Oriented growth of MCM-22 zeolite films

MCM-22 zeolite films have been grown with layers vertical to the substrate under hydrothermal synthesis conditions, and characterized by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy.

On the formation of vertically oriented MCM-22 zeolite crystal films

Growth of MCM-22 zeolite films on glass substrates was studied with the focus on the understanding of the unusual vertical crystal orientation. The films formed were characterized by scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction. Separate thin disk-like MCM-22 crystals were found vertically oriented at the early crystallization stage. With crystallization the crystals grew into thick disks and finally into continuous films. The vertically oriented MCM-22 thin crystals could be developed from the orientation of columnar MCM-22 nuclei, which have larger parameters in their c-directions than those in a and b directions. The preferred orientation of MCM-22 nuclei and the fast growth rate in the layer direction are responsible for the vertical growth of MCM-22 zeolite films. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Evolution feature oriented model driven product line engineering approach for synergistic and dynamic service evolution in Clouds: four kinds of schema.

The proposed research will focus on developing a novel approach to solve Software Service Evolution problems in Computing Clouds. The approach will support dynamic evolution of the software service in clouds via a set of discovered evolution patterns. An initial survey informed us that such an approach does not exist yet and is in urgent need. Evolution Requirement can be classified into evolution features; researchers can describe the whole requirement by using evolution feature typology, the typology will define the relation and dependency between each features. After the evolution feature typology has been constructed, evolution model will be created to make the evolution more specific. Aspect oriented approach can be used for enhance evolution feature-model modularity. Aspect template code generation technique will be used for model transformation in the end. Product Line Engineering contains all the essential components for driving the whole evolution process.

Semi-Supervised OWA Aggregation for Link-Based Similarity Evaluation and Alias Detection

T.Boongoen and Q. Shen. Semi-Supervised OWA Aggregation for Link-Based Similarity Evaluation and Alias Detection. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Fuzzy Systems (FUZZ-IEEE'09), pp. 288-293, 2009. Sponsorship: EPSRC

Checklists for grading object-oriented CS1 programs: concepts and misconceptions

Sanders, K. and Thomas, L. 2007. Checklists for grading object-oriented CS1 programs: concepts and misconceptions. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual SIGCSE Conference on innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (Dundee, Scotland, June 25 - 27, 2007). ITiCSE '07. ACM, New York, NY, 166-170

Habit, aggregation and long memory: Evidence from television audience data

Byers, D., Peel, D., Thomas, D. (2007). Habit, aggregation and long memory: Evidence from television audience data. Applied Economics, 39 (3), 321-327. RAE2008

Non-anonymous ballot aggregation: an axiomatic generalization of Approval Voting

We study axiomatically situations in which the society agrees to treat voters with different characteristics distinctly. In this setting, we propose a set of intuitive axioms and show that they jointly characterize a new class of voting procedures, called Type-weighted Approval Voting. According to this family, each voter has a strictly positive and finite weight (the weight is necessarily the same for all voters with the same characteristics) and the alternative with the highest number of weighted votes is elected. The implemented voting procedure reduces to Approval Voting in case all voters are identical or the procedure assigns the same weight to all types. Using this idea, we also obtain a new characterization of Approval Voting.

Which of the three action-oriented corporate social responsibility (CSR) types is the most effective in improving the public attitude toward tobacco companies?

Dissertação apresentada à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciências da Comunicação, ramo de Marketing e Publicidade

On the Interaction between Data Aggregation and Topology Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are characterized by limited energy resources. To conserve energy, application-specific aggregation (fusion) of data reports from multiple sensors can be beneficial in reducing the amount of data flowing over the network. Furthermore, controlling the topology by scheduling the activity of nodes between active and sleep modes has often been used to uniformly distribute the energy consumption among all nodes by de-synchronizing their activities. We present an integrated analytical model to study the joint performance of in-network aggregation and topology control. We define performance metrics that capture the tradeoffs among delay, energy, and fidelity of the aggregation. Our results indicate that to achieve high fidelity levels under medium to high event reporting load, shorter and fatter aggregation/routing trees (toward the sink) offer the best delay-energy tradeoff as long as topology control is well coordinated with routing.

Object Oriented Animation on the World Wide Web

This report describes our attempt to add animation as another data type to be used on the World Wide Web. Our current network infrastructure, the Internet, is incapable of carrying video and audio streams for them to be used on the web for presentation purposes. In contrast, object-oriented animation proves to be efficient in terms of network resource requirements. We defined an animation model to support drawing-based and frame-based animation. We also extended the HyperText Markup Language in order to include this animation mode. BU-NCSA Mosanim, a modified version of the NCSA Mosaic for X(v2.5), is available to demonstrate the concept and potentials of animation in presentations an interactive game playing over the web.

Optimal Scheduling of Secondary Content for Aggregation in Video-on-Demand Systems

Dynamic service aggregation techniques can exploit skewed access popularity patterns to reduce the costs of building interactive VoD systems. These schemes seek to cluster and merge users into single streams by bridging the temporal skew between them, thus improving server and network utilization. Rate adaptation and secondary content insertion are two such schemes. In this paper, we present and evaluate an optimal scheduling algorithm for inserting secondary content in this scenario. The algorithm runs in polynomial time, and is optimal with respect to the total bandwidth usage over the merging interval. We present constraints on content insertion which make the overall QoS of the delivered stream acceptable, and show how our algorithm can satisfy these constraints. We report simulation results which quantify the excellent gains due to content insertion. We discuss dynamic scenarios with user arrivals and interactions, and show that content insertion reduces the channel bandwidth requirement to almost half. We also discuss differentiated service techniques, such as N-VoD and premium no-advertisement service, and show how our algorithm can support these as well.

Robust Sketching and Aggregation of Distributed Data Streams

The data streaming model provides an attractive framework for one-pass summarization of massive data sets at a single observation point. However, in an environment where multiple data streams arrive at a set of distributed observation points, sketches must be computed remotely and then must be aggregated through a hierarchy before queries may be conducted. As a result, many sketch-based methods for the single stream case do not apply directly, as either the error introduced becomes large, or because the methods assume that the streams are non-overlapping. These limitations hinder the application of these techniques to practical problems in network traffic monitoring and aggregation in sensor networks. To address this, we develop a general framework for evaluating and enabling robust computation of duplicate-sensitive aggregate functions (e.g., SUM and QUANTILE), over data produced by distributed sources. We instantiate our approach by augmenting the Count-Min and Quantile-Digest sketches to apply in this distributed setting, and analyze their performance. We conclude with experimental evaluation to validate our analysis.