5,824 research outputs found
Modeling of the HIV infection epidemic in the Netherlands: A multi-parameter evidence synthesis approach
Multi-parameter evidence synthesis (MPES) is receiving growing attention from
the epidemiological community as a coherent and flexible analytical framework
to accommodate a disparate body of evidence available to inform disease
incidence and prevalence estimation. MPES is the statistical methodology
adopted by the Health Protection Agency in the UK for its annual national
assessment of the HIV epidemic, and is acknowledged by the World Health
Organization and UNAIDS as a valuable technique for the estimation of adult HIV
prevalence from surveillance data. This paper describes the results of
utilizing a Bayesian MPES approach to model HIV prevalence in the Netherlands
at the end of 2007, using an array of field data from different study designs
on various population risk subgroups and with a varying degree of regional
coverage. Auxiliary data and expert opinion were additionally incorporated to
resolve issues arising from biased, insufficient or inconsistent evidence. This
case study offers a demonstration of the ability of MPES to naturally integrate
and critically reconcile disparate and heterogeneous sources of evidence, while
producing reliable estimates of HIV prevalence used to support public health
decision-making.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS488 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Distributed Computing Grid Experiences in CMS
The CMS experiment is currently developing a computing system capable of serving, processing and archiving the large number of events that will be generated when the CMS detector starts taking data. During 2004 CMS undertook a large scale data challenge to demonstrate the ability of the CMS computing system to cope with a sustained data-taking rate equivalent to 25% of startup rate. Its goals were: to run CMS event reconstruction at CERN for a sustained period at 25 Hz input rate; to distribute the data to several regional centers; and enable data access at those centers for analysis. Grid middleware was utilized to help complete all aspects of the challenge. To continue to provide scalable access from anywhere in the world to the data, CMS is developing a layer of software that uses Grid tools to gain access to data and resources, and that aims to provide physicists with a user friendly interface for submitting their analysis jobs. This paper describes the data challenge experience with Grid infrastructure and the current development of the CMS analysis system
Application development process for GNAT, a SOC networked system
The market for smart devices was identified years ago, and yet commercial progress into this field has not made significant progress. The reason such devices are so painfully slow to market is that the gap between the technologically possible and the market capitalizable is too vast. In order for inventions to succeed commercially, they must bridge the gap to tomorrow\u27s technology with marketability today. This thesis demonstrates a design methodology that enables such commercial success for one variety of smart device, the Ambient Intelligence Node (AIN). Commercial Off-The Shelf (COTS) design tools allowing a Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) approach are combined via custom middleware to form an end-to-end design flow for rapid prototyping and commercialization. A walkthrough of this design methodology demonstrates its effectiveness in the creation of Global Network Academic Test (GNAT), a sample AIN. It is shown how designers are given the flexibility to incorporate IP Blocks available in the Global Economy to reduce Time-To-Market and cost. Finally, new kinds of products and solutions built on the higher levels of design abstraction permitted by MDA design methods are explored
ACHIEVING AUTONOMIC SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE USING CASE BASED REASONING
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables composition of large and complex
computational units out of the available atomic services. However, implementation of
SOA, for its dynamic nature, could bring about challenges in terms of service
discovery, service interaction, service composition, robustness, etc. In the near future,
SOA will often need to dynamically re-configuring and re-organizing its topologies of
interactions between the web services because of some unpredictable events, such as
crashes or network problems, which will cause service unavailability. Complexity and
dynamism of the current and future global network system require service architecture
that is capable of autonomously changing its structure and functionality to meet
dynamic changes in the requirements and environment with little human intervention.
This then needs to motivate the research described throughout this thesis.
In this thesis, the idea of introducing autonomy and adapting case-based reasoning
into SOA in order to extend the intelligence and capability of SOA is contributed and
elaborated. It is conducted by proposing architecture of an autonomic SOA
framework based on case-based reasoning and the architectural considerations of
autonomic computing paradigm. It is then followed by developing and analyzing
formal models of the proposed architecture using Petri Net. The framework is also
tested and analyzed through case studies, simulation, and prototype development. The
case studies show feasibility to employing case-based reasoning and autonomic
computing into SOA domain and the simulation results show believability that it
would increase the intelligence, capability, usability and robustness of SOA. It was
shown that SOA can be improved to cope with dynamic environment and services
unavailability by incorporating case-based reasoning and autonomic computing
paradigm to monitor and analyze events and service requests, then to plan and execute
the appropriate actions using the knowledge stored in knowledge database
Towards A Generic, Service-Oriented Framework for Distributed Real-Time Systems
REACTION 2012. 1st International workshop on Real-time and distributed computing in emerging applications. December 4th, 2012, San Juan, Puerto Rico.Continuously increasing complexity and scale of
distributed real-time systems have exposed the limitations of
their existing development methodologies. This fact is evident
by the unsustainable rate of increase in the development and
maintenance costs of such systems. In this paper, we present a
generic, service-oriented framework for distributed real-time
systems. The proposed framework can potentially serve as the
basis for a widely applicable, cross-domain toolset, thus,
decreasing the development and maintenance costs for
distributed real-time systems. The proposed framework
consists of a generic, service-oriented deployment platform
that abstracts away the details of implementation platform and
an associated development methodology. The proposed
framework makes extensive use of the existing service-oriented
technologies such as Web Services. However, it also extends
these technologies for application to distributed real-time
systems by introducing QoS-aware service deployment and
service monitoring phases. This paper presents the details of
the proposed framework as well as a case-study of the
application of the proposed framework to the domain of smart
gri
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