Using Automated Negotiation for Grid Services

The popularity of grid services has widened their application to numerous domains and increased the utilization of computational resources. In order to create more incentives for the resources owners to lease their resources and prevent users from wasting the resources, the introduction of a market-oriented grid is inevitable. However, the issues for the negotiation between service provider and consumer over the supply and demand of resources can be complex, with highly interdependent issues. In this research, a simulated automated negotiation mechanism including a co-evolutionary mechanism and a modified game theory approach is proposed, to assist them in reaching an agreement over the conflicting issues. In the proposed architecture, the co-evolution process is able to reduce the multiple dimensional search space into a two-dimension search space and identify the appropriate negotiation strategies for the negotiating agents to form a payoff matrix which can be used for the game theory related stage of their interaction. The multiple stage negotiation process is introduced to improve the negotiation result. In this paper, an application which requires a large amount of computational resources to process the data generated from mobile devises is used to demonstrate that the proposed system is able to resolve the conflicts and obtain a valid solution.     

Verifiable Distributed Oblivious Transfer and Mobile Agent Security

The mobile agent is a fundamental building block of the mobile computing paradigm. In mobile agent security, oblivious transfer (OT) from a trusted party can be used to protect the agent’s privacy and the hosts’ privacy. In this paper, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive called Verifiable Distributed Oblivious Transfer (VDOT), which allows us to replace a single trusted party with a group of threshold trusted servers. The design of VDOT uses a novel technique called consistency verification of encrypted secret shares. VDOT protects the privacy of both the sender and the receiver against malicious attacks of the servers. We also show the design of a system to apply VDOT to protect the privacy of mobile agents. Our design partitions an agent into the general portion and the security-sensitive portion. We also implement the key components of our system. As far as we know, this is the first effort to implement a system that protects the privacy of mobile agents. Our preliminary evaluation shows that protecting mobile agents not only is possible, but also can be implemented efficiently. This work was supported in part by the DoD University Research Initiative (URI) program administered by the Office of Naval Research under grant N00014-01-1-0795. Sheng Zhong was supported by ONR grant N00014-01-1-0795 and NSF grants ANI-0207399 and CCR-TC-0208972. Yang Richard Yang was supported in part by NSF grant ANI-0207399. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the DialM-POMC Joint Workshop on Foundations of Mobile Computing in 2003. Sheng Zhong received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University in the year of 2004. He holds an assistant professor position at SUNY Buffalo and is currently on leave for postdoctoral research at the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS). His research interests, on the practical side, are security and incentives in data mining, databases, and wireless networks. On the theoretical side, he is interested in cryptography and game theory. Yang Richard Yang is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Yale University. His research interests include computer networks, mobile computing, wireless networking, sensor networks, and network security. He leads the LAboratory of Networked Systems (LANS) at Yale. His recent awards include a Schlumberger Fellowship and a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. He received his B.E. degree from Tsinghua University (1993), and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Texas at Austin (1998 and 2001).     

Accelerator Analysis of Tributyltin Adsorbed onto the Surface of a Tributyltin Resistant Marine Pseudoalteromonas sp. Cell

Tributyltin (TBT) released into seawater from ship hulls is a stable marine pollutant and obviously remains in marine environments. We isolated a TBT resistant marine Pseudoalteromonas sp. TBT1 from sediment of a ship’s ballast water. The isolate (10^{9.3 ± 0.2} colony-forming units mL⁻¹) adsorbed TBT in proportion to the concentrations of TBTCl externally added up to 3 mM, where the number of TBT adsorbed by a single cell was estimated to be 10^8.2. The value was reduced to about one-fifth when the lysozyme-treated cells were used. The surface of ethanol treated cells became rough, but the capacity of TBT adsorption was the same as that for native cells. These results indicate that the function of the cell surface, rather than that structure, plays an important role to the adsorption of TBT. The adsorption state of TBT seems to be multi-layer when the number of more than 10^6.8 TBT molecules is adsorbed by a single cell.     

Kinetic modelling of textural changes in ready-to-eat breakfast cereals during soaking in semi-skimmed milk

Summary Ready‐to‐eat breakfast cereals immersed in milk undergo undesirable changes in texture because of sudden moisture uptake. The textural changes are ascribable to a plasticizing effect of water, which modifies the mechanical strength of products by softening the starch/protein matrix. In this work, some textural parameters of different cereal flakes were derived from the force–displacement curves monitored during 300 s of immersion in milk. Hardness loss, deformability increment and changes in the force–displacement curve profile were calculated and plotted against soaking time. The application of a sugar coating process to a model cereal flake increased the initial product hardness and improved the preservation of the textural parameters during immersion. The Peleg model closely fitted the experimental data, with regression coefficients from 0.967 to 0.999.     

防霉建筑涂料的研究与施工使用

针对国内外防霉建筑涂料存在的问题，研制开发了以合成树脂为主要成膜物质，加入环保性杀菌防霉剂及具有防腐霉的功能性颜填料，再配以树脂固化剂等成分配制而成的高性能防霉建筑涂料，并指出该涂料防霉效果良好。     

Km高温抗蚀耐磨涂料在省煤器中的应用

锅炉省煤器磨损一直是困绕锅炉稳定运行的主要因素之一。本介绍了Km高温抗蚀耐磨涂料的性能、特点，以及在实际生产中的使用情况，通过实践充分肯定了Km高温抗蚀耐磨涂料的可行性、可靠性和经济性。     

吸水膨胀型膨润土/交联聚丙烯酰胺颗粒堵剂

使丙烯酰胺、少量N，N-亚甲基双丙烯酰胺在钙膨润土存在下进行水溶液引发接枝共聚合，聚合产物经造粒、粉碎、筛分，得到粒径0．5～1．0mm的颗粒堵剂。根据颗粒堵剂吸水量大小确定丙烯酰胺与膨润土最佳质量比为7：1，引发剂最佳用量为500g／t，交联剂最佳用量为300g／t，吸水量与这3个参数之间的关系曲线都经过最大值，颗粒堵剂在去离子水中的吸水量为560～650mL/g。该堵剂已大规模生产，在胜利、中原油田许多采油厂已用于调剖、堵水和调驱施工，在青海、江苏、大港、冀东等油田也已开始使用。在胜利东辛采油厂的一个井组，连续3个月在3口井注入该堵剂共27t，使井口压力上升3MPa，产油量大幅度增加。表l参l。     

催化裂化大油气管线阻焦剂的研究与开发

介绍了阻焦剂的阻聚分散机理，测定了不同组分的阻焦剂对不同性质原料的阻焦效果，并考察了不同加入浓度对阻焦率以及催化裂化产品分布的影响。试验结果表明：加入50—100μg/g的阻焦剂，可使催化裂化大油气管线阻焦率达到53．7％—63．8％，同时对产品分布及产品性质无不良影响，具有技术经济可行性。     

Development of intelligent multisensor surveillance systems with agents

Intelligent multisensor surveillance systems consist of several types of sensors, which are installed on fixed and mobile devices. These components provide a huge quantity of information that has to be contrasted, correlated and integrated in order to recognize and react on special situations. These systems work in highly dynamic environments, with severe security and robustness requirements. All these characteristics imply the need for distributed solutions. In these solutions, scattered components can decide and act with some degree of autonomy (for instance, if they become isolated), or cooperate and coordinate for a complete tracking of special situations. In order to cope with these requirements and to better structure the solution, we have decided to design surveillance system control as a multiagent system. This is done by applying an agent-orientated methodology, which is assessed with concrete scenarios.     

盐和水蒸气协同作用下TiAl合金腐蚀性能研究及其防护

研究了在700℃盐和水蒸气协同作用下TiAlNb合金的腐蚀行为以及溅射涂层对TiAlNb合金的防护作用。结果表明，在盐和水蒸气协同作用下，溅射TiAlCrAg涂层对TiAlNb合金具有一定的保护作用。盐和水蒸气协同作用加速了合金以及涂层的腐蚀。挥发性气体氯化物对α2相的循环作用是TiALNb合金腐蚀的主要原因。涂层中较少的α2相以及Laves相中较高的Cr含量是腐蚀有所减缓的主要原因。