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Software testing is the critical component of the software development life cycle. Cost of software testing would affect the cost benefit trade-off of a development organization. Any reduction in the cost of software testing would help to deliver the product to the customer at less cost. The existing research is to find the ways to reduce the testing cost. In this paper, an approach to test case design which reduces software testing cost in black box environment has been proposed. This type of approach has not been used earlier. The proposed approach reduces the total number of test cases in black box environment. This reduced test case set covers total functionality and ensures the quality of the product. The proposed approach is applied on four case studies and found that the reduction in testing cost is ranging between 27 and 36 percent. Hence, by using the proposed approach the software testing cost can be reduced considerably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between human activities and climate change, involving both causes as well as impacts, has become a major issue of concern and interest all over the world. The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change informs us that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has increased from 280 ppm in the period 1000-1750 AD to 379 ppm in the year 2005. The terrestrial biospheric exchange had been a cumulative source of about 30 Gt C for the past two centuries but acted as a sink in the 1990s. The concentration of methane in the atmosphere has more than doubled from 700 ppb in the period 1000-1750 AD, to reach a concentration of 1774 ppb in the year 2005. The concentrations of hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, SF6 and N2O have also increased. The tropospheric concentration of ozone has increased even though its stratospheric concentration has decreased. The rising emissions and concentrations of all these gases have led to numerous changes in global climate variables. The global mean surface temperature is very likely to have increased by 0.74±0.18°C during the hundred year period 1906-2005. Although the increase is spread out all over the globe, it is greater in the northern hemisphere, and land areas have warmed faster than the oceans. It is very likely that the number of hot days and hot nights has increased and the number of cold days, cold nights and frost has decreased for nearly all land areas. The continental precipitation has increased in the eastern parts of North and South America, northern Europe and central Asia. However, it has decreased in some regions of Africa, southern Asia and the Mediterranean. It is also likely that the area affected by drought has increased since 1970. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We summarize the constraints on a possible time variation of the fine-structure constant, α, we obtained using UVES/VLT data. In particular, we report new results based on the analysis of 6 Ni II systems. No variation is found to a fractional level of about 0.2X10-5, over a redshift range 0.4≤ z≤ 2.5. We discuss the importance of precision spectroscopy to improve the constraint on α, variation, based on our detailed analysis of a high resolution spectrum (R~ 112 000) obtained with HARPS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shape identification is a fundamental property of an object and is an important low level feature to human perception. Shape analysis is widely applied in image registration, segmentation, classification and various other computer vision applications like pattern recognition, medical image diagnostics, integral geometry etc. This paper describes a new shape descriptor using chain- encoding methods, where a shape boundary is represented as a list of vectors of line segments. This is a very compact and efficient method of shape representation which could be exploited for shape compression, classification, segmentation and shape matching techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Detection of discontinuity plays an important role in image registration, comparison, segmentation, time sequence analysis and object recognition. In this paper we address some aspects of analyzing the content of an image. A point is classified as a corner where there are abrupt changes in the curvature of the curve. This paper presents a new approach for corner detection using first order difference of chain codes called shape numbers. Since the proposed method is based on integer operations it is simple to implement and efficient. Preliminary results are presented and evaluation with respect to standard corner detectors is done as a benchmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oligonucleotide microarray has become an important and powerful tool for various genomic analyses, where, unlike conventional methods, one can identify simultaneously a large number of targets in a given sample. Postsynthesis immobilization, the most widely used method, involves the noncovalent and covalent fixing of suitably modified oligonucleotides on the solid supports. Among the various functional groups aminoalkyl, hydroxyalkyl, mercaptoalkyl, aldehyde, epoxy, and carboxyl the most frequently used functional groups on the polymeric surfaces. Because glass and polypropylene, the most widely used materials, are nonporous in nature, the functional groups density on the surface remains very low. In order to know the exact concentration of a ligand to be immobilized, it is essential to estimate the accessible functional groups on these surfaces. For this purpose, sensitive methods are required to estimate exact density of available functional groups on the surfaces. Apart from physical methods, a number of sensitive chemical methods, by making use of high extinction coefficient of 4,4′-dimethoxytrityl cation (ε498 = 70,000 Lmol−11cm−1), have been reported to estimate accessible functional groups on the glass based polymer supports. In this chapter, use of these reagents for spectrophotometric determination of functional group density on glass microslides and polypropylene film has been discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of hetero- and homobifunctional reagents have been reported to immobilize biomolecules on a variety of supports. However, efforts are on to search for a method, which is relatively simple, involving minimum of steps, cost effective, easy to reproduce, and that produces stable oligonucleotide arrays. Two new reagents, viz., [N-(2-trifluoroethanesulfonatoethyl)-N-(methyl)- triethoxysilylpropyl-3-amine], and [N-(3-trifluoroethanesulfonyloxypropyl)anthraquinone-2- carboxamide] have been designed considering the above points. These reagents contain different functional groups at their two ends. In [N-(2-trifluoroethanesulfonatoethyl)-N-(methyl)- triethoxysilylpropyl-3-amine], one end (triethoxysilyl) is capable of binding to the virgin glass surface and the other one consists of trifluoroethanesulfonate (tresyl) function specific toward aminoalkyl and mercaptoalkyl functionalities, which are easy to introduce at the 3′- or 5′-end of oligonucleotides. Likewise, in [N-(3-trifluoroethanesulfonyloxypropyl)anthraquinone-2- carboxamide], one end consists of photoactivatable moiety (anthraquinone) capable of reacting to a C-H containing surface and the tresyl function at the other end reacts specifically with aminoalkyl and mercaptoalkyl functionalities in modified oligonucleotides. These reagents have successfully been utilized to construct a number of oligonucleotide arrays and subsequently used for the detection of mismatches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In India wheat is the second most important crop occupying 27.3 million hectare area with production and productivity of 72 million tons and 2.64 tons per hectare, respectively. To cope up the ever increasing demand which will be 109 million tons by the year 2020, the present level of productivity has to be increased to 4.4 tons per hectare. The only approach for achieving quantum jump in productivity is to restructure the wheat plant architecture which can yield up to 8 tons/hectare. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India has developed new plant type (NPT) wheat, utilizing a local germplasm SFW and released wheat and genetic stocks, which has high 1000 grain weight (45-50g), high number of grain per spike (90-100), higher biomass, thick, broad, semi erect and dark green leaves, thick stem, plant height 85-100 cm and good root system. Efforts are on to increase the productive tillers in these wheats along with diverse genes for resistance to diseases in order to break the yield barrier [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The design paradigm of a joystick based control mechanism intended to provide real time control for a differential drive robot built in-house is presented and described in this paper. The novelty of the work reported in this article is the attainment of a full 360-degree of freedom movement of the robot utilizing a low cost joystick while also allowing for a secondary or keyboard mode of control to be implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pipelining is a well-known performance enhancing technique in computer science. Point multiplication is the computationally dominant operation in curve based cryptography. It is generally computed by repeatedly invoking some curve (group) operation like doubling, tripling, halving, addition of group elements. Such a computational procedure may be efficiently computed in a pipeline. More generally, let Π be a computational procedure, which computes its output by repeatedly invoking processes from a set of similar processes. Employing pipelining technique may speed up the running time of the computational procedure. To find pipeline sequence by trial and error method is a nontrivial task. In the current work, we present a general methodology, which given any such computational procedure Π can find a pipelined version with improved computational speed. To our knowledge, this is the first such attempt in curve based cryptography, where it can be used to speed up the point multiplication methods using inversion-free explicit formula for curves over prime fields. As an example, we employ the proposed general methodology to derive a pipelined version of the hyperelliptic curve binary algorithm for point multiplication and obtain a performance gain of 32% against the ideal theoretical value of 50%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Algebraic attack has recently become an important tool in cryptanalysing different stream and block cipher systems. A Boolean function, when used in some cryptosystem, should be designed properly to resist this kind of attack. The cryptographic property of a Boolean function, that resists algebraic attack, is known as Algebraic Immunity ( ). So far, the attempt in designing Boolean functions with required algebraic immunity was only ad-hoc, i.e., the functions were designed keeping in mind the other cryptographic criteria, and then it has been checked whether it can provide good algebraic immunity too. For the first time, in this paper, we present a construction method to generate Boolean functions on n variables with highest possible algebraic immunity . Such a function can be used in conjunction with (using direct sum) functions having other cryptographic properties. In a different direction we identify that functions, having low degree subfunctions, are weak in terms of algebraic immunity and analyse some existing constructions from this viewpoint. Keywords: Algebraic Attacks, Algebraic Immunity, Annihilators, Boolean Functions, Correlation Immunity, Nonlinearity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing publish/subscribe systems suffer from several drawbacks, such as the reliance on a fixed infrastructure of reliable brokers, or the lack of expressiveness of their subscription language. Most importantly, the challenging task of routing messages based on their content remains a complex and time-consuming operation, and often provides results that are just barely better than a simple broadcast. In this paper, we present a novel approach to publish/subscribe that was designed to specifically address these issues. The producers and consumers are organized in a peer-to-peer network that self-adapts upon peer arrival, departure, or failure. Our publish/subscribe system features an extremely simple and efficient routing process and excellent scalability to large consumer populations, both in terms of routing and peer management overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caching has been widely used to improve system performance in wireless mobile environment. Mobility management is a key component in allowing a client to maintain normal communication with the server while on the move, independent of its location. A cache invalidation strategy ensures that any cached item by a client has same value as on the origin server. Mobility of clients makes the cache maintenance task more complex. This paper extends our previous caching strategy in a wireless environment to handle inter-cell clients' mobility. Experiments are performed to evaluate the proposed strategy and compare the results with other existing strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

RC4 was designed in 1987 when 8-bit and 16-bit processors were commercially available. Today, most processors use 32-bit or 64-bit words but using original RC4 with 32/64 bits is infeasible due to the large memory constraints and the number of operations in the key scheduling algorithm. In this paper we propose a new 32/64-bit RC4-like keystream generator. The proposed generator produces 32 or 64 bits in each iteration and can be implemented in software with reasonable memory requirements. It has a huge internal state and offers higher resistance to state recovery attacks than the original 8-bit RC4. Further, on a 32-bit processor the generator is 3.1 times faster than original RC4. We also show that it can resist attacks that are successful on the original RC4. The generator is suitable for high speed software encryption. Keywords: RC4, stream ciphers, random shuffle, keystream generator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information and Communications Technology is becoming synonymous with the survival and sustenance of human race in social, economic, political and military terms. As a result of this the security of ICT is becoming a serious global concern. USA alone looses about $38B in security lapses and tracking of virus incidents alone runs into the range of $80B per year worldwide. These losses are incurred despite an estimated security market size of $36B expected by the year 2007-08. There are no foolproof solutions in sight. Software is the lynchpin of information systems. However software is prone to suffer disability, damage, denial, disruption or destruction in information systems. Thus insecure software is the single most serious security concern being faced by the society. The new focus across the global ICT community is therefore to eliminate threats and vulnerabilities to software by removing the root causes of its weaknesses by revisiting the life cycle approach to software engineering, whereby security is built into each stage rather than bolting it down as an after thought. The secure software is a demand of every customer. Efforts are underway in many countries to answer the call for this demand. In this talk I will present how ICT security is emerging a 21 century global nightmare, the new global vision of ICT security, where the world is moving to in the context of cyber security, why and how software is the weakest building block in ICT security journey, how the development of secure or trustworthy software can address majority of the cyber security concerns, what are the challenges of developing secure or trustworthy software, why a global initiative and collaboration is necessary, why should India position itself to be the secure or trustworthy software power house, what will it take India to create secure software development capability, what is India's value proposition in terms of education, emerging R&D base, quality, manpower etc. to succeed in secure software initiative, how to mobilize India to develop secure software development capability. The analysis presented to build a case for India will cover protection of Information Age Infrastructures as immediate national necessity, standards driven security framework for National Information Infrastructures, life cycle approach to secure software development and outlines of a blue print for India to develop into a secure software development destination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shape analysis is widely applied in image registration, segmentation, classification and various other computer vision applications like pattern recognition, medical image diagnostics, integral geometry etc. Area measure plays a very important role in image classification based on size of the image. The area of an object is a convenient measure of the objects' overall size and is a widely used simple scalar descriptor. This paper describes a new scale invariant area computation algorithm for convex shapes with constant time complexity which can also be used for computation of various scalar shape descriptors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]