A metaobject architecture for fault-tolerant distributed systems : the FRIENDS approach

The FRIENDS system developed at LAAS-CNRS is a metalevel architecture providing libraries of metaobjects for fault tolerance, secure communication, and group-based distributed applications. The use of metaobjects provides a nice separation of concerns between mechanisms and applications. Metaobjects can be used transparently by applications and can be composed according to the needs of a given application, a given architecture, and its underlying properties. In FRIENDS, metaobjects are used recursively to add new properties to applications. They are designed using an object oriented design method and implemented on top of basic system services. This paper describes the FRIENDS software-based architecture, the object-oriented development of metaobjects, the experiments that we have done, and summarizes the advantages and drawbacks of a metaobject approach for building fault-tolerant system

Generating realistic scaled complex networks

Research on generative models is a central project in the emerging field of network science, and it studies how statistical patterns found in real networks could be generated by formal rules. Output from these generative models is then the basis for designing and evaluating computational methods on networks, and for verification and simulation studies. During the last two decades, a variety of models has been proposed with an ultimate goal of achieving comprehensive realism for the generated networks. In this study, we (a) introduce a new generator, termed ReCoN; (b) explore how ReCoN and some existing models can be fitted to an original network to produce a structurally similar replica, (c) use ReCoN to produce networks much larger than the original exemplar, and finally (d) discuss open problems and promising research directions. In a comparative experimental study, we find that ReCoN is often superior to many other state-of-the-art network generation methods. We argue that ReCoN is a scalable and effective tool for modeling a given network while preserving important properties at both micro- and macroscopic scales, and for scaling the exemplar data by orders of magnitude in size.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures, extended version, a preliminary version of the paper was presented at the 5th International Workshop on Complex Networks and their Application

Design and development of GrainNet - universal Internet enabled software for operation and standardization of near-infrared spectrometers

A current trend in modern near-infrared spectroscopy is the incorporation of sophisticated mathematical algorithms into the computer instrumentation used to extract information from raw spectral data by applying complex multivariate models. To address some of the problems that near-infrared spectroscopy faces, the GrainNet software model that connects a MATLABRTM computing and development environment, NIR spectrometers, and MS Server data-storage for spectral data and calibration models, was developed.;GrainNet is a client-server based Internet enabled communication and analyzing model for Near-Infrared (NIR) instruments. FOSS Infratec, Perten, and Bruins Instruments are currently three brands of the NIR instruments that have been included in the project. The performance of the implemented calibration models was evaluated. Three calibration models are implemented in the GrainNet: (1) Partial Least Squares Regression; (2) Artificial Neural Network; (3) Locally Weighted Regression.;The Piecewise Direct Standardization (PDS), Direct Standardization (DS), Finite Impulse Response (FIR) and Multiplicative Scatter Corrections (MSC) models were developed in the MATLABRTM environment and tested for standardization transfer of the Bruins Instruments and Foss Infratec grain analyzers. A new calibration model for corn that uses feed-forward back-propagation neural networks with wavelets signal decomposition used as an input was developed