Proceedings of the 2011 2nd International Congress on Computer Applications and Computational Science

This paper describes a microrobotic gripper made from an ionic polymer metal composite (IPMC) material. The grasping capabilities of this device are described theoretically, predicting a 1.22 mN force when grasping a rigid object. Experimental results of this grasping are shown, corroborating the expected force with a measurement of 1.2 mN. In addition, a small modification to the finger, i.e., cutting one of the finger surfaces into two separate pieces allows the device to function as both a sensor and actuator. The microfinger’s sensing capability is described through its application as a force sensor.

Under the premise of predicting the dynamic obstacles, a UAV path planning strategy of variable rolling window combined with potential flows is proposed. By using an autoregressive model, the expression of prediction for dynamic obstacles between discrete sampling points is given. The rolling window is designed to a triangle, also with adaptive function based on speed and angle of incidence of the dynamic obstacles. Potential flows method is used in the rolling windows to plan the obstacle avoidance route. At last the whole route is smoothed to satisfy the UAV constraints of maximum turning angle. The problem solution implementation is described along with several simulation results demonstrating the effectiveness of the method.

In conformal radiotherapy, the final position should be confirmed with a portal radiograph showing the relationship of the patient to the beam line. Historically, this radiograph is verified by manual comparison with a reconstructed radiograph of the expected patient position. In this paper, we discuss a new automatic verification system developed for the proton therapy facility at iThemba LABS1.

This paper discusses a control method of a tele-operation system for an underwater manipulator robot. Since fluid drag affects the dynamics of the underwater manipulator and degrades the accuracy of the control, it is necessary to decrease the influence of water. Generally, in order to compensate the fluid drag, theoretical approaches are used, but the applications are restricted by the simple modeling of the robot. Instead, we adopt a method to compensate the drag using a real-time fluid simulation. By using the simulation, the method can be applied to a robot with a complicated shape. For the method, we develop a real-time fluid simulator using smoothed particle hydrodynamics. The simulator calculates the fluid drag with the position of the underwater manipulator, and the drag is fed back to the controller to eliminate the real fluid drag. Finally, experiments have been performed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper designs a new type of transport-double foot bionic electric mobile platform based on MATLAB. With the simulation software of virtual reality toolbox, video acquisition Toolbox, GUI and SIMULINK to complete the whole simulation, a 3D lower limb model to complete the controlling simulation is built and driven; By GUI, the movement of lower limbs through a camera is got, the changed angle data of hip joints, knee joints and ankle joints in movement is extracted, the storage of the lower limbs move data is completed.

The objective of this research is aimed to design and implement a Wearable Hybrid Assisted Lower Limb Orthosis (HALLO), which could provide up to 10% of knee torque support. The proposed device adopted a specially designed M-shaped flexible mechanism to store the potential energy due to different human body gestures, such as stand-to-sit, a DC motor would act as a variable damper to control the releasing rate of potential energy. To provide a proper trajectory tracking, a discrete-time output feedback sliding-mode controller design [7] is adopted to perform efficient tracking. Finally, wearing the device to perform a variety of basic movements is demonstrated through experiments.

The purpose of this paper is to solve the problem of matching two 3D point sets quickly in the field of robot vision. Moravec vertical interest operator is used to extract vertical edge feature of objects. The method of the sum squared difference (SSD) is used to match the feature points and obtain the 3D point sets which contain vertical line feature. Find the transformation relation of rotation and translation of corresponding straight lines in two 3D point sets according to the projection point of vertical line projected into x-y plane. Depending on the transformation relation, it can match two 3D point sets. The experiment results illustrate that this method has good exactness and robustness.

Due to the shortage of ignoring the balance between the mission success rate and the executive ability of the whole system in the common contract net models, a threshold-limited load balance strategy for awarding is proposed. The mathematical model of negotiation process based on improved contract net is established. The conceptual model of the multi-robot system based on improved contract net is implemented by Colored Petri Nets (CPN), and its correctness and dynamic properties such as liveness property, home property and fairness property are validated by using CPN Tools. Simulation results show that this method can effectively improve the performance, and ensure the overall system load balance.

Reinforcement learning is a good method for multi-robot systems to handle tasks in unknown environments or with obscure models. MAXQ is a hierarchical reinforcement learning algorithm, which is limited by some inherent problems. In addition, much research has focused on the completion of the task, rather than the ability to deal with new tasks. In this paper, an improved MAXQ approach is adopted to tune the parameters of the cooperation rules. The proposed scheme is applied to target searching tasks by multi-robots. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme.

The specific energy, defined as the energy consumption to complete the excavation of unit volume of the soil, can well describe the working efficiency of a shield machine. An identification model of the specific energy is established in this paper by introducing the mechanical analysis of the shield excavating process into the nonlinear multiple regression of the on-site data. The mechanical analysis of the shield-soil system helps to decouple the nonlinear multi-parameter problem and the regression process is conducted based on a group of on-site data of subway project in China. Fairly good consistency between the model results and the on-site recorded datum can be achieved. This work provides a useful tool for the analysis of the energy consumption of shield machines.

University financial data can be used to analyze university operational status and guide decision-making. In order to browse financial data from multiple dimensions, we proposed a financial analyzer based on the MDX (multidimensional expression) technology, realized querying financial data from multiple dimensions and the function of data analysis, then test the query performance of the analyzer and compared with SQL language in operation efficiency and complexity.

This paper establishes a relatively complete theoretical framework, with multi-disciplinary perspective. Intelligence-led counterterrorism framework based on data mining can be divided into four function modules: data storage, data pretreatment, data analysis and data visualization processor. The data mining process of counterterrorism’s information analysis includes problem identification of counterterrorism, data preparation, data mining, model assessment and knowledge representation. Bayesian Belief Network is a very useful tool for data mining in intelligence-led counterterrorism.

Terrorists more or less will leave the corresponding clues in premeditated, planning and implementing crime. However, it is harder than looking for a needle in a bottle of hay to use the existing technology and method to extract the antiterrorist information from the clues! Because this kind of terrorism information which is covered in the magnitude of the general information is indefinite and unknown in time series and space. The traditional database retrieval system cannot respond to this inquiry. Artificial identification, mutatis mutandis, monitoring technology and the implementation of known goal detection all need lots of manpower, and it is powerless to search unknown target in voluminous information. But the Data Mining can do!

In keywords extraction approach, TF-IDF algorithm was commonly used as a formula for calculating the weighting of keywords, the algorithm was relatively simple and had higher precision and recall rate, but it exits many defects. This article based on the traditional TF-IDF formula to calculation weighting, put forward improvement TF-IDF formula based on the weighting of the location and the keyword length, through the experimental result inspects show that the proposed method outperforms TF-IDF in precision and recall.

In this paper a scientometric study on the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 1980-2010 is presented. Using the full records from the Thomson Reuters (ISI) Web of Science (WoS), the journal’s bibliometric measures are examined in terms of growth of literature, authorship characteristics, country of origin, distribution of articles’ citations and references, and finally graph network of the research collaborations. A keyword occurrence analysis was carried out on the articles’ title and the results used to create TagClouds showing perceptually their research importance. Furthermore, these TagClouds were created for the full 3 decades, shorter 5-year periods and most recent years, providing insights into potential research trends and help to relate them to major historic contributions in software engineering.

In order to overcome the shortcomings of the incomprehensive of traditional automatic summarization, this paper proposes the automatic multi-document summarization extraction method based on user’s query for web pages. The key technology in our method is the sentence importance weight calculation, which takes varieties of impact factors into account to score the candidate sentence importance weight in the retrieval results. These impact factors include the segmentation results weight, characteristics of sentence structure, length of sentence and the mutual information of search terms. On the basis of our method, this paper gives a description of the automatic summarization process. Then, the comparative experimental results show that our method is more effective on the Precision and Recall than others in abstract extraction.

Algorithms for top-k query are widely used in massive data query, which return k most important objects based on aggregate functions. The classical Threshold Algorithm (TA) is one of the most famous algorithms for top-k query. It requires sequential and random accesses to the lists. The time cost of TA will be very high when data is massive. This paper proposes a new algorithm TABE (Top-k Algorithm Based on Extraction) to minimize the query time. TABE first extracts the objects which have higher ranking on each attribute, and then execute the Threshold Algorithm on these objects. Test results show that TABE has high accuracy to meet the general query requirements, and the experimental results of comparing TABE with NRA (No Random Accesses) show that our proposed algorithm TABE can largely reduce the query time.

In order to overcome the shortcomings of the incomprehensive of traditional keyword extraction, this paper proposes a keyword extraction based on multi-feature fusion for Chinese web pages. First, the part-of-speech and the position information of candidate words are combined in the improved TF-IDF algorithm. Second, the mutual information of the web title is taken into account to calculate the weight of candidate words. Third, the multi-feature fusion technology is formed by the linear combination of the improved TF-IDF method and mutual information. Thus, our method is proposed based on this multi-feature fusion technology for keyword extraction. Comparative experiments show that extracting keywords generated by our method has higher precision and recall compared with the classical TF-IDF algorithm.

Orientation calculation of words is the basis of orientation calculation on the large-scale text. Except some words, most of these word orientations are complex, and should be analysis in specific domain. The traditional algorithm of word orientation calculation relies mainly on the standard word set. The word orientation is calculated according to its semantic distance between words in the standard set. In this paper, a dynamic standard word set is build based on domain and part of speech information. The word orientation is calculated based on the corresponding standard set according to its domain and part of speech. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm is reasonable. The domain and part of speech is useful for the orientation calculation.

In this paper, we propose a quad-tree based distributed multi-dimensional data index (QDBI) for efficient data management and query processing in P2P system. In which, each peer use a MX-CIF quad-tree to generate index items of their high-dimensional data, and index items are organized into one dimensional ring structure, super-peers dynamically join the ring, the routing connections among super-peers are created, which are similar to Chord ring, thus forms a semantics-based structured super-peer network, and an efficient KNN query processing algorithm is proposed for high-dimensional data objects based on the index structure. Experiments show that the index structure and the KNN query algorithm have well search performance and scalability.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a method for the holistic optimization of organizational resources, including enterprise strategic directions, infrastructures, and facilities of information technology. It is effective to manage enterprise resources and decision-making with documentation of the whole of enterprises. However, EA provides no notation and methodology for the documentation; it leaves the notation to discretion of each enterprise. Moreover, EA requires various artifacts for the management. These trigger off difficulty of creation and maintenance of the documentation. Therefore, we propose formal semantics of the artifacts which is not swayed by each notation and does not obstruct unfettered selection of the modeling methodology. The semantics can provide rigorous traceability of the artifacts for any notation, thus efficiency of the maintenance will improve at a tremendous rate.

In allusion to the composition of radar signal simulation test system (RSSTS) for the control of multiple instruments based on PC, this paper, based on the construction of RSSTS, proposed the principle for the achievement of instrument driver library(IDL) and instrument softpanel(ISP), and presented a PC-based test system(PCBTS) that adopted a distributed approach for integrating a variety of instrument software; in addition, developed IDL, ISP, test report modules and various instrument integration software. Finally, an experiment based on aforesaid principles were selected to conduct a comprehensive evaluation for the PCBTS, and the results showed that this test system could fully control the physical test system(PTS) in a PC; could control the PTS to achieve a variety of radar signal simulations and outputs; and could support the report feature of test results.

Investment is one activity that is quite tricky. Investment activity should be based on accurate calculations. Government as the regulator of investment activity within a country, can build an e-Government services in the form of a Decision Support System (DSS) to assist the investment decision-making. Investment activity in one sector can influence other sectors. One model that can be used to see the influence is Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model. Some softwares has been available to perform complex CGE calculations. However, these softwares are generally not easy to use and not attractive. This paper presents the results of research in creating a system called Decision Support System for Agribusiness Investment (DSSAI). This system can perform complex CGE calculations, easy to use and has an attractive interface. These systems can be used as a benchmark for the user to determine whether he can invest in one of agribusiness sector or not. Users can perform a simulation by changing one variable, then see the effect on some sectors in agribusiness. The results of the DSSAI simulation are suitable with the opinion and the experience of economic experts, especially with the expert in agribusiness investment.

Web applications security testing is becoming a highly challenging task. A number of approaches have been proposed to deal with such a challenge. However, up to date criteria that could be used to aid practitioners in selecting appropriate approaches suitable for their particular effort do not exist. In this paper we present a set of attributes to serve as criteria for classifying and comparing these approaches and provide such aid to practitioners. The set of attributes is also meant to guide researchers interested in proposing new security testing approaches. The paper discusses a number of representative approaches against the criteria.

The size of open source software (OSS) projects has grown to the scale of an entire platform. Complete coverage of the platform facilitates and increases the opportunity for a new paradigm to drive an OSS project, as the strategic direction of an IT company. The author presents case studies of enterprise involvement in OSS projects, such as MySQL, Eclipse, Android and Chrome OS. Then, the author examines the aspects that drive enterprise involvement in OSS. The author proposes a four-stage transition model from shifts of focus in regard to enterprise involvement in OSS. The author discusses the viewpoint of the strategic evolution of OSS from lessons learned in the past.

Decision makers are key personnel working most of the time on critical duties. Information is the key to their success, and having the correct and up-to-date information is not an easy task; teamwork, where multiple parties have to work together is required. Though information is available everywhere in every action one may do during his/her daily life it has not yet been harvested as it should. Information in our approach is collected using a mobile device. Mobile devices are 90% of the time idle sitting in the pocket of its holder waiting for a call to take place or an SMS to be received. This 90% of the time is where this work focuses: monitoring GSM, Wi-Fi, GPS data and building a data warehouse. The data warehouse is the main source of information for decision makers, to succeed better in their daily tasks.

In the paper, a problem of cost optimization of Wide Area Network (WAN) is considered. For solving this problem two algorithms have been deigned and implemented: a heuristic algorithm called Marian and meta-heuristic algorithm called Kaflok. The paper presents the results of evaluation of these algorithms based on complex simulation experiments made using the designed experimentation system implemented in Java environment. The influence of distinct problem parameters on the total cost of WAN design and the comparison of efficiency of the algorithms are analyzed and discussed.

Schema integration is the activity of providing a unified representation of multiple data sources. The core problems in schema integration are: schema matching and schema merging. There are uncertain problems in schema matching and schema merging. To solve the uncertain problems of relational schema integration, Domain Knowledge Application Model (DKAM) is proposed as a component of Uncertain Relational Schema Integration Model (URSIM). An autonomic computing approach is adopted in DKAM. Semantic integration approach and D-S evidence combination approach are applied in URSIM. A new method is proposed to calculate reliability of global integrated schema in the paper. Experimental results show that URSIM is feasible and DKAM is valuable and advanced. In contrast with current methods for schema integration with uncertainty, URSIM is efficient and the time complexity is reduced.

This paper presents a new multi-pose face recognition approach using fusion of scale invariant features (FSIF). The FSIF is a face descriptor representing 3D face images features which is created by fusing some scale invariant features extracted by scale invariant features transforms (SIFT) from several different poses of 2D face images. The main aim of this method is to avoid using 3D scanner for estimating any pose variations of a face image but it still have reasonable achievement compare to 3D-based face recognition method for multi-pose face recognition. The experimental results show the proposed method is sufficiently to overcame large face variability due to face pose variations.

If a university building’s performance fails to conform to what is required or anticipated, the engineer-of-record for the facility can be charged with negligence and may bear liability for damages arising from that failure. An engineer’s negligence is assessed by arranging the engineer’s actions relative to the standard maintenance cost and budget of the profession. This paper briefly describes the meaning and application of the standard of maintenance costs and budgets, and addresses the meaning of maintenance cost and budgeting with regard to engineering. To examine this issue, this paper presents a case study on the operation maintenance phase of 4 university buildings on the campus of National Taiwan University. Using historical data on maintenance and repair over a 42-year period, a cost prediction model using the life-cycle cost (LCC) was determined using three different methods: (1) simple linear regression (SLR); (2) multiple regression (MR); and finally (3) a back propagation artificial neural network (BPN). The research results showed that the BPN model had keen estimation ability. This paper implemented the BPN model in a case study to analyze the problems of maintenance costs and budgeting for university buildings. The paper helps to set a legitimate standard for arranging repair maintenance costs, and proposes a plan and standard for the repair maintenance strategy of structures.

In this paper we propose a functional treatment of bilingual alignment together with some new mathematical functions to describe sentential semantics transparently. We propose that every sentence is composed of two categories: kernel sentence and meta-sentence. Meta-sentence can be understood as a sentence structuring operator, while kernel sentence is a simple structured, mono-predicate sentence. Kernel sentence has obvious translation of canonical form, while meta-sentence represents logical-semantic structure of sentence which takes kernel sentence(s) as its dominating variable(s). From meta-sentences we can draw a lot of useful semantic information. We also show typical examples of meta-sentences obtained from typical Japanese short sentence known as “haiku”.

This study proposed a real-time video stabilization method to eliminate the unwanted shakes, preserve the intended panning of camera, and improve the stability of the captured video sequence. The proposed method uses a functional neuro-fuzzy network to learn the phenomena of different shakes and then it chooses adequate compensation weight for two different methods to calculate the compensated motion vector. Experimental results show that the proposed method has superior performance than other motion compensation methods.

As the credit risk of enterprise group is closely related to its financial state, in this paper,we chose the financial indicators and characteristic index of the enterprise groups used in literature [1] and applied the combined method based on the Logistic model and Neural Networks to assess the credit risk of Chinese listed enterprise group. Then we chose correlative Chinese listed enterprise group over the 2004-2008 period as study sample and conducted empirical research by using the combined method. Finally, we made a comparison among the evaluation results of three methods.

According to European option pricing models such as the Black-Scholes model, option price is determined by five factors which are underlying asset price, striking price, interest rate, maturity, and volatility. Gross open interest reflects the activity of the transaction traded by the buyers and sellers in option markets. Several different kinds of gross open interest are used as the input variables of the neural networks in this work. The experimental results show that the hybrid neural network model using a kind of average gross open interest as the input variable performs better than the other models put forward in this article. It may hints that the activity of an option market could be one of the factors influencing European option price.

The author has been engaging in the research of Tibetan language information processing techniques, and has presided over the development of CDMA 450M network-based Tibetan mobile phone and vehicle phone, as well as smart mobile phone Tibetan software package based on Windows Mobile and Symbian. In 2011, required by China Mobile Communications Group Co., Ltd. Tibet Branch, Android 2.2 operating system based smart mobile phones was developed. Through in-depth study of Android operating system, the author firstly proposed Android 2.2-based Tibetan processing technology, and used own national patents to design a highly adaptive Tibetan keyboard layout, thereby achieving rapid Tibetan input established the basis of standard for Tibetan mobile phone keyboard layout. The technology is a kind of technological innovation, filling the blanks of related fields both at home and abroad.

Differential evolution (DE) algorithms is a population-based algorithm like the genetic algorithms. But there are some problems in DE,such as slow and/or premature convergence. In this paper, a self-adaptive clustering-based differential evolution with new composite trial vector generation strategies (SaCoCDE) is proposed for the unconstrained global optimization problems. In SaCoCDE, the population is partitioned into k subsets by a clustering algorithm. And these cluster centers and the best vector in the current population are used to design the new differential evolution mutation operators. And these different mutation strategies with self-adaptive parameter settings can be appropriate during different stages of the evolution. This method utilizes the concept of the cluster neighborhood of each population member. The CEC2005 benchmark functions are employed for experimental verification. Experimental results indicate that CCDE is highly competitive compared to the state-of-the-art DE algorithms.

Women and Children are the hope of human. On Millennium Development Goals [1], World Health Organization (WHO) was expressing the requirements to reduce child mortality and to improve maternal health. In this paper, the significance, objective and principle of building the Health Information Management System (HIMS) for Women and Children were established. The authors will introduce the system framework, architecture and technology, the design of database and system security also included. The paper innovated and built HIMS for Women and Children to provide an intellectual support.

This paper focuses mainly on with respective to hybrid learning in the workplace. Hybrid learning in the workplace means the adults to blend different learning ways for solving their work-related problems or adapting to new working environments. The ways involve relating work activities, mixing learning activities, blending learning technologies, and integrating learning environments. These four key components in the workplace are discussed. The factors affecting hybrid learning are also respectively analyzed from learning and context aspects.

This study takes the non-English major students as the experimental subjects, conducting four-week extracurricular English interactive activities based on Twitter-like platform, whose feasibility has been positively proved by the data obtained from the pre-/post-questionnaire, the experimental study, the quantitative and qualitative analysis. To some extent, the interaction based on Twitter-like platform not only meets students’ interest in and needs for extracurricular English learning, and promotes their control over and motivation for learning, but also increases their involvement in extracurricular English learning activities.

A new type of voltage transducer- Electrostatic Film Vibration Voltage Transducer (EFVVT) is presented in this paper in which three modes include single-end polarization one, dual-end polarization one and no polarization one are discussed. The fundamental principle is that an electric field force generated by a high voltage to be measured drives an electrostatic film to vibrate and the vibration is sensed by a reflecting fiber-optical displacement sensor. It can be used for both AC and DC voltage measurement including its true harmonics and transient non-periodic components. The mathematics models and the prototypes are discussed as well in the paper.

The development of atmospheric pollutants emission inventory is a critical step with regard to management of air quality at the regional scale. It involves the use of a Geographic Information System (GIS) software with the development of specific methodology and customized tools. The quality of input databases and the time and space scales specify the inventory effectiveness. But quality is often related to a large number of data that classical methodologies can hardly resolve. A specific methodologywith integration step of different kinds of emission sources has been developed. The tools used are PostgreSQL1 as DataBase Management System (DBMS) whitch is the kernel of the software, the Geographic Information System used is GRASS2, finally the Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a web site using PHP within the PRADO3 framework. The inventory concerns a large range of pollutants and Total Suspended Particles.

Digital instrumentation and control (I&C) systems, such as digital Reactor Protection System (RPS), are being employed gradually at newly-built and upgraded Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs). The reliability analysis of digital I&C system turns to be a research focus. This paper proposes a preliminary study on reliability analysis for the digital RPS of High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor-Pebble bed Module (HTR-PM). We first introduce the function and structure of RPS in HTR-PM; then the processes of failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) at system level are given; finally we present the FMEA of a computer device as an example and introduce the future work. This study analyses all possible safety-relevant implications arising from failures in RPS and promotes the reliability analysis of the digital RPS in HTR-PM.

To solve the traceability problem in manufacturing process, especially for complex product of dynamic process route, on the basis of batch and process state description, a traceability model is proposed in this paper after the requirements for traceability are analyzed. In the model, each material can be viewed as a point in a three-dimensional space, and each point in the space can be taken as a trace unit. By registering all relations between input and output material lots, all the necessary information to carry out forward and backward traceability can be obtained. Some coding rules based on the theorem of the set named S(I) are stipulated to make the traceability easy and accurate.

In this paper, a three-dimensional sketch modeling system is presented. This system is composed of some modules, such as gesture recognition, sketch profile recognition, three-dimensional modeling, and free-form surface modeling, etc. In this study, pattern recognition is adopted to identify different gestures, and a tolerance ring algorithm is adopted to identify primitives, such as rectangles and circles.

Taking into account the large steering shaft load of the commercial vehicle, this paper aims to design a commercial vehicle electric power steering system. Firstly, a framework of MC9S12XDP512-based hardware circuit design is presented, and then the high-power motor drive circuit and signal processing circuits are introduced in detail. In virtue of building the DC Motor reversible speed regulation system simulation models, the simulation results show that the assisted motor has been proven having a good torque response.

Based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), this paper constructs the multi-target and multilevel comprehensive evaluation model of urban landscape value evaluation from three perspectives of landscape, ecology and social effects. By adopting landscape ecological unit grid-type analytical method and by virtue of GIS technique, the paper performs lattice-based treatment, establishes landscape value evaluation system database, performs comprehensive grading of and assignment calculation of the landscape value evaluation factor by integrating weighted index model and determines the high and low each unit landscape value and its distribution. The transformation of the traditional qualitative analysis method into the combination of qualitative analysis with quantitative analysis increases the objectivity and scientificity of the urban landscape value evaluation. And the evaluation system and evaluation model is applied into the urban landscape value evaluation of Huashan, Wuhan.

The ecological crisis derived from NPP decline in grassland region not only endangers the regional stockbreeding development, but also aggravates the contradiction between ecological environment and social economy development. This paper developed a methodology to estimate the degradation process of grasslands at large scale based on the assessment of regional NPP on TM/ETM images. The improved CASA Model was used to simulate regional NPP in the short grassland (typical steppe) region on account of NPP frequently considered to indicate the degrees of grassland degradation in China. The results displayed that the average regional NPP gradually decreased from 1991 to 2000, 2005 due to impacts of climatic change and the grazing manners. Image analysis showed that the ecosystem had been in an incompetent environment over the past decades. Continued degradation will be intense unless grazing activities are changed.

Teaching computer networking concepts is difficult for its abstract concepts and complex, dynamic process among various devices and protocols. To improve students’ understanding, instructors seek the facilitation of technology. Among computer-assisted pedagogical methods, simulation-based learning (SBL) tool is regarded as a highly flexible and effective computer instruction application. While most previous studies mainly addressed the functionalities and design pattern of SBL tools, little attention has been devoted in examining what learner’s perceptions of the SBL are and its relationships with learner’s individual differences. However, teaching is an interactive process, how learners perceive the novel instruction tools be may further influence their usage of instruction tool and learning outcome subsequently. This study seeks to fill the literature gap by investigating students’ perception toward the SBL and its relationships with students’ learning outcome. Data were gathered through a survey conducted in two classes of a university in Northern Taiwan. Results suggest that simulation tool’s appeals to student (positive perceptions) are highly associated with their learning outcome as well as sophisticated learning conception. Meanwhile, students with higher learning outcome tend to engage with simulation tool more and possess more cohesive learning conception than those with lower learning outcome do. Implications of results are also discussed in this study.

Many studies are on progress in the field of digital forensics. However, most analysis methods lack from complexity as the size of data to be investigated enlarges. Thus, automated ways of analyzing the data is required to reduce the work done by the analysts. In our study, we propose an automated user analysis method that works based on the user input log. From the automated analysis, we provide priority on the further user classification, which helps reduce the total number of potential user to 21% of the total users, even in the worst case. In average cases, the exact matching user is found within the 10.5% highest priority users. By combining our proposed method with other existing methods, it would be possible to further reduce the complexity of jobs need to be done by the analysts.

In order to offer opportunities to practice collaboration skills to students of hypermedia engineering and students of journalism and mass communication, a cross-university course “Developing an Online Publication for Journalism” based on simulations of real-world design projects was organised in spring 2011. According the results, the simulations motivated both hypermedia and journalism students to learn and to develop their professional competencies and collaboration skills. A web service design project with special working methods was unfamiliar to the journalism students, who were dissatisfied with the division of work tasks and asked for more instructions and guidance.

In order to promote students’ peer learning skills and to motivate them to learn, the Hypermedia Laboratory at the Tampere University of Technology (TUT) organised a course entitled Programming of Hypermedia, which attempts to solve authentic, real-world problems. TUT Circle, a socialmedia web service, was used as the web-based learning environment for the course. It has most of the basic functions that are common in modern social media andWeb 2.0 services. The research focused in finding out, first, if the teaching experiment with TUT Circle was pedagogically usable and, second, if students voluntarily utilised peer learning to learn with and from each other without immediate teacher intervention. Both a survey and network analysis of the log data support the fact that TUT Circle supported peer learning and does not have major defects from a pedagogical usability viewpoint.

With the increasing availability and affordability of genome-wide genotyping and sequencing technologies, biomedical researchers are faced with increasing computational challenges in managing and analyzing large quantities of genetic data. Previously, this data intensive research required computing and personnel resources accessible only to large institutions. Cloud computing allows researchers to analyze their data without a local computing infrastructure. We evaluated the feasibility of cloud computing for association analysis of genome-wide data. Our approach utilized the MapReduce model which divides the analysis into independent units and distributes the work to a computing cloud. We evaluated our approach by modeling the relationships between genetic variants and disease in a simulated genome-wide association study. We generated several data sets of 100,000 subjects and various number of genetic variants, and demonstrated that our analysis approach is scalable and provides an attractive alternative to establishing and maintaining a local computing cluster.

This paper describes initial work in the development of the DNA@Home volunteer computing project, which aims to use Gibbs sampling for the identification and location of DNA control signals on full genome scale data sets. Most current research involving sequence analysis for these control signals involve significantly smaller data sets, however volunteer computing can provide the necessary computational power to make full genome analysis feasible. A fault tolerant and asynchronous implementation of Gibbs sampling using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is presented, which is currently being used to analyze the intergenic regions of the

Mycobacterium tuberculosis

genome. In only three months of limited operation, the project has had over 1,800 volunteered computing hosts participate and obtains a number of samples required for analysis over 400 times faster than an average computing host for the

Mycobacterium tuberculosis

dataset. We feel that the preliminary results for this project provide a strong argument for the feasibility and public interest of a volunteer computing project for this type of bioinformatics.

In order to improve near infrared spectrum analysis precision, it is need to extract information from spectrum data. Derivative can not only eliminate spectrum background disturb , baseline drift and other factors influence, but also improve spectrum resolution ratio. However, at the same time derivative strengthen signal noise, reduce spectrum SNR (signal-to-noise ratio). Smoothing can effectively smooth high frequency noise, heighten spectrum SNR. In use of smoothing window’s size has a great effect on spectrum information extraction. This paper take near infrared spectrum of eucalyptus to research NIR spectrum information extraction methods, pay more attention on smoothing window’s size influence on spectrum information extraction. Then combine with multiple scatter correction and standardized variables to build eucalyptus lignin PLS model. The results showed that, using 1st derivative to combine with one of 19 point smoothing, multiple scatter correction, standardized variables to treat spectrum can all get good modeling result. In one word, spectrum information extraction can dislodge unfavorable factors influence and enhance spectrum analysis precision.

The need for self-powering of low power electronics has accelerated the research of energy harvesters. Electromagnetic energy harvesting poses a relatively inexpensive alternative amongst other methods but has impediments like low voltage and difficulty to scale for micro size level. This study is intended to explore the possibility of increasing the voltage by spatial variation of the magnetic field. An energy harvester design similar to a microphone is considered. A novel methodology of analytically determining the spatial variation and deducing the analytical voltage expression is discussed. This is followed by development of the theoretical model and validation by experiment. The results of the study establish that the theoretical model is not only helpful in readily predicting the output characteristics of the energy harvester but also with high accuracy. This study is helpful for developing future electromagnetic energy harvesters by spatially varying the magnetic field.

In the power industry, transformers are key components for electrical energy transfer. However, the transformer always is affected by inrush current problems of itself. The inrush currents will cause power system network with voltage dip, harmonic, over-voltage, sympathetic current and mal-trip of protective relay and so on. In the past, there are no total solutions for all of these problems. Therefore, this paper will develop an inrush current eliminator to eliminate inrush currents of transformer, so all of the above mentioned problems of transformer will be solved.

IT specialty of Modern Vocational Education is faced with many environmental problems, of which a considerable part of the practice teaching training program requires a better environment and the biggest problem is multi-machines per student; multiple network segment environment and destructive experiments of data and system. The prevailing problem in all schools is a large investment and difficulty in environmental equipment maintenance, judging from construction cost and training environment upkeep. A virtual machine technology environment might be a good solution to it. This way is to put a machine in use for effects of multi-machines for the purpose of saving money and reducing maintenance cost.

Combining APDL in ANSYS with VC, the Parametric Modeling and Finite Element Analysis system of skirt support is developed. In the system, VC is used to establish dialog interfaces and encapsulate the process of ANSYS finite element analysis, the system itself will produce the APDL program and run ANSYS automatically through inputting the needed parameters, which realizes the parameterized finite element analysis of the skirt support. A case study is used to prove the feasibility of this system.

This thesis is devoted to a research into the usability of China’s E-Government websites. According to Nielsen’s usability principle, a theoretical model of usability is initially constructed. Based on this model, from the perspective of the user’s needs, this thesis evaluates the weight of the indicators that indicate the usability. Concerning the evaluation of the importance of the indicators, this thesis mainly adopts the approach of Analytic Hierarchy Process . From the perspective of the market research, this thesis evaluates the weight of every indicator in the whole system so as to learn about the performance of the indicators indicating the usability of China’s e-Government websites and rationalize the evaluation result.

Piezoelectric material can be used to transform ambient vibration energy into small amounts of electrical power. As piezoelectric materials have been developing, such as lead-zirconate-titanate (PZT), Quick Pack (QP), macro fiber composite (MFC) and polyvinylidineflouride (PVDF), many researchers have been investigating their applications. This research investigates the possibility of electrical energy being generated by a macro fiber composite (MFC) patch mounted onto the surface of a pipe structure. In addition to the application of MFC, this research investigates the effect of varying load impedance to; the resonance frequency, voltage and electrical power generated by the structure. The results presented are for a large structure where most previous research on power harvesting has been undertaken on much smaller structures.

This study employed an open source Ubuntu Enterprise Server together with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud to construct a “Private Small-Cloud Computing” (PSCC) in which a cloud controller (CLC ) has been linked to some cluster controllers (CC), where the cloud computing initiates the services like SaaS, PaaS, and/or IaaS. A cloud controller (CLC ) may connect remote mobile devices or thin clients through the wired or wireless networking, for example, Ethernet, WiFi or 3G. We also made mobile device or thin client to be a low-capacity Linux embedded platform where JamVM virtual machine is utilized to form the J2ME environment and GNU Classpath is viewed as Java Class Libraries. Finally, the rapid identification fulfills access security within 2.2 seconds in PSCC in order to verify the cloud system effectiveness and efficiency in access security.

In the database principles course teaching reform, we should determine teaching mode and training target according to the professional requirements and the course property, and in the reform of teaching contents and practice, we should pay attention to the integration and refining of theoretical knowledge and practical skills . Through letting the student write demand analysis report, complete database conceptual model, a logical model, the physical model design, the implementation of database, make the students master the practical skills, In the teaching process of mastering of using comprehensive assessment of the way to complete the course teaching.

Gas-water pulse pipe cleaning technology based on the theory of gas-water two-phase flow is a high-efficient, water-saving and low-cost method for cleaning fouling in the pipe wall. Pressure drop and flow rate during cleaning can. A data acquisition system based on virtual instrument is designed to acquire real-time data of pressure drop and flow rate which can express cleaning effect. The experiment shows that the data acquisition system is suitable for acquiring data of high-speed multi-channel signals and LabVIEW could decrease development time and improve the efficiency of program.

Quick Formulas based on DDA outputs is a set of partitioned polynomials aiming at easy-coding and time-saving during calculating extinction and backscattering properties for oblate spheroid raindrops. The Quick Formulas for the common radar wave bands of S, C, X and Ka have been obtained. It has been shown that the accuracy of Quick Formulas is more than 95%, that is, the error is less than 5%, and the time consumed is negligible as compared with DDA computation. The resulting codes can be inserted into the software for radar reflectivity simulation and real-time attenuation correction of rainfall estimation with radar.

The present study is aimed at optimization of the geometers of the fin-and-tube heat exchanger with louver fin through numerical simulation. The optimization is carried out by using the simplified conjugate-gradient method (SCGM) is adopted for solving the optimal problem. Using the optimizer, the louver angle of louvered fin is adjusted toward the maximization of the performance of the heat exchanger. It is also shown that the maximum of area reduction ratios at the louver fin for Re

Lp

100 – 400 with Lp = 1 mm. For the louver pitches, the following correlations for the optimal louver angle are derived, based on Reynolds number Re

Lp

ranging from 100 to 400. The results indicate the optimal louver angle applied in heat exchangers can effectively enhance the heat transfer performance. Thus, the correlations is derived that can be applied to the design of heat exchangers.

Laminar forced convection of a water-based suspension of Al

2

O

3

nanoparticles through in-line and staggered tube banks with constant wall temperature boundary condition have been investigated numerically. A two phase mixture model is employed to simulate the nanofluid convection, taking into account appropriate thermophysical properties. Nanoparticles are assumed spherical with a diameter equal to 50 nm. The effects of Reynolds number and nanoparticle volume concentration on the flow and heat transfer behavior are studied. Results show that convective heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop for nanofluids is greater than that of the base fluid. It is found that the heat transfer enhancement increases with increase in Reynolds number and nanoparticle volume concentration. In general, the heat transfer in a staggered array of tubes is found to be higher than that in an in-lined array of tubes.

Because of the special application environment and high reliability requirements of the on-board computers, this article presents a design of on-board computer based on ERC32 with high reliability. This article also addresses the conception of ‘Cumulative Single Event Upset’ as well as the corresponding strategies to diminish such errors. It puts forward a variety of coping strategies for single event upset effects in space; it describes the design of the storage modules which are hard to cosmic rays briefly. The design has characteristics of high reliability and high compatibility; some ideas in it have been used in some of our earlier on-board computer systems. The long-term on orbit working performance shows that these strategies are effective to mitigate the errors caused by radiation and to improve the reliability of the payload systems.

The spatial differences of economic strength of 109 counties along the Lower Yellow River in 2009 have been analyzed by weighted principal component analysis, trend analysis tools and Moran’s I index of GIS. On this basis, the classification of economic strength is realized by the SOFM neural network model in MATLAB 7.0. The study shows that, the spatial concentration of the county economy is very significant as was indicated by Moran scatter plot. The level of economic strength of 109 counties can be divided into five categories with the principal component scores as the input of the SOFM network.

Monuments and historic buildings, is the cultural legacy of our ancestors, but also social and cultural development for the life experience of technology, customs and heritage. 3D laser scanner technology, not only can do non-contact measurement of high accuracy digital data, but also can save the complete 3D digital data files for future restoration and value-added application. In this study, the digitization process of the original point cloud was obtaining information by reverse engineering software Rapidform XOR, and then converted them to 3DS Max for additional editing and applications. Appropriate Maxscript modeling program is developed to increase the editing efficiency of the designer.