特定领域的数据参考模型建模方法研究

针对领域内数据实体变化频繁,复用性低的问题,提出了特定领域数据参考模型的概念,它基于概念模型的形式,对领域内的通用数据模型进行说明和描述,成为领域内应用系统数据建模的基础.给出了领域数据参考模型的体系架构,它对整个模型进行了纵横向的划分以便作为不同程度的复用的基础.在概念模型构建时,提出了数据模型构建步骤,并引入了"维度","维度层次"和"事实"3个数据仓库中的概念,扩充了ER图中的属性定义,为构建稳定可复用的领域实体提供了有效的途径.

VarBIFT:指令级的变量冗余容错检测技术

为了解决空间辐射对嵌入式计算机系统正确性的影响越来越明显的问题,基于典型的编译级容错技术,在编译器LCC上实现了基于有向无环图的编译级容错检测方法VarBIFT。该方法可以有效的保护由于粒子效应所引起的瞬时硬件故障,并可针对不同的目标机自动生成容错代码。实验结果表明,VarBIFT使源程序的平均段错误率从32.3%降到了13.9%,平均错误输出率从28.6%降到了9.2%;而其时间开销和空间开销仅为0.7%和36%。

ARM嵌入式系统在纳米操作系统中的应用研究

近年来，随着微纳米科技的迅速发展，机电产品有望向更微观化、高性能化发展，这将促进材料、制造、电子、生物医学、信息等领域新的科学技术出现，在新的科学技术层次上为可持续发展的理论提供物质和技术保障。微纳米科技最终目标是研究和发现微纳尺度物质所具有的新颖的物理、化学和生物学现象与特性。并以此为基础来设计、制作、组装成新的材料、组件或系统，实现与之相应的特定功能，促进新的科学技术发展与变革，这无疑具有十分重要的科学意义和经济价值。而实现这个目标的使能技术便是微纳米尺度下观测、操作和装配的科学方法与相关的技术和装备，因此开展微纳米操作研究具有特别重要的意义。微纳米操作是微纳米制造科学技术的重要内容之一，使用探针模式的机器人化微纳操作方法，实现在微纳米尺度物体的可控操作，对促进我国微纳米科学技术发展具有特别重要的意义。 目前已有的基于探针的纳米技术装置如SPM (Scanning Probe Microscope)是基于探针模式的纳米观测基本装置。在此基础上研究发展的基于探针的纳米操作已成为纳米科技研究的新领域，是目前世界上各国正在大力开发的前沿研究课题。但目前市场上的SPM等纳米观测设备缺乏驱动控制与信息交互功能和开放界面，限制了用户在此基础上开发纳米操作、装配等功能的能力，因而研究具有信息交互能力的、可进行在线操作控制与宏-微-纳观信息交互的纳米操作监控系统，进而发展成具有自动化/机器人化功能的纳米作业系统队纳米科学技术发展、纳米制造的实现无疑具有重要意义。本论文的科研内容是以面向纳米制造的机器人化系统为研究背景，在自主技术的基础上，开展应用ARM嵌入式系统构成纳米作业系统的实时控制器研究。实时多任务的操作控制系统是纳米作业系统的核心技术，可以实时进行基于探针的传感信息采集、状态反馈控制、形貌观测数据生成、作业运动轨迹生成、位置反馈控制等功能的数据处理与实现。本论文重点介绍以SAMSUNG公司的ARM9处理器芯片S3C2410为嵌入式控制器系统的核心，在移植嵌入式Linux作为操作系统的基础上，开发具有实时数据采集与控制指令、通信功能的人机交互界面。基于ARM的实时控制器的研究为探针模式的纳米观测与操作系统开发提供了关键技术，可以提供开放的AFM系统，促进操作型纳米系统的研究与实现，可以保证纳米观测与操作控制的实时性，可以为纳米作业控制方法提供方便的编程、开发功能。本论文主要研究了面向纳米作业的基于ARM嵌入式实时控制器硬件结构及软件系统的研究与开发过程。首先介绍嵌入式系统的基本概念和特点；其次介绍基于SPM模式的纳米操作系统性能与技术特点；第三，根据纳米作业系统的技术功能要求，详细介绍了具有实时多任务管理功能的硬件系统的设计，重点解决核心板和扩展板各部分功能模块的设计；第四，详细介绍了嵌入式Linux操作系统下的应用程序开发模式及开发过程；最后，详细介绍了嵌入式Linux操作系统下的应用程序开发，主要工作是完成SPM纳米操作系统中的ARM开发平台的功能接口模块的调试及Linux系统下多线程技术在本系统中的应用。本次毕业设计已完成ARM开发平台在整个SPM纳米操作系统中要实现的各个功能模块，结合SPM纳米操作系统的实时性问题，进行了ARM开发平台的系统软件架构分析和利用多线程技术的以太网通信实验，在一定程度上提高了纳米操作系统中的实时性和成像质量。

jλ变换与离散振荡指标Md在海洋机器人控制系统动态综合中的应用

本文给出由连续系统的S域,到离散领域?的转换的通式。并给出了离散传递函数W(?)的基本属性、离散振荡指标Md的基本概念、?变换的稳定判据、二阶无静差数字随动系统的动态综合、Md综合在海洋机器人航向控制中的应用。

学前儿童朴素生物学“理论”的发展——对“生长”认知的实验研究

There is a debate in cognitive development theory on whether cognitive development is general or specific. More and more researchers think that cognitive development is domain specific. People start to investigate preschoolers' native theory of human being's basic knowledge systems. Naive biology is one of the core domains. But there is argument whether there is separate native biological concepts among preschoolers. The research examined preschoolers' cognitive development of naive biological theory on two levels which is "growth" and "aliveness", and it also examined individual difference and factors that lead to the difference. Three studies were designed. Study 1 was to study preschoolers' cognition on growth, which is a basic trait of living things, and whether children can distinguish living and non-living things with the trait and understanding the causality. Study 2 was to investigate preschoolers' distinction between living things and non-living things from an integrated level. Study 3 was to investigate how children make inferences to unfamiliar things with their domain specific knowledge. The results showed the following: 1. Preschoolers gradually developed naive theory of biology on growth level, but their naive theory on integrated level has not developed. 2 Preschoolers' naive theory of biology is not "all or none", 4- and 5-year-old children showed some distinction between living and non-living things to some extent, they use non-intentional reason to explain the cause of growth and their explanation showed coherence. But growth has not been a criteria of ontological distinction of living and non-living things for 4- and 5-year-old children, most 6-year-old children can distinguish between living and non-living things, and these show the developing process of biological cognition. 3. Preschoolers' biological inference is influenced by their domain-specific knowledge, whether they can make inference to new trait of living things depends on whether they have specific knowledge. In the deductive task, children use their knowledge to make inference to unfamiliar things. 4-year-olds use concrete knowledge more often while the 6-year-old use generalized knowledge more frequency. 4. Preschoolers' knowledge grow with age, but individuals' cognitive development speed at different period. Urban and rural educational background affect cognitive performance. As time goes by, the urban-rural knowledge difference to distinguish living and nonliving things reduces. And preschoolers' are at the same developmental stage because the three age groups have similar causal explanation both in quantity and quality. 5. There is intra-individual difference on preschoolers' naive biological cognition. They show different performance on different tasks and domains, and their cognitive development is sequential, they understand growth earlier than they understand "alive", which is an integrated concept. The intra-individual differences decrease with age.

Survey of Rough and Fuzzy Hybridization.

P. Lingras and R. Jensen, 'Survey of Rough and Fuzzy Hybridization,' Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE'07), pp. 125-130, 2007.

Learning Embeddings for Indexing, Retrieval, and Classification, with Applications to Object and Shape Recognition in Image Databases

Nearest neighbor retrieval is the task of identifying, given a database of objects and a query object, the objects in the database that are the most similar to the query. Retrieving nearest neighbors is a necessary component of many practical applications, in fields as diverse as computer vision, pattern recognition, multimedia databases, bioinformatics, and computer networks. At the same time, finding nearest neighbors accurately and efficiently can be challenging, especially when the database contains a large number of objects, and when the underlying distance measure is computationally expensive. This thesis proposes new methods for improving the efficiency and accuracy of nearest neighbor retrieval and classification in spaces with computationally expensive distance measures. The proposed methods are domain-independent, and can be applied in arbitrary spaces, including non-Euclidean and non-metric spaces. In this thesis particular emphasis is given to computer vision applications related to object and shape recognition, where expensive non-Euclidean distance measures are often needed to achieve high accuracy. The first contribution of this thesis is the BoostMap algorithm for embedding arbitrary spaces into a vector space with a computationally efficient distance measure. Using this approach, an approximate set of nearest neighbors can be retrieved efficiently - often orders of magnitude faster than retrieval using the exact distance measure in the original space. The BoostMap algorithm has two key distinguishing features with respect to existing embedding methods. First, embedding construction explicitly maximizes the amount of nearest neighbor information preserved by the embedding. Second, embedding construction is treated as a machine learning problem, in contrast to existing methods that are based on geometric considerations. The second contribution is a method for constructing query-sensitive distance measures for the purposes of nearest neighbor retrieval and classification. In high-dimensional spaces, query-sensitive distance measures allow for automatic selection of the dimensions that are the most informative for each specific query object. It is shown theoretically and experimentally that query-sensitivity increases the modeling power of embeddings, allowing embeddings to capture a larger amount of the nearest neighbor structure of the original space. The third contribution is a method for speeding up nearest neighbor classification by combining multiple embedding-based nearest neighbor classifiers in a cascade. In a cascade, computationally efficient classifiers are used to quickly classify easy cases, and classifiers that are more computationally expensive and also more accurate are only applied to objects that are harder to classify. An interesting property of the proposed cascade method is that, under certain conditions, classification time actually decreases as the size of the database increases, a behavior that is in stark contrast to the behavior of typical nearest neighbor classification systems. The proposed methods are evaluated experimentally in several different applications: hand shape recognition, off-line character recognition, online character recognition, and efficient retrieval of time series. In all datasets, the proposed methods lead to significant improvements in accuracy and efficiency compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. In some datasets, the general-purpose methods introduced in this thesis even outperform domain-specific methods that have been custom-designed for such datasets.

Design principles for an enterprise systems chartering method

Our research follows a design science approach to develop a method that supports the initialization of ES implementation projects – the chartering phase. This project phase is highly relevant for implementation success, but is understudied in IS research. In this paper, we derive design principles for a chartering method based on a systematic review of ES implementation literature and semi-structured expert interviews. Our analysis identifies differences in the importance of certain success factors depending on the system type. The proposed design principles are built on these factors and are linked to chartering key activities. We specifically consider system-type-specific chartering aspects for process-centric Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A) systems, which are an emerging class of systems at the intersection of BI&A and business process management. In summary, this paper proposes design principles for a chartering method – considering specifics of process-centric BI&A.

Cross-hemispheric collaboration and segregation associated with task difficulty as revealed by structural and functional connectivity.

Although it is known that brain regions in one hemisphere may interact very closely with their corresponding contralateral regions (collaboration) or operate relatively independent of them (segregation), the specific brain regions (where) and conditions (how) associated with collaboration or segregation are largely unknown. We investigated these issues using a split field-matching task in which participants matched the meaning of words or the visual features of faces presented to the same (unilateral) or to different (bilateral) visual fields. Matching difficulty was manipulated by varying the semantic similarity of words or the visual similarity of faces. We assessed the white matter using the fractional anisotropy (FA) measure provided by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and cross-hemispheric communication in terms of fMRI-based connectivity between homotopic pairs of cortical regions. For both perceptual and semantic matching, bilateral trials became faster than unilateral trials as difficulty increased (bilateral processing advantage, BPA). The study yielded three novel findings. First, whereas FA in anterior corpus callosum (genu) correlated with word-matching BPA, FA in posterior corpus callosum (splenium-occipital) correlated with face-matching BPA. Second, as matching difficulty intensified, cross-hemispheric functional connectivity (CFC) increased in domain-general frontopolar cortex (for both word and face matching) but decreased in domain-specific ventral temporal lobe regions (temporal pole for word matching and fusiform gyrus for face matching). Last, a mediation analysis linking DTI and fMRI data showed that CFC mediated the effect of callosal FA on BPA. These findings clarify the mechanisms by which the hemispheres interact to perform complex cognitive tasks.

Statistical Techniques In Stereology

Stereology typically concerns estimation of properties of a geometric structure from plane section information. This paperprovides a brief review of some statistical aspects of this rapidly developing field, with some reference to applications in the earth sciences. After an introductory discussion of the scope of stereology, section 2 briefly mentions results applicable when no assumptions can be made about the stochastic nature of the sampled matrix, statistical considerations then arising solelyfrom the ‘randomness’ of the plane section. The next two sections postulate embedded particles of specific shapes, the particular case of spheres being discussed in some detail. References are made to results for ‘thin slices’ and other prob-ing mechanisms. Randomly located convex particles, of otherwise arbitrary shape, are discussed in section 5 and the review concludes with a specific application of stereological ideas to some data on neolithic mining.

Folkbiology doesn’t come from Folkpsychology: evidence from Yukatek Maya in cross-cultural perspective

Nearly all psychological research on basic cognitive processes of category formation and reasoning uses sample populations associated with large research institutions in technologically-advanced societies. Lopsided attention to a select participant pool risks biasing interpretation, no matter how large the sample or how statistically reliable the results. The experiments in this article address this limitation. Earlier research with urban-USA children suggests that biological concepts are (1) thoroughly enmeshed with their notions of naive psychology, and (2) strikingly human-centered. Thus, if children are to develop a causally appropriate model of biology, in which humans are seen as simply one animal among many, they must undergo fundamental conceptual change. Such change supposedly occurs between 7 and 10 years of age, when the human-centered view is discarded. The experiments reported here with Yukatek Maya speakers challenge the empirical generality and theoretical importance of these claims. Part 1 shows that young Maya children do not anthropocentrically interpret the biological world. The anthropocentric bias of American children appears to owe to a lack of cultural familiarity with non-human biological kinds, not to initial causal understanding of folkbiology as such. Part 2 shows that by age of 4-5 (the earliest age tested in this regard) Yukatek Maya children employ a concept of innate species potential or underlying essence much as urban American children seem to, namely, as an inferential framework for understanding the affiliation of an organism to a biological species, and for projecting known and unknown biological properties to organisms in the face of uncertainty. Together, these experiments indicate that folkpsychology cannot be the initial source of folkbiology. They also underscore the possibility of a species-wide and domain-specific basis for acquiring knowledge about the living world that is constrained and modified but not caused or created by prior nonbiological thinking and subsequent cultural experience.

Self-esteem and self-efficacy: Associations with alcohol consumption in a sample of adolescents in Northern Ireland

Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies have reported equivocal findings regarding the association between self-esteem, self-efficacy and adolescent alcohol use. Data were collected from a sample of 11-16-year olds in Northern Ireland (n = 4088) over two consecutive academic years measuring global self-esteem, academic, social and emotional self-efficacy and alcohol involvement. Results showed a domain-specific association between alcohol involvement and self-efficacy, with more problematic alcohol use associated with higher social self-efficacy but lower emotional and academic self-efficacy. Additionally, regression analyses revealed that all self-concept measures significantly predicted drinking group membership. The results are discussed in terms of reported drinking behaviour, interventions with adolescent groups and general development.

The link between logic, mathematics and imagination: evidence from children with developmental dyscalculia and mathematically gifted children

This study examined performance on transitive inference problems in children with developmental dyscalculia (DD), typically developing controls matched on IQ, working memory and reading skills, and in children with outstanding mathematical abilities. Whereas mainstream approaches currently consider DD as a domain-specific deficit, we hypothesized that the development of mathematical skills is closely related to the development of logical abilities, a domain-general skill. In particular, we expected a close link between mathematical skills and the ability to reason independently of one's beliefs. Our results showed that this was indeed the case, with children with DD performing more poorly than controls, and high maths ability children showing outstanding skills in logical reasoning about belief-laden problems. Nevertheless, all groups performed poorly on structurally equivalent problems with belief-neutral content. This is in line with suggestions that abstract reasoning skills (i.e. the ability to reason about content without real-life referents) develops later than the ability to reason about belief-inconsistent fantasy content.A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90DWY3O4xx8.

Multi-standard sub-pixel interpolation architecture for video motion estimation

A new domain-specific reconfigurable sub-pixel interpolation architecture for multi-standard video Motion Estimation (ME) is presented. The mixed use of parallel and serial-input FIR filters achieves high throughput rate and efficient silicon utilisation. Flexibility has been achieved by using a multiplexed reconfigurable data-path controlled by a selection signal. Silicon design studies show that this can be implemented using 34.8K gates with area and performance that compares very favourably with existing fixed solutions based solely on the H.264 standard. ©2008 IEEE.