of PVM for Java have been added, making PVM programming accessible to the Java community. 
 
With PVM for Java however, the user still needs to partition the problem, calculate the data partitioning and program the message passing and synchronization. In this paper, JPT is introduced, a parallelization tool which generates PVM code from a serial Java program. JPT automatically detects parallel loops and generates master and slave PVM programs.
5687277
A self-adaptive scheduling algorithm of on-demand broadcasts
In mobile wireless systems data on air can be accessed by a large number of mobile users. Many of these applications such as wireless internets and traffic information systems are pull-based, that is, they respond to on-demand user requests. In this paper, we study the scheduling problems of on-demand broadcast environments. Traditionally, the response time of the requests has been used as a performance measure. In this paper we consider the performance as the average cost of request composed of three kinds of costs—access time cost, tuning time cost, and cost of handling failure request. Our main contribution is a self-adaptive scheduling algorithm named LDFC, which computes the delay cost of data item as the priority for broadcast. It performs well compared with some previous algorithms in this context.
2820577
Localizing XML Documents through XSLT
Existing efforts on XML internationalization and localization have been focusing on the contents of XML documents instead of on the meta presentations such as tags and attributes. Although XML standard allows the use of unicode throughout a document including the meta level presentations, most tags and attributes of XML documents are still defined in English, which makes it difficult for native people to use. This paper presents a pure XSLT stylesheet to completely translate and localize XML documents into different natural languages. Furthermore, we also describe how this technique can be applied to translation problems in programming (e.g. C and Java) or documentation (e.g. LaTeX) languages when the program or the document can be converted to and from XML documents.
1921065
Partitioning loops with variable dependence distances
A new technique to parallelize loops with variable distance vectors is presented. The method extends previous methods in two ways. First, the present method makes it possible for array subscripts to be any linear combination of all loop indices. The solutions to the linear dependence equations established from such array subscripts are characterized by a pseudo distance matrix (PDM). Second, it allows us to exploit loop parallelism from the PDM by applying unimodular and partitioning transformations that preserve the lexicographical order of the dependent iterations. The algorithms to derive the PDM, to find a suitable loop transformation and to generate parallel code are described, showing that it is possible to parallelize a wider range of loops automatically.
4001661
Configuring common personal software: a requirements-driven approach
We investigate the personalization capabilities of common personal software systems. We use a typical e-mail client as an example of such a system, and examine the configuration screens it offers to its users. We discover that each configuration value reflects each of the ways with which the user goals can be satisfied. Thus, we construct a goal model in which alternative ways for satisfying high level goals are matched with alternative system configurations. This way, automatic configuration of the system by reasoning about the overlaying goal model can be achieved. We find that the vast majority of the configuration options that refer to system functionality can be configured using this method, facilitating thereby the personalization tasks for users with no technical background, and ensuring, at the same time, consistency and meaningfulness in the configuration result.
123116880
Shadow Graphs and 3D Texture Reconstruction
We present methods for recovering surface height fields such as geometric details of 3D textures by incorporating shadow constraints. We introduce shadow graphs which give a new graph-based representation for shadow constraints. It can be shown that the shadow graph alone is sufficient to solve the shape-from-shadow problem from a dense set of images. Shadow graphs provide a simpler and more systematic approach to represent and integrate shadow constraints from multiple images. To recover height fields from a sparse set of images, we propose a method for integrated shadow and shading constraints. Previous shape-from-shadow algorithms do not consider shading constraints while shape-from-shading usually assumes there is no shadow. Our method is based on collecting a set of images from a fixed viewpoint as a known light source changes its position. It first builds a shadow graph from shadow constraints from which an upper bound for each pixel can be derived if the height values of a small number of pixels are initialized correctly. Finally, a constrained optimization procedure is designed to make the results from shape-from-shading consistent with the height bounds derived from the shadow constraints. Our technique is demonstrated on both synthetic and real imagery.
40955801
Polarimetric SAR image segmentation using texture partitioning and statistical analysis
This paper presents a new technique for partitioning polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (POL-SAR) imagery into regions of homogeneous polarimetric backscattering properties. The method consists of two cascaded steps: an initial texture segmentation of one image derived from the POL-SAR data, and a polarimetric statistical region merging process that refines and modifies the initial segmentation. In the first stage, a morphological region-based image partitioning technique, the watershed algorithm, plays the key role. While in the second stage, the region adjacency graph and the segment dissimilarity measures derived from the Wishart model and the K distribution are applied. The overall segmentation algorithm has been tested using real 4-look POL-SAR imagery and sample results are provided in the paper. The main innovation of this work is the utilization of the K distribution in the segmentation process.
53223698
Validating the result of a Quantified Boolean Formula (QBF) solver: theory and practice
14491026
An iterative method for optimizing FIR filters synthesized using the two-stage frequency-response masking technique
An efficient technique for drastically reducing the number of multipliers and adders in narrow-transition band linear-phase finite-impulse response filters is to use one-stage or multistage frequency-response masking (FRM) approaches as originally introduced by Lim. It has been observed recently that for the one-stage FRM approach the filter complexity can be considerably reduced by iteratively optimizing the periodic filter and masking filters by properly sharing the frequency-response-shaping responsibilities in their respective frequency regions. In this paper, a similar iterative method is applied to the two-stage FRM structure to reduce the filter complexity even more. An example taken from the literature is included illustrating that the number of adders and multipliers for the resulting filters are less than 75 percent compared with the original designs.
15449420
Procurement of enterprise resource planning systems: experiences with some Hong Kong companies
Many cases of adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have been reported in the literature. Some of the adopted ERP systems fail to satisfy the customer's requirements, despite the high spending and substantial efforts that have been put into the adoption exercise. This is undoubtedly unsatisfactory. A way to avoid this problem is to adopt a well planned, managed, and controlled ERP procurement process. This paper describes our studies of three Chinese companies in Hong Kong which have adopted ERP systems. We report the experience of these companies, and discuss how the Chinese culture might have shaped the procurement practices in their ERP adoption exercises.