Showing papers on "Component (UML) published in 2013"

Low-rank matrix completion using alternating minimization

Abstract: Alternating minimization represents a widely applicable and empirically successful approach for finding low-rank matrices that best fit the given data. For example, for the problem of low-rank matrix completion, this method is believed to be one of the most accurate and efficient, and formed a major component of the winning entry in the Netflix Challenge [17].In the alternating minimization approach, the low-rank target matrix is written in a bi-linear form, i.e. X = UV†; the algorithm then alternates between finding the best U and the best V. Typically, each alternating step in isolation is convex and tractable. However the overall problem becomes non-convex and is prone to local minima. In fact, there has been almost no theoretical understanding of when this approach yields a good result.In this paper we present one of the first theoretical analyses of the performance of alternating minimization for matrix completion, and the related problem of matrix sensing. For both these problems, celebrated recent results have shown that they become well-posed and tractable once certain (now standard) conditions are imposed on the problem. We show that alternating minimization also succeeds under similar conditions. Moreover, compared to existing results, our paper shows that alternating minimization guarantees faster (in particular, geometric) convergence to the true matrix, while allowing a significantly simpler analysis.

Systems and methods for performing replication copy storage operations

Abstract: A system and method are provided for performing storage operations relating to a first secondary copy of electronic data. A storage policy or storage preferences may dictate that a replication copy should be used in storage operations performed to a particular client, sub-client, data, media or other item. Based on the storage policy, when a new client, sub-client, data, media or other item is received, a media agent determines whether there is a replication copy of the item. In the absence of a replication copy, one may be created. The replication copy may be provided by a third party application, or created by the client or a storage management system component. Information regarding the replication copy and its corresponding first secondary copy may be stored in a database. To optimize use of system resources, storage operations relating to the first secondary copy may be performed using the replication copy instead of the first secondary copy.

Recent advances in flexible sensors for wearable and implantable devices

Abstract: Flexible devices are emerging as important applications for future display, robotics, in vitro diagnostics, advanced therapies, and energy harvesting. In this review, we provide an overview of recent achievements in flexible mechanical and electrical sensing devices, focusing on the properties and functions of polymeric layers. In the order of historical development, sensing platforms are classified into four types: electronic skins for robotics and medical applications, wearable devices for in vitro diagnostics, implantable devices for human organs or tissues for surgical applications, and advanced sensing devices with additional features such as transparency, self-power, and self-healing. In all of these examples, a polymer layer is used as a versatile component including a flexible structural support and a functional material to generate, transmit, and process mechanical and electrical inputs in various ways. We briefly discuss some outlooks and future challenges toward the next steps for flexible devices. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Appl. Polym. Sci. 130: 1429–1441, 2013

Systems and Methods for Cleaning a Minimally Invasive Instrument

Abstract: An anatomical probe system comprises an elongated flexible body and an operational component extending within a channel of the flexible body. The system also comprises a support member at a distal end of the elongated flexible body. The support member includes a fluid director adapted to direct a fluid from the channel toward the operational component. The fluid may be automatically directed towards the operational component in response to detecting a material obstruction of an image.

Anxiety and Cognitive Processing of Instruction

Abstract: : This article examines recent research on anxiety, in terms of a research model proposed after reviewing the effects of anxiety on learning from instructions. The model specifies the points at which anxiety on learning can be expected to affect learning. It is assumed that since learning is a process that is essentially cognitively mediated, anxiety can affect learning only indirectly, by affecting the cognitive process mediating learning at various stages. The model separates the instructional process into the three classic information-processing components: input, processing, and output. The input component denotes presentation of instruction to students, processing represents all of the operations students use to encode, organize, and store input, and output designates student performance on any evaluative instrument after instruction. It was hypothesized that there are three points at which anxiety could affect learning from instructions most directly: in preprocessing, during processing, and after processing, but just before output.

Mobile device case with interchangeable display

Abstract: A mobile device case system includes a first case system component usable to at least partially enclose a mobile device. A second case system component is attachable to the first case component (e.g., mechanically and/or electronically) to provide additional features and functionality such as, for example, an expansion battery and/or an external display. The second case system component can be replaced with other system components to, for example, change the display, replace the battery, or provide a decorative cover for the external surface of the case system.

3-Sweep: extracting editable objects from a single photo

Abstract: We introduce an interactive technique for manipulating simple 3D shapes based on extracting them from a single photograph. Such extraction requires understanding of the components of the shape, their projections, and relations. These simple cognitive tasks for humans are particularly difficult for automatic algorithms. Thus, our approach combines the cognitive abilities of humans with the computational accuracy of the machine to solve this problem. Our technique provides the user the means to quickly create editable 3D parts---human assistance implicitly segments a complex object into its components, and positions them in space. In our interface, three strokes are used to generate a 3D component that snaps to the shape's outline in the photograph, where each stroke defines one dimension of the component. The computer reshapes the component to fit the image of the object in the photograph as well as to satisfy various inferred geometric constraints imposed by its global 3D structure. We show that with this intelligent interactive modeling tool, the daunting task of object extraction is made simple. Once the 3D object has been extracted, it can be quickly edited and placed back into photos or 3D scenes, permitting object-driven photo editing tasks which are impossible to perform in image-space. We show several examples and present a user study illustrating the usefulness of our technique.

A simulation-based optimization framework for urban transportation problems

Abstract: This paper proposes a simulation-based optimization (SO) method that enables the efficient use of complex stochastic urban traffic simulators to address various transportation problems. It presents a metamodel that integrates information from a simulator with an analytical queueing network model. The proposed metamodel combines a general-purpose component (a quadratic polynomial), which provides a detailed local approximation, with a physical component (the analytical queueing network model), which provides tractable analytical and global information. This combination leads to an SO framework that is computationally efficient and suitable for complex problems with very tight computational budgets. We integrate this metamodel within a derivative-free trust region algorithm. We evaluate the performance of this method considering a traffic signal control problem for the Swiss city of Lausanne, different demand scenarios, and tight computational budgets. The method leads to well-performing signal plans. It le...

Security challenges , issues and their solutions for vanet

Abstract: Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are the promising approach to provide safety and other applications to the drivers as well as passengers. It becomes a key component of the intelligent transport system. A lot of works have been done towards it but security in VANET got less attention. In this article, we have discussed about the VANET and its technical and security challenges. We have also discussed some major attacks and solutions that can be implemented against these attacks. We have compared the solution using different parameters. Lastly we have discussed the mechanisms that are used in the solutions.

The Cyber Security Modeling Language: A Tool for Assessing the Vulnerability of Enterprise System Architectures

Abstract: The cyber security modeling language (CySeMoL) is a modeling language for enterprise-level system architectures coupled to a probabilistic inference engine. If the computer systems of an enterprise are modeled with CySeMoL, this inference engine can assess the probability that attacks on the systems will succeed. The theory used for the attack-probability calculations in CySeMoL is a compilation of research results on a number of security domains and covers a range of attacks and countermeasures. The theory has previously been validated on a component level. In this paper, the theory is also validated on a system level. A test indicates that the reasonableness and correctness of CySeMoL assessments compare with the reasonableness and correctness of the assessments of a security professional. CySeMoL's utility has been tested in case studies.

Reducing signal loss in cables

Abstract: Cables capable of high-speed data transmission and having a low insertion loss. Examples may mitigate the effect of the suckout component of insertion loss by providing cables that eliminated, shift, or reduce the suckout. Examples may eliminate, or at least partially eliminate, the suckout component by providing a continuous return path. Others may shift the frequency of the suckout component to a high frequency where it no longer interferes or significantly attenuates signals being conveyed by the cable. Still others may reduce or control the magnitude of the suckout component.

The BRICS component model: a model-based development paradigm for complex robotics software systems

Abstract: Because robotic systems get more complex all the time, developers around the world have, during the last decade, created component-based software frameworks (Orocos, Open-RTM, ROS, OPRoS, SmartSoft) to support the development and reuse of "large grained" pieces of robotics software. This paper introduces the BRICS Component Model (BCM) to provide robotics developers with a set of guidelines, metamodels and tools for structuring as much as possible the development of, both, individual components and component-based architectures, using one or more of the aforementioned software frameworks at the same time, without introducing any framework- or application-specific details. The BCM is built upon two complementary paradigms: the "5Cs" (separation of concerns between the development aspects of Computation, Communication, Coordination, Configuration and Composition) and the meta-modeling approach from Model-Driven Engineering.

DEECO: an ensemble-based component system

Abstract: The recent increase in the ubiquity and connectivity of computing devices allows forming large-scale distributed systems that respond to and influence activities in their environment. Engineering of such systems is very complex because of their inherent dynamicity, open-endedness, and autonomicity. In this paper we propose a new class of component systems (Ensemble-Based Component Systems - EBCS) which bind autonomic components with cyclic execution via dynamic component ensembles controlling data exchange. EBCS combine the key ideas of agents, ensemble-oriented systems, and control systems into software engineering concepts based on autonomic components. In particular, we present an instantiation of EBCS - the DEECo component model. In addition to DEECo main concepts, we also describe its computation model and mapping to Java. Lastly, we outline the basic principles of the EBCS/DEECo development process.

Social Role Discovery in Human Events

Abstract: We deal with the problem of recognizing social roles played by people in an event. Social roles are governed by human interactions, and form a fundamental component of human event description. We focus on a weakly supervised setting, where we are provided different videos belonging to an event class, without training role labels. Since social roles are described by the interaction between people in an event, we propose a Conditional Random Field to model the inter-role interactions, along with person specific social descriptors. We develop tractable variational inference to simultaneously infer model weights, as well as role assignment to all people in the videos. We also present a novel YouTube social roles dataset with ground truth role annotations, and introduce annotations on a subset of videos from the TRECVID-MED11 [1] event kits for evaluation purposes. The performance of the model is compared against different baseline methods on these datasets.

OCRA: a tool for checking the refinement of temporal contracts

Abstract: Contract-based design enriches a component model with properties structured in pairs of assumptions and guarantees. These properties are expressed in term of the variables at the interface of the components, and specify how a component interacts with its environment: the assumption is a property that must be satisfied by the environment of the component, while the guarantee is a property that the component must satisfy in response. Contract-based design has been recently proposed in many methodologies for taming the complexity of embedded systems. In fact, contract-based design enables stepwise refinement, compositional verification, and reuse of components. However, only few tools exist to support the formal verification underlying these methods. OCRA (Othello Contracts Refinement Analysis) is a new tool that provides means for checking the refinement of contracts specified in a linear-time temporal logic. The specification language allows to express discrete as well as metric real-time constraints. The underlying reasoning engine allows checking if the contract refinement is correct. OCRA has been used in different projects and integrated in CASE tools.

Stochastic ordering properties for systems with dependent identically distributed components

Abstract: In this paper, we obtain ordering properties for coherent systems with possibly dependent identically distributed components. These results are based on a representation of the system reliability function as a distorted function of the common component reliability function. So, the results included in this paper can also be applied to general distorted distributions. The main advantage of these results is that they are distribution-free with respect to the common component distribution. Moreover, they can be applied to systems with component lifetimes having a non-exchangeable joint distribution. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Component-Based Representation in Automated Face Recognition

Abstract: This paper presents a framework for component-based face alignment and representation that demonstrates improvements in matching performance over the more common holistic approach to face alignment and representation. This work is motivated by recent evidence from the cognitive science community demonstrating the efficacy of component-based facial representations. The component-based framework presented in this paper consists of the following major steps: 1) landmark extraction using Active Shape Models (ASM), 2) alignment and cropping of components using Procrustes Analysis, 3) representation of components with Multiscale Local Binary Patterns (MLBP), 4) per-component measurement of facial similarity, and 5) fusion of per-component similarities. We demonstrate on three public datasets and an operational dataset consisting of face images of 8000 subjects, that the proposed component-based representation provides higher recognition accuracies over holistic-based representations. Additionally, we show that the proposed component-based representations: 1) are more robust to changes in facial pose, and 2) improve recognition accuracy on occluded face images in forensic scenarios.

The land surface model component of ACCESS: description and impact on the simulated surface climatology

Abstract: The land surface component of the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS) is one difference between the two versions of ACCESS used to run simulations for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5). The Met Office Surface Exchange Scheme (MOSES) and the Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE) model are described and compared. The impact on the simulated present day land surface climatology is assessed, in both atmosphere only and coupled model cases. Analysis is focused on seasonal mean precipitation and screen-level temperature, both globally and for Australia. Many of the biases from observations are common across both ACCESS versions and both atmosphere only and coupled cases. Where the simulations from the two versions differ, the choice of land surface model is often only a small contributor with changes to the cloud simulation also important. Differences that can be traced to the land surface model include warm biases with CABLE due to underestimation of surface albedo, better timing of northern hemisphere snowmelt and smaller seasonal and diurnal temperature ranges with CABLE than MOSES.

On board vehicle installation supervisor

Abstract: The present disclosure describes a microprocessor executable installation supervisor operable to determine, for a selected computational component to be installed in the vehicle, whether the selected computational component satisfies a requirement and/or restriction associated with the selected computational component, when installed, and, when the selected computational component can satisfy the requirement and/or restriction, create a set of data structures in the selected computational component and/or a computer readable medium on board the vehicle to bind the selected computational component to the vehicle.

Managing non-functional uncertainty via model-driven adaptivity

Abstract: Modern software systems are often characterized by uncertainty and changes in the environment in which they are embedded. Hence, they must be designed as adaptive systems. We propose a framework that supports adaptation to non-functional manifestations of uncertainty. Our framework allows engineers to derive, from an initial model of the system, a finite state automaton augmented with probabilities. The system is then executed by an interpreter that navigates the automaton and invokes the component implementations associated to the states it traverses. The interpreter adapts the execution by choosing among alternative possible paths of the automaton in order to maximize the system's ability to meet its non-functional requirements. To demonstrate the adaptation capabilities of the proposed approach we implemented an adaptive application inspired by an existing worldwide distributed mobile application and we discussed several adaptation scenarios.

SmartSynth: synthesizing smartphone automation scripts from natural language

Abstract: This paper presents SmartSynth, a novel end-to-end programming system for synthesizing smartphone automation scripts from natural language descriptions. Our approach is unique in two key aspects. First, it involves a carefully designed domain-specific language that incorporates standard constructs from smartphone programming platforms to balance its expressivity and the ability to synthesize scripts from natural language. Second, our synthesis algorithm integrates techniques from two research areas: (1) It infers the set of components and their partial dataflow relations from the natural language description using techniques from the Natural Language Processing community; and (2) It uses techniques from the Program Synthesis community to infer missing dataflow relations via type-based synthesis and constructs scripts in a process akin to reverse parsing. SmartSynth also performs conversational interactions with the user when multiple top-ranked scripts exist or it cannot map part of the description to any component. Evaluated on 50 tasks collected from smartphone help forums, our system produces the intended scripts in real time for over 90% of the 640 natural language descriptions obtained from a user study for those tasks. SmartSynth has also been adapted to TouchDevelop, an end user-targeted programming environment on mobile platforms, with very promising results (see http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~su/smartsynth.mp4 for a video demo). We believe that SmartSynth is a step toward fully personalized use of smartphones' increasingly rich functionalities.

V-edge: fast self-constructive power modeling of smartphones based on battery voltage dynamics

Abstract: System power models are important for power management and optimization on smartphones. However, existing approaches for power modeling have several limitations. Some require external power meters, which is not convenient for people to use. Other approaches either rely on the battery current sensing capability, which is not available on many smartphones, or take a long time to generate the power model. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new way of generating power models from battery voltage dynamics, called V-edge. V-edge is self-constructive and does not require current-sensing. Most importantly, it is fast in model building. Our implementation supports both component level power models and per-application energy accounting. Evaluation results using various benchmarks and applications show that the V-edge approach achieves high power modeling accuracy, and is two orders of magnitude faster than existing self-modeling approaches requiring no current-sensing.

The Social Component of Information Systems—How Sociability Contributes to Technology Acceptance

Abstract: Research Article Iris Junglas Florida State University iris.junglas@gmail.com Lakshmi Goel University of North Florida l.goel@unf.edu Chon Abraham College of William and Mary chon.abraham@mason.wm.edu Blake Ives University of Houston bives@mac.com The adoption of information systems is often explained in terms of usefulness and ease of use. Lately, researchers have begun to recognize that a hedonic streak in human beings provides a further contributing factor in the adoption and acceptance of information systems. Embedded in this streak is a broader social aspect that incorporates not only the solitary, individual pleasure one gets from using the system, but also a pleasure that one gets from interacting and socializing with others through the system. This becomes particularly evident in virtual environments that support high levels of interaction with others and with artifacts embedded in an immersive context. By drawing on IS theories of technology acceptance and IS success, and on theories of social interaction from evolutionary psychology, activity theory, situated action, and distributed cognition, we test the construct of sociability and its antecedents in Second Life—a popular virtual environment. Our results support that, in addition to an information and system component, a social component contributes to IS usage.

System and method for heterogeneous carrier aggregation

Abstract: Techniques for aggregating heterogeneous carriers in a wireless communication system are disclosed. A mobile device may receive a configuration for aggregating a plurality of component carriers including one or more cellular carriers and a wireless local area network (WLAN) carrier. The one or more cellular carriers may include LTE carriers, and aggregation may be performed at a sub-IP protocol layer of operation. In one aspect, protocol entities may be modified to perform quality of service determinations, carrier selection, traffic mapping, or the like, in view of the different capabilities and characteristics of the heterogeneous carriers in the carrier aggregation configuration.

Operational performance assessment of additive manufacturing

Abstract: A method for assessment of operational performance of a 3D manufacturing apparatus is provided. Images are obtained, in real-time during a 3D polymer printing build process in which at least one structure is built by the 3D manufacturing apparatus, the images being of an area of a build platform on which the at least one structure is built. The obtained images are evaluating, and it is determined, based on the evaluating, whether an operational flaw with the 3D manufacturing apparatus has occurred. Operational flaws include errors in the operation of the 3D manufacturing apparatus and/or component thereof, as evidenced by, for instance, distortions or other errors in the structure(s) being built and/or materials being used.