Organic Computing

The development of industrial robotics applications is a complex and often a very expensive task. One of the core problems is that a lot of implementation and adaptation effort can only be done after the robotic hardware has been installed. This paper shows how Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) can facilitate the fast prototyping of novel industrial applications and thus lower the overall development costs. Microsoft Robotics Studio is a development tool for creating software for robotic applications. It includes an asynchronous, serviceoriented runtime and a realistic physics-based simulation environment. This allows for testing and improving software prototypes before any hardware is installed. As an example control software for a vision of tomorrow's production automation systems has been implemented and evaluated in the simulation environment of MSRS.

Organic Computing systems are systems which have the capability to autonomously (re-)organize and adapt themselves. The benefit of such systems with self-x properties is that they are more dependable, as they can compensate for some failures. They are easier to maintain, because they can automatically configure themselves and are more convenient to use because of automatic adaptation to new situations. While Organic Computing systems have a lot of desired properties, there still exists only little knowledge on how they can be designed and built. In this paper an approach for specification and construction of a class of Organic Computing systems is presented, called the Restore Invariant Approach (RIA). The core idea is that the behaviour of an Organic Computing system can be split into productive phases and self-x phases. This allows for a generic description of how "organic" aspects can be specified and implemented. The approach will be illustrated by applying it to a design methodology for Organic Computing systems and further refining it to an explicit case study in the domain of production automation.

This paper provides a unifying view for the engineering of self-adaptive (SA) and self-organising (SO) systems. We first identify requirements for designing and building trustworthy self-adaptive and self-organising systems. Second, we propose a generic framework combining design-time and run-time features, which permit the definition and analysis at design-time of mechanisms that both ensure and constrain the run-time behaviour of an SA or SO system, thereby providing some assurance of its self-* capabilities. We show how this framework applies to both an SA and an SO system, and discuss several current proof-of-concept studies on the enabling technologies.

We present three explicit constructions of hash functions, which exhibit a trade-off between the size of the family (and hence the number of random bits needed to generate a member of the family), and the quality (or error parameter) of the pseudo-random property it achieves. Unlike previous constructions, most notably universal hashing, the size of our families is essentially independent of the size of the domain on which the functions operate. The first construction is for the mixing property -mapping a proportional part of any subset of the domain to any other subset. The other two are for the extraction property -mapping any subset of the domain almost uniformly into a range smaller than it. The second and third constructions handle (respectively) the extreme situations when the range is very large or very small. We provide lower bounds showing that our constructions are nearly optimal, and mention some applications of the new constructions.

In memory of Garth Gaudry, who set me on the road Contents Preface ix Notation x Acknowledgments xi Chapter 1. Expansion in Cayley graphs 1 §1.1. Expander graphs: basic theory 2 §1.2. Expansion in Cayley graphs, and Kazhdan's property (T) 20 §1.3. Quasirandom groups 54 §1.4. The Balog-Szemerédi-Gowers lemma, and the Bourgain-Gamburd expansion machine 81 §1.5. Product theorems, pivot arguments, and the Larsen-Pink non-concentration inequality 94 §1.6. Non-concentration in subgroups §1.7. Sieving and expanders Chapter 2. Related articles §2.1. Cayley graphs and the algebra of groups §2.2. The Lang-Weil bound §2.3. The spectral theorem and its converses for unbounded self-adjoint operators §2.4. Notes on Lie algebras §2.5. Notes on groups of Lie type Bibliography Index vii 1 Perhaps this is because so many of these fields are all grappling with aspects of a single general problem in mathematics, namely when to determine whether a given mathematical object or process of interest "behaves pseudorandomly" or not, and how this is connected with the symmetry group of that object or process. whenever f is non-negative and supported on a set of cardinality at most |V |/2. Let us assume (1.3) for now and see why it implies (1.2). Let f ∈ 2 (V ) have norm one and mean zero. We split f = f + -f -into positive and negative parts, where f + , f -are non-negative with disjoint supports. . At least one of f + and f -is supported on a set of size at most |V |/2. By symmetry we may assume that f -has this small support. Let σ > 0 be a small quantity (depending on c) to be chosen later. If f -has 2 (V ) norm Now we turn to the rigorous construction of random expander graphs. We will assume that k is a large (but fixed) even integer, k = 2l. To build a 2l-regular graph on n vertices {1, . . . , n}, what we will do is pick l permutations π 1 , . . . , π l : {1, . . . , n} → {1, . . . , n}, and let G be the graph formed by connecting v to π i (v) for all v ∈ {1, . . . , n} and i = 1, . . . , l. This is not always a 2l-regular graph, but we will be able to show the following two claims (if k is large enough): Proposition 1.1.12 (G can be k-regular). The graph G is 2l-regular with probability at least c -o n→∞;k (1), where c > 0 depends only on k. Proposition 1.1.13 (G usually expands). There is an ε > 0 depending only on k = 2l, such that the probability that G is 2l-regular but not a one-sided ε-expander is o n→∞;k (1). Putting these two propositions together, we conclude Corollary 1.1.14. With probability at least c -o n→∞;k (1), G is a 2l-regular one-sided ε-expander. In particular, this allows us to construct one-sided expander families of k-regular graphs for any fixed large even k. Remark 1.1.15. If one allowed graphs to have multiple edges and loops, then it would be possible to dispense with the need for Proposition 1.1.12, and show that G (now viewed as a 2l-regular graph with multiple edges and loops) is a one-sided ε-expander with probability 1 -o n→∞;k (1). (This requires extending results such as the weak discrete Cheeger inequality to the case when there are multiple edges and loops, but this turns out to

In memory of Garth Gaudry, who set me on the road Contents Preface ix Notation x Acknowledgments xi Chapter 1. Expansion in Cayley graphs 1 §1.1. Expander graphs: basic theory 2 §1.2. Expansion in Cayley graphs, and Kazhdan's property (T) 20 §1.3. Quasirandom groups 54 §1.4. The Balog-Szemerédi-Gowers lemma, and the Bourgain-Gamburd expansion machine 81 §1.5. Product theorems, pivot arguments, and the Larsen-Pink non-concentration inequality 94 §1.6. Non-concentration in subgroups §1.7. Sieving and expanders Chapter 2. Related articles §2.1. Cayley graphs and the algebra of groups §2.2. The Lang-Weil bound §2.3. The spectral theorem and its converses for unbounded self-adjoint operators §2.4. Notes on Lie algebras §2.5. Notes on groups of Lie type Bibliography Index vii 1 Perhaps this is because so many of these fields are all grappling with aspects of a single general problem in mathematics, namely when to determine whether a given mathematical object or process of interest "behaves pseudorandomly" or not, and how this is connected with the symmetry group of that object or process. whenever f is non-negative and supported on a set of cardinality at most |V |/2. Let us assume (1.3) for now and see why it implies (1.2). Let f ∈ 2 (V ) have norm one and mean zero. We split f = f + -f -into positive and negative parts, where f + , f -are non-negative with disjoint supports. . At least one of f + and f -is supported on a set of size at most |V |/2. By symmetry we may assume that f -has this small support. Let σ > 0 be a small quantity (depending on c) to be chosen later. If f -has 2 (V ) norm Now we turn to the rigorous construction of random expander graphs. We will assume that k is a large (but fixed) even integer, k = 2l. To build a 2l-regular graph on n vertices {1, . . . , n}, what we will do is pick l permutations π 1 , . . . , π l : {1, . . . , n} → {1, . . . , n}, and let G be the graph formed by connecting v to π i (v) for all v ∈ {1, . . . , n} and i = 1, . . . , l. This is not always a 2l-regular graph, but we will be able to show the following two claims (if k is large enough): Proposition 1.1.12 (G can be k-regular). The graph G is 2l-regular with probability at least c -o n→∞;k (1), where c > 0 depends only on k. Proposition 1.1.13 (G usually expands). There is an ε > 0 depending only on k = 2l, such that the probability that G is 2l-regular but not a one-sided ε-expander is o n→∞;k (1). Putting these two propositions together, we conclude Corollary 1.1.14. With probability at least c -o n→∞;k (1), G is a 2l-regular one-sided ε-expander. In particular, this allows us to construct one-sided expander families of k-regular graphs for any fixed large even k. Remark 1.1.15. If one allowed graphs to have multiple edges and loops, then it would be possible to dispense with the need for Proposition 1.1.12, and show that G (now viewed as a 2l-regular graph with multiple edges and loops) is a one-sided ε-expander with probability 1 -o n→∞;k (1). (This requires extending results such as the weak discrete Cheeger inequality to the case when there are multiple edges and loops, but this turns out to

Computer architects have been studying the dynamically reconfigurable computer for a number of years. New capabilities such as on-demand computing power, self-adaptiveness and self-optimization capabilities by restructuring the hardware on the fly at run-time is seen as a driving technology factor for current research initiatives such as autonomic [2, 3] and organic computing . Much research work is currently devoted to models for partial hardware module relocation and dynamically reconfigurable hardware reconfiguration on e.g., FPGAbased platforms. However, there are many physical restrictions and technical problems limiting the scope or applicability of these approaches. This led us to the development of a new FPGA-based reconfigurable computer called the Erlangen Slot Machine. The architecture overcomes many architectural constraints of existing platforms and allows a user to partially reconfigure hardware modules arranged in so-called slots. The uniqueness of this computer stems from a) a new slot-oriented hardware architecture, b) a set of novel inter-module communication paradigms, and c) concepts for dynamic and partial reconfiguration management.

Production planning and variation modeling are interdependent parallel activities critical to the success of a software product line. Software product line organizations design a production capability to satisfy their business goals. That production capability is dependent on and must support the full range of product variation. Current techniques for variation modeling identify and handle variations among products but fail to recognize variations that result from business goals such as rapid time to market which are satisfied by how products are built. In this paper we present a view of our production planning technique and describe our preliminary research into its relation to variation modeling.

The objective of this work was to develop patient-specific dosimetry for patients with metastatic gastrointestinal tract cancers who received 111In-CC49 IgG for imaging before therapy with 90Y-CC49 IgG. Whole-body imaging of 12 patients, who received 111-185 MBq (3-5 mCi) of 111In-CC49, commenced in < 2 hr postinfusion and was continued daily for 4-5 days. SPECT data were acquired at 24 and 72 hr to determine the range of 111In-CC49 activity concentrations in tumors and normal organs. Time-activity curves were generated from the image data and scaled from 111In-CC49 to 90Y-CC49 for dosimetric purposes. Absorbed-dose calculations for 90Y-CC49 included the mean and range in tumor and normal organs. Computed 90Y-CC49 activity concentrations were compared with measurements on 10 needle biopsies of normal liver and four tumor biopsies. In 9 of 10 normal liver samples, the range of computed 90Y-CC49 activity concentrations bracketed measured values. This was also the case for 3 of 4 tu...

The "motivation domain" of an Enterprise Architecture addresses objectives in a broad scope ranging from high-level statements expressing the goals of an enterprise to declarations of requirements on business processes, services and systems. An important development regarding the incorporation of the motivation domain in a comprehensive Enterprise Architecture modeling language is the upcoming Motivational Extension to ArchiMate (based on the ARMOR language). The extension proposes the inclusion of concepts such as concerns, assessments, goals, principles and requirements to ArchiMate. We believe that careful definition of the semantics of these concepts is required, especially when considering that the motivation domain addresses subjective aspects of the enterprise. To address that, this paper focuses on an ontology-based semantics for the Motivation Extension. We interpret the concepts by using the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) as a semantic domain, and, as a result, propose well-founded recommendations for improvements of the extension.

US007305371B2 (12) United States Patent Brueckner et al. (io) Patent No.: US 7,305,371 B2 (45) Date of Patent: Dec. 4, 2007 (54s) SWARMING AGENTS FOR DISTRIBUTED 6,799,087 FP* 9/2004 Estkowski 700/245 PATTERN DETECTION AND 6,801,819 R1 * 10/2004 ...

Relationships between entities in many complex systems, such as the Internet and social networks, have a natural hierarchical organization. Understanding these inherent hierarchies is essential for creating models of these systems. Thus, there is a recent body of research concerning the extraction of hierarchies from networks. We propose a new method for modeling hierarchies through extracting the affiliations of the network. From these affiliations, we construct a lattice of the relationships between nodes. A principal advantage of our approach is that any overlapping community structures of the nodes within the network have a natural representation within the lattice. We then show an example of our method using a real data set.

Definitions of autonomous agents—simple living systems—have often included the thermodynamic idea that agents need to do work to construct constraints and to maintain these constraints. We show that an ant-pheromone system is sufficiently rich to allow an explanation of its behavior in terms of thermodynamic properties, particularly the work done by the system on itself to build structure. This work is done by an inward pressure whose origin is the antpheromone system itself. The degree of structure formed by the system can ...

Allostasis is a mechanism that permits adaptation of an organism as a response to changing (physical or social) environmental conditions. Allostasis is driven by a number of factors, including regulation through hormonal mechanisms. Oxytocin (OT) is a hormone that has been found to play a role in regulating social behaviours and adaptation. However, the concrete effects that OT promotes remain unclear and controversial. One of these effects is on the attention paid to social cues (social salience). Two opposing hypotheses have been proposed. One hypothesis is that adaptation is achieved by increasing attention to social cues (increasing social salience), the other that adaptation is achieved by decreasing attention to social cues (decreasing social salience). In this paper, we present agent simulation experiments that test these two contrasting hypotheses under different environmental conditions related to food availability: a comfortable environment, a challenging environment, and ...

Pervasive systems are intended to make use of services and components that they encounter in their environment. Such systems are naturally spatial in that they can only be understood in terms of the ways in which components meet and interact in space. Rather than treating spatiality separately from system components, researchers are starting to develop computational models in which the entire structure of a pervasive system is modelled and constructed using an explicit spatial model, supporting multi-level spatial reasoning, and adapting autonomously to spatial interactions. In this paper we review current and emerging models of spatial computing for pervasive ecosystems, and highlight some of the trends that will guide future research.

The focal point of this paper pivots on a most plausible proposition to develop a model via which live biological entities can be visualized as components of a wireless sensor network. Inherent distributed communication methodologies present among such chosen organisms are exploited to provide the interaction mechanism between the nodes of the sensor network. The related functional specifications of the bio-sensors and their related rationale have been discussed. The sensor network thus developed is used as a tool for implementing Pervasive Computing. Salient benefits of using Bio-sensor nodes over electronic sensors have been discussed.

Chemotaxis is the capacity of a micro organism to perceive nutrient gradient in their chemical setting and to moves towards higher concentrations of chemoattractant. Sophisticated strategies have been developed by micro organisms to perform chemotaxis by comparing intensities of the stimulus at different times. In this study, the hydrodynamic of the run and tumble strategy in a shear flow is examined. The oceanic environment has been reproduced by introducing a non homogeneous and periodic strength of shear. The model implemented in this study is inspired by that suggested in Pedley and Locsei (P.D.) [11], but it differs from the P.D. model in the temporal discretization of the bacterial random walk. In addition we add a dynamic torque to reproduce tumbling. Three state parameters (or variable) have been used in order to analyze the model on different aspects: the shape of the swimmer, quantified by its elongation η, the tumbling time τ d and the mean reorientation angle θ. In order to maximize the velocity drift at low values of shear, γ < 1, it was convenient to maintain a mean reorientation angle Θ < 40 • and a tumbling time τ d < 0.3. On the contrary an elongated particle maximizes its velocity drift for higher values of shear. Introducing a periodic variation in the strength of the shear flow, Ω, which reproduce the wave effect, the performance of the elongated particles decreases quickly with an increasing rate of shear.

The goal of Risk Management activities is to define prevention and control mechanisms to address the risks attached to specify activities and valuable assets. Many Risk Management efforts operate in silos with narrowly focused, functionally driven, and disjointed activities. That fact leads to a fragmented view of risks, where each activity uses its own language, customs and metrics. The lack of interconnection and holistic view of risks limits an organization-wide perception of risks, where interdependent risks are not anticipated, controlled or managed. In order to address the Risk Management interoperability and standardization issues, this paper proposes an alignment between Risk Management, Governance and Enterprise Architecture activities, providing a systematic support to map and trace identified risks to enterprise artifacts modeled within the Enterprise Architecture, supporting the overall strategy of any organization. We discuss the main relationships between Risk Management and Enterprise Architecture and propose an architecture to integrate risks concerns into the overall organization environment.

Current technology of engineering has reached a level where lifecycle product information, comprehensive sets of model creation procedures, product data management, and Internet based communication environment serve integrated group work of engineers. It is inevitable, that the next main ...

With increasing complexity and heterogeneity of computing devices, it has become crucial for system to be autonomous, adaptive to dynamic environment, robust, flexible, and having so called self-*properties. These autonomous systems are called organic computing(OC) systems. OC system was proposed as a solution to tackle complex systems. Design time decisions have been shifted to run time in highly complex and interconnected systems as it is very hard to consider all scenarios and their appropriate actions in advance. Consequently, Self-awareness becomes crucial for these adaptive autonomous systems. To cope with evolving environment and changing user needs, system need to have knowledge about itself and its surroundings. Literature review shows that for autonomous and intelligent systems, researchers are concerned about knowledge acquisition, representation and learning which is necessary for a system to adapt. This paper is written to compare self-awareness and organic computing by discussing their definitions, properties and architecture.

Expander graphs have been, during the last five decades, the subject of a most fruitful interaction between pure mathematics and computer science, with influence and applications going both ways (cf. [Lub94], [HLW06], [Lub12] and the references therein). In the last decade, a theory of "high dimensional expanders" has begun to emerge. The goal of the current paper is to describe some paths of this new area of study.

The recent innovation of modern cars has mainly been driven by the development of new as well as the continuous improvement of existing electrical and electronic (E/E) components, including sensors, actuators, and electronic control units. This trend has been accompanied by an increasing complexity of E/E components and their numerous interdependencies. In addition, external impact factors (e.g., changes of regulations, product innovations) demand for more sophisticated E/E product data management (E/E-PDM). Since E/E product data is usually scattered over a large number of distributed, heterogeneous IT systems, application-spanning use cases are difficult to realize (e.g., ensuring the consistency of artifacts corresponding to different development phases, plausibility of logical connections between electronic control units). To tackle this challenge, the partial integration of E/E product data as well as corresponding schemas becomes necessary. This paper presents the properties of a typical IT system landscape related to E/E-PDM, reveals challenges emerging in this context, and elicits requirements for E/E-PDM. Based on this, insights This is an extended version of the paper Managing Complex Data for Electrical/Electronic Components: Challenges and Requirements selected for the special DASP issue Best Workshop Papers of BTW 2013.

The normalized distance Laplacian matrix of a connected graph G, denoted by D L (G), is defined by D L (G) = T r(G) −1/2 D L (G)T r(G) −1/2 , where D(G) is the distance matrix, the D L (G) is the distance Laplacian matrix and T r(G) is the diagonal matrix of vertex transmissions of G. The set of all eigenvalues of D L (G) including their multiplicities is the normalized distance Laplacian spectrum or D L-spectrum of G. In this paper, we find the D L-spectrum of the joined union of regular graphs in terms of the adjacency spectrum and the spectrum of an auxiliary matrix. As applications, we determine the D L-spectrum of the graphs associated with algebraic structures. In particular, we find the D L-spectrum of the power graphs of groups, the D L-spectrum of the commuting graphs of non-abelian groups and the D L-spectrum of the zero-divisor graphs of commutative rings. Several open problems are given for further work.

Nowadays, fast, reliable and accurate optimization methods are extensively used to realize edge intelligence in industrial applications of internet of things in order to better processing of big data collected by different environmental sensors on the ground and under the sea. Sometimes, the collected data is a one-dimensional signal with periodic/semi-periodic pattern (in terms of time, distance, etc.) which shows important features of the sensed data. However, finding the general extremum (global maximum or minimum) may not be easy in some measurements of such observed signals. The global points are critical to be found very accurately because of their importance to find optimal velocity, effective distance (or optimum range), the moment of optimality, and so on (related to physical measurements that need to be optimized). In this study, an analysis to find global optimal points of generic trigonometric functions with relatively complicated periodic patterns is carried out based on a modified form of grid search (GS) technique while there is a possibility of repetitive global points. As it is shown, some marine signals behave in such a way that can make the optimization process more complicated with losing optimal points while using the basic GS method. The basic method cannot find all repetitive maximum/minimum points in some signals. There is therefore a challenge in the use of the basic method in practice, because some global optimum points may be classified as local optimum points. We used some trigonometric functions to model the signals, and apply the modified GS method to them to find all repetitive points. Our results confirm that the modified solution can find all the repetitive points of the functions under a normally determined accuracy (not very high). Thus, we have proposed this new version of grid search to safely find all global points without a high accuracy parameter setting for sensitive data. This is indeed toward less complexity of the optimization algorithm. Keywords Optimization Á Industrial signals Á Grid search Á Repetitive global optimums Á Periodic functions Á Industrial internet of things (IIoT) Á Edge intelligence (ED) Hani Attar and Reza Khosravi have been contributed equally to this work.

The purpose of this article is to identify and explain the barriers that prevented the case study organization, an Australasian university, from implementing a groupware package. This is an insider action research case study, using qualitative semi-structured interviews, group and individual training to look at users’ technological frames around the implementation and use of a groupware product. Technological frames were used to enable a systematic examination of the assumptions, expectations, and knowledge of technology; in particular, the use of technological frames reveals aspects of user resistance. While addressing criticisms of the technological frames genre, this study uses technological frames as a lens to examine the underlying drivers and impediments to information systems (IS) implementation. In this case study, changes to a groupware product failed to be implemented, not because of user resistance to the product, but because of organizational politics. This study demonst...

Discusses the use of information technology to facilitate communication and collaboration. In this action research project a groupware product called Lotus NotesTM was implemented to facilitate communication and collaboration amongst the senior management team. Although there was a real need for change, and the project received strong support from senior management on the basis that it would enable radical changes in coordination within the workgroup, these radical changes did not occur. The authors analyse the reasons for failure, and suggest that the project failed because of institutional forces which inhibited dramatic changes in work habits.

The development of new heterogeneous architectures for computer systems is an advanced research direction in the field of supercomputer engineering. At the same time, software porting between different heterogeneous architectures requires significant code revision as a consequence of the architectural limitations of the programming languages available. To solve this problem, we propose Set@l, a new architecture-independent programming language which extends some ideas of the COLAMO and SETL programming languages. In Set@l, an algorithm and its parallelization are described by separated modules of the program. This is determined by the application of the set-theoretic code view and the aspect-oriented programming paradigm. The source code in Set@l is architecture-independent and represents the solution to a computational problem as an information graph specified in terms of set theory and relational calculus. Aspects adapt a universal algorithm to the architecture and configuration of a particular computer system by means of partition and classification of sets. In contrast to SETL, Set@l offers different classification criteria for collections, particularly in accordance with the type of parallelism. Sets of indefinite type of parallelism are denoted as implicit ones. In the paper, we describe the fundamentals of architecture-independent programming in the Set@l language and consider an example in which Set@l is applied for coding Gaussian elimination.

C codebases frequently embed nonportable and unstandardized elements such as inline assembly code. Such elements are not well understood, which poses a problem to tool developers who aspire to support C code. This paper investigates the use of x86-64 inline assembly in 1264 C projects from GitHub and combines qualitative and quantitative analyses to answer questions that tool authors may have. We found that 28.1% of the most popular projects contain inline assembly code, although the majority contain only a few fragments with just one or two instructions. The most popular instructions constitute a small subset concerned largely with multicore semantics, performance optimization, and hardware control. Our findings are intended to help developers of C-focused tools, those testing compilers, and language designers seeking to reduce the reliance on inline assembly. They may also aid the design of tools focused on inline assembly itself.

Relationships between entities in many complex systems, such as the Internet and social networks, have a natural hierarchical organization. Understanding these inherent hierarchies is essential for creating models of these systems. Thus, there is a recent body of research concerning the extraction of hierarchies from networks. We propose a new method for modeling hierarchies through extracting the affiliations of the network. From these affiliations, we construct a lattice of the relationships between nodes. A principal advantage of our approach is that any overlapping community structures of the nodes within the network have a natural representation within the lattice. We then show an example of our method using a real data set.

Previous studies have identified a population of cells recorded in the postsubiculum and the anterior thalamic nucleus (ATN) that discharge as a function of an animal's head direction (HD) in the horizontal plane. The present experiments monitored HD cell activity when rats were confronted with a situation in which directional information from internal sensory sources (e.g., proprioceptive, vestibular, or motor efference copy) conflicted with directional information derived from familiar, external landmarks. Results showed that when a salient, familiar cue was reintroduced to rat's environment into a position that conflicted with the cell's current firing direction, HD cells in both the ATN and the postsubiculum shifted their preferred direction to reflect their originally established orientation with this cue. This finding suggests that sensory inputs onto HD cells from external landmark cues are capable of overriding spatial information developed through internal sensory cues. Several behavioral studies have shown that both the dead

Interest in organic computers, commonly called wetware, has been on the rise in the past decades as innovations continue to happen in the fields of biology and neuroscience. Wetware, once set firmly in the realms of science-fiction has become a potential future path of computers. Combined with the predicted "death" of Moore's Law exploration on the viability of wetware as a future path of computers has become increasingly more important. In this paper, I will be discussing the principle behind wetware, its advantages over silicon chips, and the potential behind wetware as an alternative to traditional silicon-based chips.

A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is considered one of the most important techniques used to propagate trust in authentication over the Internet. This technology is based on a trust model defined by the original X.509 (1988) standard and is composed of three entities: the certification authority (CA), the certificate holder (or subject), and the Relying Party (RP). The CA plays the role of a trusted third party between the certificate holder and the RP. In many use cases, this trust model has worked successfully. However, we argue that the application of this model on the Internet implies that web users need to depend on almost anyone in the world in order to use PKI technology. Thus, we believe that the current TLS system is not fit for purpose and must be revisited as a whole. In response, the latest draft edition of X.509 has proposed a new trust model by adding new entity called the Trust Broker (TB). In this paper, we present an implementation approach that a Trust Broker could...

The design, construction, and testing of a large distributed system of novel, small, low-cost, autonomous surface vehicles in the form of self-propelled buoys capable of operating in open waters is reported. We detail the successful testing of collective behaviors of systems with up to 50 buoys, achieving scalable deployment and dynamic monitoring in unstructured environments. This constitutes the largest distributed multi-robot system of its kind reported to date. We confirm the robustness of the system to the loss of multiple units for different collective behaviors such as flocking, navigation, and area coverage. For dynamic area monitoring, we introduce a new metric to quantify coverage effectiveness. Our system exhibits near optimal scalability for fixed target areas and a high degree of flexibility when the shape of the target changes with time. This system demonstrates the potential of distributed multi-robot systems for the pervasive and persistent monitoring of coastal and inland water environments.

Unicellular bottom-heavy swimming microorganisms are usually denser than the fluid in which they swim. In shallow suspensions, the bottom heaviness results in a gravitational torque that orients the cells to swim vertically upwards in the absence of fluid flow. Swimming cells thus accumulate at the upper surface to form a concentrated layer of cells. When the cell concentration is high enough, the layer overturns to form bioconvection patterns. Thin concentrated plumes of cells descend rapidly and cells return to the upper surface in wide, slowly moving upwelling plumes. When there is fluid flow, a second viscous torque is exerted on the swimming cells. The balance between the local shear flow viscous and the gravitational torques determines the cells&#39; swimming direction, (gyrotaxis). In this thesis, the wavelengths of bioconvection patterns are studied experimentally as well as theoretically as follow; First, in aquasystem it is rare to find one species lives individually and w...

Although the Web is almost omnipresent in many children's lives, most children lack adequate Web searching skills as well as skills to process and critically evaluate Web information. In this article, we describe and evaluate an educational program that aimed at acquiring Web skills in the context of a content knowledge domain. Through a multiple case study design we wanted to gain insight into the contextual factors that influence the realization of such program and into the learning gains in the participating classes in terms of content knowledge and Web skills. Four 5th grade teachers carried out the program, which consisted of eight weekly sessions and focused on teaching students Web searching, reading and evaluating skills within the subject of healthy food. Data from a variety of sources were collected: videotaped and written lesson observations, interviews with teachers and students, teacher diaries, student questionnaires and student assignments. The results show that the teachers appeared to be able to carry out the program to varying degrees. Contextual factors that influenced the realization of the program were partly related to specific conditions as the investment of time and effort by the teacher and the school's way of organizing computer work and its supervision. The extent to which teachers' teaching styles corresponded with the program's assumptions also played an important role. Students' knowledge and skills improved during the program with regard to both content knowledge and Web skills. However, most students appeared to remain inconsistent Web users, and did not act upon their knowledge of Web searching, reading and evaluating skills. Although generally speaking there were differences between stronger and weaker performing students, all students showed unexpected, inconsistent or inflexible behavior.

CLIP proteases are non-digestive serine proteases present in hemolymph of insects and other arthropods. They are composed of one or more amino-terminal clip domains followed by a linker sequence and a carboxyl-terminal S1A family serine protease domain. The genes for CLIP proteases have evolved as four clades (CLIPA, CLIPB, CLIPC, CLIPD), each present as multigene families in insect genomes. CLIP proteases in hemolymph function in innate immune responses. These include proteolytic activation of the cytokine Spätzle, to form an active Toll ligand leading to synthesis of antimicrobial peptides, and specific activation of prophenoloxidase, required for the melanization response. CLIP proteases act in cascade pathways. In the immune pathways that have been characterized, microbial surface molecules stimulate activation of an initiating modular serine protease, which then activates a CLIPC, which in turn activates a CLIPB. The active CLIPB then cleaves and activates an effector molecule (proSpätzle or prophenoloxidase). CLIPA proteins are pseudoproteases, lacking proteolytic activity, but some can function as regulators of the activity of other CLIP proteases and form high molecular weight immune complexes. A few three dimensional structures for CLIP proteases are now available for structure-function analysis of these immune factors, revealing structural features that may act in specific activation or in formation of immune complexes. The functions of most CLIP proteases are unknown, even in well studied insect species. It is very likely that additional proteins activated by CLIP proteases and acting in immunity remain to be discovered.

Organic Computing (OC) systems differ from classical software systems as the topology and the participating components of the system are not predefined and therefore are subject to unforeseeable change during the systems' runtime. Thus, completely new challenges to the verification and validation of such systems as well as for interactions between system components and, of course, between the system and the user arise. These challenges can be subsumed by the terms trustworthiness or trust. This paper proposes-after exploring the notions and principles of trust in the literature-a definition of trust which encompasses all aspects that define the trustworthiness of an Organic Computing system. It then outlines the different research challenges that have to be tackled in order to provide an understanding of trust in OC-systems and gives perspectives on how this endeavour can be taken on. Current research initiatives in the area of trust in computing systems are reviewed and discussed.

Numerical studies are made of the flow of a viscous thermally-stratified fluid in a square container. The flow is driven by the top lid of the container, which executes torsional oscillations. A stabilizing vertical temperature difference (TH-Tc) is applied on the horizontal boundary wails ; the two vertical side walls are thermally insulated. Numerical solutions are secured to the time-dependent Navier-Stokes equations under the Boussinesq-fluid approximation. Details of unsteady flow and thermal fields are exhibited over broad ranges of three principal parameters, i.e. the Reynolds number Re, the Grashof number Gr, and the frequency ratio 0'. Of particular interest is the possibility of resonance; this gives rise to intensification of flows in the interior and associated augmentation of convective heat transport. Systematically-organized computational results indicate that the existence of resonance is verified, and the enhancement of heat transfer is demonstrated at particular values of 0'.

In this work, we address the problem of scheduling loops with dependences in the context of speculative parallelization. We show that the scheduling alternatives are highly influenced by the dependence violation pattern the code presents. We center our analysis in those algorithms where dependences are less likely to appear as the execution proceeds. Particularly, we focus on randomized incremental algorithms, widely used as a much more efficient solution to many problems than their deterministic counterparts. These important algorithms are, in general, hard to parallelize by hand and represent a challenge for any automatic parallelization scheme. Our analysis led us to the development of MESETA, a new scheduling strategy that takes into account the probability of a dependence violation to determine the number of iterations being scheduled. MESETA is compared with existing techniques, including Fixed-Size Chunking (FSC), the only scheduling alternative used so far in the context of speculative parallelization. Our experimental results show a 5.5 percent to 36.25 percent speedup improvement over FSC, leading to a better extraction of the parallelism inherent to randomized incremental algorithms. Moreover, when the cost of dependence violations is too high to obtain speedups, MESETA curves the performance degradation. Index Terms-Parallelism and concurrency, load balancing and task assignment, scheduling and task partitioning, geometrical problems and computations.

In this paper the tiny nodes are deployed in target areas according to the deployment nature of target but nodes are easily targeted by attacker with physical attack of node capture. So, secure communications in some wireless sensor networks are critical because these networks are highly vulnerable to internal and external attacks. In our paper, we present an enhanced High-Resolution Robust Localization for security of wireless sensor networks. This combination of scheme provides the good performances and efficiency in terms of network connectivity. We propose a range-independent localization algorithm called HiRLoc that allows sensors to passively determine their location with high resolution, without increasing the number of reference points, or the complexity of the hardware of each reference point. In HiRLoc, sensors determine their location based on the intersection of the areas covered by the beacons transmitted by multiple reference points. we show that HiRLoc is robust against known attacks on WSN.. Finally, our performance evaluation shows that HiRLoc leads to a significant improvement in localization accuracy compared to state-of-the-art range independent localization schemes, while requiring fewer reference points.

This paper describes the modelling, analysis and simulation of artificial foraging ant communities. Each virtual ant (vant) taking part in the simulation is modelled as an agent. The objective of each vant is to collect food for their community. Our aim is to study the communication flow in the community (and not to be biologically realistic). In this way, exchange of information can occur between colliding vants. We have used simulation and mathematical analysis to study different situations, such as low memory vants, forgetful vants and dying vants. Several statistical properties of these systems are characterized and some emergent phenomena are observed.