37350008
On Edge-Disjoint Spanning Trees in Hypercubes
In this note we give a construction for obtaining the maximum number of edge-disjoint spanning trees in a hypercube. The result has applications to multicast communication in wormhole-routed parallel computers.
736283
System support for pervasive applications
Pervasive computing provides an attractive vision for the future of computing. Computational power will be available everywhere. Mobile and stationary devices will dynamically connect and coordinate to seamlessly help people in accomplishing their tasks. For this vision to become a reality, developers must build applications that constantly adapt to a highly dynamic computing environment. To make the developers' task feasible, we present a system architecture for pervasive computing, called <i>one.world</i>. Our architecture provides an integrated and comprehensive framework for building pervasive applications. It includes services, such as discovery and migration, that help to build applications and directly simplify the task of coping with constant change. We describe our architecture and its programming model and reflect on our own and others' experiences with using it.
17316572
Aligning Ontologies through Formal Concept Analysis
Abstract.Ontologies have been developed for a number of knowledge domains as di-verseasclinicalterminology,photocamerapartsandmicro-arraygeneexpressiondata.However,aninnatecharacteristicofthedevelopmentofontologiesisthattheyareoftencreatedbyindependentgroupsofexpertise,whichgeneratedthenecessityofmergingandaligningontologiescoveringoverlappingdomains.Manyalgorithmsandtoolshavebeenproposedformergingofontologies,butmostofthemdisregardthestructuralpropertiesofthesourceontologies,focusingmostlyonsyntacticanalysis.This article focuses on an alignment method for ontologies based on Formal ConceptAnalysis,adataanalysistechniquefoundedonlatticetheory. 1 Introduction IntheheartofSemanticWebinitiative,proposedbyTimBerners-lee[2,3],liestheideaofmachineprocessableinformation,suchthatautomatedagents,orsoftbots,couldscanthewebspaceforinformationwithaspeciﬂcmeaning.Nevertheless,theunderstandingofmeaninginWebpagesdesignedforhumansisnotaneasytaskforthepresentgenerationofsoftbotsandontologiescangreatlyassistinthisendeavour.Manyinitiativesaroundtheworldhavecreatedontologies.Someoftheseontologieswerecreatedforhighleveldescriptionoftheworld,whereasothersrepresentveryspeciﬂcsub-jects,likebreastcancer,forinstance.Sometimes,ontologiesdevelopedindependentlymayhavesomeoverlaps.TheforementionedBreastCancerOntology,forexample,mayhavecommonconceptsandrelationswithaGeneOntology.Theseoverlapsareveryimpor-tantfromthepointofviewofinformationintegration,becausethecommonontologicalentitieshavetobeidentiﬂedbeforeinformationcanbesuccessfullyintegrated.Forthisreason,mergeandalignmentofontologieshavereceivedsigniﬂcantattentionfromtheresearchcommunityinthelastsixyears.Theﬂrstimportantissueinmerge/alignmentofontologiesistherelationsymbol-meaning.Ontologiesareconstitutedofsymbols(entities)andrelationsbetweensymbols.However,inSemiotics[18]symbolshaveassociatedmeaning,whichlinksthemtotheirreferent
3198534
Understanding Information Technology Complementarities Using an Augmented Endogenous Growth Framework
The complex relationships between information technology investments and organizational practices have been the focus of intensive research in recent years. The research focus appears to have shifted to investigating the effects of various organizational practices and their interactions with information technology capital. There also is emerging evidence of recent emphasis on organizational factors and a greater shift toward IT complementarities in which value addition is linked to combining complementary organizational practices with IT investments. In this paper we focus on the contributions of IT use and organizational practices and their interactions. We use firm-level data to extend previous studies in three ways: (1) by using a large sample covering 3,299 firms spanning 11 industries, (2) by focusing on a large number of organizational practices, and (3) by augmenting the endogenous growth accounting framework with a data mining technique. Our findings indicate that the set of interrelated organizational practices that complement positively to IT use is different from the set of practices hindering IT use. We conclude that IT complementary factors that positively affect productivity growth do not necessarily have a reverse effect when they are reduced or removed. It appears that some organizational factors have asymmetrical effects on growth.
31090559
The SSP: an example of high-assurance systems engineering
The SSP is a high assurance systems engineering effort spanning both hardware and software. Extensive design review, first principle design, n-version programming, program transformation, verification, and consistency checking are the techniques used to provide assurance in the correctness of the resulting system.
2738544
Estimating the global pagerank of web communities
Localized search engines are small-scale systems that index a particular community on the web. They offer several benefits over their large-scale counterparts in that they are relatively inexpensive to build, and can provide more precise and complete search capability over their relevant domains. One disadvantage such systems have over large-scale search engines is the lack of global PageRank values. Such information is needed to assess the value of pages in the localized search domain within the context of the web as a whole. In this paper, we present well-motivated algorithms to estimate the global PageRank values of a local domain. The algorithms are all highly scalable in that, given a local domain of size n, they use O(n) resources that include computation time, bandwidth, and storage. We test our methods across a variety of localized domains, including site-specific domains and topic-specific domains. We demonstrate that by crawling as few as n or 2n additional pages, our methods can give excellent global PageRank estimates.
62531827
Robust detection of people in thermal imagery
We present a new contour analysis technique to detect people in thermal imagery. Background-subtraction is first used to identify local regions-of-interest. Gradient information within each region is then combined into a contour saliency map. To extract contour fragments, a watershed-based selection algorithm is used. A path-constrained A* search is employed to complete any broken contours, from which silhouettes are formed. Results using thermal video sequences demonstrate the capability of the approach to robustly detect people across a wider range of environmental conditions than is possible with standard approaches.