QoS-aware service composition for distributed video surveillance

Quality of Service (QoS) is essential for the ubiquitous access of media services in real-time distributed video surveillance applications. To have ubiquitous access of desired media with emergency officials’ handheld devices, appropriate media transcoding services are required. Currently, it is challenging to select and compose these services for each of the devices to satisfy the desired QoS demand. To compose these media services so that video stream is available for target pervasive and smart devices, a composition algorithm is required. Thus, this paper presents a QoS-aware service composition algorithm to select the best composition for the target ubiquitous client so that it can optimally provide QoS to heterogeneous users. We have implemented a video surveillance prototype to demonstrate the performance of the proposed QoS-aware composition algorithm. Results from this prototype reveal that the approach is suitable for real-time video surveillance.     

Predictive and content-aware load balancing algorithm for peer-service area based IPTV networks

Load balancing is a crucial factor in IPTV delivery networks. Load balancing aims at utilizing the resources efficiently, maximizing the throughput, and minimizing the request rejection rate. The peer-service area is the recent architecture for IPTV delivery networks that overcomes the flaws of the previous architectures. However, it still suffers from the load imbalance problem. This paper investigates the load imbalance problem, and tries to augment the peer-service area architecture to overcome this problem. To achieve the load balancing over the proposed architecture, we suggest a new load-balancing algorithm that considers both the expected and the current load of both contents and servers. The proposed load-balancing algorithm consists of two stages. The first stage is the contents replication according to their expected load, while the second stage is the content-aware request distribution. To test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we have compared it with both the traditional Round Robin algorithm and Cho algorithm. The experimental results depict that the proposed algorithm outperforms the two other algorithms in terms of load balance, throughput, and request rejection rate.     

Electrochemical intercalation into graphite seen as an electrocapillary process

The electrochemical intercalation of H₂SO₄ into graphite leads to the well known graphite salts C⁺_n HSO⁻₄. χH₂SO₄ (with n → 20), χ ≈ 2.5). The potential—charge relations observed during intercalation agree well with a model involving the extended graphene layer-intercalate interfacial capacitance. The components of this capacitance are studied, including the effect of Fermi level lowering. A computed electrocapillary curve is compared to the separation work of graphene layers.     

Who and what links to the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive’s (IA) Wayback Machine is the largest and oldest public Web archive and has become a significant repository of our recent history and cultural heritage. Despite its importance, there has been little research about how it is discovered and used. Based on Web access logs, we analyze what users are looking for, why they come to IA, where they come from, and how pages link to IA. We find that users request English pages the most, followed by the European languages. Most human users come to Web archives because they do not find the requested pages on the live Web. About 65 % of the requested archived pages no longer exist on the live Web. We find that more than 82 % of human sessions connect to the Wayback Machine via referrals from other Web sites, while only 15 % of robots have referrers. Most of the links (86 %) from Websites are to individual archived pages at specific points in time, and of those 83 % no longer exist on the live Web. Finally, we find that users who come from search engines browse more pages than users who come from external Web sites.     

Statistical segmentation and structural recognition for floor plan interpretation

A generic method for floor plan analysis and interpretation is presented in this article. The method, which is mainly inspired by the way engineers draw and interpret floor plans, applies two recognition steps in a bottom-up manner. First, basic building blocks, i.e., walls, doors, and windows are detected using a statistical patch-based segmentation approach. Second, a graph is generated, and structural pattern recognition techniques are applied to further locate the main entities, i.e., rooms of the building. The proposed approach is able to analyze any type of floor plan regardless of the notation used. We have evaluated our method on different publicly available datasets of real architectural floor plans with different notations. The overall detection and recognition accuracy is about 95 %, which is significantly better than any other state-of-the-art method. Our approach is generic enough such that it could be easily adopted to the recognition and interpretation of any other printed machine-generated structured documents.     

Corrosion and mechanical behavior of fusion bonded epoxy (FBE) in aqueous media

In recent years there have been many reported cases of corrosion failure in cement concrete pipelines. In the majority of cases, the failures have been attributed to rebar corrosion which is caused by the permeability of chloride from low resistivity soil and subsequent attack on a passive layer on an iron bar in the structure. As a possible alternative to cementitious materials, some organic coatings based on olefin, vinyl or epoxy-based polymers have been considered. However, due to a paucity of data on the behavior of these coatings in aqueous media— particularly product water—the possibility of their application in water transmission systems in the Kingdom has not been fully exploited. This paper deals with the studies carried out on the corrosion and mechanical behavior of fusion bonded epoxy (FBE) coating on steel in aqueous media which include product water, distilled water and saline water. The mechanical testings on coating include adhesion, bending and cathodic disbondment testings. The corrosion studies include immersion testing under static and dynamic conditions, autoclave tests and accelerated (salt-fog) tests. The analysis of results indicates chemical inertness of FBE coating in either of the aforementioned water used during testing, good adhesion and no damage to the coating during bending. Cathodic disbondment tests indicate that FBE coating sustains under cathodic protection (CP) conditions. In general, the results of mechanical and corrosion tests indicate that FBE is a promising material for internal coating on steel in water transmission systems.     

Remarks on the Surface Area and Equality Conditions in Regular Forms. Part I: Triangular Prisms

This work presents four mathematical remarks concluded from the mathematical analysis for the interrelationships between the dependent and independent variables that control the measures: perimeter, floor area, walls surface area and total surface area in the regular forms that have a given volume. Such forms include prismatic and pyramidal forms. The work consists of four parts, of which this first part presents the remarks of the isosceles triangular right prism. The first remark examines the effect of θ, the angle of the triangular base, on the total surface area. The second remark calculates the minimum total surface area in two cases, depending on whether angle θ is constant or variable. The third remark calculates the walls ratio and the critical walls ratio. The last remark studies the required conditions for the numerical equality in two cases, where the perimeter is equal to the area, and where the total surface area is equal to the volume.     

A personal meeting scheduling agent

When setting up a meeting, meeting participants need to reach a mutual agreement to hold the meeting subject to their personal constraints and preferences. It is a time-consuming process, and a variety of calendaring applications are in use assisting users to schedule meetings. Software applications failed to overcome the constraints of the traditional-scheduling process and works as a supporting tool for managing meeting information. One of the main constraints in automated scheduling is the unavailability of a standard structured communication protocol. In addition, automated scheduling requires other issues to be considered such as automated decision-making paradigm, negotiation strategy selection mechanism, etc. This paper proposes a personal meeting scheduling agent (PMSA) and a personal meeting scheduling protocol (PMSP). PMSP is embedded in the PMSA for handling bilateral and multilateral negotiations. PMSA is designed using model-based, goal-based methodology. Additionally, PMSP is designed following a structured negotiation protocol influenced by simultaneous response protocol. To evaluate all meeting invitations and to make decisions subject to users’ preferences, participants’ profiles, and the schedule availability, this paper utilizes the naïve Bayes model of maximum likelihood Estimation. The PMSP goal is to automatically make decisions and select the appropriate negotiation strategies to avoid or resolve possible meeting conflicts. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed PMSP, a simulation environment with experimental results is presented.     

Effects of cobalt and potassium doping on thermal stability and electrical properties of radiation grafted acrylic acid onto poly(tetrafluoroethylene ethylene) copolymer films

Grafted copolymer of poly(tetrafluoroethylene ethylene) (ET) with acrylic acid (AAc) was prepared by direct radiation method. The obtained films were modified by treating with small amounts of Co²⁺ and K⁺ ions (1.0 wt %). The effects of such treatment on the thermal stability and electrical conductivity of these films were studied. Cobalt treatment did not much affect the thermal degradation of the films. The results obtained revealed that k⁺ treatment enhanced the thermal degradation of ET‐g‐PAAc, which started 273 K lower than that observed in the case of the untreated and Co²⁺‐treated films. Potassium and cobalt treatment of the investigated films increased their electrical conductivity (σ) and decreased the activation energy ΔE_σ. The increase in σ values was, however, more pronounced in the case of K⁺‐treated film. These results were discussed in terms of the effective increase in the hydrophilicity of the films, especially those treated with potassium. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 97: 867–871, 2005