Academic Panel: Can Self-Managed Systems be trusted?

Trust can be defined as to have confidence or faith in; a form of reliance or certainty based on past experience; to allow without fear; believe; hope: expect and wish; and extend credit to. The issue of trust in computing has always been a hot topic, especially notable with the proliferation of services over the Internet, which has brought the issue of trust and security right into the ordinary home. Autonomic computing brings its own complexity to this. With systems that self-manage, the internal decision making process is less transparent and the ‘intelligence’ possibly evolving and becoming less tractable. Such systems may be used from anything from environment monitoring to looking after Granny in the home and thus the issue of trust is imperative. To this end, we have organised this panel to examine some of the key aspects of trust. The first section discusses the issues of self-management when applied across organizational boundaries. The second section explores predictability in self-managed systems. The third part examines how trust is manifest in electronic service communities. The final discussion demonstrates how trust can be integrated into an autonomic system as the core intelligence with which to base adaptivity choices upon

Effect of Static Disorder in an Electron Fabry-Perot Interferometer with Two Quantum Scattering Centers

In a recent paper -- F. Ciccarello \emph{et al.}, New J. Phys. \textbf{8}, 214 (2006) -- we have demonstrated that the electron transmission properties of a one-dimensional (1D) wire with two identical embedded spin-1/2 impurities can be significantly affected by entanglement between the spins of the scattering centers. Such effect is of particular interest in the control of transmission of quantum information in nanostructures and can be used as a detection scheme of maximally entangled states of two localized spins. In this letter, we relax the constraint that the two magnetic impurities are equal and investigate how the main results presented in the above paper are affected by a static disorder in the exchange coupling constants of the impurities. Good robustness against deviation from impurity symmetry is found for both the entanglement dependent transmission and the maximally entangled states generation scheme.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Studying Relationship between the Approach of Business Reengineering and Performance "An Empirical Study on Food Companies Listed at the Amman Stock Exchange" )

In Jordan, the changing dynamics of the industrial companies in general and food industry specially, forced players at all levels to re-engineering their business companies. This research aims to study the response and support food companies to the concept of business re-engineering. To measure the extent of support managements to apply the concept of re-engineering, the extent of availability requirements for the application of process re-engineering, and, to measure the extent of the application of re-engineering processes and its impact on the financial performance of food companies listed at the Amman Stock Exchange.The researchers studied the intellectual frame and scientific rooting for business reengineering to achieve study objectives. They have designed a questionnaire aimed to execute of the study problem variables in order to test hypotheses. The research suggested the following results: application of re-engineering have benefits for companies that are applied. It could improving their competitive, increasing market share, productions, efficiency, and cost reduction. There are a statistically significant relationship in the attitudes of the study sample towards the response and support management of companies, the availability of requirements of the application, and the impact of the application of business re-engineering to the performance on food companies. It recommended that reengineering process remains effective tools for companies needing to operate as effectively and efficiently. Companies are required to reengineering their business processes in order to achieve best performance and growth. Keywords:  Business Process, Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), Companies Performance, Information Technology, Evaluation Process

Biometric signature verification system based on freeman chain code and k-nearest neighbor

Signature is one of human biometrics that may change due to some factors, for example age, mood and environment, which means two signatures from a person cannot perfectly matching each other. A Signature Verification System (SVS) is a solution for such situation. The system can be decomposed into three stages: data acquisition and preprocessing, feature extraction and verification. This paper presents techniques for SVS that uses Freeman chain code (FCC) as data representation. Before extracting the features, the raw images will undergo preprocessing stage; binarization, noise removal, cropping and thinning. In the first part of feature extraction stage, the FCC was extracted by using boundary-based style on the largest contiguous part of the signature images. The extracted FCC was divided into four, eight or sixteen equal parts. In the second part of feature extraction, six global features were calculated against split image to test the feature efficiency. Finally, verification utilized Euclidean distance to measured and matched in k-Nearest Neighbors. MCYT bimodal database was used in every stage in the system. Based on the experimental results, the lowest error rate for FRR and FAR were 6.67 % and 12.44 % with AER 9.85 % which is better in term of performance compared to other works using that same database

Discovering Predictive Event Sequences in Criminal Careers

In this work, we consider the problem of predicting criminal behavior, and propose a method for discovering predictive patterns in criminal histories. Quantitative criminal career analysis typically involves clustering individuals according to frequency of a particular event type over time, using cluster membership as a basis for comparison. We demonstrate the effectiveness of hazard pattern mining for the discovery of relationships between different types of events that may occur in criminal careers. Hazard pattern mining is an extension of event sequence mining, with the additional restriction that each event in the pattern is the first subsequent event of the specified type. This restriction facilitates application of established time based measures such as those used in survival analysis. We evaluate hazard patterns using a relative risk model and an accelerated failure time model. The results show that hazard patterns can reliably capture unexpected relationships between events of different types

Validated Stability-indicating HPTLC Determination of Baclofen in Bulk Drug, Pharmaceutical Formulations and Real Human Urine and Plasma.

A simple, highly selective and stability-indicating high-performance thin-layer chromatographic method was developed and validated for the analysis of baclofen in bulk powder, pharmaceutical formulations and human urine and in and real human plasma. The method employed TLC aluminum plates precoated with silica gel 60 F254 as the stationary phase. The solvent system consisted of butanol–acetic acid–water (3.0: 0.5: 0.5, v/v/v). This system was found to give compact spots for baclofen (Rf value of 0.54). Densitometric analysis was carried out in the absorbance mode at 238 nm. The linear regression analysis data for the calibration plot showed good linear relationship (r2 = 0.9983) in the concentration range 1.5-7.5 µg per spot. The analytical performance of the method was fully validated, and the results were satisfactory. The limits of detection and quantitation were 0.31 and 1.03 µg per spot, respectively. Baclofen was subjected to acid and alkali hydrolysis, oxidation and photodegradation. The degraded product was well separated from the pure drug. Results indicate that the drug is stable against light and basic conditions. However, additional peaks were observed at Rf value of 0.65 and at Rf value of 0.14 with hydrogen peroxide and hydrochloric acid respectively, indicating that the drug is susceptible to oxidation and acid degradation. The method was applied for the analysis of baclofen in commercial tablets and the results were similar to those obtained using the reference method. As the method could effectively separate the drug from its degradation product, it can be employed as a stability-indicating one. The high sensitivity of the proposed method allowed determination of baclofen in real human urine and plasma

Dynamic Overlap Concentration Scale of Active Colloids

By introducing the notion of a dynamic overlap concentration scale, we identify universal and previously unreported features of the mechanical properties of active colloids. These features are codified by recognizing that the characteristic length scale of an active particle's trajectory, the run-length, introduces a new concentration scale ϕ∗. Large-scale simulations of repulsive active Brownian particles (ABPs) confirm that this new run-length dependent concentration, which is the trajectory-space analogue of the overlap concentration in polymer solutions, delineates distinct concentration regimes in which interparticle collisions alter particle trajectories. Using ϕ∗ and concentration scales associated with colloidal jamming, the mechanical equation-of-state for ABPs can be collapsed onto a set of principal curves that contain a number of previously overlooked features. The inclusion of these features qualitatively alters previous predictions of the behavior for active colloids as we demonstrate by computing the spinodal for a suspension of purely-repulsive ABPs. Our findings suggest that dynamic overlap concentration scales should be of great utility in unraveling the behavior of active and driven systems