Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Internet In Turkey And Pakistan: A Comparative Analysis, Peter Wolcott, Seymour E. Goodman

Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis Faculty Publications

The Global Diffusion of the Internet Project was initiated in 1997 to study the diffusion and absorption of the Internet to, and within, many diverse countries. This research has resulted in an ongoing series of reports and articles that have developed an analytic framework for evaluating the Internet within countries and applied it to more than 25 countries. (Seehttp://mosaic.unomaha.edu/gdi.html for links to some of these reports and articles.)

The current report applies the analytic framework to compare and contrast the Internet experiences of Turkey and Pakistan, through mid-2000. Although historically these countries have not been closely related, there are …

Classes Of Logic Programs Which Possess Unique Supported Models, Anthony K. Seda, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Logic programming is concerned with the use of logic as a programming language. The main manifestation of this computing paradigm is in the various versions of Prolog which are now available, in which computation is viewed as deduction from sets of Horn clauses, although there is also growing interest in the related form known as answer set programming, see [10]. The reference [1] contains a good survey of the growth of logic programming over the last twenty-five years both as a stand-alone programming language and as a software component of large information systems. One advantage a logic program P has …

Semantic Web And Information Brokering: Opportunities, Commercialization, And Challenges, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

From the chairs' report published in SIGMOD record: The keynote address entitled 'Semantic Web and Information Brokering: Opportunities, Early Commercializations, and Challenges' was delivered by Amit Sheth (University of Georgia and Taalee Corp). Sheth characterized semantics as the next step in the evolution of the WWW and stressed the importance of semantically organized information for supporting ubiquitous, powerful, accurate and efficient access to this information. Sheth also reviewed proposals for semantic interoperability frameworks such as the DAML(DARPA Agent Mark-Up Language), the Oingo family of tools for defining concepts and extracting knowledge from large databases, as well as several scenarios on …

Exception Handling In Workflow Systems, Zongwei Luo, Amit P. Sheth, Krzysztof J. Kochut, John A. Miller

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper, defeasible workflow is proposed as a framework to support exception handling for workflow management. By using the “justified” ECA rules to capture more contexts in workflow modeling, defeasible workflow uses context dependent reasoning to enhance the exception handling capability of workflow management systems. In particular, this limits possible alternative exception handler candidates in dealing with exceptional situations. Furthermore, a case-based reasoning (CBR) mechanism with integrated human involvement is used to improve the exception handling capabilities. This involves collecting cases to capture experiences in handling exceptions, retrieving similar prior exception handling cases, and reusing the exception handling experiences …

Dimensionality Reduction Using Genetic Algorithms, Michael L. Raymer, William F. Punch, Erik D. Goodman, Leslie A. Kuhn, Anil K. Jain

Kno.e.sis Publications

Pattern recognition generally requires that objects be described in terms of a set of measurable features. The selection and quality of the features representing each pattern affect the success of subsequent classification. Feature extraction is the process of deriving new features from original features to reduce the cost of feature measurement, increase classifier efficiency, and allow higher accuracy. Many feature extraction techniques involve linear transformations of the original pattern vectors to new vectors of lower dimensionality. While this is useful for data visualization and classification efficiency, it does not necessarily reduce the number of features to be measured since each …

Estimating The Economic Value Of The Ocean In A National Income Accounting Framework, Charles S. Colgan

Publications

A key part of the effort to estimate the economic value of the ocean is to develop estimates of the appropriate values of the goods and services traded in the market economy. Such estimates should include the output of industries associated with the ocean, as well as other measures of economic activity, including income generated, employment, the number of firms, etc. Providing the information that permits seeing the economy of the ocean within the context of other economic activity requires preparing estimates that are consistent with the National Income and Product

Accounts (NIPA). The key component is Gross Product Originating …

A New Fixed-Point Theorem For Logic Programming Semantics, Anthony K. Seda, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

We present a new fixed-point theorem akin to the Banach contraction mapping theorem, but in the context of a novel notion of generalized metric space, and show how it can be applied to analyse the denotational semantics of certain logic programs. The theorem is obtained by generalizing a theorem of Priess-Crampe and Ribenboim, which grew out of applications within valuation theory, but is also inspired by a theorem of S.G. Matthews which grew out of applications to conventional programming language semantics. The class of programs to which we apply our theorem was defined previously by us in terms of operators …

On-Line Bayesian Speaker Adaptation By Using Tree-Structured Transformation And Robust Priors, Shaojun Wang, Yunxin Zhao

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper presents new results by using our previously proposed on-line Bayesian learning approach for affine transformation parameter estimation in speaker adaptation. The on-line Bayesian learning technique allows updating parameter estimates after each utterance and it can accommodate flexible forms of transformation functions as well as prior probability density functions. We show through experimental results the robustness of heavy tailed priors to mismatch in prior density estimation. We also show that by properly choosing the transformation matrices and depths of hierarchical trees, recognition performance improved significantly.

Local Properties Of Query Languages, Guozhu Dong, Leonid Libkin, Limsoon Wong

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper we study the expressiveness of local queries. By locality we mean — informally — that in order to check if a tuple belongs to the result of a query, one only has to look at a certain predetermined portion of the input. Examples include all relational calculus queries. We start by proving a general result describing outputs of local queries. This result leads to many easy inexpressibility proofs for local queries. We then consider a closely related property, namely, the bounded degree property. It describes the outputs of local queries on structures that locally look “simple.” Every …

How Do We Know There Is A Population-Environment Problem?, Peter J. Taylor

Working Papers on Science in a Changing World

Five fictional friends of the author have agreed to meet and talk, hoping that he was right when he claimed that discussion crossing the usual boundaries of their fields would enrich their different inquiries and concerns. Ecolo, a natural and human ecologist, breaks the ice. He wants to marshall scientific knowledge to persuade others of the seriousness of the population problem. He is questioned by Philoso, whose philosophical bent leads her to observe the models that people use and to ask how they support the claims they make. In turn, the other three join in: Activo, an activist who is …

The Space Of Jumping Emerging Patterns And Its Incremental Maintenance, Jinyan Li, Kotagiri Ramamohanarao, Guozhu Dong

Kno.e.sis Publications

The concept of jumping emerging patterns (JEPs) has been proposed to describe those discriminating features which only occur in the positive training instances but do not occur in the negative class at all; JEPs have been used to construct classifiers which generally provide better accuracy than the state-of-the-art classifiers such as C4.5. The algorithms for maintaining the space of jumping emerging patterns (JEP space) are presented in this paper. We prove that JEP spaces satisfy the property of convexity. Therefore JEP spaces can be concisely represented by two bounds: consisting respectively of the most general elements and the most specific …

Toward A Heuristic Optimum Design Of Rolling Schedules For Tandem Cold Rolling Mills, Dadong Wang, A Kiet Tieu, Friso Deboer, B Ma, W. Y. Daniel Yuen

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Scheduling for tandem cold mills refers to the determination of inter-stand gauges, tensions and speeds of a specified product. Optimal schedules should result in maximized throughput and minimized operating cost. This paper presents a genetic algorithm based optimization procedure for the scheduling of tandem cold rolling mills. The optimization procedure initiates searching from a logical staring point - an empirical rolling schedule - and ends with an optimum cost. Cost functions are constructed to heuristically direct the genetic algorithm's searching, based on the consideration of power distribution, tension, strip flatness and rolling constraints. Numerical experiments have shown that the proposed …

Induced C*-Algebras, Coactions And Equivariance In The Symmetric Imprimitivity Theorem, Siegfried Echterhoff, Iain Raeburn

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The symmetric imprimitivity theorem provides a Morita equivalence between two crossed products of induced C*-algebras and includes as special cases many other important Morita equivalences such as Green's imprimitivity theorem. We show that the symmetric imprimitivity theorem is compatible with various inflated actions and coactions on the crossed products.

Developments In Blast Furnace Process Control At Port Kembla Based On Process Fundamentals, Robert Nightingale, Rian Dippenaar, Wei-Kao Lu

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

This article is based on a presentation made in the "Geoffrey Belton Memorial Symposium," held in January 2000, in Sydney, Australia, under the joint sponsorship of ISS and TMS.

Influence Of In-Plane Displacement And Double-Aperture Orientation On Slope Fringe Formation In Double-Shearing-Aperture Speckle Interferometry, K F. Wang, A Kiet Tieu, Enbang Li

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The influence of the in-plane displacement and double-aperture orientation on the slope fringe formation in double-shearing-aperture speckle interferometry is discussed in detail. The research results show that the two in-plane displacement components, one parallel to and the other perpendicular to the shearing direction, have an influence on the slope fringe formation and that the double-aperture orientation also has an important influence on the slope fringe formation. A theoretical analysis and experimental results are presented. The experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical analysis.

The C*-Algebras Of Row-Finite Graphs, Teresa Bates, David Pask, Iain Raeburn, Wojciech Szymanski

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

We prove versions of the fundamental theorems about Cuntz-Krieger algebras for the C*-algebras of row-finite graphs: directed graphs in which each vertex emits at most finitely many edges. Special cases of these results have previously been obtained using various powerful machines; our main point is that direct methods yield sharper results more easily.

Fuelling Quasars With Hot Gas, Paul E J Nulsen, A C. Fabian

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

We consider a model for quasar formation in which massive black holes are formed and fuelled largely by the accretion of hot gas during the process of galaxy formation. In standard hierarchical collapse models, objects about the size of normal galaxies and larger form a dense hot atmosphere when they collapse. We show that if such an atmosphere forms a nearly ‘maximal’ cooling flow, then a central black hole can accrete at close to its Eddington limit. This leads to exponential growth of a seed black hole, resulting in a quasar in some cases. In this model, the first quasars …

Non-Gravitational Heating In The Hierarchical Formation Of X-Ray Clusters, K K S Wu, A C. Fabian, Paul E J Nulsen

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The strong deviation in the properties of X-ray clusters from simple scaling laws highlights the importance of non-gravitational heating and cooling processes in the evolution of protocluster gas. We investigate this from two directions: by finding the amount of ‘excess energy’ required in intracluster gas in order to reproduce the observed X-ray cluster properties, and by studying the excess energies obtained from supernovae in a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation. Using the insights obtained from the model, we then critically discuss possible ways of achieving the high excess specific energies required in clusters. These include heating by supernovae and active …

The C*-Algebras Of Infinite Graphs, Neal J. Fowler, Marcelo Laca, Iain Raeburn

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

We associate C*-algebras to infinite directed graphs that are not necessarily locally finite. By realizing these algebras as Cuntz-Krieger algebras in the sense of Exel and Laca, we are able to give criteria for their uniqueness and simplicity, generalizing results of Kumjian, Pask, Raeburn, and Renault for locally finite directed graphs.

A Physical Model For The Hard X-Ray Background, R J. Wilman, A C. Fabian, Paul E J Nulsen

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

We combine a semi-analytic galaxy formation model with a prescription for the obscured growth of massive black holes, to reproduce the hard X-ray background (XRB), the local 2–10 keV active galactic nuclei (AGN) luminosity function and the source counts, including recent Chandra results. The model also complies with constraints on the AGN contribution to the far-infrared and submillimetre backgrounds.

The comoving density of luminous AGN [L(2-10keV) > 10⁴⁴ erg s^-1, in the unabsorbed rest-frame] in the model declines sharply since z=2, mimicking the observed evolution of the quasar population. The abundance of lower luminosity AGN simultaneously increases, and …

Convergence Of Eigenvalues In State-Discretization Of Linear Stochastic Systems, Jose A. De Dona, Graham C. Goodwin, Richard H. Middleton, Iain Raeburn

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The transition operator that describes the time evolution of the state probability distribution for continuous-state linear systems is given by an integral operator. A state-discretization approach is proposed, which consists of a finite rank approximation of this integral operator. As a result of the state-discretization procedure, a Markov chain is obtained, in which case the transition operator is represented by a transition matrix. Spectral properties of the integral operator for the continuous-state case are presented. The relationships between the integral operator and the finite rank approximation are explored. In particular, the limiting properties of the eigenvalues of the transition matrices …

Simulated Annealing With An Optimal Fixed Temperature, Mark James Fielding

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Contrary to conventional belief, it turns out that in some problem instances of moderate size, fixed temperature simulated annealing algorithms based on a heuristic formula for determining the optimal temperature can be superior to algorithms based on cooling. Such a heuristic formula, however, often seems elusive. In practical cases considered we include instances of traveling salesman, quadratic assignment, and graph partitioning problems, where we obtain results that compare favorably to the ones known in the literature.

The Berry-Esseen Bound For Studentized Statistics, Qiying Wang, Bing-Yi Jing, Lincheng Zhao

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

We derive Berry-Esseen bounds for a class of Studentized statistics. The results are applied to Studentized U-statistics, Studentized L-statistics and Studentized functions of the sample mean to give the Berry-Esseen bounds under conditions weaker than those obtained by alternative methods.

An Equivariant Brauer Semigroup And The Symmetric Imprimitivity Theorem, Astrid An Huef, Iain Raeburn, Dana Williams

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

No abstract provided.

Specific Yield For A Two-Dimensional Flow, Peter Tritscher, W Wayne Read, Philip Broadbridge

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

We investigate the systematic secular spatial variation of specific yield. As a vehicle for this analysis we consider a canonical unconfined aquifer consisting of a porous zone whose cross section is a simple long rectangle. The hydraulic conductivity in the unsaturated zone is modeled by the quasi-linear approximation. We find that locally the specific yield may be strongly influenced by the water table depth and mildly dependent on the recharge rate if that rate is high. For the simple geometry considered, a lateral component of flow has been found to have an insignificant effect on the local specific yield and …

Integer-Modulated Filter Banks Providing Perfect Reconstruction, Alfred Mertins, Tanja Karp, Jorg Kliewer

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

In this paper, we extend the perfect reconstruction conditions known for cosine modulation to other, more general modulation schemes. The modified PR conditions provide additional degrees of freedom which can be utilized to design integer-modulated filter banks. Techniques for the design of prototypes and modulation sequences are presented.

Network Reconfiguration For Enhancement Of Voltage Stability In Distribution Networks, Kashem M. Muttaqi, Velappa Ganapathy, G G. Jasmon

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

Network reconfiguration is performed by altering the topological structure of distribution feeders. By reconfiguring the network, voltage stability can be maximised for a particular set of loads in distribution systems. A new algorithm is formulated for enhancement of voltage stability by network reconfiguration. Initially, a certain number of switching combinations is generated using the combination of tie and its two neighbouring switches, and the best combination of switches for maximising the voltage stability in the network among them is determined. Then the search is extended by considering the branches next to the open-branches of the best configuration one by one …

The Effect Of Different Rotation Patterns On The Revisions Of Trend Estimates, David G. Steel, Craig H. Mclaren

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

The X11 and X11ARIMA procedures are widely used to produce seasonally adjusted and trend estimates from time series obtained from sample surveys. The surveys are often based on designs in which there is sample overlap between different periods. The degree of overlap is determined by the pattern of inclusion of selected units over time, i.e., the rotation pattern. An important issue in analysing the series is that trend estimates at the end of the series are revised as estimates for recent periods are added. This article considers the effects of different rotation patterns on the mean squared error of the …

Naturality And Induced Representations, Siegfried Echterhoff, S Kaliszewski, John Quigg, Iain Raeburn

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

We show that induction of covariant representations for C^*-dynamical systems is natural in the sense that it gives a natural transformation between certain crossed-product functors. This involves setting up suitable categories of C^*-algebras and dynamical systems, and extending the usual constructions of crossed products to define the appropriate functors. From this point of view, Green's Imprimitivity Theorem identifies the functors for which induction is a natural equivalence. Various special cases of these results have previously been obtained on an ad hoc basis.

The Method Of Generalised Conditional Symmetries And Its Various Implementations, Joanna Goard

Faculty of Engineering and Information Sciences - Papers: Part A

We relate Kaptsov's method of B-determining equations for finding invariant solutions of PDEs to the nonclassical method and to the method of generalised conditional symmetries. An extension of Kaptsov's method is then used to find new solutions of degenerate diffusion equations.