Exploiting latent relevance for relational learning of ubiquitous things

With recent advances in radio-frequency identification(RFID), wireless sensor networks, andWeb services, physical things are becoming an integral part of the emerging ubiquitous Web. While this integration offers many exciting opportunities such as efficient supply chains and improved environmental monitoring, it also presents many significant challenges. One such challenge lies in how to classify, discover, and manage ubiquitous things, which is critical for efficient and effective object search, recommendation, and composition. In this paper, we focus on automatically classifying ubiquitous things into manageable semantic category labels by exploiting the information hidden in interactions between users and ubiquitous things. We develop a novel approach to extract latent relevances by building a relational network of ubiquitous things (RNUbiT) where similar things are linked via virtual edges according to their latent relevances. A discriminative learning algorithm is also developed to automatically determine category labels for ubiquitous things. We conducted experiments using real-world data and the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and validity of our proposed approach.Lina Yao and Quan Z. Shen

Multi-scale interactions of geological processes during mineralization: cascade dynamics model and multifractal simulation

Relations between mineralization and certain geological processes are established mostly by geologist's knowledge of field observations. However, these relations are descriptive and a quantitative model of how certain geological processes strengthen or hinder mineralization is not clear, that is to say, the mechanism of the interactions between mineralization and the geological framework has not been thoroughly studied. The dynamics behind these interactions are key in the understanding of fractal or multifractal formations caused by mineralization, among which singularities arise due to anomalous concentration of metals in narrow space. From a statistical point of view, we think that cascade dynamics play an important role in mineralization and studying them can reveal the nature of the various interactions throughout the process. We have constructed a multiplicative cascade model to simulate these dynamics. The probabilities of mineral deposit occurrences are used to represent direct results of mineralization. Multifractal simulation of probabilities of mineral potential based on our model is exemplified by a case study dealing with hydrothermal gold deposits in southern Nova Scotia, Canada. The extent of the impacts of certain geological processes on gold mineralization is related to the scale of the cascade process, especially to the maximum cascade division number <i>n</i><sub>max</sub>. Our research helps to understand how the singularity occurs during mineralization, which remains unanswered up to now, and the simulation may provide a more accurate distribution of mineral deposit occurrences that can be used to improve the results of the weights of evidence model in mapping mineral potential

Existence problem of proton semi-bubble structure in the 21+2_1^+ state of 34^{34}Si

The fully self-consistent Hartree-Fock (HF) plus random phase approximation (RPA) based on Skyrme-type interaction is used to study the existence problem of proton semi-bubble structure in the $2_1^+$ state of $^{34}$Si. The experimental excitation energy and the B(E2) strength of the $2_1^+$ state in $^{34}$Si can be reproduced quite well. The tensor effect is also studied. It is shown that the tensor interaction has a notable impact on the excitation energy of the $2_1^+$ state and a small effect on the B(E2) value. Besides, its effect on the density distributions in the ground and $2_1^+$ state of $^{34}$Si is negligible. Our present results with T36 and T44 show that the $2_1^+$ state of $^{34}$Si is mainly caused by proton transiton from $\pi 1d_{5/2}$ orbit to $\pi 2s_{1/2}$ orbit, and the existence of a proton semi-bubble structure in this state is very unlikely.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

Towards a user-centric social approach to web services composition, execution, and monitoring

This paper discusses the intertwine of social networks of users and social networks of Web services to compose, execute, and monitor Web services. Each network provides details that permit achieving this intertwine and thus, completing the three operations. A user social-network is used to advise users on the next Web services to select based on their peers’ experiences, whereas a Web service social network is used to advise users on the substitutes to select in case a Web service fails, for example. To make the intertwine of these social networks happen, three components are developed: composer, executor, and monitor. The social composer develops composite Web services considering relations between users and the ones between Web services. The social executor assesses the impact of these relations on these compositeWeb services execution progress. Finally, the social monitor replaces failing Web services to guarantee the execution continuity of these composite Web services. A running example and a prototype illustrate and demonstrate the intertwine of these social networks, respectively.Zakaria Maamar, Noura Faci, Quan Z. Sheng and Lina Ya

Gait recognition using a few gait frames.

Gait has been deemed as an alternative biometric in video-based surveillance applications, since it can be used to recognize individuals from a far distance without their interaction and cooperation. Recently, many gait recognition methods have been proposed, aiming at reducing the influence caused by exterior factors. However, most of these methods are developed based on sufficient input gait frames, and their recognition performance will sharply decrease if the frame number drops. In the real-world scenario, it is impossible to always obtain a sufficient number of gait frames for each subject due to many reasons, e.g., occlusion and illumination. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the gait recognition performance when the available gait frames are limited. This paper starts with three different strategies, aiming at producing more input frames and eliminating the generalization error cause by insufficient input data. Meanwhile, a two-branch network is also proposed in this paper to formulate robust gait representations from the original and new generated input gait frames. According to our experiments, under the limited gait frames being used, it was verified that the proposed method can achieve a reliable performance for gait recognition

Keeping you in the loop: enabling web-based things management in the internet of things

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm where physical objects are connected and communicated over the Web. Its capability in assimilating the virtual world and the physical one offers many exciting opportunities. However, how to realize a smooth, seamless integration of the two worlds remains an interesting and challenging topic. In this paper, we showcase an IoT prototype system that enables seamless integration of the virtual and the physical worlds and efficient management of things of interest (TOIs), where services and resources offered by things can be easily monitored, visualized, and aggregated for value-added services by users. This paper presents the motivation, system design, implementation, and demonstration scenario of the system.Lina Yao, Quan Z. Sheng, Anne H.H. Ngu and Byron Ga

A directed mutation operator for real coded genetic algorithms

Copyright @ Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.Developing directed mutation methods has been an interesting research topic to improve the performance of genetic algorithms (GAs) for function optimization. This paper introduces a directed mutation (DM) operator for GAs to explore promising areas in the search space. In this DM method, the statistics information regarding the fitness and distribution of individuals over intervals of each dimension is calculated according to the current population and is used to guide the mutation of an individual toward the neighboring interval that has the best statistics result in each dimension. Experiments are carried out to compare the proposed DM technique with an existing directed variation on a set of benchmark test problems. The experimental results show that the proposed DM operator achieves a better performance than the directed variation on most test problems