Active node supporting context-aware vertical handover in pervasive computing environment with redundant positioning

A major requirement for pervasive systems is to integrate context-awareness to support heterogeneous networks and device technologies and at the same time support application adaptations to suit user activities. However, current infrastructures for pervasive systems are based on centralized architectures which are focused on context support for service adaptations in response to changes in the computing environment or user mobility. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical architecture based on active nodes, which maximizes the computational capabilities of various nodes within the pervasive computing environment, while efficiently gathering and evaluating context information from the user's working environment. The migratable active node architecture employs various decision making processes for evaluating a rich set of context information in order to dynamically allocate active nodes in the working environment, perform application adaptations and predict user mobility. The active node also utilizes the Redundant Positioning System to accurately manage user's mobility. This paper demonstrates the active node capabilities through context-aware vertical handover applications.

Canonical solution groups of a homomorphism : manipulator kinematics, nonparametric regression and distributed object systems

The kinematic mapping of a rigid open-link manipulator is a homomorphism between Lie groups. The homomorphisrn has solution groups that act on an inverse kinematic solution element. A canonical representation of solution group operators that act on a solution element of three and seven degree-of-freedom (do!) dextrous manipulators is determined by geometric analysis. Seven canonical solution groups are determined for the seven do! Robotics Research K-1207 and Hollerbach arms. The solution element of a dextrous manipulator is a collection of trivial fibre bundles with solution fibres homotopic to the Torus. If fibre solutions are parameterised by a scalar, a direct inverse funct.ion that maps the scalar and Cartesian base space coordinates to solution element fibre coordinates may be defined. A direct inverse pararneterisation of a solution element may be approximated by a local linear map generated by an inverse augmented Jacobian correction of a linear interpolation. The action of canonical solution group operators on a local linear approximation of the solution element of inverse kinematics of dextrous manipulators generates cyclical solutions. The solution representation is proposed as a model of inverse kinematic transformations in primate nervous systems. Simultaneous calibration of a composition of stereo-camera and manipulator kinematic models is under-determined by equi-output parameter groups in the composition of stereo-camera and Denavit Hartenberg (DH) rnodels. An error measure for simultaneous calibration of a composition of models is derived and parameter subsets with no equi-output groups are determined by numerical experiments to simultaneously calibrate the composition of homogeneous or pan-tilt stereo-camera with DH models. For acceleration of exact Newton second-order re-calibration of DH parameters after a sequential calibration of stereo-camera and DH parameters, an optimal numerical evaluation of DH matrix first order and second order error derivatives with respect to a re-calibration error function is derived, implemented and tested. A distributed object environment for point and click image-based tele-command of manipulators and stereo-cameras is specified and implemented that supports rapid prototyping of numerical experiments in distributed system control. The environment is validated by a hierarchical k-fold cross validated calibration to Cartesian space of a radial basis function regression correction of an affine stereo model. Basic design and performance requirements are defined for scalable virtual micro-kernels that broker inter-Java-virtual-machine remote method invocations between components of secure manageable fault-tolerant open distributed agile Total Quality Managed ISO 9000+ conformant Just in Time manufacturing systems.

Simulation of robot manipulator control strategies

The high capital cost of robots prohibit their economic application. One method of making their application more economic is to increase their operating speed. This can be done in a number of ways e.g. redesign of robot geometry, improving actuators and improving control system design. In this thesis the control system design is considered. It is identified in the literature review that two aspects in relation to robot control system design have not been addressed in any great detail by previous researchers. These are: how significant are the coupling terms in the dynamic equations of the robot and what is the effect of the coupling terms on the performance of a number of typical independent axis control schemes?. The work in this thesis addresses these two questions in detail. A program was designed to automatically calculate the path and trajectory and to calculate the significance of the coupling terms in an example application of a robot manipulator tracking a part on a moving conveyor. The inertial and velocity coupling terms have been shown to be of significance when the manipulator was considered to be directly driven. A simulation of the robot manipulator following the planned trajectory has been established in order to assess the performance of the independent axis control strategies. The inertial coupling was shown to reinforce the control torque at the corner points of the trajectory, where there was an abrupt demand in acceleration in each axis but of opposite sign. This reduced the tracking error however, this effect was not controllable. A second effect was due to the velocity coupling terms. At high trajectory speeds it was shown, by means of a root locus analysis, that the velocity coupling terms caused the system to become unstable.

Redundant representations as a means of transmitting data covertly

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Nanophotonic microfluidic sensor and manipulator

Resonant structures created along a thin capillary by nanoscale deformation of its surface can perform comprehensive sensing and manipulation of microfluids. The concept is illustrated with a model of triangular bottle resonator and floating microparticles.

A completely kinematostatically decoupled XY compliant parallel manipulator through new topology structure

This paper deals with a completely kinematostaticaly decoupled XY compliant parallel manipulator (CPM) composed of exactly-constrained compliant modules. A new 4-PP XY translational parallel mechanism (TPM) with a new topology structure is firstly proposed where each two P (P: prismatic) joints on the base in two non-adjacent legs are rigidly connected. A novel 4-PP XY CPM is then obtained by replacing each traditional P join on the base in the 4-PP XY TPM with a compound basic parallelogram module (CBPM) and replacing each traditional P joint on the motion stage with a basic parallelogram module (BPM). Approximate analytical model is derived with comparison to the FEA (finite element analysis) model and experiment for a case study. The proposed novel XY CPM has a compact configuration with good dynamics, and is able to well constrain the parasitic rotation and the cross-axis coupling of the motion stage. The cross-axis motion of the input stage can be completely eliminated, and the lost motion between the input stage and the motion stage is significantly reduced.

Integrating concrete and virtual materials in an elementary mathematics classroom : a case study of success with fractions

This paper describes an approach to introducing fraction concepts using generic software tools such as Microsoft Office's PowerPoint to create "virtual" materials for mathematics teaching and learning. This approach replicates existing concrete materials and integrates virtual materials with current non-computer methods of teaching primary students about fractions. The paper reports a case study of a 12-year-old student, Frank, who had an extremely limited understanding of fractions. Frank also lacked motivation for learning mathematics in general and interacted with his peers in a negative way during mathematics lessons. In just one classroom session involving the seamless integration of off-computer and on-computer activities, Frank acquired a basic understanding of simple common equivalent fractions. Further, he was observed as the session progressed to be an enthusiastic learner who offered to share his learning with his peers. The study's "virtual replication" approach for fractions involves the manipulation of concrete materials (folding paper regions) alongside the manipulation of their virtual equivalent (shading screen regions). As researchers have pointed out, the emergence of new technologies does not mean old technologies become redundant. Learning technologies have not replaced print and oral language or basic mathematical understanding. Instead, they are modifying, reshaping, and blending the ways in which humankind speaks, reads, writes, and works mathematically. Constructivist theories of learning and teaching argue that mathematics understanding is developed from concrete to pictorial to abstract and that, ultimately, mathematics learning and teaching is about refinement and expression of ideas and concepts. Therefore, by seamlessly integrating the use of concrete materials and virtual materials generated by computer software applications, an opportunity arises to enhance the teaching and learning value of both materials.

Detecting and resolving redundancies in EP3P policies

Current regulatory requirements on data privacy make it increasingly important for enterprises to be able to verify and audit their compliance with their privacy policies. Traditionally, a privacy policy is written in a natural language. Such policies inherit the potential ambiguity, inconsistency and mis-interpretation of natural text. Hence, formal languages are emerging to allow a precise specification of enforceable privacy policies that can be verified. The EP3P language is one such formal language. An EP3P privacy policy of an enterprise consists of many rules. Given the semantics of the language, there may exist some rules in the ruleset which can never be used, these rules are referred to as redundant rules. Redundancies adversely affect privacy policies in several ways. Firstly, redundant rules reduce the efficiency of operations on privacy policies. Secondly, they may misdirect the policy auditor when determining the outcome of a policy. Therefore, in order to address these deficiencies it is important to identify and resolve redundancies. This thesis introduces the concept of minimal privacy policy - a policy that is free of redundancy. The essential component for maintaining the minimality of privacy policies is to determine the effects of the rules on each other. Hence, redundancy detection and resolution frameworks are proposed. Pair-wise redundancy detection is the central concept in these frameworks and it suggests a pair-wise comparison of the rules in order to detect redundancies. In addition, the thesis introduces a policy management tool that assists policy auditors in performing several operations on an EP3P privacy policy while maintaining its minimality. Formal results comparing alternative notions of redundancy, and how this would affect the tool, are also presented.

A Reliable Basis for Approximate Association Rules

For most of the work done in developing association rule mining, the primary focus has been on the efficiency of the approach and to a lesser extent the quality of the derived rules has been emphasized. Often for a dataset, a huge number of rules can be derived, but many of them can be redundant to other rules and thus are useless in practice. The extremely large number of rules makes it difficult for the end users to comprehend and therefore effectively use the discovered rules and thus significantly reduces the effectiveness of rule mining algorithms. If the extracted knowledge can’t be effectively used in solving real world problems, the effort of extracting the knowledge is worth little. This is a serious problem but not yet solved satisfactorily. In this paper, we propose a concise representation called Reliable Approximate basis for representing non-redundant approximate association rules. We prove that the redundancy elimination based on the proposed basis does not reduce the belief to the extracted rules. We also prove that all approximate association rules can be deduced from the Reliable Approximate basis. Therefore the basis is a lossless representation of approximate association rules.

Great adaptations : China's creative clusters and the new social contract

The transformation of China's urban landscape has witnessed a boom in cultural adaptation, namely the adaptation of a Western idea, the creative cluster. This chapter examines the formatting of hundreds of creative clusters-art centres, animation bases, cultural zones, and incubators. The cluster has important implications for how we understand China going forward into the second decade of the 21st century. The cluster phenomenon has resulted in to a substantive remaking of the social contract, between officials, entrepreneurs, local residents, academics-and most significantly cultural producers. However, these processes of adaption are mostly driven by real estate developers working in partnership with local government officials. Cut and paste design is the fast road to completion. In this sense, the description 'creative' may well be redundant.

Concise representations for association rules in multi-level datasets

Association rule mining has made many advances in the area of knowledge discovery. However, the quality of the discovered association rules is a big concern and has drawn more and more attention recently. One problem with the quality of the discovered association rules is the huge size of the extracted rule set. Often for a dataset, a huge number of rules can be extracted, but many of them can be redundant to other rules and thus useless in practice. Mining non-redundant rules is a promising approach to solve this problem. In this paper, we firstly propose a definition for redundancy; then we propose a concise representation called Reliable basis for representing non-redundant association rules for both exact rules and approximate rules. An important contribution of this paper is that we propose to use the certainty factor as the criteria to measure the strength of the discovered association rules. With the criteria, we can determine the boundary between redundancy and non-redundancy to ensure eliminating as many redundant rules as possible without reducing the inference capacity of and the belief to the remaining extracted non-redundant rules. We prove that the redundancy elimination based on the proposed Reliable basis does not reduce the belief to the extracted rules. We also prove that all association rules can be deduced from the Reliable basis. Therefore the Reliable basis is a lossless representation of association rules. Experimental results show that the proposed Reliable basis can significantly reduce the number of extracted rules.

Granule-based knowledge representation for intra and inter transaction association mining

Abstract With the phenomenal growth of electronic data and information, there are many demands for the development of efficient and effective systems (tools) to perform the issue of data mining tasks on multidimensional databases. Association rules describe associations between items in the same transactions (intra) or in different transactions (inter). Association mining attempts to find interesting or useful association rules in databases: this is the crucial issue for the application of data mining in the real world. Association mining can be used in many application areas, such as the discovery of associations between customers’ locations and shopping behaviours in market basket analysis. Association mining includes two phases. The first phase, called pattern mining, is the discovery of frequent patterns. The second phase, called rule generation, is the discovery of interesting and useful association rules in the discovered patterns. The first phase, however, often takes a long time to find all frequent patterns; these also include much noise. The second phase is also a time consuming activity that can generate many redundant rules. To improve the quality of association mining in databases, this thesis provides an alternative technique, granule-based association mining, for knowledge discovery in databases, where a granule refers to a predicate that describes common features of a group of transactions. The new technique first transfers transaction databases into basic decision tables, then uses multi-tier structures to integrate pattern mining and rule generation in one phase for both intra and inter transaction association rule mining. To evaluate the proposed new technique, this research defines the concept of meaningless rules by considering the co-relations between data-dimensions for intratransaction-association rule mining. It also uses precision to evaluate the effectiveness of intertransaction association rules. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is promising.