32843088
Analysis of Zipf's law: An index approach
Abstract A rigorous analysis of Zipf's law is made using an index for the sequence of observed values of the variables in a Zipf-type relationship. Three important properties relating rank, count, and frequency are identified. Using this approach, the shape of Zipf-type curves can be described in terms of three distinct regions and two parameters of the Mandelbrot-Zipf law. This result has considerable practical significance, since it provides rigorous foundations for the application of Zipf's law.
16469592
IT businesses and franchising: a research proposal
Franchising has been popular as a growth strategy for small businesses; it is even more so in today's global and information-based economy. In early 2001, Entrepreneur magazine-well known for its Franchise 500 listing-added a tech businesses category to its franchise zone with three subcategories: Internet businesses, tech training, and miscellaneous tech businesses. This study applies Herbert Simon's model for business firm growth as a theory-grounded solution to help managers understand the growth dynamics of IT-based franchising businesses. We present a research proposal with a pilot study of the growth of 27 IT-based franchise businesses, and explain how to relate the parameters of Simon's model to strategic variables that can give managers a valuable strategic tool to understand the context of their industrial competition in IT-based franchising.
672758
Fingerprint Quality Indices for Predicting Authentication Performance
The performance of an automatic fingerprint authentication system relies heavily on the quality of the captured fingerprint images. In this paper, two new quality indices for fingerprint images are developed. The first index measures the energy concentration in the frequency domain as a global feature. The second index measures the spatial coherence in local regions. We present a novel framework for evaluating and comparing quality indices in terms of their capability of predicting the system performance at three different stages, namely, image enhancement, feature extraction and matching. Experimental results on the IBM-HURSLEY and FVC2002 DB3 databases demonstrate that the global index is better than the local index in the enhancement stage (correlation of 0.70 vs. 0.50) and comparative in the feature extraction stage (correlation of 0.70 vs. 0.71). Both quality indices are effective in predicting the matching performance, and by applying a quality-based weighting scheme in the matching algorithm, the overall matching performance can be improved; a decrease of 1.94% in EER is observed on the FVC2002 DB3 database.
6014524
Physically-based animation of volumetric objects
The paper presents a voxel-based animation technique which employs either a mass-spring model or a finite element model. Two volumetric objects, a voxelized chair and a scanned muscle, are used as case studies with the two different models. The mass-spring model is used to show an animation sequence of a falling and bouncing chair: wireframe display and volume rendering are used to display a real-time animation of the process. In addition, a real-time simulation is carried out by the finite element method (FEM) of a voxel-based multi-resolution muscle mesh. Two techniques, a direct integration and a simplified modal analysis method are discussed in the context of applying FEM for muscle deformation. Local deformation optimization with modal analysis for higher resolution muscle volumetric animation, which allows accurate prediction of muscle deformation changes, has been used. Physiological muscle force has been considered and a biomechanically-based 3D FEM muscle model has been implemented. Realistic animations have been produced based on the FEM simulation with various graphics techniques.
369741
EXPedite: a system for encoded XML processing
As XML becomes an increasingly popular format for information exchange, the efficient processing of broadcast XML data on a constrained device (for example, a cell phone or a PDA) becomes a critical task. In this paper we present the EXPedite system: a new model of data processing in an information exchange environment, which "migrates" the power of the data-sending server to receivers for efficient processing. It consists of a simple and general encoding scheme for servers, and streaming query processing algorithms on encoded XML stream for data receivers with constrained computing abilities. Experiments show the impressive performance of EXPedite.
14356634
A service scheduler in a trustworthy system
The aim of the research is to investigate techniques that support efficient service scheduling algorithms in a service-oriented fault-tolerant real-time distributed system. Techniques we developed include deadline-based real-time scheduling, priority-based scheduling, and redundant resource allocation for fault-tolerance. The system model and scheduling algorithms are designed, and a prototype is implemented to facilitate the investigation and experimentation.
10148394
Generating C Code from LOGS Specifications
This paper introduces a tool that automatically translates a concrete form of specifications into C code linked with BSPlib. The translation tool is rigorously developed with important safety properties proved. A Logs specification for Bulk-Synchronous Parallelism is a relation of an initial state, a final state and some intermediate states. Nondeterminism and parallelism correspond to disjunction and conjunction respectively. Various advanced specification commands can be derived from the basic ones. The translator checks syntax, freedom of communication interference, type consistency and communication dependencies before generating the target code. Static analysis (including both static checkings and translation) is presented in abstract interpretation. It is shown that a few laws are complete for transforming any specification into a normal form. These laws are satisfied by the abstract functions. We demonstrate the actual effects of the abstract functions by applying them on the normal form. The approach has been implemented using an object-oriented language.