A Map-Reduce Parallel Approach to Automatic Synthesis of Control Software

Many Control Systems are indeed Software Based Control Systems, i.e. control systems whose controller consists of control software running on a microcontroller device. This motivates investigation on Formal Model Based Design approaches for automatic synthesis of control software. Available algorithms and tools (e.g., QKS) may require weeks or even months of computation to synthesize control software for large-size systems. This motivates search for parallel algorithms for control software synthesis. In this paper, we present a Map-Reduce style parallel algorithm for control software synthesis when the controlled system (plant) is modeled as discrete time linear hybrid system. Furthermore we present an MPI-based implementation PQKS of our algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first parallel approach for control software synthesis. We experimentally show effectiveness of PQKS on two classical control synthesis problems: the inverted pendulum and the multi-input buck DC/DC converter. Experiments show that PQKS efficiency is above 65%. As an example, PQKS requires about 16 hours to complete the synthesis of control software for the pendulum on a cluster with 60 processors, instead of the 25 days needed by the sequential algorithm in QKS.Comment: To be submitted to TACAS 2013. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1207.4474, arXiv:1207.409

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Cross-cultural transfer in gesture frequency in Chinese-English bilinguals

10.1080/01690961003694268Language and Cognitive Processes25101335-1353LCPR

Last Mile fulfilment strategy for competitive advantage

One of the biggest challenges in e-business is the so-called 'Last Mile', the fulfilment service for the customer. It is particularly difficult to combine profitability and a high service level for competitive advantage. This paper defines and describes a model of the Last Mile advantage from the perspective of competition. The Last Mile advantage is the innovation in combining inbound and outbound logistics within the supply network to bring together fragmented buyers and sellers. The model outlines two businesses - architecture and infrastructure businesses - both of which are responsible for managing different competitive forces for the firm's competitiveness. Essentially, all firms can be evaluated based on these two businesses, which can be used to translate corporate strategy into project initiatives that add value to and control value in the firm. This paper also outlines the different Last Mile configuration and initiatives for those players located within the value system.Department of Industrial and Systems Engineerin

Pointing gestures for a robot mediated communication interface

10.1007/978-3-642-10817-4_7Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)5928 LNAI67-7

Mnemonic effect of iconic gesture and beat gesture in adults and children: Is meaning in gesture important for memory recall?

10.1080/01690965.2011.573220Language and Cognitive Processes275665-681LCPR